Christmas Wishes, Mistletoe Kisses

CHAPTER FIVE

THE other three stopped talking and looked at him. He grinned, walked over to the row of pegs and pulled off a fluffy knitted hat and matching scarf. ‘Come with me,’ he said as he walked back towards Louise, whose eyes were wide and round, then he linked the tips of his fingers with hers and pulled her up to stand.

Her mouth moved, but no sound emerged.

He tugged her in the direction of the hallway, to the large gilt mirror he’d seen hanging there on his very first visit after Louise had moved in. He stood behind her and, while she continued to stare at him in the mirror, he pulled the dusky purple hat over her head. It was one of those tight-fitting ones with no embellishment or bobbles, and the crocheted hem came down level with her eyebrows.

Better. But she still looked like Louise Thornton. He scowled at her reflection and her eyebrows raised so they disappeared under the hat. It was the hair. That long, glossy dark hair was her trademark-instantly recognisable, indefinably her.

He brushed the hair framing her face back behind her ears and twisted the strands into a loose plait. When his gaze flicked up to the mirror again, she was staring at their reflections, her mouth slightly apart, and then she shivered and shook his hands away from her shoulders. He broke eye contact and busied himself wrapping the scarf once, twice, around her neck, letting it stand up so it covered the lower half of her face. Somehow his hands had made their own way back on to her shoulders with the flimsy pretence of keeping the scarf in place.

Only the eyes gave her away now, but there wasn’t much he could do to diminish their impact. She could hardly wear sunglasses on a chilly autumn evening. That would only draw more attention to her.

‘There.’

She was motionless, the only movement her eyes as they flicked between her own reflection and his. ‘I’m wearing a hat and scarf. Is that your stunning plan?’

‘No one will be able to pick you out of a crowd in this. It’s going to be almost pitch-dark, after all. Top it off with a big dark coat and you’ll look just like the rest of us.’

‘I am like the rest of you.’

He knew celebrities weren’t a different breed of human being, so he could almost agree. But there was something about Louise Thornton that defied explanation, that made her unlike anyone he had ever met before. And he really hoped he didn’t feel that way because she was famous. He didn’t want to be that shallow.

They stared at each other in the mirror a good long time. Her shoulders rose and fell beneath his hands.

‘Mum, look!’

The stillness was shattered and suddenly he was moving away and Jack and Jasmine were running into the hallway, bundled up in coats and hats and jumping up and down. Jack was tall for his age and Jasmine petite, making them almost the same height. It took a few seconds for him to realise that Jack’s overexcited squeaking was coming from underneath Jasmine’s hat and scarf. Louise looked from one child to the other and burst out laughing. She pulled the fluffy hat with earflaps up by its bobble until she could see her son’s eyes.

‘If you’d have kept quiet, I’d have had no idea that you two had switched coats!’

Jack jumped up and down. ‘Can we go? Can we?’

Louise rolled her eyes again. ‘Okay, we’ll go.’

Their cheers echoed round the tall hallway and up the elegant sweep of the stairs. Pounding footsteps followed as they raced back into the kitchen. ‘You can wear your own coats and hats, though,’ Louise called after them.

When the silence returned, she looked at him. ‘Do you really think it’ll work?’

‘Of course, everyone is going to be craning their necks and looking up at the sky. They won’t even pay attention to who’s standing next to them. And, let’s face it, it has to be a better disguise than your last attempt!’

She pulled the hat off her head and spent a few seconds defluffing her hair. ‘You don’t beat around the bush much, do you?’

He shook his head. Why waste time using inefficient words when you could use a few that hit straight to the heart of the matter?

Louise unwound the scarf and held it, together with the hat. ‘Was it really that bad?’

He nodded and tried very hard not to smile. ‘You looked like a celebrity trying very hard to not look like a celebrity. I mean, a pink track suit with the word “Juicy” splashed all over the…um…back.’

She gave him a knowing look. ‘Oh, you noticed that, did you?’

If Ben Oliver had been a man prone to blushing, he’d have been as pink as Louise’s ‘Juicy’ jogging bottoms at that moment. Thank goodness his body was far too sensible for such displays of emotion. He gave her the sort of look a headmaster would give a gum-chewing schoolgirl. ‘It was hard not to.’

‘When are the fireworks going to start?’ Louise looked first to the left and then to the right and clung a little harder on to the rope strung between rusting metal poles in front of her. Lower Hadwell’s village green bordered the river just upstream from the main jetty and the fireworks had been set up on the stony beach with a clear boundary marked out to stop excited children getting too close.

‘Twenty minutes.’ Ben’s voice was calm and reassuring, but it did nothing to soothe her. ‘Don’t worry.’ His hand rested lightly on her shoulder and she jumped.

Don’t worry. That was easy enough to him to say. Every time he let his guard down, someone didn’t jump in front of him and pop a flashbulb. In recent years, she’d stopped letting down the wall she put up between herself and the rest of the world. Life was just too dangerous to lay herself open in that way. Only now the tabloids labelled her ‘stuck-up’ and ‘fake’.

She sighed and, as her warm breath flowed out of her mouth, cool night air laced with wood smoke and sulphur filled her nostrils. She smiled.

Her family-well, what had been left of her family once Mum had died-had always attended the little firework display in the local park each November. The fireworks themselves hadn’t been all that spectacular, but her memories were of cosiness, laughter and a feeling of belonging.

Then she’d met Toby and all that had changed. Had her family life really been that bad? On paper…probably.

As the eldest of five, with an invalid father, she’d had to fill her mother’s shoes. The role had been too big for her. Like a little girl playing dressing up in her mother’s high heels, there’d been obstacles she just hadn’t been able to negotiate. In her dramatic teenage way, she’d imagined herself as a modern-day Cinderella-albeit looking after a much-loved family. She’d become cook, cleaner, carer, sympathetic ear, referee…

But what their lives had been lacking in money and glamour, they’d made up for with love. And she hadn’t realised all families weren’t like that until there was a big gaping hole in her life.

‘Mum? Can I have a hot dog?’

Louise blinked and then focused on Jack, who was tugging on one of her arms.

‘Pardon, sweetheart?’

He tugged so hard she thought her shoulder would work loose from its socket. ‘I’m really hungry. Can I have a hot dog?’

The smell of onions, caramelising as they cooked on the makeshift grill on the far corner of the green invaded her senses. Hot on its tail was the aroma of herbs and meat. Her nose told her that when Jack said ‘hot dogs’ he didn’t mean skinny little frankfurters but bulging, meaty local sausages, bursting out of their skins and warming the soft, floury white bread that surrounded them. Her mouth filled with saliva.

‘Jack, you’re going to pull my arm off! Give me a second to think!’

She was safe here at the front of the crowd. No one could see her face, only half lit from the bonfire off to the left. But over there by the grill, a generator grumbled as it provided power for a couple of harsh floodlights, making it as bright as any runway she’d ever walked down when she’d been modelling.

‘Um…’

Ben took hold of Jack’s hand, his eyebrows raised in a question as he searched her face. ‘Why don’t we let your mum save our spot here and we can go and get the hot dogs? If that’s okay with you…’ he added a little more quietly.

Her face relaxed so much in relief that she couldn’t help but smile. She nodded and almost breathed her response. ‘Thank you.’

It was only when Ben and the two kids had disappeared through the crowd that she realised she should have asked him to get one for her too. She opened her mouth to yell, but stopped herself and pulled the hem of her hat down until it was touching the bridge of her nose. Too many faces.

There were always too many faces these days. Yes, back in the beginning, she’d loved that aspect of her golden life with Toby. Dad had needed a lot of help when she’d been finishing secondary school and, after being in class so infrequently that some of the kids in her year hadn’t even known who she was, it had been nice to be recognised. She’d underestimated just how addictive being noticed could be.

Her first hit had been the adrenaline rush she’d had when that talent scout for a modelling agency had come up to her when she’d been working in the supermarket one Saturday afternoon. Within weeks she’d been flying round Europe for photo shoots, attending industry parties, meeting famous people…

Dad had been so proud of her. And she’d ignored the guilt she’d felt at letting Sarah, the next oldest, slip into her Cinderella role whilst her big sister had danced away in an imaginary world where the clock never seemed to strike midnight.

And then she’d met Prince Charming-Tobias Thornton, rising star and darling of the British film industry. After that, she’d smothered all those nagging feelings by reasoning that now, at least, her family had decent food on the table. That they’d moved into a proper house with a bedroom for all of them…except Louise. And the school uniforms were no longer hand-me-downs or scavenged from local charity shops. Best of all, Dad had a full-time nurse to look after him.

It had been the nurse who’d been sitting beside him when he’d died only six months after she and Toby had said ‘I do’ on a private island in the Caribbean.

Tears stung Louise’s eyes and the bonfire became a big orange blur. She stared at the mass of colour until it started to sharpen and move again. Slowly, she became aware of people talking and being nudged, but she didn’t seem able to move. It was only when she heard Jack laugh and splutter with a mouthful of hot dog that she realised the others had returned. She carelessly rested a hand on top of Jack’s head but he shook it off.

‘You looked hungry too.’ There was a smile in Ben’s voice and she turned to look at him, even though the world was still shimmering slightly. He was holding up a big, juicy sausage in a roll, dripping with fried onions and ketchup. ‘Of course, I’ve heard models don’t eat, so I’m prepared to make the sacrifice of eating two if you don’t want it.’

‘Ex-model,’ she said, snatching it out of his hand and stuffing one end in her mouth before he could change his mind. Ben threw his head back and laughed. And, when she had finished chewing, she did the same.

‘Mum? What’s so funny?’

Louise gave a tiny shake of her head, her gaze locked with Ben’s. ‘I don’t know, Jack. Just…’Ben was still grinning, but his eyes weren’t just smiling at her now. Deep underneath, there was something intense, something that drew her and terrified her at the same time. ‘…something.’

She breathed out and returned her attention to her hot dog, which wasn’t hard to do. She hoped these had been happy pigs because, boy, they made one heck of a good sausage. Their sacrifice had been entirely worth it.

But then, sacrifices often were.

If Mum hadn’t died, if Dad hadn’t been ill, if she hadn’t been standing at that particular supermarket till that day-looking ‘haunting’ as the scout had told her-then she wouldn’t have met Toby. Okay, she might not have any regrets about erasing Toby from her life at this particular moment, but without Toby there would have been no Jack. And Jack was worth any sacrifice.

She looked at him, hanging off the rope and trying to edge closer to where the fireworks were being set up. Before she could reach for him, a strong male hand gently grabbed his coat and hauled him back into place.

A bonfire sprang into life inside Louise. In a place that had been cold and dead for so long, flames licked and tickled.

No. Not now. Not here. Not with this man.

Not that Ben Oliver wasn’t worthy of admiration. After all, he was good-looking, thoughtful and kind. A good father. All the things a girl should put at the top of her list when searching for a prospective Prince Charming. And he had a presence, a quiet charisma that made it impossible not to search him out in a crowd or feel that he was someone you could trust your life with.

But this wasn’t the time to be noticing those things about someone. This was time for her and Jack to heal, to rebuild. And she’d felt this way before, had trusted Toby with her life, and he had made it glitter and shine for a while, but ultimately he’d decided it wasn’t worth his enduring attention.

So this was her sacrifice: she wouldn’t go there. She’d cut off the oxygen supply to whatever feelings were warming her core. Jack deserved all her attention and her love at the moment and he shouldn’t have to share it with anyone. He wouldn’t.

The fireworks started. Louise had thought herself immune to the pretty showers of colour. Last year they’d seen the New Year’s fireworks in London from a balcony of an expensive riverside apartment a quarter of a mile away. It had been a dramatic display, with rockets shooting off the London Eye and barges on the Thames, but she’d felt removed from it all somehow.

There was no ignoring anything tonight. Not the way the crowd collectively held its breath waiting for a bang. Not the warmth of the bonfire on one side of her face. Especially not the breath of the man standing slightly behind her that made her right ear tingle.

In the inky blackness of a country night, the sprays of light-from pure white to red and green, and blue and gold-were reflected in a river that had stretched itself taut and flat. The effect was stunning. Magical. Soon she was saying ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ with everyone else, and clapping and watching Jack’s reaction-and finding herself catching the gaze of a warm brown pair of eyes, then quickly looking away again.

The last firework glittered and fizzed, shooting so high up into the sky that she would have sworn that, briefly, she caught a glimpse of her big white house on the opposite bank. And then it exploded and split into a thousand stars that gracefully fell to earth. She sighed and closed her eyes. Simple pleasures.

How odd. She’d always thought that money and fame would make it easier to find pleasure, but all it had really done was make it more complicated. Pure happiness, joy with no strings attached was an unknown commodity in her life. When had she become so poor? And how had she become so blind she hadn’t even realised what a sorry state she was in?

‘Come on…’ Ben’s hand, resting once again on the shoulder of her thick wool coat, caused her to open her eyes, releasing the magic moment and letting it flutter away like the sparks from the bonfire. ‘I’ll give you a lift home.’

Jack, who should have been totally worn out by now, jumped up and down even harder. ‘Are we going on the dingy again?’

Jas put on a very superior tone. ‘It’s not a dingy, Jack. You say it ding-gee. Dinghy.’

Jack pulled himself up to his full height. ‘I knew that.’

Ben shook his head. ‘No. I’ll drive you.’

Louise opened her mouth to protest. It would take more than half an hour to drive down to Dartmouth, catch the ‘higher ferry’, as the locals called it, and double back to Whitehaven.

‘I wouldn’t take the kids out in the boat when it’s this dark,’ he explained.

Louise followed him as he headed for the quiet spot where he’d parked his car and looked carefully at the scenery. It had been verging on darkness when they’d made the trip over, or at least she’d thought it was. The trees had been dark grey shapes and the sky had faded from bright cobalt at the horizon to indigo overhead but, compared to how it looked at the moment, that had merely been twilight. Everything was black if it wasn’t lit up by either starlight or electricity.

‘And you and Jack would have to scramble back through the woods in the pitch-dark.’

Okay, he’d convinced her. She got lost in her own back garden in daylight still. No way was she dragging her eight-year-old through those woods tonight.

As she strapped Jack into the back of Ben’s car, Louise went still. Ben must have known all along that they wouldn’t be able to return to Whitehaven the way they’d come. It explained why he’d disappeared when they’d first arrived to move his car-away from the main road and the village centre, where the crowds were now ambling-into a quiet side road.

She sat in the front passenger seat and fastened her seat belt without looking at him. Pretty soon they were whizzing through isolated country lanes in silence, the only hint they weren’t alone inside a big black bubble were the golden twigs and branches picked out by the headlights in front of them. The patterns the light made on the road and hedgerows shifted and twisted as they sped past. Every now and then, for a split-second, an odd tree stump or a gate would be illuminated and then it would be gone.

Louise breathed in the silence. After a few minutes she turned her head slightly to look at Ben. His hands gripped the wheel lightly, but she had no doubt he was in full control. All his concentration was focused on the road in front of them. He looked at it the same way he’d looked at her in the mirror that afternoon.

The air begun to pulse around her head and a familiar craving she’d thought she’d conquered started to clamour deep inside her-the heady rush of simply being noticed. Immediately, she twisted her head to look straight ahead and clamped her hands together in her lap. They were shaking.

Simple pleasures.

She had an idea that Ben Oliver was full of them.

It was taking every ounce of his will-power to keep his eyes on the road ahead. Having Louise Thornton in the front seat of his car was proving a distraction. And not an oh-my-goodness-there’s-a-celebrity-in-my-car kind of distraction. Unfortunately. He could have talked himself out of that one quite easily.

And it wasn’t even because she was the most stunning woman he’d ever laid eyes on. She was way out of his league, he knew that. The logic of this situation would catch up with him eventually.

At the start of the evening, she’d stood tall and still, and a casual onlooker would have thought her relaxed and confident. But, unfortunately, he’d discovered he could no longer regard Louise casually.

He’d noticed the way her gloved hands had hung on to the boundary rope as if it were a lifeline. He’d seen the panic in her eyes when she’d thought she’d have to face the crowd and might be recognised. He had the oddest feeling that the real Louise had shrunk small inside herself, hiding beneath the thick outer shell. How long had she been that way?

Then, as the evening had worn on, he’d seen her hands unclench from the rope and noticed the unconscious, affectionate gestures that flowed between mother and son. He’d heard her laugh when ketchup had dripped on to her chin from the hot dog, and listened to the soft intakes of breath with every bang and crackling shower of the fireworks.

And he didn’t want to notice these things about her. He didn’t want to know how warm and rich her laugh was, or how tender and gentle she was below the surface. He just wanted to see the surface alone-much in the same way he only saw the rippling surface of the river and never the rocks and currents beneath.

He would rather remember the bare facts-that her divorce was still raw and fresh, that the last thing he and Jas needed in their lives at the moment was another woman with too much baggage for him to shoulder.

He’d known that Megan had had ‘issues’ when he’d first met her, but they seemed inconsequential to the situations facing Louise. And she faced them with such dignity and poise…

There he went again, admiring her when he should be concentrating on other things.

A flash of movement across the road caused his foot to stamp instantly on the brake. All of the joke-telling and giggling from the back seat stopped.

‘It’s okay,’ he said, his heart pounding. ‘Only a rabbit-and he’s away up the hill by now.’

Jas and Jack returned to their knock-knock jokes and he put the car into gear. He pulled away gently, aware of the slim fingers that had flown to the dashboard and were now curling back into her lap.

Getting freaked out by a rabbit? What was happening to him? They darted in front of the car all the time and he never usually reacted this way. He pressed his foot on the accelerator, the car picked up speed and soon they were flying down the country lane as if nothing had happened. Ben concentrated on the road and pretended he didn’t know how to answer his own question.

The other occupants of the car fell into silence and it wasn’t long before he was pulling into the long drive that led to Whitehaven. Louise shifted in her seat, as if she was preparing to dart out of the door as soon as the wheels had stopped turning. Good. If she didn’t feel the need to linger in his presence, that was fine by him.

‘Can I have cake when I get in, Mum?’

Ben stifled a smile as he slowed the car and brought it to a halt outside the front porch. And then his tummy rumbled. It had fond memories of that cake.

‘Jack! It’s past your bedtime! Of course you’re not going to have-’

‘Cakes!’

They all turned and looked at Jas, whose eyes were wide and a hand was clamped over her mouth. Then she started to cry. Instantly, he was out of the car and opening the rear passenger door. ‘Jas? What is it?’

Jas’s lip trembled. ‘C-cakes. My class are doing a tea party for the old people in the village. Mum was going to help me make cakes this weekend, but she went away…’

Ben tried not to let the irritation show on his face. Megan could waltz off to Timbuktu for all he cared, but when her flaky ways affected Jas it was a different matter entirely.

‘I’m supposed to take them in on Tuesday morning or I won’t get any house points!’ Jas wailed. ‘Can you help me, Dad?’

‘Um…’There was nothing he’d like more, but he wasn’t sure Jas would be getting any house points for anything he tried to bake-‘tried’ being the operative word.

‘I can help.’

As one, he and Jas swivelled round to look at Louise and stared. Her face was expressionless. Had he really heard that right?

Ben turned back to Jas. ‘Can’t you do it on your own? I’ll supervise.’

There was a loud snort from the passenger seat. He ignored it.

Jas had the end-of-the-world expression on her face that was common to all eleven-year-olds in a crisis. ‘I don’t know. I can never get the beginning bit right when you have to mix the eggs and flour together.’

‘Eggs and sugar.’ Louise spoke quietly. In his experience, that tone was deceptive. He just might be in big trouble.

‘Yeah, eggs and sugar. That’s what I meant,’ Jas said absently.

Ben sighed. ‘Can’t we just buy some?’

Jas shook her head and started to cry again.

‘I can help.’ This time Louise’s tone was more insistent.

‘Home-made cakes?’

‘What do you think you were eating earlier? Scotch mist?’

Reality dropped away and Ben felt as if he were standing on nothing. ‘You made that cake?’ He could tell by the look on her face that he was probably sabotaging Jas’s only chance-which was a pity. He hadn’t meant his words to come out quite like that, but they’d escaped before his brain had had a chance to give them the once-over.

Louise glared at him. ‘No, the cake fairies left it on the doorstep.’

Okay. He’d deserved that.

Jas, who was wiping her eyes with her coat sleeve, piped up. ‘I thought that if Jack needed cakes for school you’d have just bought them at Harrods.’

It seemed his daughter had inherited his capacity for opening his mouth only to change feet.

Louise clamped a hand across her mouth and, just as he was expecting her to flounce out of the car, slamming the door, her eyes sparkled and she let out a raucous laugh.

Ben was floored. This wasn’t the shy giggle he’d seen earlier; it was a full-bellied chuckle. And it was pretty infectious. When the surprise had worn off, his mouth turned up at the corners and, pretty soon, all four of them were crying with laughter. Louise was clutching on to the door for support and Jack’s titter was so high-pitched it was starting to hurt his ears.

Still giggling, Louise managed a few words, even though she was a little short of breath. ‘Sometimes…sometimes…when I was really busy…I did get them at Harrods!’ That just set them all off again.

When they all managed to get back on the right side of sanity he felt as exhausted as if he’d done a cross-country run. Man, it hurt to breathe.

Louise let out a long happy sigh. Her face was soft and relaxed and her cheeks were flushed. It was just as well there were two children in the back of the car, because he had the stupidest urge to kiss her.

That sobered him up pretty fast.

‘Are you sure? I know you’re really busy. We don’t want to put you out, do we, Jas?’

Jas didn’t say anything, but pleaded at him with her eyes.

‘Busy doing what?’ Louise raised an eyebrow. ‘The house is practically finished. There’s only so much interior decorating a girl can do, you know.’ And then she winked at him-actually winked at him. ‘I’d be happy to help. You gave us a great night out tonight.’

Ben stuttered. That was the problem. In his mind, tonight had been about making a nice final gesture to ensure that Louise was settled into the neighbourhood before he backed off. How was he going to do that if she was going to be in his kitchen tomorrow?

After she’d put Jack to bed that night, Louise couldn’t sleep. Didn’t even want to try. It must be the fresh air or something.

She found herself flopped on one of the big velvet-covered sofas in the drawing room, the remote control in her hand, flicking through endless cable stations searching for something to watch. A fire glowed in the hearth and the lights were low. The rich, deep colours and luxurious textures of the fabrics in here truly had made a large draughty room incredibly cosy.

Wait a minute…

She stopped jabbing the button on the remote and went back a few channels. Just as she’d thought-there was old film footage of Laura Hastings, not from one of her movies, but of her getting on a plane. Louise dropped the remote and snuggled back into the over-sized cushions that lined the back of the sofa.

It was obviously a documentary and, although she’d missed the first twenty minutes, she settled down to watch. Laura had been so beautiful when she was young. Her ice-blonde hair, pale skin and blue eyes looked fabulous in gaudy nineteen-fifties Technicolor.

She’d had such an interesting life. Two failed marriages-a hint of a scandal. Louise smiled to herself. It all might seem very dashing and glamorous when it was reported like that, but she knew from experience that living through it was just as painful as it was for the rest of the human beings on the planet. Not only did she admire the former owner of Whitehaven, but she identified with her. Had Laura Hastings been happy in the end?

As she kept watching, she didn’t really get an answer. Laura had lived life to the full, taken every chance offered her. And that was where Louise saw the difference between them. Yes, she’d grabbed at the chance to become a model and marry the man of her dreams-literally. But then, even when things had turned sour, she’d hung on to the empty shell of all her hopes, too scared to let go and trust that things would turn out right in the end.

Her gaze drifted from the television and she huffed gently and shook her head. She’d been a coward. It had taken Toby carrying on, practically under her nose, to push her into leaving him. She’d been scared that, imperfect as it was, if she let go of her life she’d go into freefall and there’d be no one there to catch her.

She still felt as if she were falling sometimes.

A picture of Whitehaven appeared on the screen and Louise sat up. Wow. The footage looked like old black and white cine film. Laura, now middle-aged but still stunning, walking on the lawn in front of the house, staring out across the river.

Much more of the house was visible. The trees were, of course, shorter but it wasn’t just that. Everything looked a little more…cared for. The garden still had a wild and unusual beauty, but there was a harmony that was missing from it in its present state.

The house and garden might have been looking lovely, but the voiceover indicated that Laura Hastings’s life had been disintegrating at this point. She’d fallen in love with both the house and her leading man while filming on location at Whitehaven some ten years earlier.

There had been a torrid affair, but the actor already had a wife and Laura had married someone else on the rebound. Years later, the illicit romance had blossomed into life again and Laura, sure that happiness was finally in her grasp, had divorced her husband and waited for her lover to free himself from his marriage too. The waiting had turned into yearning and the yearning into heartbreak. The love of her life had never followed through.

A tear trickled down Louise’s cheek and she hugged a pillow to her. Laura Hastings might have made some bad choices along the way, but she couldn’t help admiring her courage.

The credits rolled. The next thing on was A Summer Affair, the very film set at Whitehaven. It was the story of the young serving girl who’d captured the heart of the wealthy owner’s son. The chemistry on-screen between Laura and her man was sizzling-hot. But, now Louise knew it had ended in a doomed love affair, every touch, every kiss had a bittersweet quality to it.

She sighed and settled down to watch, a chenille cushion hugged to her chest.

There was a scene halfway through the film, just as the lovers were starting to act on their feelings for each other, that had been filmed on the balcony of the boathouse. A picnic was set out on a little table with a red and white checked cloth. The sun was shining and shy, heated glances were flying between hero and heroine.

Louise sighed. That was what love should be like, she mused as she covered her mouth with a hand to stifle a yawn-overly bright and colourful, the sun always shining. The zing of electricity in the air. And the way he looked at her-as if he could see right through her and into her soul. As if he wanted to drown in her. That was what love should be like.

What a pity it was only like that in corny old movies, she thought, as the hero pulled the heroine into the shadowy interior of the boathouse and wrapped her in his arms.