Pippa’s Cornish Dream

He was perfectly polite, but something in his voice told her to back off. That was fine by her – she knew enough about families to understand that they were complicated. Her own, for example, was so weird you could make a sitcom about it. A lot of people came to Harte Farm for privacy, peace, seclusion. Which was a good job, as it was perched on top of a windswept hill overlooking the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean – not the place for a buzzing social life. If Mr Retallick wanted to be left alone, she would respect that. Even if he was the hottest thing in hotsville.

“How’s it going in there?” he asked, gesturing towards the bathroom, where her various tools lay scattered on the harlequin-tiled floor. Not the best of first impressions, she thought, gathering them all back up and stowing them in her dad’s old metal box. But then again, that’s what you got when you turned up two hours before check-in. Behind the exterior of every chocolate-box-perfect holiday cottage lies a potential plumbing disaster – one she couldn’t afford to pay a professional to deal with.

“Fine and dandy, I assure you,” she replied, wiping her oil-smeared hands down on her dungarees.

“I’m Pippa Harte, welcome to our farm,” she said. “I’d offer you my hand but – ”

“I don’t know where it’s been?” he finished, his face deadpan but his tone amused. He was one of those chaps, she thought. Not one for belly laughs and grin-fests, but dry and witty. She liked those chaps. Or she used to, back in the day when she had anything to do with chaps at all.

“Well, I think you know exactly where it’s been – that’s the problem! You’re staying for a week aren’t you, Mr Retallick? Lovely weather you have for it!”

As the skies had been lashing a steady drizzle for the last two days, slanted almost horizontal by the gale-force winds, she was obviously joking. A lot of guests would have complained – city types in particular seemed to think the countryside should come with guaranteed sunshine whenever they visited – but he just shrugged those actually-now-you-mention-it-pretty-awesome shoulders and made a “them’s the breaks” comment.

Pippa stared at him as he unzipped his coat, wondering if they’d met before. It wasn’t just the Cornish name – it was the face. The eyes in particular. They were pretty spectacular eyes, after all, and she had the uncanny feeling she’d looked into them before.

“Have we met?” she asked. “You look really familiar…”

His face changed as fast as a storm raging in from the sea, the already dark eyes shading even deeper, a frown marring the skin of his fine, strong forehead. She felt a rebuff coming on and prepared to handle it. She’d been running this holiday business practically single-handed for three years now and had learned to deal with all kinds of strange visitors and their foibles.

As he opened his mouth to speak, the front door flew open and Daisy ran in, blonde curls swirling in a wild, tangled halo around her face. Predictably enough Lily followed, hot on her heels and just as flustered.

Daisy screeched, “SpongeBob’s escaped again! She’s –” “– pooing all over the courtyard!” finished Lily. They were identical twins, nine years old, and never seemed to be able to complete a sentence without each other’s help. Which was at least an improvement on the secret language they’d used exclusively until they were seven. Pippa had been on the verge of calling in an exorcist when they suddenly stopped, although she still occasionally heard them gibbering together at night in their bedroom. Still, as long as their heads weren’t spinning round, she was happy.

“Oh…sausages!” said Pippa, vaulting over Mr Retallick’s rucksack and sprinting out and around the back to the courtyard. Sure enough, there was SpongeBob – that’s what happens when you let kids name cows – munching away on the hydrangeas. She looked up as Pippa approached, her wide mouth sliding slowly from side to side as she chewed, her long-lashed eyes placid. At least to the untrained eye. Pippa had tangled with SpongeBob one too many times to be tricked.

“Daisy, Lily! One to the left, one to the right!” she shouted. “Scotty – I know you’re out there somewhere – get the gate open!”

On cue, a little boy of about four, with the same long, wild blonde hair, appeared from behind the decorative water trough and ran over to a broad metal gate, reaching up on tiptoes to unhook the blue nylon string that tied it closed.

Pippa advanced steadily, hopping over the steaming gifts that SpongeBob had deposited on the cobbles, muttering the fake swear words she used in front of the kids – variations of “sugar”, “broomsticks”, “rubber ducks” and her personal favourite, “molluscs!” She noticed Mr Retallick coming closer from the corner of her eye and shouted out to him, “Don’t be fooled! I know she looks like a pin-up, but this is the Osama bin Laden of cows! Best stay away!”

He nodded and instead headed towards the metal feed bucket that had been abandoned next to the gate. He picked it up and banged it with his fist so the contents rattled. SpongeBob looked up and over, her broad head turning towards the noise. Her eyes narrowed – Pippa swore they did – as she thought about it. Weighed up the pros and cons in her big cow brain.

Mr Retallick shook the feed bucket some more and walked through the gate towards the barn. Pippa walked closer to the cow, making gentle shooing gestures with her hands. Daisy and Lily edged in nearer on either side and Pippa could see their tiny blonde heads reflected in SpongeBob’s huge, liquid brown pupils. They patted her on the side and Pippa gave a delicate shove from the rear, careful to avoid clomping hooves and swishing tails that could catch you in the eye if the animal got her dander up.

Finally, the combination of carrot and stick worked and she lumbered slowly towards the gate, after one final defiant munch of bright-purple hydrangea petals. She still had one dangling from her mouth as she walked.

“Into the barn!” shouted Pippa, watching as her early guest nodded and strode forward, angling long legs over the muddy puddles, leading the evil cow genius right inside. He smacked her on the behind as she wandered through and SpongeBob turned to give him the evil-cow genius eye. He gave her the eye back before shutting and latching the barn door.

Then he stood, hands on hips, threw his head back and laughed. Laughed long and hard, and loud. Pippa looked on in fascination, drinking in the sight of this stunning male specimen standing in her farmyard in the rain. Drizzle dripped from his soaked hair, over his forehead, along the slightly aquiline ridge of his nose, down to the sensual curve of his wide mouth. He really was drop-dead gorgeous. And even better, seemed to know his way around a cow. Wow! The perfect man. Now, if he could iron school uniforms and turn into a pizza after sex, even better.

The children scurried closer, looking at him with similar curiosity, Scotty clutching onto her hand for security. The twins were fearless, but her baby? He always needed an extra layer of security. Which was fine by her – as long as he still wasn’t climbing into bed for cuddles when he was 16, she would always be available for hand-holding. She gave his fingers a little squeeze of reassurance.

“Thank you, Mr Retallick,” she said. “ I see you’ve spent some time in the company of cows before?”

“There are many answers to that, Miss Harte, but I’ll restrain myself – and it was my pleasure. Been a while since I was at the business end of a Friesian. This used to be a dairy farm, didn’t it?”

“Yes. 500 head. But my parents…aren’t here any more. It’s just us. So we converted to holiday lets. A working farm is – well, a lot of work. Too much for this gang of troublemakers, anyway.”

“By ‘us’, you mean…” he cast his spookily sexy brown eyes over the gathered crowd, which now numbered Pippa, Daisy, Lily, Scotty, a nanny goat called Ben Ten and a pair of Muscovy ducks known as Phineas and Ferb. In fact, Pippa thought, there was only one person missing. As usual.

“Yes. Us. These are my brothers and sisters, and our animal friends,” she said, introducing them all individually. “And there’s one missing. Patrick. He’s seventeen, and he’ll be the one hiding somewhere after leaving the barn door open.”

“Again!” said Lily and Daisy in unison, rolling their eyes in a way that spoke volumes about Patrick and his various misdemeanours.

“You look after all of…these?” said Ben Retallick, frowning as he looked at this slip of a girl, smudged in oil, crazy blonde hair escaping in corkscrew tufts from an elastic band, soaking wet in her torn dungarees.

He couldn’t quite believe that she was playing mother hen to this whole brood. She only looked about eighteen herself, which had been giving him some major fits of the guilts since he’d arrived. The minute he’d seen her leaning over that broken lav, pert butt in the air, he’d noticed the fact she wore nothing but a tatty hot-pink t-shirt beneath those dungarees. He’d been working very hard not to notice how tight it was – or the fact that she didn’t have a bra on – ever since. It had been difficult to know where to look. He had enough self-loathing going on as it was, without adding perving over a teenager to the list. And now it seemed he’d been wrong – she must be a bit older than that, surely, to have all this responsibility resting on those slender shoulders?

“Yes, Mr Retallick,” she said firmly, drawing herself up to her full height – which had to be all of five foot three in her ancient Hunter wellies – and fixing him with kind of withering look clearly intended to make parts of him shrivel up and die. “I do indeed look after all of…these. We live together in an old shoe on top of the hill. Now, thanks for your help, and feel free to take yourself right back to Honeysuckle and settle in.”

Her tone had changed – the easy humour and casual flirtation of earlier had disappeared – and instead she sounded wary, formal. Mightily huffy, in fact. He’d upset her without even trying – a specialist subject of his. He felt a shiver run through him: not fear, not quite, but a spark of something…admiration, he thought. That was it. This tiny woman, almost a child from the looks of it, was swollen up with pride and fury and protective instinct. He’d poked a stick at her family, and now she was preparing to shove it right where the sun doesn’t shine. Which, he thought, looking around him at the familiar farmyard, was pretty much everywhere in Cornwall right now.

“Right. I’ll do just that,” he said. “See you around, Pippa. Daisy. Lily. Scotty. Ben Ten. Phineas and Ferb. Give my regards to Madame SpongeBob.”

He nodded at each of them individually as he turned to walk away, and Pippa felt her anger soften down to mild irritation. He’d remembered all of their names. Even the animals. That was pretty much a first in her experience; even she forgot them sometimes, resorting to “You, there, with the feathers!”, or “Oi! Boy child!”

Maybe he wasn’t that bad after all, she thought. Possibly he was just one of those unintentionally rude people who doesn’t realise they’re being offensive. Or possibly, she admitted, she was just one of those unintentionally prickly people who don’t realise they’re being defensive. She’d had a lot to defend over the years, and when it came to the kids and her ability to care for them, defensive was her default setting. None of which was tall, dark and cow-handy’s fault.

She chased after him as he strode away, wellies squelching in the mud.

“Wait!” she shouted, tugging hold of his arm to stop him. “Where do I know you from, really? You’re so familiar…” she said, realising as she touched it that his arm was solid as the oaks shading the side of the farm driveway. He looked city, but he felt country. He felt good.

The shutters went down again and he glanced at her clinging hand, raising his eyebrow eloquently: Back Off, Broomstick, clear as day.

Ben sighed, watched as her hand peeled away from his arm. She was the same as all the rest. Just another stranger who felt she knew him. Not quite there yet, still piecing it together, but give it a few minutes – she’d match the face with the name, with the story, with the legend. And she’d assume she knew him inside out. They all did.

He felt the familiar sense of frustration rise within him. It had been over a year since his release from prison, but still people stopped him. Still people chatted to him, touched him without permission, slapped him on the back and tried to shake his hand. Congratulated him, told him well done, like he was a hero for having survived eight months in HMP Scorton. He hated it. The lack of privacy, the pictures in the paper, the feeling of having his whole life played out in public. In fact, he’d come here to try and escape exactly that – back here to this isolated stretch of Cornish coastline, where the cows outnumbered the people and the internet was patchy at best. He’d hoped to have a week of solitude, without any prying eyes or being expected to bare his soul to complete strangers. Which showed what he knew – even here, his face was known.

Pippa stared at him intently, rubbing her cheeks and smudging that oil patch even harder into the milky-smooth velvet of her skin. Huge, cornflower-blue eyes. English rose all the way, if English roses had taken to abandoning the need for underwear and had just trodden in a cow pat.

He waited the few beats he knew it would take, saw the confusion in her eyes clear as she finally recognised him. Never mind, he thought. He could leave in the night; find somewhere even more deserted. Somewhere his face wouldn’t be known. Somewhere they wouldn’t have him pegged as the UK’s most popular jailbird. Somewhere he wouldn’t have to face someone who thought they knew him, thought they understood his story.

She pointed one grimy finger at him, and said, triumphantly: “You! I’ve figured it out! I know who you are! You’re that bastard who threw me in the duckpond when I was seven!”

Chapter 2 (#u01435c6e-b5a2-5214-8409-8c3629d7d4a5)

Ben stared back at her, wondering if he’d fallen into some kind of wormhole and landed in an alternative reality. Okay. She did recognise him – but not for the reasons he’d assumed. She hadn’t got a clue who Ben Retallick really was, had never heard of his case, never heard of Darren McConnell, and clearly hadn’t got any idea that he was one of the most famous criminals in the country. He’d assumed she would be like all the rest – about to quiz him, prod him, look at him with that familiar mix of admiration and fear.

Well…she hadn’t. She seemed to have him pegged for a far more historic crime – one he couldn’t even remember. Maybe he’d started to believe his own hype…

“It was a long time ago – fourteen years or something like it – but I know it was you, there’s no point denying it!” she said, almost jumping up and down in her excitement. Again, he studiously avoided looking at her upper half. She might be twenty-one, if he had the maths right there, but it was still a decade or so younger than him. It was still…wrong. And he’d worked very hard at avoiding women altogether since he’d been released. Since Johanna and her family made it clear they wanted nothing to do with a common-or-garden ex-con, no matter how justified his actions had been. Johanna – his fiancée when the incident that changed his life forever had occurred – had disappeared as fast as his career. She was engaged again now, he heard, to some corporate lawyer in Abu Dhabi. Good luck to her. And him, poor bastard – he’d need it.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about,” he replied, ragging himself back to the here, the now, and to Pippa – wondering if she’d accidentally sniffed some adhesive while she was fixing the loo.

She poked him in the chest with one finger – hard enough that it made him take a step back.

“You remember! Of course you do! It was ages ago, and you were here with your…grandfather, I think? Is that right? He was talking to my dad about some business thing or another, and you stayed here for a couple of nights. I was seven, so Patrick would have been, well, about three, and the twins and Scotty didn’t even exist then. You seemed really glamorous, all the way from London – don’t you remember, really?”