The Honey Queen

He wanted it to be right for her. He wanted her to be happy, not rushed. How beautiful that was.

She reached for his hands and pulled them back to her blouse.

‘It’s right,’ she said softly. She laid her palms on either side of his face and drew his mouth to hers.

Peggy woke in David’s bed, wrapped in his arms, the duvet tangled around them. Outside it was still dark. She didn’t know what time it was, but she felt no panic at being somewhere different – only a sense of rightness at being beside him, a feeling she could honestly say she’d never felt before.

He was sleeping deeply and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could make out his profile against the pale colour of his sheets. She had been to bed with other men, but she realized now that with them it had just been sex. Sometimes wonderful sex, she knew, but it had been purely mechanical. Bodies merging in mutual need, and when the lust was slaked, both parties had been happy to go their own way.

But this …

Peggy closed her eyes again and snuggled against David’s warm body. In sleep, he shifted so that he was wrapped more closely around her and she relaxed into the sensation. They hadn’t had sex, they’d made love. There had been lust and tenderness, true closeness, and now that she’d experienced it, Peggy knew the difference. If she stayed with David, she could have this. She could come home and lie in his arms at night: loved and sated. She could tell him about her day and he’d touch her face gently, and be glad or sad for her, depending on the circumstances. He would be her support in all things and Peggy, who’d had no experience of such a thing in her entire life, began to cry silently at the thought of what had to be done.

She hadn’t told him about her background, for all that he’d asked her. She hadn’t told anyone.

He’d asked her to lunch with his parents, but there was no way Peggy could go, she knew that. She should never have slept with David. She should never have gone out with him. Right at the beginning, she’d known that he was different from all the other men she’d been with. He was a good man. And she was …

Well, she wasn’t able for that sort of relationship. He would want two-point-five kids and the white picket fence, and Peggy couldn’t do that. She didn’t know how. She would mess it all up because you did what you’d grown up with, right?

Silently, she slid out of the bed and picked up her discarded clothes. She dressed in the bathroom, then tiptoed quietly downstairs. David’s wallet and keys were on the coffee table. She’d leave a note there, better to do that than go back upstairs with it and risk him being awake. She found a scrap of paper and a pen, and wrote:

David, I’m sorry but I can’t go out with you any more. You are a lovely guy and you deserve to be happy. Just not with me. It would be easier for us both if you don’t contact me. Please don’t come to the shop.

No hard feelings,

Peggy

She slipped the note into his wallet, so he’d find it easily, then left. It was the right thing to do.

Her priority should be the shop, she told herself as she drove home in the yellow glow of the streetlights. She had no time for someone like David. There could be no place in her life for him. She knew that and it was easier to end things now, before it went horribly wrong, which it would. It was bound to. So why was she crying?

Chapter Three

Sitting at the scarred wooden desk in front of the small window of her eyrie on St Brigid’s Terrace, Freya Bryne was smiling. She was reading an email from a sweet foreign gentleman – from Nairobi this time – who had a few million dollars to invest in her country and wanted her to assist him.

He was a prince, and due to problems in his country, and the fact that his father, the king, was under threat, he couldn’t invest it himself. But she could help …

She really did have the worst spam filter on the planet, Freya decided. No matter what she did, genuine emails ended up in her junk box and funny ones from people pretending to be investors or proclaiming that she’d won a lottery and all that was needed were her bank details and passport number, were forever popping into her inbox. She started to type a reply:

OMG, I can’t believe I’m writing to a real prince!!!! Mom is going to be, like, aced out! You have no idea how good a time this would be for us to have friends in new places – and a prince! Wow, as we say in Headache Drive. Mom hasn’t had a proper holiday since that incident with the airline company. She needed two seats and we thought that had been made plain from the start but no, she only got one and that sweet guy beside her – well, the feeling did come back into his arms a day later but it was very stressful for all concerned. Now, obviously, we have to visit before we work on this million-dollar deal – again, what LUCK! Mom has maxed out her credit card trying to buy the scratch card with the £25 million ticket and she needs a holiday. If you can get a hold of the royal plane, that would be perfect. Just remember: NO SUGAR ON BOARD. She might get her hands on some and … well, the less said about that time in the chocolate shop the better. We settled out of court, which was good for all concerned. But she is very partial to that South African creamy drink. Four bottles ought to cover it. We can stay in a nice hotel if you have recommendations, but from a financial point of view, do you have spare rooms in the palace? And any brothers? Mom is worried about marrying again but I read her tarot cards for her online today and by an AMAZING COINCIDENCE, it said she’d meet someone new …

‘Freya, lovie, it’s nearly eight,’ yelled her aunt Opal from downstairs. ‘I have scrambled eggs on …’

Opal’s voice trailed off. She was always trying to stuff Freya with protein in the mornings, while Freya was more of a coffee and a sliver of toast kind of person.

Poor Opal didn’t understand. Apparently, at breakfast every morning the three boys had wolfed down food as if they hadn’t eaten for a week and now she felt that this was the correct way to feed Freya.

Desperate as she was not to hurt her aunt’s feelings, the thought of an egg in the morning turned Freya’s stomach.

She finished her email with a quick:

Reply soonest. We’ll start packing. Mom does tend to overpack but I am assuming this won’t be a problem on the royal plane, right? Hugs,

Cathleen Ni Houlihan

Freya grinned as she clicked send.

If only she could fly through the Internet like her email and perch on the computer of the man receiving it, to see his astonished face as he read it.

Just outside her window, she could see the blossom on the apple tree in the postage-stamp garden below. Behind the fence her uncle Ned had painted pale green the summer before, the council had started turning a scrap of deserted land into a proper park. The adjacent allotments would stay the way they were, despite the plans for the park, which was wonderful. Uncle Ned would have died if he couldn’t go to his allotment every day. She could see some of the plain but sturdy sheds from the window and the neatly planted allotments themselves. Ned grew tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes and all manner of salad greens on his. In the distance Freya could make out the spires and towers of the city, but it seemed a long way away, giving the sense that Redstone was out in the country instead of being part of town.

All in all, Freya felt that the view from the third-floor bedroom of the narrow house more than made up for the tininess of the room.

‘You’re sure it’s not too small?’ Aunt Opal had said anxiously four years ago when Freya had come to live with them. ‘Meredith wouldn’t have this room – she said it was a spiders’ paradise up here in the attic. Mind you, Steve was happy enough in here.’

‘I love it,’ Freya had replied. She wasn’t in the slightest bit scared of spiders for she had spent years taking them gently out of the bath for her mother and releasing them back into the wild. Now the bedroom had a DIY bookcase on one wall, and Freya’s own artwork on another. She’d painted the old wardrobe so it looked like part of Opal and Ned’s colourful garden down below, although Opal didn’t have any enquiring and abnormally large caterpillars on her flowers, or indeed, a Venus fly trap with a shy smile.

Freya checked her watch. Eight o’clock. Time to grab some toast and leave for school.

She clicked off her inbox, unplugged her phone and picked up her schoolbag. This rucksack contained her life, although it hardly looked the part: a greying canvas thing inherited from her cousin David, she’d decorated it with butterflies interspersed with gothic, dangerous-looking faerie creatures, all painstakingly coloured in – often in lessons – with felt-tip pens. She skimmed down the narrow stairs, light on her feet, racing past the second floor where her cousins’ old bedrooms were. Opal and Ned’s bedroom was the biggest, but it was still small compared to Freya’s old home. Not that she cared. Twenty-one St Brigid’s Terrace might be cramped and shabby, but the difference was that in this home she felt loved. Beloved. Something she hadn’t felt for a long time with Mum.

Opal was standing at the cooker in the kitchen that she, Ned and Freya had painted Florida sunshine yellow last Christmas.

‘Too bright?’ Opal had said doubtfully in the paint shop, as the three of them had looked at the colour chart.

Freya hated to see even the faintest hint of worry in her darling Opal’s face.

‘No such thing!’ she reassured her with a hug. ‘Yellow makes people happy, you know.’

And Opal, who would have done anything to make Freya happy, was satisfied.

The tiles on the kitchen splashback were a riot of citrus fruits far too fat to be normal and Opal herself had run up a pair of yellow gingham curtains on her old sewing machine.

‘Freya, love, good morning,’ said Opal now, her face creasing up in a smile as her niece flew into the kitchen. A small, plump woman with a cloud of silvery, highlighted hair, Opal had one of those faces that made everyone want to smile back at her. It didn’t matter that, as she neared sixty, her face was wreathed in wrinkles or that she didn’t walk as fast as she used to because of her arthritis. She was still the same Opal.

Freya had long since decided that her aunt was one of life’s golden people: someone from whom goodness shone like light from a storm lantern on a dark night. Someone who brought the best out in everyone.

‘Morning, Opal,’ Freya said and bent over to give her aunt a kiss on the cheek.

Freya wasn’t tall herself but Opal was really tiny.

Foxglove the cat, a black-and-white scrap that Freya had rescued near the allotments two years ago, sat on the radiator licking her paws. Freya gave her a quick stroke, which Foxglove ignored as usual.

Almost instantly Opal began to fret about Freya’s breakfast. It was a routine that the two of them played out every morning.

‘Look, pet, it’s after eight and you have to get going. You haven’t had a bite to eat or a drink of water, nothing. Honestly, I can’t let you out the door like this. You know they say that young people have to have a proper breakfast in them before they can study. Now I was doing eggs for your Uncle Ned and I can easily pop in a bit of toast and give you some …’

Opal went back to the cooker where she was stirring an ancient saucepan with a wooden spoon. Opal’s scrambled eggs were better than anyone else’s, fluffy clouds glistening with butter. But Freya had neither the time nor the appetite this morning.