Chapter Fourteen
‘Christ! Winnie, get up!’
Someone was yelling and banging on her door.
Stella was yelling and banging on her door.
‘Win! Wake up! Fire!’
Fire? Her feet hit the smooth floorboards before her eyes were even properly open, her heart thumping with panic. Struggling to focus, she squinted at her watch. Half past midnight. She could only have been asleep for half an hour or so.
‘What? Where?’ she shouted, dragging her robe on over her slip as she half ran, half stumbled across the bedroom and yanked her door open. Stella had already disappeared; Winnie could hear her footsteps receding down the stairs at a pace.
‘There’s a fire in the garden!’ Stella shouted back up. ‘Have you seen Frank? She’s not in her room.’
‘She was outside when I came home. On the loungers by the beach!’
Winnie caught up with Stella at the bottom of the stairs, still barefoot.
‘Back garden.’ Stella gripped her arm tight for a second and then belted off down the hallway towards the kitchen. ‘Angelo’s already outside.’
Winnie followed, shoving her feet into her Birkis by the back door, terrified by the bright orange glow on the far side of the garden.
‘Buckets!’ Stella shouted, panicked. ‘We need buckets or something! Anything!’
Behind her, Winnie heard footsteps, and seconds later Frankie and Seth appeared around the side of the building, all of them frantically searching for buckets or anything that might help.
‘Call Panos!’ Angelo yelled, running back with the only bucket to refill it at the garden tap. ‘Hosepipes, we need a lot more water now! The whole damn garden will catch at this rate.’
‘I’m here, I’m here,’ someone panted, and they turned to see Panos dressed only in Y-fronts and a vest, unravelling a tangled hosepipe and handing the tap end to Angelo. ‘I saw the flames from my bedroom window.’
‘Thank God,’ Winnie said, hugging him fast and hard. ‘Thank you for coming so quickly.’
‘Mikey!’ Seth shouted suddenly, taking off across the garden towards the flames. Angelo ran behind dragging the hose, with all three of the women unravelling it behind him frantically as he went. Winnie’s eye’s tracked Seth to the body on the grass.
Oh my God, there was a body on the grass.
Seth dropped to his knees beside Mikey at the same moment as Angelo inadvertently doused him with a blast of cold water, waking him from his gin slumber with a violent jerk into sitting position.
‘What the …?’ he mumbled, scrubbing his hands over his face as he stared at the flames not far from where he’d passed out. ‘I’m soaking wet.’ He frowned, peeling his damp T-shirt away from his ribs as he squinted around and joined the dots. ‘Oh fuck.’
Seth dragged him up onto his feet and deposited him unceremoniously over by the villa.
Winnie heard him mutter, ‘Stupid drunken bastard,’ as he propped him against the wall before running back across to see if he could help.
Thankfully, the now plentiful water supply seemed to be doing the trick; Angelo had things mostly under control already, the worst of the flames dying out.
Panos put his arm around Winnie’s shoulders. ‘Not so bad,’ he said, soothingly. ‘Could have been much worse.’
Winnie nodded grimly. It could. The whole place could have gone up with them all inside it. Jesus, with the amount of alcohol in the cellar it would have been a fireball in minutes. Angelo gave the whole area an extra drenching just to be certain, and then gave Seth the nod to shut off the water.
‘It’s out,’ he said, stepping backwards to survey the burnt black bushes and shrubs. ‘But you’ve lost pretty much everything on this side of the garden.’ He waved his hand along the sodden swathe of land and then unwittingly wiped it over his face, daubing himself with smoky charcoal streaks.
‘Thank God you were here,’ Stella said, wrapping her arm around his middle. ‘Our hero.’
He dropped a kiss on the top of her head and murmured something in Greek that had Panos lifting his eyebrows.
‘Well, I think we could all do with a drink,’ Winnie said wearily. ‘Come in?’
Panos looked down at his underwear. ‘I think I should say no.’
‘You’re sure?’ Frankie planted a kiss on his cheek. ‘You’re our hero too, dashing across the beach to help. We owe you, Panos.’
He shrugged and nodded brusquely, then threw his hosepipe over his shoulder as he walked away. ‘It’s the Skelidos way. We look out for our neighbours.’
Winnie wrapped her arms around her midriff, reminded of the fact that Jesse had said something very similar not very long ago.
‘Did I miss something?’
Jamie Harte wandered out of the kitchen door, obviously having just woken up. He looked at his bandmate slumped on his backside by the wall, and then over towards Seth.
‘Take him up and chuck him in his bed, would you? I might knock his fucking head off his shoulders otherwise,’ Seth said.
Jamie sighed heavily, sniffing the acrid air and surveying the soaked, burnt-out half of the garden. ‘Mikey?’
Seth nodded. There was an inevitability about the look that passed between them, and Winnie wondered how they’d managed to keep the fact that Mikey Miller was a functioning alcoholic out of the press for so long.
It was almost ironic that they’d booked themselves into a secret gin distillery, presumably in the hope of lying low while Mikey cleaned his act up.
They all sat out on the front terrace for an hour or so, too hyped to sleep any time soon after the fire.
‘We’ll pay to get it all put right, that goes without saying,’ Seth said, nursing a tumbler of brandy between his hands. ‘But I need to ask you all a favour.’
‘You want us to keep Mikey’s secret,’ Stella guessed, stirring her G if word gets out that we’re here and he’s drinking again the island will be crawling in hours.’
The three women exchanged concerned looks.
‘We’ve taken a handful of bookings for the next few weeks already,’ Winnie said. ‘Let me look at the diary tomorrow and see what we can do.’
‘We’d pay well for the privilege,’ Seth said, placing his empty glass down as he stood up and rolled those fabulous rock-star shoulders. ‘The privacy here is something pretty special.’
Raising his hand in goodnight, he wandered back inside the villa, and Angelo took his cue to do the same, planting a kiss on Stella’s neck and murmuring something in her ear that made her eyebrows slide into her fringe.
Winnie moved to sit alongside Stella and Frankie on the bench overlooking the dark, moonlit sea. ‘That was a close call,’ she said. ‘We could have lost it all and we’ve barely got going.’
Frankie nodded, sighing heavily. ‘Made me realise how much I already love this place.’
‘Mikey bloody Miller,’ Stella grumbled, pulling leaves one by one from the rosemary stick and dropping them into her empty glass.
‘Thank God the donkey wasn’t in the garden,’ Frankie said, leaning slightly forward to look at Winnie.
Winnie nodded, philosophical. ‘I don’t think he’s ever coming back.’
Stella looked at her. ‘Have you fallen out?’
They all knew that they weren’t just talking about the donkey any more.
Winnie shook her head. ‘Nothing like that. I just understand him a bit more now. He’s perfectly content with his life as it is.’
Frankie frowned. ‘But you’re still going to visit regularly, right?’
‘We seem to have reached an agreement, yes.’
‘Does that mean that you’re shagging?’ Stella said, bumping shoulders with a sly laugh.
‘Me and the donkey? That’s disgusting, Stell.’
Stella rolled her eyes. ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’
‘Do it, Win,’ Frankie said suddenly. ‘Just bloody do it. He’s the perfect antidote to Rory.’
Both Winnie and Stella looked at her. ‘Somebody’s fired up.’
Frankie shook her head. ‘I’m not especially, but we’re thirty-four-year-old women. That’s young! We should be able to do whatever we like with whoever we like without feeling bad about it.’
‘I know,’ Winnie said, thinking as much about Frankie and Seth as herself and Jesse. ‘So what’s the deal with Seth? You two looked pretty cosy out here when I got back from Jesse’s.’
Frankie screwed her nose up. ‘Isn’t that ridiculous? How can I have been stargazing with Seth Manson tonight?’ She paused, scratching her short, deep-red fingernails along the grooves of the driftwood table. ‘He nearly kissed me, just before the fire.’
‘Christ,’ Stella whispered. ‘Do you know how many women would literally kill right now to swap places with you?’
Frankie let out a nervous laugh. ‘Nothing happened, not really. We were just talking about life, and exes, and complications. Listening to him, I wouldn’t want to be famous; everybody around him has an agenda.
He likes that I’m just normal, I think,’ she said, nodding towards the empty loungers on the edge of the beach.
‘We were sitting down there, and I turned to say something at the same time as he did, and suddenly we were nose to nose.’