Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 2: The House on Willow Street, The Honey Queen, Christmas Magic, plus bonus short story: The Perfect Holiday

She knew that from personal experience. When Jethro had moved on, she’d never heard from him again, despite their having shared a bed for more than two years.

Today’s meeting was with her editor, the marketing team and the cover department. They were all at least fifteen years younger than Suki and Melissa, but Suki tried to tell herself she didn’t care. When she’d started out as a writer, these kids were still in strollers. How could they know what she stood for with their talk of modern covers and what people wanted?

It turned out that they had heard about the Suarez book and everyone was pretty perky at the prospect.

‘It’s what people want to read, the inside story,’ breathed one particularly young girl in opaque pantyhose and a skirt so short she’d have been told she was ‘asking for it’ when Suki was young.

Suki had railed against the ‘asking for it’ mantra all her life. Women should be able to wear what they want, be what they want. But as she’d found to her cost, it hadn’t quite worked out that way. When you looked like you were asking for it, you sometimes got it – and that had the potential to destroy you.

Decades on, female politicians were still criticized for what they wore, though nobody would do that to male ones. Yet here were these young women with careers wearing clothes that seemed to say ‘one more inch and you’re at my crotch’.

Suki shook her head to rattle these crazy thoughts out of it and tuned back in. They’d moved on to the subject of e-books, blogging tours and the fact that Suki’s interesting past made her a person of interest to both the books and feature pages.

She continued to intermittently tune in and out until the meeting came to an end. Still in a Zanax-induced daze, she made her way back down to street level. On her way to hail a cab, she passed a gaggle of young girls wearing what looked to her like fancy dress costume: dark pantyhose, tight denim shorts, unflattering sneaker boots, long open shirts and skimpy stomach-baring T-shirts with writing on them. The clothes were not revealing as such, but they did, Suki realized, highlight the female body. Some guys laying cable watched the girls and Suki watched the men. She had never worn clothes like that when she was their age, but the body-conscious dresses and high boots she’d dressed in back then were designed to achieve the same result.

After the no-nonsense style of Melissa, who’d made such a statement, Suki felt almost shocked by the girls. And she was unshockable, wasn’t she?

In Women and Their Wars she’d written about female empowerment and the glass ceiling. At the time, it had been a hot topic. Not any more. Though the glass ceiling remained, no one seemed interested. Feminist writers had devoted entire books to topics such as body image, sexuality, the power of motherhood – and what difference had it made?

Young girls still chose clothes that would make men want to sleep with them. Older women wanted to have both a career and babies. Women of all ages wanted to look attractive to the opposite sex and not show any sign of growing old, ever. Nothing had changed at all.

Suki held out a hand to hail a passing cab. When it drew up, she saw her own image reflected in the windows: a woman with a nest of tousled blonde hair and full lips stained with red gloss. The perfect image of wanton sexuality.

In the back of the cab, she wiped the excess red off with a tissue.

The plane was delayed and she had to wait an hour at the gate with nothing to read but notes of the meetings and a magazine she’d bought that morning. She liked the empowering stuff and snippets about mindfulness or meditation. She didn’t do any of it; so far as Suki was concerned, reading about it was enough. The articles calmed her, as if the information was seeping into her bones.

One day, she promised herself, she would give this stuff a try. Maybe when the book came out and she had some money. Perhaps then she’d go to Avalon and spend time with Zach and Kitty. They were growing up and she was missing so much of it. She’d been close to Zach when he was younger: he’d been so sweet, so wise, despite being a kid. Suki had felt the warmth of both Tess and their father’s kindness in the boy and she’d adored being with him.

But she hadn’t been home for a long time. There were phone calls at Christmas and birthdays, but she knew he was slipping away from her. Once kids grew up, they moved on. She didn’t want to lose him. She still had time with Kitty because she was young.

Yes, when her book was done, assuming she managed to dodge the bullet with the bloody Suarez book, she’d go to Avalon and move in with Tess for a while. Practise yoga and mindfulness, meditate on the beach, stuff like that. She smiled at the thought.

Another delay announcement was broadcast, so she phoned Mick, who sounded grumpy when she told him that she was going to be home late.

‘Why don’t you go out for a session with Renaud?’ she suggested, like a mother suggesting a new toy to an irate toddler. Easier to have him sinking a few beers than waiting for her and getting annoyed.

‘I guess I could do that.’

The after-effects of the drugs and the energy she’d had to summon up for the day, had left her feeling exhausted. Suki kept her bag protectively close on her lap, wrapped a light shawl around her shoulders and let herself sink into the airline gate seat as far as its hard back would allow.

Jethro and the band had their own jet. There was no hanging around boarding gates when you were travelling with TradeWind. Her mind went back once more to that first time she’d met Jethro, that instant connection on the television show and then that kiss in his dressing room, after he’d thrown everyone else out, his hands holding her face so tenderly.

His music wasn’t the only lure for the fans; Jethro’s looks were a huge part of the appeal. Tall, almost menacing in his beauty, except for that wry, crooked smile; the jet black hair swept back from his forehead, and the Sioux bones he’d inherited from his mother defining the tanned face. He was so fiercely stunning that Suki had wanted to touch his face to see if he was real or if clever make-up had created those incredible shadows and high bones. But he wouldn’t let her touch him.

His was the only touch allowed. His hands on her body, feeling for her breasts under the silk shirt, making her not care who was on the other side of the dressing-room door or what they might think. Just wanting him.

‘No,’ he rasped, face buried in her breasts. ‘Not here – my hotel.’

‘I thought you had to fly to another gig?’ she said breathlessly, watching as he grabbed his jacket from a chair, checked the pockets for his smokes and took her hand.

But the jet could wait. There was time to go back to his hotel before they had to race off to Pittsburgh.

As they left the television studios, Suki felt the exquisite buzz of being with a man everyone recognized, a rock god at a time when there were many such gods. But Jethro wasn’t a man on self-destruct mode. Beneath all the stage make-up and tattoos, including a snake writhing up one arm and around his carotid artery, Jethro had more in common with Suki’s former father-in-law, Kyle Richardson Senior, than he did with his fellow rock gods. Like Kyle Senior, he knew precisely what he wanted and was hell-bent on getting it, no matter who got hurt along the way.

Surrounded by bodyguards in suits – otherwise Jethro said, nobody would be able to tell the bull-necked roadies from security – they were escorted to a black limo. Through the smoky glass, Suki saw the screaming fans held back by the barrier, and as the car pulled into traffic she leaned back, feeling safe, cocooned, special.

Jethro sprawled across the back seat and Suki, unsure now and wondering whether she had made a hideous mistake, sat nervously near the window. She could smell her own sweat through the Shalimar she’d drenched herself in that morning. Studio lights made everyone sweat and she pressed her arms firmly to her sides lest the inevitable wet patches on her amber silk shirt were visible.

‘Do fans turn up like this every time you’re on television?’ she asked, trying to ground herself in normality. She could still get out of this, this madness that had possessed her during that frantic kiss in his dressing room. Television made people crazy, it was well known. The studio lights, the notion that you were smiling into millions of peoples’ homes; it was all pure madness.

And then, to have someone like Jethro growl that you were the sexiest thing he’d ever seen …

She stole a glance at him, his roman profile staring straight ahead, jet black (dyed?) hair raked back from his high forehead. He must wear contact lenses, she decided, peering a bit closer because he wasn’t paying her the slightest bit of attention. Nobody’s eyes were that green; a lucent green like crystal from the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

‘You still thinking of backing out?’ he murmured without looking at her. He reached into a compartment beside him, took out a bottle of champagne and glasses, then deftly popped the cork with all the skill of a sommelier.

When he passed Suki her glass, the look of pure lust in his eyes made her feel all the heat and excitement come rushing back.

‘Just one,’ she mumbled. ‘I have a thing on tomorrow …’ She was babbling now, particularly as he slid across the leather seat to get closer to her.

‘Cancel it,’ he said flatly. ‘You’ll be in Pittsburgh tomorrow. With me.’

‘I can’t cancel it,’ she said, suddenly irked, despite the inky liquid pooling inside her groin. How dare he tell her to cancel something!

Jethro drank some of his champagne and then he was right beside her. His face with its hard lines was close to hers, and then his mouth was opening hers, and she could feel the coolness of his champagne coursing into her mouth. She’d heard of liquid kisses but nobody had ever done it to her before, and suddenly she pulled herself away, drained her own glass, then dropped it and pulled his face close to hers with both hands, and spilled a sliver of cold bubbles into his mouth. She could feel his throaty growl rather than hear it because they were so close, chest to chest, and it didn’t matter that she smelled of fresh hot sweat and Shalimar: he was the same, a raw animal smell and something musky and expensive.

He drained the last of his drink, then held the bottle to her lips.

‘Who needs glasses?’ he said, mouth closing on the soft curve of her neck.

At the airport in Martha’s Vineyard, she had to wait in line for fifteen minutes to pick up a cab.

‘You wanna share one?’ said a guy in a business suit in front of her. Suki sized him up; business man out of town for work, expense account dinner in front of him and a bottle of whatever he liked. Probably fancied a little fun on the way.

‘No, thank you,’ she said in her steeliest voice.

When the cab pulled up in front of her house, Suki got out slowly. The street was quiet, the way suburban streets were in winter, with most of the kids inside, no teams of laughing teens playing softball in someone’s front yard, no drone of a lawnmower or the bark of a small dog being walked by a gaggle of little girls who’d squeal with delight when the dog peed.

Suki shivered at the November cold and let herself into the house. She was cold a lot of the time now, apart from when she had the hot flushes and her core body temperature seemed to reach meltdown levels. She was fed up with this damn hormonal thing but she wouldn’t give in to it. No way, sister. She was going to beat it at its own game with agnus castus and the dong quai she got from the Chinese medical centre in town. Taking replacement hormones was like admitting it was all over: welcome to Cronesville. She would not do it. She was still young, still fertile, still beautiful.

The house had the appearance it always had when Mick was home all day. The sports pages of the newspaper had been dumped on the floor beside Mick’s recliner, which in turn, was facing the flat-screen plasma, an item she hadn’t wanted and which Mick couldn’t afford, but he’d got a loan from the bank for it. She could smell takeout from the kitchen and knew, without looking, that he’d have left the boxes on the table.

She resisted the impulse to tidy up. First, she needed to get out of her dressy clothes. Lord knew, she didn’t have many elegant clothes left. The designer outfits she’d once worn were all out of date and too small. This messiness with her hormones had thickened her waist, and she hated that.

Upstairs in their bedroom, she stripped off and pulled on her sloppy velour sweatpants and a GAP sweatshirt she’d once bought for Mick, not realizing that denim was his preferred choice in all clothing.

There was a note on the bed: Baby, gone for beers with Renaud. Might be late. Xx Mick.