Kiss Me Under the Mistletoe. Fiona Harper

hung on to that thought, used it to give her inner strength when she felt out of her depth or that everyone could see past the designer clothes and make-up to the lanky, shy teenager still hiding beneath.

      But now everything had gone wrong. Toby didn’t want her any more.

      Not really. Oh, he might say he didn’t want the marriage to end, that he wanted to work on it with her, but she’d lost hope he’d ever change. Even if he wanted to—which was a big if—she wasn’t sure he was capable of it.

      So, big step or not, it was time to go.

      And no one thought being with Toby made her special any more, anyway. Even though she knew for a fact that half the newspaper reports hadn’t been true, Toby had not behaved well the last few years. The rest of the world thought she was a fool. And she was finally ready to agree with them. Staying with Toby was making her an object of scorn—or worse, pity.

      ‘I’m going to buy a big house in the country somewhere,’ she told Tara, ‘Maybe Devon or Somerset. And Jack and I are going to have long, healthy walks in the fresh air and enjoy the community spirit of village life.’

      ‘Devon!’ Tara almost choked on her champagne. ‘Nobody lives in Devon!’

      Louise blinked. She knew for a fact they did. The county had been the location of some of her favourite family holidays as a girl, before her mother died. ‘Well you’d better phone up the police and report all those people in the houses down there for breaking and entering then,’ she said.

      Tara rolled her eyes. ‘You know what I mean. God, I’m so lucky that Gareth is the sort who’d never stray. I’d hate to have to do what you’re doing. But do you really have to go to the lengths of burying yourself alive in the back of beyond?’ She turned to Louise with a genuinely sincere expression on her face, so Tara’s next words astonished her completely. ‘Couldn’t you just, you know, have a hot fling with some young stud to get Toby back and then forget about it all? Tit for tat and all that …’

      Louise shook her head again. ‘I can’t.’

      She had to think of Jack. What would seeing an I-can-shag-more-people-than-you-can contest between his parents in the tabloids teach him? It was precisely because she didn’t want him to grow up and think that was normal behaviour that she was leaving.

      ‘Pity,’ Tara said. ‘There’s going to be a complete lack of eligible men in Dorset …’

      ‘Devon,’ Louise reminded her.

      Tara waved a hand. ‘Wherever. The geography’s irrelevant. You’re going to become a dried-up old prune with no sex life.’

      ‘Thanks for the encouragement,’ Louise said dryly. ‘Nice to know you’re on my side.’

      Tara’s brows arched. ‘I am on your side. I’m trying to get you to think this through properly, Lou. I don’t think you’ve really considered what you’ll be giving up.’

      Ah, the one time Tara liked to play the clever card was when she was instructing Louise on how to live her life. She did it very well. It got right up Louise’s nose.

      ‘Perhaps I’ll meet a hot surfer dude or a nice young farmer,’ she told Tara in silky voice, going for shock effect and knowing she’d succeeded from the look of horror on the other woman’s face. Unlike Tara, Louise didn’t need guarantees of Porsches in the garage or Rolexes on a man’s wrist before she dropped her knickers.

      ‘Maybe I’ll have a hot fling after all,’ Louise said airily, then swigged back a mouthful of her warming champagne. ‘All men are rats, anyway. There’s not a good one out there. I don’t want or need their money. I might as well use them for sex. That’s what they do to us, and it’s about time someone turned the tables.’

      Tara’s expertise also extended to her vast vocabulary of swear words. She let a choice phrase out now. ‘I seriously don’t know what’s wrong with you tonight, Lou. I’ve got half a mind to bundle you into a cab and take you to The Priory.’

      Louise just laughed. ‘What for? Regaining my sanity? Taking control of my life? I don’t think they make a pill or a detox treatment for that.’

      Tara’s brows lowered as she looked at her friend. ‘They should.’ And then she pouted. ‘I’m going to miss you if you move away from London. What are you going to do with yourself?’ She looked her up and down. ‘I suppose you could try plus size modelling.’

      Louise closed her eyes briefly and swallowed. Thanks for that, Tara, she muttered silently in her head. You know just how to cheer a girl up.

      And she wasn’t plus size, really. She was a normal thirty-year-old woman, with a normal, post-pregnancy, thirty-year-old body. Why was that such a crime? So what if she was the only one amongst her peers not to have shrunk back to beanpole proportions within ten minutes of giving birth?

      That was the problem with the kind of life she led: her current version of ‘normal’. Everything was distorted: body image, priorities, people, marriages … children. What some of her older acquaintances were shelling out in rehab fees for their teenage children was shocking. She didn’t want that to be Jack’s fate in a few years’ time. Some of those kids were only thirteen, fourteen …

      No, she didn’t want to have a get-you-back fling and carry on like nothing had happened. She wanted out of this life. For her and for Jack. She wanted to find a way to be normal again, to feel like a proper person again. But Tara wouldn’t understand that. All she was interested in was climbing the bling-encrusted ladder of WAGdom until she was Queen Bee. And Louise was quite happy to step out her way and let her.

      The time came for speeches and donations, and Louise wrote an eye-watering cheque for the charity. But even that only gave a momentary lift in her spirits. All evening she’d talked and sipped champagne and watched the other people congratulating themselves on having made it onto the exclusive guest list, and all she’d been able to think was: is this all there is? Is this all I was made for?

      That couldn’t be true. It couldn’t. She wanted more from life. Needed more. There was a great gaping hole inside her that demanded it.

      And once she’d thought she could get that elusive something by being Toby’s wife. It hadn’t worked. Not even one little bit, because Louise felt more of a nothing now than she’d ever done.

      So this new life for her and Jack would all be about finding out how she could be something without him. A strange quivering feeling started up in her chest as that thought floated through her brain. She squashed it down. She could be something without Tobias Thornton by her side. She would.

      

      CHAPTER TWO

       15th May, 1952

       Finally I have something worthwhile to write in my diary, something more than screen tests and script learning and rehearsals.

       I’ve fallen in love.

       I knew it from the very first moment. Never, ever have I felt anything like this before. I’ve found my soul mate. Pity it’s a house and not a man. However, I could never imagine a man being as perfect as Whitehaven. I envy the owners so much it hurts.

       Still, for the next two months I can pretend it’s my home. That’s the beauty of being an actress. I can step into another reality for a while. Alexander isn’t coming with me to film on location, so I can pretend I’m not married too, just for a bit. He always says his travels do him good, so maybe this will be my holiday away from him.

      The house sits on a wooded hill high above the River Dart in Devon, farther upstream than the busy town of Dartmouth, just before a bend where the green waters widen. I spotted the whitewashed exterior and columns from the river as