Holiday Fling Read online

  Holiday Fling

  An Accent Press Romance Anthology

  Edited by Catriona Camacho

  Just the Two of Us:

  Louisa’s over the moon about her holiday to Cornwall with her boyfriend David. Sun, sea, and a romantic, swashbuckling setting; what’s not to like? Maybe this will be the week when she and David finally have enough privacy to take their relationship to the next level. Then she hears that her partner has invited his mother to join them, and her heart plummets to her boots. A whole week sharing a room with the most pernickety and selfish woman in the universe. What on Earth is this going to mean for her relationship?

  The Cruise:

  It’s almost the end of the summer, and she’ll go spare unless she can finally jet off to the sun. But with one thing and another, and especially her husband being made redundant that year, the possibility isn’t exactly looking likely. So when he comes home one day with a pile of holiday brochures and the promise of a Mediterranean cruise, she has a feeling that this is going to be a holiday with a difference …

  Breaking Through:

  Fleeing a broken relationship and her ex-fiancé’s wedding to someone else, Freya Storm has convinced herself that she is absolutely fine holed up on an isolated country estate, working hard to produce a historical guide. Things seem to be going well, until a tall and handsome jogger appears one day while she is taking photographs and mistakes Freya for a tabloid journalist, causing her to smash her camera and putting the completion of her guide on time into jeopardy. Realising his mistake, the stranger offers to help in any way he can, and Freya quickly finds that things are suddenly going very well indeed.

  The Difference Between Us:

  Monica has not seen her preternaturally beautiful and successful twin, Eva, since the night she left home after a disastrous date with her long-time crush, Tony, where he seemed to constantly compare her to Eva. Fearing she would never be free of the influence of her stunningly attractive sister, Monica has spent a year away travelling before she risks returning for a visit. On her return though Monica finds that her situation with Tony wasn’t quite as she’d thought when she left.

  A Lady’s Fancy:

  After she finds her fiancé, the wicked Earl of Avon, in the arms of her beautiful cousin at their engagement ball, Elinor Camden makes a new life for herself as a governess and author of comic Gothic novels. Eight years later Avon is back from the Peninsular Wars and Elinor finds herself the heroine of her own adventure as she is snatched off a country road by the amorous earl, who is intent on rewriting the ending to their unhappy love story …

  Greek Gifts:

  When offered an opportunity out of the blue to spend a week away on holiday in the Greek countryside, shy insurance worker Ellen jumps at the chance. When she arrives she is swept away by the unspoiled beauty of the land around her, and resolves to pack her holiday with as much as possible to make the most of her time this wonderful country. When the taverna keeper’s son Alexi, with his Greek god looks, spends the evening telling her stories under the stars, Ellen is captivated, but knows with a man like Alexi, who is seeing a new tourist girl every week, she can be nothing but a distraction. But Alexi’s parents have noticed his strange new behaviour around Ellen, and she finds that her ideas about what will happen on this holiday aren’t quite what she originally thought …

  Waiting for Take Off:

  Today was supposed to be the day Bella Frost married her Mr Right, Lewis, in the wedding ceremony she’d been planning for years. Instead, a few weeks before the wedding she discovered that Lewis was a serial cheater and had no intention of ever going through with the marriage. Most of her bridesmaids offered her ice-cream and sympathy, but Julie turned up at her flat, packed some clothes, and took her to the airport so they can spend a week together at Julie’s Spanish island hideaway. Bella is sceptical about the trip at first, but is persuaded that this may be just what she needs to get over Lewis. But with Bella getting distracted by handsome men and children in distress in the departure lounge, and their flight being called, can she tear herself away long enough to make the plane?

  Dancing Naked on the Lawn:

  Fed up with her husband’s preference for watching the golf on a glorious sunny afternoon, Jessica decides that she’ll do anything to get out of the house, and decides to take her confused Aunt Hilda out of her nursing home for a drive. She is very surprised as they set out to find that her aunt is more confused than she’d imagined, and believes her to be eighteen again instead of middle-aged and long-married. As Jessica finds herself getting lost in the country roads, she finds herself reflecting on how much her life has changed since her undergraduate days, and wondering if she needs a man who watches the golf on a glorious day, and not one from her past who took her dancing naked on the lawn.

  Winter Break:

  The winter rain is pouring down and the central heating has packed up, the children are complaining and to cap it all off her colleague Janice will not stop showing off about the luxurious holiday her husband is taking her on to Lanzarote. With life a seemingly endless round of work, sleep, nagging the kids to get on with their homework, and never even having enough time for a night out with husband Terry, her colleague seems to have it all. Yet some unexpected news and an equally unexpected night in with Terry go some way towards changing her mind …

  Contents

  Christina Jones – Just the Two of Us

  Jane Bidder – The Cruise

  Gill Sanderson – Breaking Through

  Laura Wilkinson – The Difference Between Us

  Eve Bourton – A Lady’s Fancy

  Jan Jones – Greek Gifts

  Caroline Dunford – Waiting for Take-off

  Grace Wynne-Jones – Dancing Naked on the Lawn

  Jane Wenham-Jones – Winter Break

  Just the Two of Us

  Christina Jones

  If you knew me, you’d realise that contemplating murder was totally out of character. I’m a great believer in the sanctity of life, I mean I even rescue spiders from the bath – OK, yes, with the aid of one of those little bug-catcher devices – even though they terrify me. I literally wouldn’t hurt a fly. But David’s mother was something else entirely.

  David’s mother had driven me way beyond the bounds of rational behaviour. I would have happily throttled David’s mother if I’d thought I could get away with it.

  The holiday had been David’s idea. A week – just one short week because, obviously, David’s company would teeter into bankruptcy without him for any longer – in Cornwall.

  Mind you, Cornwall suited me fine. I’m addicted to Daphne du Maurier and Poldark and all that gothic, romantic, swashbuckling stuff, and had often imagined myself being carried away by some dashing, ne’er-do-well pirate or highwayman on stark and windswept Bodmin Moor. So, yes, I was very much looking forward to a week away with David, on our own. And who knew – we might even move the relationship on a bit – if you get my meaning …

  Anyway, David dropped the bombshell with full explosive force, just two days before we left.

  ‘Louisa, I’ve been thinking,’ David was pacing up and down the tiny living room in my equally tiny flat while I was trying to watch something gripping on the television news. ‘About the holiday … look, there’s no easy way to say this, but would you mind awfully if we asked Mum along too?’

  Mind? Mind? Was he mad?

  ‘Your mother?’ I looked up glacially, zapping the television into silence. ‘You want your mother to come on our holiday? The first week away together we’ve ever had? The first time we’ve ever managed to be alone?’

  I should tell you here that David
and I suffered from a massive lack of privacy in our relationship. I mean mercifully, David didn’t live with his mum – that would have been a step too far even for me – but he did live in a shared house with four workmates that was about as private as a football stadium on cup final day. And my miniscule flat – shared with two other girls – wasn’t much better.

  So, David and I didn’t have that sort of relationship. Yet.

  Which was why I’d really hoped, you know, in Cornwall …

  David had that slapped-puppy look. ‘Well, yes. I know it’s not what we wanted, and it does rather mess up our plans, but it’s been so hard for her since Dad left. She’s lonely and she needs a break and she’s getting on and …’

  ‘David,’ my voice was icily calm, ‘your dad left twelve years ago. Your mother isn’t sixty yet. She works, she has millions of friends, and a better social life than I do. She’s more than capable of arranging her own holiday.’

  David’s mother, it has to be said, had perfected the art of aging thirty years in as many seconds and becoming The Wronged Woman, abandoned and alone, whenever she felt she was fading from the limelight. David, her only child, fell for it every time.

  ‘I know all that,’ David stopped pacing, ‘but she’s my mum and she looked so unhappy when I told her about us going away, and she needs a holiday as much as we do.’

  I was incredulous. Oh, yes, OK, it showed a really nice caring side of David’s nature, but honestly …

  I shook my head. ‘She went to Lanzarote with the – um – girls from work last November, and that trip to Benidorm with the Bingo Club at Easter. That’s two more holidays than I’ve had – or you. How many more does she need, for heaven’s sake?’

  David sighed. ‘I know, but she wants a family seaside holiday, she says. Like when Dad was still around. She wants us to have some fun together – like we used to. She’s only got me now. It might be the last time …’

  ‘Rubbish!’ I snorted, zapping the television back into life and raising my voice above the newsreader. ‘She’ll be around to get her telegram on her one hundredth birthday! Anyway, family holidays mean paddling and buckets and spades! You’re twenty-seven, David, not seven! And this was supposed to be a break for us – just the two of us … remember?’

  The argument spiralled a bit from there and I’ll gloss over it here. My flatmates arrived home from work in the middle of it, pulled faces, and tactfully disappeared into their rooms. It ended, as our disagreements about his mother always did, with me giving in with extremely bad grace and David, looking apologetic, saying I was amazing and wonderful and he’d make it up to me, and giving me a quick hug and kiss before leaving to tell his mother the good news.

  Really, our relationship was pretty peculiar. My own mum had warned me over six months earlier, when David had first asked me out after we’d met at a mutual friend’s Christmas party. I smiled, remembering her chuckling down the phone: ‘An accountant, Lou? How funny! Oh, I’m sure he’s a lovely man – but an accountant? Are you sure you’ll have anything in common? They’re so – so solid and realistic, and you’re anything but. Figures mean nothing to you … You’ve always been such a dreamer … Chalk and cheese! I really can’t see it working out at all.’

  But it had, in a funny sort of way. David was drop dead gorgeous, actually, and a lovely man, even if he was tied a little too tightly to his mum’s apron strings for my liking. We got on well, he made me laugh, he was generous and kind and fun to be with. And he was so heavily involved in his work and his maternal duties that he never demanded every minute of my spare time. I could wander rounds parks and art galleries and spend entire weekends lost in a romantic novel without him making any comment.

  That suited me nicely, mainly because I was waiting for The Grand Passion, and David would fill in nicely until it came along. Which, of course, indicates again that David and I had never – well, you know … We were very close, like best friends, but actually I really did fancy him, and I’d been pretty sure that maybe, even if he wasn’t The Grand Passion, alone in romantic Cornwall, we might just be able to nudge things up a notch …

  And now, it seemed, it was going to be a case of “mother came too” … A passion-killer if ever there was one!

  The journey to Cornwall was a nightmare. Six hours, nose-to-tail, on the motorway, with David’s mother being alternately queasy, hungry, thirsty, hot, cold, and dying to spend a penny. I swear we patronised every service station on the route. It was like being with a bubble-permed toddler.

  However, once we arrived, the hotel – a large country house – was wonderful and things started to look up. I’d checked that David had booked us into a double room and hopefully put his mum in some distant annexe. It was all rather daring and exciting. As David and his mother did the stuff at Reception I gazed at the view. The hotel overlooked a craggy cove where Atlantic breakers crashed and frothed on to the black rocks and seagulls dived and shouted and the sun shone on a tiny white-sanded beach from a cloudless sky.

  Bliss.

  ‘Er, Louisa …’ David called from the reception desk, interrupting my daydreams. ‘There seems to be a bit of a problem …’

  I sighed and turned away from the gorgeous view. Clearly his mum hadn’t been put in some distant annexe … She was probably next door …

  It was worse than that. Far, far worse.

  The fully booked hotel had thought, thanks to some misinterpretation of David’s email, that we were a proper family party and had allocated us the family suite … yep, two linked bedrooms, one double, one single …

  I knew, as sure as night follows day, that David and I would not be sharing the double bed and consummating our relationship with his mother a few feet away through an open archway – not even a damn door!

  There was a lot of arguing and explaining and apologising and shaking of heads. We couldn’t cancel and go elsewhere, Cornwall, it appeared was fully booked. High season, we were told, you won’t even find a vacant tent …

  I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists, counted to ten million – and sighed. ‘Well, if that’s all there is …’

  It was a very, very silent lift journey up to the family suite.

  David self-consciously unpacked his bag in the single room, while David’s mum and I unjoyously and mutinously did the same in the adjoining double room – complete with queen-sized bed. I could have wept.

  While David’s mother was folding and hanging her zillions of outfits and grizzling about the pattern of the wallpaper, the tog-rating of the duvet, the hardness of the mattress, and the softness of the pillows, the noise of the seagulls and the crashing waves, I nosed though her jars and potions that were overflowing the shelves in the en-suite.

  There was enough stuff there to rejuvenate every over-fifty in the country! I parked my toilet-bag, make-up bag, toothbrush, and deodorant in the one vacant corner and, as his mother declared that the journey had nearly killed her and she needed a nap and proceeded to close the balcony door and windows and draw the curtains over the spectacular view, I escaped downstairs to the bar.

  Two G&Ts later and I began to feel more human. David was very apologetic, again, but as the booking mix-up wasn’t his fault, there was no need – although, obviously, if we hadn’t brought his mother none of it would have happened. But I felt it would be unhelpful at this stage to remind him – and gradually the soft Cornish air began to work its magic. I relaxed, David smiled, and we anticipated dinner …

  We really shouldn’t have. David’s mother was a total hummer. She was rude to the waiters, complained about the gorgeous food, and declared she had a migraine brought on by eating shellfish – she really didn’t need to have ordered the prawns – and retired once again to our suite.

  Happily alone, and having made a pact not to mention Her, David and I went for a walk along the cliff top. The village was stunningly beautiful in the evening sun: tiny cottages dotted in the bracken; cobbled streets tumbling towards the cove; tubs ablaze with geraniums and lobelia
s on every corner. I was lost in a romantic haze as David strolled beside me, his arm draped companionably round my shoulders.

  I gazed at a gorgeous Cornish cottage, all slate and stone, standing alone, with a higgledy-piggledy path and a perfect overblown multi-coloured garden surrounding it like a fallen rainbow. I could just see The Grand Passion and me living there, in rustic bliss, with several chubby sun-browned children playing around our feet.

  As we stopped to admire the view, David pulled me closer and kissed the top of my head.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ I murmured.

  David looked down at me, smiling. ‘I was calculating how much these properties would fetch at home. That cottage across there is pretty run-down – you’d possibly get it for a song, and you could renovate it and make a fortune letting it out during the holiday season, and –’

  ‘What?’ I jerked away from him, my happy-ever-after dreams popping like bubbles. ‘Are you completely soulless? Can’t you just accept something for its aesthetic value alone? That cottage is original and untouched and beautiful. Truly beautiful.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ David looked puzzled. ‘But it’s also possibly great investment material. Surely you can see that?’

  ‘No, I can’t!’ I snapped. ‘Just for once try looking at something without putting a price on it!’

  David smiled benevolently. ‘Oh, Lou – you should know me by now. It’s the way I am – just as you’re such a dreamer. One of us has to keep our feet on the ground, don’t we? You’re just a hopeless romantic …’

  ‘Pity you’re not, David,’ I sighed. ‘Your loss. Oh, please leave me alone. I’ll find my own way back to the hotel …’

  ‘Lou …’

  ‘No, really,’ I flapped my hands. ‘I just want to be on my own.’ And I didn’t even think ‘go on, run back to see if your mother needs you more than I do’ – honest.

  ‘Look, Lou …’