without explanation.
‘I’ll get him this time,’ he promised as he kissed meringue crumbs from her lip. ‘I’ll take on the world, Tash my darling, and bring you back gold and the Kiwi.’ He sounded like a knight about to go on a crusade.
‘You do that,’ she laughed, kissing cream from his lips.
The haunting Dillon Rafferty song was still filling the room, sweeping Tash and Hugo up in its sexy slipstream.
Nine months pregnant, with swollen ankles, numb fingers, a weak bladder and backache, Tash wasn’t feeling at her most seductive these days, but she felt surprisingly horny tonight. She felt ravishing, in fact. And Hugo found her immensely desirable. With breasts as vast and buoyant as two hot air balloons rising from her jaunty turquoise maternity bra, her long legs wrapped around his hips and her face pink with exertion and naughtiness, she pleasured him on the small button-back chair in the corner of the oak-panelled snug room, lit only by the dim picture light that was always illuminated over the grandiose Millais portrait of Hugo’s great-uncle Horace, and watched by a pack of interested dogs lined up obediently on the mud rug by the door.
Later that evening, while Hugo was out doing his routine and much-loathed night-check around the stable yards, Tash picked up thephone on a whim. Physically exhausted yet still curiously charged from a day of childcare, relatives, late pregnancy, domesticity and lovemaking, she needed to assuage the flood of post-coital affection that was raging through her. She longed to share, to radiate tenderness and to hear a soothing, cheering voice in return for a quick-fix catch up.
But her mother, top of her wish list, was still firmly incommunicado, the answer phones switched on both at her Parisian apartment and the Loire Valley house, her mobile switched off. So Tash called the next best thing. Zoe.
‘Tash! At last! I was giving up hope.’ That voice – as reassuring as comfort-eating Nutella on hot buttered muffins – was bliss. ‘Darling one, we were just talking about you!’ There was a babble of conversation in the background. ‘Don’t say it’s happening already?’
‘No, not yet.’ Tash could hear laughter and music. At least she needn’t have worried about disturbing the O’Shaughnessys in bed. ‘If I’m interrupting I’ll call back.’
‘No, no, just some house guests.’ Zoe’s dulcet tones contorted as she clearly reached to close a door. The next moment her voice was clearer and captured in glorious isolation. ‘They can wait – a few old and new friends of Niall’s.’
She made them sound very unimportant, whereas Tash would happily lay a bet that at least two of them would be A-list Hollywood, much as Niall himself was nowadays. The O’Shaughnessys lived variously between London, LA and Ireland, where they were now, spending every summer en famille with their six-year-old twins, Cian and Maeve. Rufus and India, Zoe’s grown-up children from her first marriage, were usually there for at least a part of the time. The O’Shaughnessys’ Irish base was a gloriously laid-back retreat, counter-balancing a picture-postcard stone house with acres of overgrown meadows and woodland to the front and a backdrop of cliffs and ocean to the rear, plus a hidden tunnel straight from the cellars down to the beach.
Tash had spent a hugely enjoyable week there with baby Cora the previous summer, although Hugo had ducked out of the majority of their long-promised stay and dashed around Ireland looking at horses. He had only spent one night at Ballyhoon, and that was somewhat under duress. He complained that the presence of Tash’s brother Matty and his quarrelsome, free-range family set his teethon edge, but the truth was more sensitive. Although he adored Zoe, and got on like a house on fire with Niall, especially when drunk, he found it difficult reconciling himself to the fact that Niall and Tash had once been lovers.
This issue – and the time
Erin M. Leaf
Ted Krever
Elizabeth Berg
Dahlia Rose
Beverley Hollowed
Jane Haddam
Void
Charlotte Williams
Dakota Cassidy
Maggie Carpenter