The House On Willow Street (46 page)

“Hey, it’s chilly standing here at the window, despite—is that
triple
glazing? Why don’t we sit down,” suggested Sherry.

Cashel watched her as she led the way to a two-seater couch. She had a fabulous body, which spoke of getting up at about five in the morning to go to the gym, as traders started early and worked late. He began to like Sherry more and more. Maybe this holiday had been a good idea after all.

Across the room, Rhona caught Sherry’s eye and winked at her. Sherry allowed herself a brief grin back. It was early days yet.

Sherry sat beside Cashel at dinner that night. It was his first night there, even though the others had arrived over the previous few days. Normally at these things he felt sort of
different, an outsider for all his money. Shades of his insecurity, he knew; and he hated that, hated that there was any insecurity in Cashel Reilly, millionaire, entrepreneur, successful business man, but it remained nonetheless. With Sherry however, he didn’t feel in the slightest bit uneasy. He felt comfortable around her. They knew some of the same people, moved in some of the same circles. But it wasn’t that; no, it was the sense that Sherry had come up the hard way. She understood hard work and she understood not fitting in; partly, he reckoned, from being a woman in a man’s world. There was no doubt about it, working in the city was definitely a man’s world. But she was easygoing when she talked about her work.

There were no horror stories of
Playboy
magazine being passed around the office, rude e-mails or trips with clients to golf courses or strip clubs. Clearly Sherry had figured out how to deal with such things. She was comfortable with herself and he liked that. They talked easily, happily; it was rather like he was in a room with her and nobody else there. Once he caught Rhona grinning across the table at him, looking like someone who’d that instant figured out string theory. “What?” he mouthed across at her.

“You two,” she mouthed back, pointing at him and Sherry in a most un-Rhona-like way. Normally, Rhona was very hot on the social niceties and would as lief point across a dinner table as she would talk about her upper brow lift. But it was clear she was happy that she had set up such a good match between her ex-husband and Sherry.

Funny that, he thought, raising a glass of red wine to her. She was happy that he had clicked with a girl she’d invited for him. Whatever else you might say about their marriage, at least they’d ended on amicable terms. How many ex-wives
tried to arrange dates for their ex-husbands? Mind you, she’d done it a few times before with less successful results, but Rhona was a quick learner. She’d worked out his type soon enough. A go-getter, like him.

For a sliver of a moment his mind ran back to Avalon and Tess Power. Tess was very different from Sherry, different in almost every way. Different physically, different in the way she approached life, different in her job and upbringing. There was nothing posh about Sherry, nor did she pretend there was. She was simply a very smart, beautiful woman who’d used her brains to get ahead. While Tess was . . . well, Tess was a smart woman too, who’d come from a different world to him. He hadn’t understood the rules of her world, the rules that said it was perfectly all right for her to break his heart.

“You’re miles away,” said Sherry, turning back from her neighbor to talk to him. “Tell me what’s going on in that clever head of yours. Have you some fabulous plan to take over the world? Should I know about it? Would that be insider trading?” She leaned back in her chair, fingers wrapped lazily around the stem of her wineglass. She didn’t drink much, he noticed. She was one of those women who looked around and watched carefully, smiling as if she was happy to be in this place at this time.

“No,” he lied. “I was thinking how nice it was to be here with friends and how nice it was to meet you.”

Sherry Petrovsky didn’t do anything as gauche as blush; she’d learned not to do that sort of thing years ago. But there was an undeniable glow to her cheeks as she smiled back at him. Cashel Reilly was gorgeous. Even more gorgeous than his photos. She was glad she’d come, even though in the beginning she’d resisted Rhona’s efforts to persuade her.

“I don’t have time to date guys who are emotionally stunted or who’ve been destroyed in the past, Rhona,” Sherry
said with mild irritation. She knew Rhona from college, a million years ago when they were both art students, before Sherry had realized that art was so not her and had switched cleverly into economics.

“I didn’t say he was emotionally stunted,” Rhona said. They were sitting in J. Sheekey’s fish restaurant on a girls’ night out with the old college crowd. Sherry liked going out with the gang. It was fun. She couldn’t help the thrill she felt, the fact that she was the most successful of them all when it came to business.

Of course, she hadn’t been quite so successful in those other female markers—family, husband, all that sort of stuff. But she had what she wanted—for now, anyway.

“All I said,” Rhona explained, already quite tipsy on champagne, “was that there’s this woman from his past, his first love—I know, such a cliché—but he’s never quite got over her. She shaped him, she was part of his life when he was growing up. It’s the classic poor-boy-made-good stuff, and some of them have a chip on their shoulder—not that I’m saying Cashel has a chip on his shoulder, because he doesn’t. He’s very proud of where he came from, the fact that his mother cleaned houses. But you see, he fell in love with the girl whose house his mother cleaned, only for some reason she dumped him or betrayed him. I’m not sure exactly what happened because he would never talk about it, but it was obvious that it was niggling away at him. You know how guys like that can be: they can’t stand for there to be any unfinished business, any battle they haven’t won. So it’s always there somewhere in the back of his mind, biting away at him.”

“And that was why you got divorced?” Sherry asked, feeling less and less interested in Cashel Reilly, even though his picture had caught her eye in the financial pages many times.

“No, we got divorced because we were different. Looking for different stuff really. You know me,” Rhona grinned, “I like to have fun. Cashel is more of a workhorse. Right up your street, Sherry.”

“So he’s not secretly pining after this woman from the past then?” Sherry said. “I mean, he’s had other girlfriends, yes?”

“Oh, loads of them,” Rhona explained. “Loads before he met me and after we divorced. Every party we’ve invited him to, he brings a different girl. For a while, he was going for those young model girl types and I said, ‘Cashel, stop! You do need someone you can talk to.’ Eventually the message got through. No, he’s had loads of girlfriends. Loads of relationships since then, but I think he’s definitely over the one from the past and I think you are just his sort of girl.”

“Why are you trying to fix up your ex-husband, though?” said Sherry.

Rhona shrugged. “It seems weird, I know. Most of my friends hate their ex-husbands, but Cashel was always so generous. The divorce settlement was fabulous. Then I met Rico, and now I’m happy. I never stopped
liking
Cashel; we weren’t suited, that’s all. I suppose you could say it’s karma: I feel I’m doing something good for the universe by doing something good for Cashel, helping him heal his wounds from the past.”

Sherry laughed at this. “You are so funny, Rhona,” she said. “You’re adorable.”

Rhona beamed and waggled a finger on her right hand on which sat a beautiful cabochon diamond. “I know,” she said. “Rico thinks so too. Isn’t this lovely? It was our third anniversary last week—our
third.
I said to him, ‘Isn’t that tin or cotton or something?’ And he said, “No, honey, for you it’s gotta be diamonds!’”

Sherry thought of all this as she looked at Cashel Reilly. He really was the whole package. Tall, lean, muscular, none of that belly fat that some businessmen got from endless airplane journeys knocking back whiskies to help them relax, and endless rich dinners in fancy restaurants. Cashel was lean and sexy. She liked the dark hair flecked with gray and the dark eyes that were smiling at her now. She could imagine the fierce passion in them. Yes, she liked him very much, thank you.

M
ara loved Christmas morning, loved the crisp coolness, the sense of celebration. She lay in her bed and listened to the sounds of the cottage, the sounds she’d got used to. It was a windy morning and cold, even indoors she could feel the coldness, and yet she was snug in her bed in the little bedroom with its pretty blue floral wallpaper. In a jug by her bed was a posy of Christmas roses; Danae had put them there the night before, along with some sprigs of holly. There were a few with the berries on.

“I love them with the berries,” Mara had said wistfully.

“I do too,” said Danae, “but the birds need them more than we do.”

“Oh, of course,” said Mara, realizing she’d been thoughtless. Feeding the birds was not something she’d ever done before, but here with Danae, making special bird cake from old cooking fat, seeds and nuts was part of everyday living. Danae cared for every creature who came near her, from her beloved hens to her darling Lady and every robin in between. She’d come back from her walks with Lady and tell Mara about the wildlife she’d seen. So much so that Mara
started getting up extra early to go with her and experience for herself the scent of wet grass in the morning, admire the beauty of the ivy clustering over the old abbey, touch the gnarled boughs of the old willows and magnolia trees in the grounds of Avalon House and stare down at the beauty that was Avalon Bay.

“It really is amazing here,” she’d said to Danae as they stood watching the sunrise together one morning.

“I know,” Danae agreed, “it’s peaceful and beautiful. This high up, I feel as if we’re almost a part of nature and yet close to people too.”

There had been a time when Mara had wondered whether part of the charm of this beautiful house high above Avalon was its distance from people. But Danae had changed of late, and today, Christmas, was proof of that. There was so much to be done today!

Every bit as excited as she used to be when she was a child waiting for Santa Claus, Mara bounded out of bed, ran into the shower room and turned the heater on. The central heating was timed to come on early, but probably not yet, and Mara was anxious to get up and have her shower, dress in her Christmas best and then serve Danae tea in bed and watch her open her present.

Mara was particularly excited about the present. She’d spent so long wondering what to get for Danae, who was probably the least material person she knew. It had been Rafe who’d come up with the idea.

“There’s a guy I know, lives about fifty miles from here, and he makes animal sculptures out of wood. They’re works of art,” he said, “really beautiful and each one’s unique. What about something like that?”

“Oh, what a wonderful idea,” Mara had exclaimed and kissed him. He was very easy to kiss, was Rafe. She was
never careful with him, not the way she had been with Jack. With Jack she’d never acted without first trying to gauge what was the right thing to do, whether he was in the mood to be kissed or touched, or if he’d shrug off her embrace, irritated by it. With Rafe, she could spontaneously throw her arms around him and hug him and he’d hug right back, delighted. It wasn’t that he was a less complex character than Jack—far from it. Rafe Berlin was very complex, but he was straightforward and honest in his love for her.

They’d driven down together in Rafe’s truck to see the wood sculpture.

“I’m not taking you on the back of a bike yet,” he said. “I don’t think you’re ready for it.”

“What do you mean? I love excitement, I love thrills,” Mara had said crossly.

“Yeah, well, I need to be sure,” said Rafe, “because you’re too precious for me to risk you on the back of a bike until I’m certain.”

So far they’d only been on short journeys around the village with Rafe going at what seemed like ten miles an hour.

“You all right, you all right?” he kept yelling over his shoulder.

“I’m fine,” Mara had screamed through the visor of her helmet. “I’m not some little old lady, you know.”