Secrets and Lies (5 page)

Some of her friends had warned her that sex was the first thing to go when you got married but Hope and Niall's lovemaking h
ad become even more intense; it felt like they wanted each other now more than ever. Sex with her husband was one of her favourite pleasures in life and she certainly wasn't going to ruin it by having children any time soon. She had just celebrated her thirty fourth birthday and wasn't in any rush to have babies. Luckily, Niall wasn't putting pressure on her to have children either. He agreed with her that they had plenty of time before they had to start acting like proper grownups. They'd been married only six months and were still enjoying their life as newlyweds.

They'd been teasing each other with sexy text messages back and forth all month, which had grown more intense this past week and Hope was longing to have her naked body wrapped around her beloved husband soon.

She sighed and picked up her mobile phone which was full of photos of her handsome man.

“I miss you,” she whispered to him as she studied the smiling face she loved so much. She could gaze at him for hours and never grow tired.

Niall Gilligan was a very attractive man. He had jet black hair, which didn't have the slightest hint of grey, despite the fact that he was almost forty five years old. His sallow skin emphasised his bright blue eyes and immaculate white smile. Hope loved his dimples which deepened dramatically whenever he smiled. She traced the outline of his face with her finger on the telephone screen and couldn't help smiling back at him.

Theirs had not been a whirlwind romance and courtship, which was exactly the way Hope had wanted it. They'd met two years previously in the park when they'd been taking their dogs for a walk. Hope had been walking her Labrador, Poppy
, when she'd spotted Niall's Boxer dog, Candy, coming around the corner. She remembered vaguely thinking to herself that Candy was a very pretty dog. Then her owner, Niall, had followed and Hope had thought that he was rather gorgeous too! She'd managed to overcome her unexpected burst of shyness to blurt out a quick hello. He'd smiled back at her and said hello too.

She'd walked her dog every day after that in the hope of bumping into the handsome stranger again and it soon got to the stage where she was getting dressed up, too dressed up, for a walk in the park with her dog, much to the amusement of her other dog-walking friends!

Hope had been walking Poppy at the same park for a few years and had gotten to know a lot of the regulars who walked their dogs there too and they'd all soon become friends. So when they saw her dressed up in dresses, sexy clothes and makeup, they'd burst out laughing and teased her for being so transparent. They knew she was trying to get Niall's attention but she'd act innocent about it and pretend she didn't know what they meant. The teasing increased exponentially when she arrived one day at the park in her horse-riding gear, which consisted of a little riding crop and jodphurs!

The funny thing was that Niall was also making more of an effort with his appearance in the hope of bumping into her again. She found out later that he'd even asked some of t
he other dog walkers what time she usually walked Poppy so that he could “accidentally” bump into her. Before he met Hope, he would regularly walk Candy at nine o' clock in the morning, but suddenly he was waking the poor dog at the much earlier time of seven! Candy was permanently tired and dopey; she probably wondered what on earth was wrong with her master!

Eventually, Niall and Hope met again and their dogs took an instant liking to each other which they'd displayed rather amorously, much to the embarrassment of their re
spective owners! It had taken them quite some time to disentangle their dogs. They'd laughed about it afterwards over a coffee in the park's cosy cafe. Hope liked Niall immediately.He had a friendly, open manner and he smiled a lot. She couldn't help smiling back at him. He seemed very easy in his own skin and happy with life; qualities which she found very attractive.

When they first started dating
they would talk for hours and really got to know each other slowly, which Hope believed helped to set the solid foundation for their relationship. She'd jumped into bed with her past boyfriends after a few dates and had already been married briefly but disastrously. Her ex-husband had dumped her within months of their being married and had moved back in with his previous girlfriend.

Hope had been playing it safe on the relationship front by the time she met Niall. She had been single for almost a year and was carefully taking time out from boyfriends. She'd rushed into relationships in the past and had gotten badly burned. She'd realised
the hard way that it was best to wait and take things slowly but she was enormously impatient; when she wanted something, she wanted it now and that's what she was usually like when she met a man she fancied. It was difficult for her to hold back and let the relationship evolve naturally. Before she met Niall, she'd have forced the issue if she wanted something to happen with a guy, but she'd come to believe that most men enjoyed being in control and chasing a woman.

She'd arrived at a point in her life where she was examining her past mistakes and reflecting on where she'd gone wrong. When she met Niall, she was ready to let him to do all the chasing; she wanted to feel like a woman. She took it slowly and six weeks later he asked her out.

Two weeks after their first date, they shared their first kiss. Before Niall, she'd always gone for the “naughty but nice” type of man, the type you can't really trust with other women, which was wrong and very tiring. She just didn't want to have that sort of a relationship any more.

Niall was a good, decent person. When her friends met him they raved on about how solid and kind they found him. Hope knew that he was very good for her and she believed that he felt the same way ab
out her. She thought they complemented each other perfectly. Niall was quietly confident while she was quite loud and extrovert.

A year after they'd first bumped into each other on that fateful day in the park, the couple and their two dogs were all living happily together. Their romance almost seemed like it was straight out of a Hollywood movie.

Life was about to become even more romantic when they flew to Switzerland the year after they’d first met to spend Christmas with his family. He presented her with a dazzling diamond and platinum engagement ring on Christmas Day and asked her to marry him.

The actual proposal was quite a big surprise to her. Niall didn't actually get down on one knee as he was a little mer
ry from too much wine at dinner! He'd later hit the vodka for a bit of Dutch courage before popping the question. Hope said yes after she'd recovered from the initial shock of his unexpected proposal because until she saw the ring she was too frightened to believe that he was actually asking her to marry him. She'd expected him to suddenly say, “I’m only joking” but she quickly regained her composure and of course said yes. She was on cloud nine and immediately began planning their wedding.

Hope had no qualms about taking the plunge again, despite the failure of her first marriage. She'd thought long and hard about her decision to marry Niall, but she knew what was involved this time and she definitely didn't want to go through another divorce. She was sure of what she was getting herself into when she married him and was glad that they had decided to live together beforehand. It was lovely that they had taken their time getting to know each other slowly at the start of their relationship. She knew that he was a wonderful man and that he thought the world of her. They were absolutely besotted with each other and Hope felt more at peace with
herself than at any other time in her life.

Hope’s childhood had been quite unconventional
. She was the daughter of an Irish father, Darren Kennedy and a French mother, Chantale Decoursiere. Chantale already had a daughter, Sandrine, from a previous relationship when she was only eighteen years old. Chantale was very glamorous, but very wild, and Darren had tried to explain to Hope on numerous occasions that her mother just didn't have it in her to look after a child. She was very young when Hope was born and her father had tried to explain to his young daughter that her mother couldn't cope with the responsibility of raising a baby.

Hope was only two years old when Chantale fled from her marriage to Darren and ended up living in an apartment in the exclusive eighth arrondissement (district) in Paris, near the Champs Elysees.

She never really believed her father's excuses for her mother abandoning her. How had Chantale coped with raising Sandrine who was five years older than Hope? Chantale would have been just eighteen years old when her first daughter was born and surely having a child at that young age would have been much more daunting than having a child at twenty three. Darren tried to explain to his daughter that her mother was a free spirit who hated being tied down to anyone or anything.

Hope still kept a photo of her mother hidden in her journal. She really was th
e most beautiful woman that she had ever seen, with classic Gallic good looks and an air of mystery about her. Her father said that she was the image of her mother but Hope couldn't really see the similarity.

Whatever it was that caused her mother to flee back to her native France, it was left to her father to decide what would be best for his beloved daughter. Darren realised that he probably wouldn't cope very well with the emotional demands of raising his daughter on his own while he was trying to hold down a job as a travelling sales representative. He thought a good option would be to have Hope live with his parents while he was on the road, at least then she would have some stability in her life and, if nothing else, he cou
ld see her at the weekends. She dearly loved her grandparents but Sundays would always be filled with dread when her father had to leave her behind again.

Hope flicked through her old photo album. Amateur photography was a hobby she'd had since her thirteenth birthday, when her mother had presented her with her very own camera. Now every event, from ordinary to extraordinary was represented in her well-worn and battered ever- expanding photo album which she'd taped together
several times over the years. She smiled at the many precious memories that she'd captured on camera.

There were many photographs of her grandparents
and lots of her mother too who she used to see during her school holidays. It was quite confusing at times to have three sets of parental figures in her young life. Her grandparents cared for her during the week, her dad spoilt her rotten at the weekends and then she'd fly off to Paris to be with her mother during the school holidays. At first, the young Hope thought that her mother was a very exciting woman to be around, with an electric if somewhat eccentric personality. Chantale was always the centre of some drama, but she had an amazing sense of humour too. Hope often felt that she was the parent and her mother the child in their relationship, as she often found herself trying to look after her and keep her under control.

Whenever Hope thought of her mother these days, she pictured her dressed head to toe in a scarlet, floor-length fake fur coat, which she would dramatically wear to her local cafe, where she'd flirt outrageously with somebody completely inappropriate. Chantale would even make citizen's arrests when someone dared to pinch her bum! She was completely mad, but very funny and fantastic, as long as you weren't her daughter. Hope was the envy of all her friends who thought Chantale was the coolest mother on the planet, but Hope would simply cringe with embarrassment at her mother's crazy antics.

Hope left school when she was eighteen years old, fluent in French and with a decent final year examination result which was enough to follow her classmates to university, but she decided instead to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. She'd shown a natural acting talent while at school and had often been chosen as the lead in her school plays. When she saw Vivien Leigh's magnetic performance as Scarlett O' Hara in the epic Hollywood romantic blockbuster “Gone with the Wind” she was completely entranced and made up her mind to be an actress. She'd often dress up as Scarlett and prance around her grandparents' living room, treating them to her version of the leading lady. She would traipse around in a discarded evening dress of her grandmother's and dramatically quote the immortal lines “quite frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!” Rhett Butler had the best lines in her opinion and she explained that she was using her artistic licence when she stole his infamous line.

However, in spite of a few notable appearances in some low-profile independent films, she was still chasing that ever elusive “big break” role. Her career path to date had been interesting but eclectic to say the least.

Shortly after leaving school she went to live in Paris where she worked as a singing waitress at the Moulin Rouge, which is still the most famous and oldest of all the cabarets in the world and is one of the most legendary monuments of Paris. Edith Piaf, Ginger Rogers, Lisa Minnelli and Frank Sinatra are just a few of the famous names to have played cabaret at the venue. It is also where topless dancers take audiences on a travelogue across the ages and continents with performances of folklore histories from around the world. It is, of course, the only place where the French “Can-Can” is truly to be found and Hope would always be proud to say that she worked at the infamous Moulin Rouge.

Hope spent almost a year working in Paris, before returning home to Cork where she dabbled in modelling for a while. She thought it would be a good way for her to get noticed and make contacts in the acting world, but she hadn't counted on the backstabbing and bitchiness which she encountered on the catwalk and she soon decided that modelling wasn't for her.