The Forever Home (Little Duck Pond Cafe #38)

PROLOGUE

He thought about her as he retreated upstairs to his painting room.

What would she be doing now? Did she still have time to paint? Or was she married as well now, with a house full of laughing children running around and demanding her time?

Closing the door behind him, he felt that lovely sense of relief... a loosening of his shoulders as he looked forward to a few precious hours of solitude.

His wife had invited three of her ‘besties’ round and he could hear them laughing and gossiping in the kitchen.

Earlier, she’d told him off for using her new top-of-the-range coffee maker and not wiping it down afterwards. ‘You know I’ve got the girls coming over. Do you have to be so annoying?’

It had been on the tip of his tongue to say that real friends wouldn’t actually care, but that would just make her angrier. He could also have added that technically speaking, it was his coffee machine. He paid for everything while she enjoyed a life of sleeping late, lunching with her friends and going to shows in London. She had no idea how much it cost to run a house, so she’d leave all the lights in the house blazing without a thought for the electricity bill. (It was a pet hate of his. He seemed to spend his entire life switching lights off after her!) But it would have been petty to say any of this, so he’d just given her a disbelieving smile and walked out of the room.

‘I’m the only one whose husband won’t pay for a cleaner. No wonder I get so stressed,’ she’d complained. ‘And would you stop using the best mugs? They cost a fortune!’

He’d escaped the ear-bashing, and the sound of last-minute hoovering had following him up the stairs. He could picture her seething over the lack of a cleaner, turning the air blue with her muttered opinion of him. Up in his room, he’d closed the door firmly behind him.

Now, he stood by the window, looking out over the large back garden and thinking about how his life had panned out. They should never have married, but he’d believed there was a child on the way and he’d been over the moon at the idea of becoming a dad. They’d since had Rihanna, though, and she was the light of both their lives. He smiled, thinking about her. She was musical. A bright, creative girl of nineteen, who lit up every room she entered.

Their daughter had kept them together through the bad times. Whenever he’d had enough and was contemplating leaving, he’d think about the effect the split would have on Rihanna and he just couldn’t do it.

A child needed both their parents, preferably living in the same house. So however tough it got at home, he would stay until Rihanna left or was old enough to cope with the emotional upheaval of her parents separating.

He set up his easel, fetching his watercolours and filling a jar with water from the en-suite bathroom.

Downstairs they’d be planning their annual ‘girlie get-away’ – usually four or five nights in a luxury spa hotel where they’d lie by the pool all day and then dress up and dance the night away. He couldn’t think of anything more boring, and that was part of the problem. His tastes were simple. He quite liked his own company. She got bored easily and needed the constant validation of friends and acquaintances to make her feel good. They were so different. She could never understand how he could happily shut himself away for hours with nothing but his music and his watercolours for company.

She hated his paintings. Always had. Even though she’d pretended to like them at the start, when things had been good between them.

‘Why can’t you paint pictures with more life in them instead of those endless boring hills and sea?’ She’d said this so many times in the two decades they’d been married that it was like water off a duck’s back now. He’d tried to explain, in the early years, saying that painting landscape scenes in his down-time helped him to relax after a hard day’s graft.

After a while, though, he’d realised there was no point giving explanations to someone who didn’t really care about the answer.

Lately, though, something had changed within him. Maybe it was to do with his fortieth birthday, which was looming ever closer. People tended to reassess things on reaching milestone birthdays.

Instead of landscapes, he’d begun painting faces... people in a variety of settings. A woman smiling, standing in an orchard, resting a low-hanging rosy red apple in the palm of her hand; another perched among some sand dunes, chin on her raised knees, staring out to sea. His favourite was of a woman in profile, sitting at her easel, painting the same view he was trying to capture himself. A canvas within a canvas. He was quite proud of that one.

He’d thought she would be pleased with this departure from ‘boring bloody sheep’. Not that this was his motive. He’d given up trying to make their marriage work a long time ago.

But she’d taken one look at his efforts, fixed him with her slyly mocking grin and snapped, ‘Ha! Well, three guesses who that is, then.’

It was only then that he realised he’d been painting the same woman over and over. The same dark glossy hair, swept up from her neck in a ponytail... the same pale complexion... the same hauntingly sad green eyes.

It was the one face that, no matter how hard he tried, he could never seem to forget...