Honeymoon Suite Read online

  Copyright © 2016 Wendy Holden

  Author photograph © Laurie Fletcher

  The right of Wendy Holden to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in this ebook edition in 2016

  by HEADLINE REVIEW

  An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 8536 2

  Ebook conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford on Avon, Warwickshire

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise for Wendy Holden

  Also by Wendy Holden

  About the Book

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  PART TWO

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  PART THREE

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Discover more novels from Wendy Holden

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Number one bestselling author Wendy Holden has written ten consecutive Sunday Times Top Ten bestsellers. A former journalist on The Sunday Times, Tatler and the Mail on Sunday, she contributes features and short stories to a range of publications and is a regular TV and radio contributor. She was a judge for the Costa 2013 Novel and Book of the Year Awards and is a Daily Mail book reviewer. She lives with her husband and two children in Derbyshire.

  Visit her on her website www.wendyholden.net,

  or follow her on Twitter @Wendy_Holden

  and on Facebook www.facebook.com/Wendyholdenauthor.

  PRAISE

  Make your world a brighter place:

  ‘A modern-day Jilly Cooper, Wendy Holden has made the raunchy romp her own’ Glamour

  ‘Deftly combining romance with satire and expertly choreographing her cast, Wendy Holden’s sure-to-be-bestseller is smart, sharp and hugely entertaining’ Daily Mail

  ‘Chirpy, saucy and funny, this is the perfect novel to curl up with’ Bella

  ‘This fabulously witty story of love, social climbing and downright snobbery is a riot of a read’ Closer

  ‘Provides a humorour insight into the world of shamless social climbing. It has all the makings of a brilliant beach read’ Good Housekeeping

  ‘Satisfying page-turner filled with animation, romance – all wrapped up with a twinkle in its eye’ Candis

  ‘Holden’s trademark satire here acquires an extra bite’ Guardian

  ‘This is an author guaranteed to lift your spirits’ Grazia

  ‘A brilliant trademark Wendy Holden novel’ Heat

  ‘Fiendishly witty’ Marie Claire

  ‘Hilariously outrageous’ Cosmopolitan

  ‘Fun and irrepressible’ Woman & Home

  ‘Devilishly witty’ Elle

  ‘The perfect choice’ Glamour

  Pick up a Wendy Holden.

  By Wendy Holden

  Simply Divine

  Bad Heir Day

  Pastures Noveaux

  Fame Fatale

  Azur Like It

  The Wives of Bath

  The School For Husbands

  Filthy Rich

  Beautiful People

  Gallery Girl

  Marrying Up

  Gifted and Talented

  Wild and Free

  Honeymoon Suite

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  When Nell is marooned at the altar, her feisty best friend Rachel says she’ll come with her on honeymoon instead. Why waste a week in a posh country hotel?

  So the duo, plus Rachel’s Agatha Christie-obsessed small daughter Juno, head for the hills and idyllic Edenville, on the edge of the beautiful Pemberton estate. Awaiting them is a cast of colourful characters from Jason the harrassed hotel manager to the ruthless Angela, Director of HR. Not to mention the handsome Dylan, a bestselling writer on the run from his past.

  Nell doesn’t want to go back to London, so when a job on the estate comes up, she’s happy to stay. Even if it is arranging weddings in the Big House! As she becomes entangled in the lives of the locals – and they weave their way into her heart – she realises there might be a way to reach the rainbow’s end after all.

  To everyone at Headline for everything they have done.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  The Cornish hamlet of Tremadoc was giving good spring. Walls thick with yellow gorse, edged fields glossy with deep-green grass. Birds sang in bushes bursting with white elder blossom. A powerful sun shone down.

  At the centre of the village, its sculptured finials lacy against the blue of the sky, rose the mediaeval granite tower of St Fennec’s. Beside it squatted the pub, the Miner’s Arms, its beer garden dancing with parasols.

  Around that was a scattering of grey cottages whose tiled roofs were orange with lichen. Behind the village the dwellings thinned out to the cliff edge. Here the gentle green land suddenly ended. It turned abruptly downwards, changed into a sheer face of grey jagged rock and plunged into the white spume of a tossing and troubl
ed sea.

  On the very edge, almost at the point where the field became the cliff face, stood a building that had been, until recently, a ruined barn. Now the roof had been repaired and out of it poked, periscope-like, the silver funnel of an Aga chimney. Windows had been pierced in the thick stone sides and fitted with custom-made frames painted, like the stable door, a modish lavender blue.

  Inside, fishing nets with glass balls hung from the ceiling and papier-mâché fish swam along the stone walls. There were lanterns of a seafaring type and a framed poster recruiting ‘Fit Young Men’ to a Georgian frigate bound for the Americas. Upstairs were two small bedrooms with driftwood-effect headboards and a tiny bathroom with a lifebelt-shaped mirror and a little wooden lighthouse dangling from the light-switch cord. The clear plastic loo seat was set with pearly shells.

  ‘Bosun’s Whistle’ had once been an upscale holiday cottage but, failing to get the expected returns, had been put on the market. Dylan, the writer who had bought it fully furnished a year ago, was relaxed about the cheesily nautical interior. He had wanted to escape the London literary circus and have somewhere quiet to work. And apart from the boom of the waves, the howl of the wind, the scream of the gulls and the farmer yelling at the loudly complaining cattle, quiet it tended to be.

  He liked the name too, obvious though it was that a bosun had never been near the place, let alone whistled in it. ‘Bosun’s Whistle’ seemed to Dylan an amusing euphemism. It had the ring of a phrase that could be used suggestively to replace something infinitely ruder. He could imagine the Two Ronnies singing about it; he had made up a song himself, or at least the last line of one, in their style:

  ‘She was up all night, and so was the bosun’s whist-le . . .’

  Dylan hummed now at his desk at the downstairs window whose pale blue curtains were printed with little red boats. Before him was a sea of scribbled-on papers on which a laptop was in full sail. His fingers were idle and his face turned to the sea view, eyes resting on the distant horizon.

  ‘It’s big and it’s shiny, it must be the bosun’s whist-le . . .’

  He must get on with his work, not sit here composing puerile ditties. He had no excuse now; there was no longer anything between him and what he was supposed to be doing.

  Finally, Beatrice had gone and he could write.

  Last night, she had slammed out of the cottage amid a storm of Gallic curses and the shrieking assurance that their relationship was over. It was by no means their first row, but it was certainly the worst. The décor of Bosun’s Whistle had suffered irreparably; driftwood sculptures were swept off shelves and naïf paintings of lighthouses ground beneath Beatrice’s stiletto heel. Even the shell-embedded loo seat was wrenched from its moorings and hurled at the shell-patterned tiles of the shower before Beatrice made a door-slamming, cottage-shuddering exit.

  Would she be back? Dylan was pretty sure she would. She always was after a row.

  Did he want her back? This was more difficult. It was an understatement to say that Beatrice was a handful. She was a tsunami, a whirlwind, a maelstrom, a tornado. Her rages were violent and sudden. One minute she might be passionately devouring him, the next scratching his eyes out. But there was no question he found all that exciting.

  And while she was hardly a soul mate, her body more than made up for it. Beatrice was beautiful, with her waist-length black hair, thick, straight black brows and pneumatic pouting lips. She wasn’t tall – in fact she was petite – but her slender limbs looked sensational clothed in tight black rubber. Dylan had met her at Fennec Cove, the local surfing beach, and had been struck by her unusual surf boots. They had ‘Devil’ stamped on the side in red letters and divided the big toe from the rest of the foot by means of a black plastic cloven hoof.

  Despite this, Beatrice had initially made Dylan think of the village church. St Fennec’s contained a black fourteenth-century pew-end on which was a mediaeval carving of a mermaid. Her tiny waist swelled out to huge hips. You could see her navel and her breasts, partly concealed by long, thick hair. Even in the sexually free-and-easy twenty-first century Dylan had felt a frisson on seeing the carving. The effect it must have had on the generations of repressed yokels who had worshipped here could only be imagined.

  Men who never saw a woman naked till their wedding night, and possibly not even then, must have positively fought to get the nearest pews. So when Beatrice had emerged from the sea like a siren, to Dylan’s literary fancy she had seemed the Tremadoc mermaid made flesh. She had been so goddamn sexy it had been hard for him to look, especially wearing something as revealing as a wetsuit.

  Beatrice had looked, however, and had liked what she saw. She had wasted no time, told him that she wanted him, and had taken him shortly afterwards in a lay-by in the back of his car. That was how Beatrice did things.

  She was twenty-one, beautiful and restless. Before coming to Cornwall she had been doing a film course in London, but it hadn’t worked out for some reason. Surfing didn’t seem to Dylan the natural next step, but Beatrice had heard that it was fashionable and she was obviously from the kind of wealthy family that allowed her to follow her urges. She wasn’t much good on a surfboard, in fact, but she was very good at a lot of other things.

  And if these didn’t include conversation, empathy, or even humour, Dylan certainly wasn’t complaining. He was young, healthy and twenty-four and Beatrice was a sex-crazed beauty three years his junior who talked dirty in husky Franglais. She was also fascinated by the fact that he was a writer.

  ‘You must put me dans ton roman,’ she would gasp through her tumbling hair from above him. ‘Je voudrais être ton inspiration.’

  She wasn’t his inspiration, though. Nothing was these days. Writing suddenly seemed such a slog, when it had all been so easy before.

  Perhaps too easy. All Smiles, Dylan’s first novel, had been a smash hit. One minute he’d been writing a book in the evenings after work. The next, he’d sent it to an agent, it had been accepted and become a literary phenomenon overnight.

  His second novel, Charm Itself, was the one he was currently writing. It was eagerly awaited by hundreds of thousands of fans. When it was published, Dylan would be an even richer man than All Smiles had made him. He supposed he should be excited about this.

  Beatrice certainly was. She loved to swank about Tremadoc showing off about her famous boyfriend. It was not something that endeared her to the locals. There weren’t many French people in Tremadoc, or even many locals, except in half term when the place was swamped with Boden-wearing families staying at National Trust cottages. But the handful of farmers, scented-candle-makers, fudge entrepreneurs and home-educators who made up what passed for the resident population certainly treated Beatrice with caution.

  Even the contrarian landlord of the Miner’s Arms refrained from irking Beatrice’s ire. She was the only customer who he never asked for a table number after she’d ordered food. This was usually the Waterloo of everyone else, who, faced with the fact they had no idea what their number was, were forced to go outside, find it, then join the back of the queue again. It was, Dylan suspected, the landlord’s twisted idea of a joke, but it blew up when he tried it with Beatrice. She had yelled at him to stuff his numéros de table up his arse and stormed out.

  Now, Dylan knitted his brows and tried to concentrate on his keyboard. He should be able to crack this. Pull off the whole trick again.

  But maybe a trick was all it had ever been. All Smiles, to be sure, had won a whole string of book prizes and garnered him a fortune. There had been film options left, right and centre. It was all terribly flattering. But had he deserved it, really?

  Because it had all been won with so little effort it had left Dylan feeling curiously empty inside. So perhaps it made sense that he now sought physical sensation, something that made him feel real. Not just sex, but surfing too.

  He had taken up sur
fing after he met Beatrice, and to his immense surprise, having never done it before, he’d proved a natural from the start. He loved the struggle in and out of the water, thighs pushing against the stiff, resisting swell, the struggle to keep upright amid the stinging white spray, balancing on the surge of pure power that was a wave. The freezing exhilaration of it was completely different from the heat and sweat of making love to Beatrice, but identical in its powerful release. Both activities calmed and exhausted him. Both required huge reserves of energy. Both, in their way, were a struggle, which writing never really had been.

  Now, Dylan drummed his fingers on the table and tried to ignore the ocean. His mind remained on it, even so. Before he had come to Cornwall he had thought that the sea was just the sea. Big. Blue. Cold to swim in. Had fish below it and boats on the top. Sometimes, if the fish were caught and the boats sank, the other way round.

  Now he knew better. The sea wasn’t just blue, for a start. Its colours and textures changed all the time. Sometimes it was billowing pale blue silk, sometimes wrinkly purple leather. You got patches of liquid silver, sulky pewter and dark flint, often simultaneously.

  The sea had personality. It was as moody, contradictory and capricious as any person, as Beatrice, in fact. Sometimes, like her, it was roaring; furious with an insatiable rage. Then, walls of water reared and crashed and tides pounded like fists into the rocks and cliffs. At other times it was feminine, spreading sheets of lace on the sodden sands and turning a coy, baby-doll pink in the sunset while small white waves like feather boas rolled in. Like the feather boas Beatrice wore during her marabou feather routine.

  He had, with enormous difficulty, only just regained his concentration when his mobile rang.

  ‘How’s Charm going, dear boy?’ Dylan recognised the rich, purring tones of his agent Julian. ‘Eve’s been asking me for updates.’

  Eve was Dylan’s editor. ‘It’s going OK,’ he lied.

  ‘Marvellous. Because I need you to take a day off. Come up to the big smoke. Various new TV offers have come in and I’d like to discuss them with you in person.’