Chapter One
‘How the shagging hell did this happen?’
Stella looked from Winnie to Frankie clustered around the breakfast bar in her screamingly cool loft apartment.
They’d barely sobered up from landing back in England a few hours ago, and reality was sinking in fast. It wasn’t just their hearts that had come home lighter from Skelidos.
Their bank accounts were significantly lighter too.
Winnie’s half of the profits from the sale of her beloved house, the one she’d imagined her babies would grow up in.
Stella’s handsome redundancy from Jones the reality of living all alone with Gavin had been too much to bear.
The boys had filled the silence and the space with noise and clutter: hockey sticks in the hall, muddy football boots in the porch, music too loud in their rooms. Who knew the silence they left behind would be even more deafening?
Marcia’s money had allowed Frankie to rent a tiny place all of her own while she considered her next move, somewhere to lie low and lick her wounds, somewhere to spin the globe with her eyes closed and choose an adventure grand enough to warrant Marcia’s approval.
‘Looks like adventure got tired of waiting and came looking for you,’ Winnie said quietly.
All three of them stared at the large white envelope between them on the breakfast bar, and at the bunch of keys resting on top of it.
They’d flown to Skelidos in the expectation of a couple of days’ hedonistic escape, and they’d flown home again with the deeds to Villa Valentina in their weekend bag beside the duty-free.
‘God knows what he put in those cocktails,’ Stella said, frowning. ‘He was more hypnotic than Derren sodding Brown.’
Winnie stared at her. ‘You don’t think he slipped us something illegal, do you?’
‘Yes,‘ Stella huffed. ‘He slipped us pipedreams and bare bronzed chests and sand between our toes. He slipped us sunshine on our shoulders and lazy, idyllic afternoons, and he slipped us long starlit evenings drinking cocktails beneath fairy lights strung between pine trees. He slipped us the idea of a perfect life, and we reached out and grabbed it in our pale English hands because we had stressed, lonely and gullible stamped on our foreheads.’
As she spoke she pointed from herself to Frankie and then finally to Winnie. Stressed, lonely and gullible.
‘Well, that’s lovely,’ Frankie frowned, wrapping her hands around her mug of steaming coffee. ‘Anyone would be lonely going from living with my kids to the silence of an empty flat.’
‘At least you got lonely. I got gullible,’ Winnie muttered, twisting the slender wedding band she still wore even though her marriage was all over bar the decree absolute.
‘Ladies, it wasn’t an insult.’ Stella shook her head.
‘We are where we are. Of course you’re lonely, Frank, you’re recovering from years of being needed by a whole bloody cul-de-sac, and Winnie, the fact that you’re still too trusting after what Knobchops did to you is a good thing, not a bad one.
And me? I didn’t even have a relationship to break.
I pinned years of hopes onto Jones fate had conspired to bring Winnie, Stella and Frankie to his island at that precise moment because this place was now their destiny, not his.
At heart, Winnie was a believer in fate and superstition; the idea that she’d been guided to the island charmed her all the way to the bank.
Frankie, of course, felt more guided by Marcia’s instruction to find adventure; she’d needed little in the way of persuasion to realise that this would certainly be that.
Stella had been perhaps the most hesitant of the three, until Frankie and Winnie had decided that they’d find a way to buy it together even if Stella decided it wasn’t for her.
The idea of missing out on a potential business opportunity and a life in the sun with her best friends had proved too tempting to pass up, and in the end she’d signed on the understanding that she could always pull out after a year if she wanted to.
They each had their own reasons for signing, and for all of them there was an element of running away and an element of looking for a new place to call home.
A text alert vibrated her phone, making it rattle and jump around on the little pine bedside table. Winnie lunged for it before it slid off the edge, momentarily grateful for the distraction until she saw who had sent the message.
Did I really need to hear you’re leaving the country from Stella’s sister-in-law? What am I supposed to do, send the divorce papers by carrier pigeon? I’ve never even heard of the fucking place.