Kiss and Tell (62 page)

Dillon saw it too and smiled to himself before turning to kiss Nell firmly on the mouth. ‘Thank you for putting up with today,’ he breathed into her ear, ‘I know it wasn’t your thing.’

She touched the Tiffany heart at her throat and felt somewhat cheered. At least his children had stayed well out of the way, and she hadn’t had to see any of his horses, especially the one she’d injured.

‘Is Rory not here?’ Dillon double-checked as they prepared to leave, making Nell hold her breath.

Tash shook her head apologetically. ‘You’ll probably pass him on the way home.’

Beccy tracked down Lemon and Faith to the stables, where they were skipping out the furthest row of boxes. Flushed pink from kitchen heat and whisky macs, delighted to be a part of the inner circle as opposed to the stable hands, she couldn’t wait to impart all her news.

‘Lough is
so scary
!’ she gasped, making Lemon turn even paler. ‘You should have heard him shouting at Tash. I’m sure he made her cry. Hugo’s spitting tacks about it all in there and is dying to take him on, so there’ll be fireworks soon!’

‘Can’t wait,’ Lemon said faintly, guessing that he would personally be tacked to the Catherine wheel.

‘You never said how goddamned
sexy
he is!’ Beccy was too tight to censor herself much. ‘He’s so hot the water troughs bubble like Rotorua when he walks past. Even the horses were batting their eyelashes at him.’ She was still thrilled he hadn’t recognised her, imagining their slate wiped clean and ready to be written upon again.

‘Oh, he’s sexy all right.’ Lemon sighed sadly. ‘But too hot to handle, trust me.’

Beccy felt the familiar mix of fear, shame and excitement curdle in her belly and knew that she was willing to give it a try. If any man could exorcise her crush on Hugo, then surely Lough was the one. She couldn’t wait to see them square up to each other.

‘Has Rory called at all?’ Faith was asking.

‘Oh, put him back in your doll’s house, Faith!’ Lem suddenly snapped.

‘What?’

‘You’re so pathetic, chasing after him all the time, worrying about him. You’re like a fucking stalker. No wonder the poor guy wants some distance.’

‘How dare you!’

But all the pent-up anxiety, fear and frustration that Lemon had been suppressing about Lough’s return was bursting out and needed a target.

‘You need to grow up, girl,’ he snarled at Faith, marching out of the stable. ‘Get real and see that Rory does not and will never fancy
you. You’re. Just. Not. His. Type. He told me so himself, that night he brought me home from the club.’

Faith was a fighter and, attacked on any other topic, would have held her ground, but this had always been a subject she was too sensitive to take. Throwing down her shavings fork and turning on her heel she sprinted through the snow, sending up great puffs of flakes in her wake as she headed for her car, already an indistinguishable mound of white. Scraping the windscreen with her sleeve, she jumped in and started the engine before reversing with an even bigger puff of snow and slithering from the yard, headlights swivelling.

‘Shouldn’t you have tried to stop her?’ Beccy asked impassively.

‘Shouldn’t
you
?’ he snapped back.

‘Not my fight. I hope she doesn’t get stuck.’

‘She’s only going as far as Lime Tree Farm,’ Lemon muttered. ‘Anyway, she’s still got her Christmas present in the back – she’s safe with that.’

‘Don’t tell me, she got a toboggan?’

‘Close.’ Lemon stared past Faith’s black tyre tracks to the darkened Lodge Cottage. ‘Was he really mad when he arrived?’

‘Spitting.’ Beccy shivered with an almost sexual tingle at the memory.

‘Christ.’

In the back of her chauffeur-driven Cayenne, which cut an easy swathe through the snow, Sylva curled up deliciously against the heated leather upholstery and rang Mama.

‘Did it work,
ma
i
ka
?’ her mother demanded breathlessly as soon as she picked up.

‘Yes, Mama.’

‘When are you meeting again?’

‘It will take a little more time for that, I think.’

‘You did something wrong then!’

‘No … no, but it’s complicated.’

Mama wouldn’t listen, launching into a tirade of Slovakian as she always did when she was upset, insisting that Sylva should have tried harder.

Holding the phone away from her ear, Sylva decided that now was not the time to mention that she didn’t really fancy Dillon very
much. Mama would insist that was totally irrelevant. This was business, after all.

Sylva was far more attracted to men like Hugo, who had so much energy and willpower, and who was so overwhelmingly male. Metrosexual family guys really didn’t do it for her. She’d rather have a woman.

Mama had fallen silent at last. With a few soothing words and a promise that she would try harder next time, Sylva rang off and texted Castigates to suggest a snowy meeting the following day, but the reply that came back was wholly dissatisfying:
For pity’s sake, leave me alone at Christmas
.

Irritated, Sylva deleted the message. She had nobody to play with. Perhaps coming back to Haydown on New Years’ Eve was not such a bad idea after all.

Not a single strand of Lough’s intricate body art was visible as he knocked at the back door of Haydown later that evening. Dressed in a thick black Merino sweater, suede Puffa, cream jeans and brown boots, he was a picture of country respectability. When Sophia answered, she positively shivered with delight.

‘You must be Lough. Come in out of the cold. Did you have a good sleep?’ Today was turning out to be such fun – first dishy Dillon, who was gloriously rock and roll meets Roquefort and organic bread roll, and now luscious Lough, who was a heavenly mix of Kiwi and Byron.

‘Tash and Daddy are propped up together in the snug, snoring away like troopers,’ she announced as she showed him in, ‘but Hugo’s around somewhere. Drink?’

Having followed her through the warren of old domestic rooms to that big kitchen again – bigger than the courtyard of his old stable block at home – Lough found a glass of white wine being pressed in his hand.

‘Cloudy Bay – thought you’d appreciate it.’ Sophia eyed him excitedly. She was exquisitely beautiful, with Tash’s bone structure and colouring in a finer, more symmetrical package.

‘Thanks.’ He forced a smile, although he was more of a beer man.

‘Tash tells us you were terribly delayed?’

To Sophia’s mounting excitement, Lough’s deep, deep voice was hypnotic and too bad-boy for words. ‘There was a bit of a mix-up and I found myself behind bars for a while.’

‘In a Hong Kong hotel, yes, so Tash said – thank goodness for those bars, eh? They serve some terribly good cocktails out there. Must make spending Christmas in transit a little less wretched.’

He regarded her for a moment, eyebrows aloft, then those big black thunder eyes softened to teak brown.

‘Didn’t it just?’ He raised his glass and smiled at her, revealing a gold crown just behind one canine tooth.

Sophia tingled and belted off in search of Hugo, grateful that Ben had fallen asleep in front of
Lawrence of Arabia
.

Lough looked around the kitchen, at the many framed photographs and portraits – horses, family, friends, mostly in that familiar style he recognised from the painting in his room. It astonished him that a room so big could be so filled with life, with a family’s identity and style stamped everywhere – and it smelled just delicious. The rest of the house, so huge and so historic, intrigued him now, and he could only guess at its matching warmth and flair. He’d imagined that Haydown would be a cavernous mausoleum housing the empty heartache of a failed marriage, but if first impressions were anything to go on it was overwhelmingly welcoming. A part of him wanted to run away, but his
taniwha
heart kept him standing still, waiting, knowing that the wave would come to sweep fate his way.

He stepped closer to a photograph of Tash and Hugo on their wedding day, hung at an angle above a long bookcase crammed with cook books. Tash looked smoky-eyed, tousle-haired, excited and beautiful – like a top-class mare who had run wild all her life only to find herself coralled, broken in, mounted and ridden away just in time for the annual fiesta parade.

‘Seven years ago,’ a voice drawled behind him, ‘and no itch yet apart from the willingness to scratch each other’s backs. Lough.’ Hugo held out his hand and shook Lough’s firmly, his own grip an equal match to the Strachan crunch. He’d just fired his first warning shot. ‘Welcome to Berkshire. And Merry Christmas. Your horses had a great pipe-opener this morning.’

‘You could have asked.’ Lough kept his tone light, but both men’s grips tightened. ‘I always ask permission before I take things that don’t belong to me.’

Hugo’s blue eyes frosted and for a moment he looked as though he was going to hit him, but he had better manners than to flatten
a guest the moment he walked through his door, however unwelcome they might be. ‘You could have rung ahead to let us know you were arriving two months late.’

‘I’ve been delayed,’ Lough apologised far from humbly.

‘Understatement.’ Hugo turned away to fetch the wine bottle from the fridge. ‘In fact, better never than late.’

Lough didn’t hear, and Tash suddenly appeared in the room.

Having just awoken at Sophia’s prodding insistence with such a cramp in her foot that her limping entrance was reminiscent of Sarah Bernhardt late for her cue, Tash was groggy, sticky-eyed and bad tempered.

‘Do you want something to eat?’ she asked rather brusquely, blinking madly because a contact lens appeared to be dangling from her eyelashes and she could only see half the kitchen in focus – the half in which Hugo was scowling and stalking around as opposed to the half containing the brooding Lough Strachan. But she didn’t have to see him to know that he was truly the most devastating package; Sophia was behind her, panting like an eager Labrador.

‘
Do
stay,’ she echoed Tash more winningly. ‘There’s Tash’s famous blue cheese and walnut risotto, lashings of rare beef fillet and winter salad, and honey-glazed figs for pud.’

Tash glanced over her shoulder at her sister in alarm, wondering where she’d whipped that fantasy from (although it had admittedly been on her original written list for the day, still pinned to the fridge door). There was shooting lunch leftovers.

But Lough was already shaking his head, staring at Tash with those molten dark-chocolate eyes. ‘I just came to the house to apologise for my behaviour earlier. I was sore-headed and I was mean to you. I’m sorry.’

‘Forgiven.’ Tash smiled kindly, closing one eye and trying to focus on him without looking too much like a winky perv. No wonder Sophia was like a cat with its tail up, and still ogling his dangle-from-me shoulders and his wrap-your-thighs-around-me hips from over her shoulder. He was ravishing. She could feel her sister’s hot breath on the back of her neck.

‘So what, exactly, kept you?’ Hugo enunciated carefully.

‘I was arrested boarding the plane in September,’ he spoke matter-of-factly. ‘And I’ve been in and out of custody for almost two months. They finally let me go last month, but I had no home and
no passport and they wouldn’t let me leave New Zealand until this week.’

There was a shocked silence.

Sophia, ever the social butterfly, attempted to find a positive angle first: ‘Gosh, how dreadful. I remember when my darling interior designer was caught in a similar pickle coming back from St Petersburg with a few knick-knacks that turned out to be priceless icons. He was detained for yonks – missed the Caledonian Ball and two weddings. What on earth did they try to pin on you?’

‘Murder.’ He drained his glass. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I must go and talk to Lem.’

As he walked out, leaving Sophia open-mouthed with shock, the phone rang out. Tash answered it. A moment later, she was sobbing the happiest of tears.

‘
Mummy
! Happy Christmas. Oh, it’s so good to hear your voice. Where
are
you?’ Suddenly she started to laugh. ‘New Zealand! Now there’s a coincidence …’