Page 4 of The Secret Holiday Kiss

‘Daisy. Want some coffee?’ Sophie, Harry’s wife, was rosy-cheeked from her own walk. She was tall, with reddish-brown hair and an open, easy expression. Her pale skin was lightly freckled, without a hint of makeup, her movements relaxed as she refilled the coffee machine and sliced bread in the spacious kitchen. Daisy pressed a hand to her own cheek. She’d put tinted moisturiser and mascara on to converse with her brother, a goat and the sea.

‘Coffee would be lovely, thank you.’ She put her to-go cup on the side. Was it OK that she’d helped herself earlier? She didn’t know the rules.

Sophie poured her a mug. ‘You’ve been getting reacquainted with the grounds?’

‘I walked down to the cliffs. It feels strange, being here again.’ When Sophie brought her drink over she added, ‘Can I help at all?’

‘You can help by helping yourself,’ Sophie said with a smile. ‘Fresh bread, and there’s all sorts of jams and marmalades in the fridge. Bacon too, if you want. Eggs on the counter there.’

‘It’s so kind of you.’

Sophie levelled her with a look. ‘Please don’t stand on ceremony. This is your family home.’

‘It’s a long time since it’s been that. And it’s so different, now.’

Sophie leaned against the counter, butter knife in hand. ‘Do you like it? When Harry told me you were an interior designer, but that he wasn’t going to involve you in the house changes, I was a bit concerned.’

Daisy laughed. ‘Don’t worry. If it helps, I think everything you’ve done is beautiful. You’ve enhanced the manor’s original features, and your modern touches aren’t too modern. It’s like some of the boutique hotels I worked on in Paris and Milan, but the building itself is older.’

‘Really?’ Sophie folded her arms. ‘It was mostly Harry. I helped where I could, but he had the vision.’

‘I’d better have a talk with him then. Make sure he doesn’t steal all my future business.’

Sophie laughed. ‘You really don’t mind?’

She shrugged. ‘Harry knew I didn’t want to come back – I mean apart from for his wedding. I certainly had no plans to live here again.’

‘So now …?’

Daisy blew on her coffee. ‘Now my perfectly organized world is no more.’ She tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice, but it wasn’t easy. ‘You know about Stefan?’

Sophie grabbed her coffee and sat next to Daisy, the bread forgotten. ‘Your ex-husband? Harry said he was unfaithful. I can’t imagine – it must have been awful.’

Daisy cradled her mug. ‘I got home from a business trip and found him in our bed, with the woman who runs the florist’s at the end of our road. He worked away too – he was a hotel consultant, it’s how we met – and I thought we had this perfect setup. We’d go away, do our jobs, come back and spend time together. Go to the local café on a Sunday, trips to the theatre, evenings out with friends. All normal stuff, but those times apart … my job is important to me, so is being independent, and I thought we had the best of both worlds. It turns out, whenever he was at home and I wasn’t, Kira was getting all his attention.’

‘What an asshole,’ Sophie said. ‘Seriously, Daisy.’

‘And I was off my game, dealing with the fallout, and I lost one of my biggest clients.’

‘It’s so hard to focus on work when you’re going through something so personally devastating. Did you have any time off?’

‘There were two days when I couldn’t really do anything. Then it was constant firefighting – or that’s what it felt like. Then the house …’ She swallowed, because it hurt to think about the beautiful home she’d created, and she also felt guilty that losing that was almost the worst part for her. But the house hadn’t done anything wrong, she didn’t feel any resentment or anger towards it, so it had been a pure, heart-breaking loss. ‘I let him buy me out as part of the divorce settlement.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘It was as if he’d tainted it, taken it out of my reach by taking her there.’

‘That’s terrible,’ Sophie murmured.

Daisy nodded. She had already talked too much at this woman who – OK – was her sister-in-law, but who she hardly knew. ‘I would say it’s been a rollercoaster, but actually it feels as if it’s just been one long downward plummet. Now my new flat is flooded, so here we are. I’m grateful to you and Harry.’

Sophie put a hand on Daisy’s arm. ‘We’re family. You always have a home here.’

Daisy sat up straighter, determined not to show Sophie how deeply those words had affected her. ‘You’re very kind. Now, did you say you had a farm shop’s worth of jams in your fridge? Think there might be apricot in there?’

‘Harry loves apricot jam,’ Sophie said with a smile, and Daisy thought she was probably relieved that the deep-and-meaningfuls had come to an end. ‘There’s always some in the fridge.’

‘That’s one thing we have in common,’ Daisy told her, as they got up to inspect the condiments shelf.

Chapter Two

She had only intended to walk to the end of Mistingham Manor’s long driveway, but there was a weak, welcome sun, and Daisy had done enough wallowing in the two days since she’d been here. She wasn’t a wallower by nature, and while Mo and Pete were trying to cajole Mr Bertram into fixing the apartment block their way (sending her text updates that ranged from exasperating to hilarious), she needed to keep busy. Her busyness came from work, and the client she could genuinely help while she was here was Lars Travers.