Daydreaming at the Boathouse Cafe (Maple Tree Lodge #2)

Chapter 1

Hannah Jackson looked at the group of people running along the muddy track and grimaced.

‘If I ever feel the need to do something crazy like a triathlon, just kill me because I’ll have probably gone insane,’ she declared.

Lily Wilson, one of Hannah’s best friends, turned to smile at her. ‘The only time I do exercise is when my mascara runs,’ she joked.

Ben Jackson, Hannah’s older brother, shook his head at them both. ‘Could you try and be a little more supportive?’ he asked. ‘This is the inaugural Dragonfly Lake Triathlon, after all.’

‘As long as we don’t have to take part in it, I’m happy,’ Hannah told him. ‘But I can think of better things to do on Easter Sunday.’

Like baking, she added to herself. The hot cross buns she had already made had gone down a storm at the hotel and the next batch were still proving in the larder.

But with her brother’s words still ringing in her ears, she tried to concentrate on the race.

She hadn’t been joking about how hard it was to compete in a triathlon.

The race had started at 10 a.m. with a 1.

5 km swim across Dragonfly Lake, followed by a 40 km bicycle ride around the local Cotswold country lanes.

The competitors were now on the final part, the 10 km run, which was five circuits of the lake.

Hannah thought it sounded utterly exhausting and even the Easter weekend sunshine finally appearing after heavy rain earlier couldn’t help those athletes struggling around the course who looked exhausted.

Nearby, a thick red ribbon had been strung across the rough track as a makeshift finish line, placed just in front of their family-run hotel.

Not knowing what to expect from this first triathlon held by Maple Tree Lodge, the whole family were thrilled by the response of having so many local competitors enter, as well as a large crowd of spectators.

After all, it had only been six months ago that the hotel had been close to bankruptcy.

An uptick in fortunes, thanks to Ben and Lily, who had renovated the hotel into a cosy country destination, had meant that bookings had continued to fly in each weekend.

Although business was still a little slow, so the hotel was not at capacity as often as they had hoped.

Ben gave his sister a nudge with his elbow as he noticed Tom Addison of the Cranbridge Times nearby. ‘Smile and look as if you’re enjoying this, would you?’ he muttered. ‘The local press are here.’

Hannah suppressed a yawn. ‘I’m being supportive by just being here,’ she told him. ‘I had to work late last night, remember?’

‘How late was that, by the way?’ asked Ben with a frown. ‘Even I went to bed before you and that was gone midnight.’

Hannah shrugged her shoulders. ‘You know what Saturday nights are like. There was loads of clearing up to do after a big works party at the pub,’ she replied. ‘It took me ages to tidy up before I could leave.’

Hannah worked at the Rose and Crown in Aldwych town, ten miles away from Maple Tree Lodge where she lived with her family.

The waitressing job was hard and not particularly enjoyable, thanks to a demanding manager which led to a high staff turnover.

But it was a job for which she was grateful as it helped bring much-needed funds into the family.

‘Wasn’t there anyone else to help you?’ asked Lily.

Hannah shook her head. ‘Everyone else had left.’

‘Apart from you, as usual,’ said her brother in a pointed tone. ‘They take advantage of you. I don’t know why you don’t just leave. There must be better places for work somewhere out there.’

Faye Jackson, on the other side of her son and daughter, suddenly said in a bright tone, ‘Oh, look! There’s only two laps of the lake to go!’

Hannah glanced at their mum with a grateful look of thanks for the distraction, soothed as always by Faye’s gentle way of diverting any arguments from bubbling up.

Faye was quiet and steady like Hannah. Ben was more hot-blooded, taking after their late dad and their grandad Walter, who was sitting on a camping chair nearby, banging his hand down on the arm rest. ‘Look at that guy elbowing his way through the pack!’ shouted Walter. ‘That’s blatant cheating!’

‘Walter,’ said Lily, before hushing him. ‘Think of the guests, please.’

‘It’s a race, isn’t it?’ muttered Walter.

As the athletes ran along the track on the other side of Dragonfly Lake and despite feeling weary after her late night, Hannah couldn’t help but smile at the view, her favourite in the whole world.

The lake sparkled under the spring sunshine, gentle ripples glittered under a soft breeze that was sweeping across the water. Beyond the track that went around the lake where the athletes were running were the trees and large swathes of forest, all of which was owned by the Jackson family.

Beyond the lake and forest were the green rolling hills of the English countryside, dotted with fluffy white sheep and meadows full of yellow daffodils.

The tiny new leaves on each tree and hedgerow were beginning to unfold each day now it was the first week in April.

Spring was bursting into joyful life everywhere.

It was a magical setting. No wonder her great-great-grandfather had fallen in love with the place when he had first discovered it in 1918.

Once he had purchased the land, Henry Jackson had begun to build himself and his new war-time bride a home in which to bring up their family.

Each generation of the Jackson family since had added more rooms and space to the lodge, using a mixture of the sandy-coloured brick that was characteristic within the Cotswolds area and the endless amount of timber that the family now owned, thanks to the surrounding woodland.

Hannah’s great-great-grandfather had felled many trees to build the original lodge and the future generations had followed suit so that the outside walls of the hotel were layers of huge logs, giving the place a solid but warm look.

Vast brick chimneys hugged the outside walls all the way up to the slate-tiled roof, where spires of smoke were trailing upwards into the blue sky.

Nowadays, it was a two-storey building with long wings that extended along the sandy bank of the lake.

It was too large a building for just his parents, his wife and two children to live in, so Hannah’s father Tony had decided to open up the place as a hotel in the early 1980s.

He had altered the top floor to accommodate twenty guest bedrooms with en suites, leaving the family to sleep in private staff quarters at the end of the west wing.

What would their dad have made of their recent success, wondered Hannah, glancing up at the nearby hotel.

She hoped he would be glad of the hotel being busier than she had ever known.

After all, it had been a struggling business for many years, only becoming successful once Ben had taken over as hotel manager after their father’s sudden passing a year ago.

She knew that Ben felt the weight of the success of the family-run hotel on his shoulders. Something he had been anxious to relieve their grandad of when he had moved back home a year ago when their father had died unexpectedly.

Things were definitely on the up for Maple Tree Lodge thanks to a major renovation but Hannah knew that the frequently unoccupied rooms during the week were still a worry for her big brother.

Ben, helped by Lily’s interior design skills, had helped steer the hotel into a booming business over the winter most weekends when every one of the hotel’s twenty bedrooms had been occupied with guests.

But during the week when the hotel became quieter, the lack of steady income played on everyone’s minds.

But, despite their business worries, to Hannah and the rest of the family, it wasn’t just a hotel. Maple Tree Lodge was their home as well.

‘Come on, Alex!’ shouted Walter as the group of athletes began to draw near on their penultimate lap of the lake.

‘We should be fair to everyone taking part,’ Faye reminded him in a hushed tone.

‘Humph,’ said Walter, his grey eyebrows fusing together in a frown. ‘It’s a competition, isn’t it?’

Hannah’s diminutive grandmother, Dotty, agreed with her husband. ‘Oh, clever Alex! Come on!’ she yelled, before noting her daughter-in-law’s look. ‘What?’ she asked Faye. ‘Why can’t we cheer him on?’

‘Of course you can,’ Ben told her in a quiet tone. ‘He’s my best friend and I want him to win.’

‘Quite right,’ added Jake, Ben’s other best friend, who was standing nearby. ‘I mean, it’s not the Commonwealth Games yet. But everyone says he’s going to win the gold there so why shouldn’t he win this little race as well?’

‘Little race?’ Lily laughed. ‘When was the last time you were in an endurance event?’

‘Last weekend when I had that awful date,’ replied Jake, making a face. ‘If you’d had to put up with Annabel’s inane line of conversation, you’d have been in run-away mode as well.’

Ben rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t tell me, another one to add to the pile of abandoned ex-girlfriends.’

‘Too right,’ muttered Jake, with a shudder.

Hannah smiled. Jake’s lack of desire to have any kind of long-term relationship was legendary.

‘Come on, Alex!’ shouted Ben, as his best friend ran past them, in the lead.

Lily nudged him in the chest at his lack of diplomacy but she was smiling and clapping the rest of the pack at the same time.

‘I’ve got the champagne ready,’ said Frankie, their mum’s best friend, joining them.

Frankie had moved in after being widowed a few years ago.

She now ran the bar in the hotel where her expertise with cocktails had made the snug, as the family referred to it, a success with the guests at the weekends.

‘Alex will have to be careful when he opens the bottle. I’m not sure how long it was in the cellar for. ’

‘Alex might not be the winner,’ Lily reminded her in a whispered tone.