The Bed and Breakfast on the Beach: A gorgeous feel-good read from the bestselling author of One Day in December

Winnie nodded, still feeling foolish because Jesse was clearly an internationally established artist and she’d worked from her garden shed. ‘It was more of a hobby, really,’ she murmured, although she’d burned with indignation whenever Rory had referred to it as such when they were married. He’d never taken her as seriously as she’d wished, even though her order book had been consistently full and she’d started to make a name for herself.

‘Come on, Win,’ Stella said. ‘Don’t do yourself down, it wasn’t a hobby. You’re bloody good at it.’

Winnie was aware of Jesse watching her reactions closely.

‘I haven’t done it for a while,’ she said eventually.

‘But you will do it again now you’re here, yes?’ Corinna said. ‘Because I’d love to see more of what you can do. This kind of line would be perfect for the gallery shop.’

Winnie frowned, not quite following.

‘Corinna owns the gallery in Skelidos town,’ Panos offered by way of explanation.

‘There’s a town?’ Stella looked hopeful. ‘Is there a supermarket there?’

‘Two,’ Jesse said. ‘I need to go into town for a couple of hours tomorrow. I can run one of you in if you like.’

‘Winnie,’ Frankie and Stella said at the same time.

They both shrugged when she shot them daggers.

‘I’m menu planning in the morning,’ Frankie said. She was the stand-out cook of the three of them and was dying to put her stamp on the menu revamp at the B&B. She was itching to test out new recipes and make the most of local produce to really ring the changes.

‘And I’m ready to make a start on the media package,’ Stella said, sliding into business talk because it came as second nature to her. They’d all readily agreed that she was perfectly placed to give the B&B’s tired and very basic website a much-needed makeover. She knew all the right people to take their social media profile from non-existent to boutique, to really try to get their name out there. If there was one thing that Stella understood it was marketing and PR, and she was planning to use all of those hard-earned skills that no one else back home seemed to value any more to put their new business on the discerning holidaymaker’s map.

Winnie, it had been agreed, was to be their front of house, the face of Villa Valentina, the warm welcome and the winning smile that would have people booking up season on season. But front of house needed guests, so for now, at least, she had some time on her hands.

Time to go into town with Jesse, or so it seemed.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_bf9a738b-2810-59fa-9b7b-c15b5dbd6905)

Jesse stood at his kitchen window and watched Winnie as she swung her legs over the low wall around his olive grove and made her way over to the donkeys. She seemed a little more sure of herself this morning, less as if she feared The Fonz might bite her hand off when she reached out to fuss his ears. Or had her skittishness yesterday been more about the fact that he’d been so rude to her on their first encounter? He knew he’d been unnecessarily brusque, but her passing similarity to Erin when she’d opened the door at the villa had been a red rag to a bull. On closer inspection she was quite different, but there was something familiar in the curve of her hip and the slender, lithe length of her limbs, in the natural fairness of the waves that fell around her shoulders and the fullness of her mouth. An echo, a reminder to him of a time in his life that he’d closed the door on. Without even realising it, Winnie had managed to disappoint him simply by not being someone else.

It was a disservice, of course; he was big enough and ugly enough to know that, but just watching her again today stirred that same complicated cocktail of emotions again.

He threw a whole glass of cold water down his throat, then lifted his hand in greeting when she turned and caught him looking her way.

‘Get a fucking grip,’ he muttered. ‘She’s not even that much like her.’

It had all been such a long time ago, really; a decade almost, more than long enough for him to make his peace with what had happened. And he had, for the most part anyway. He’d have given himself a fairly clean bill of emotional health up to yesterday, when all it had taken was a swish of blonde hair and a flick of a hip to send him off the deep end.

He didn’t do blondes any more. He’d nurtured a taste for brunettes with dark eyes and bad attitudes, girls your mama wouldn’t approve of, girls who knew what they wanted and who knew the score. The score, in Jesse’s case, was open access to his body and absolutely no entry into his heart or his head. Over the years he’d grown to enjoy being so sexually upfront; it was pretty liberating, freeing really. He couldn’t actually see why people bothered bending themselves over backwards to be something they weren’t in order to accommodate someone else’s needs. It wasn’t healthy.

‘Am I too early?’

Winnie leaned in through the half-open stable door, cutting off his train of thought. Pink skinny-rib T-shirt. White denim mini. Canvas sneakers. Her face looked free of makeup and she’d tied her hair back in a ponytail; Jesus, if she told him she was eighteen he’d believe her, which pretty much made him a dirty old man at thirty-nine. Brilliant. Another negative emotion to attach to her; she really was pushing all of his buttons without even trying.

Shoving his sunglasses on and sweeping his keys up out of the bowl on the dining table, he shook his head.

‘Nope. Right on time. Let’s go.’

Jesse’s dusty black VW Golf was nothing like Rory’s beloved sports car back home, and Winnie decided she much preferred its simple unpretentiousness. The air-con was icebox cool, and that was a much more valuable prize out here than hand-stitched leather bucket seats or tinted glass. The low-slung red Alfa would have been an entirely unsuitable car for a baby; Winnie sometimes wondered if the idea of losing it had been one of the contributory factors to Rory’s infidelity.

‘I have a couple of errands to run, so I’ll drop you at Carrefour and come back in an hour or so,’ Jesse said, turning left out of the lane onto the main road.

Winnie nodded, taking in the scenery as it whipped past her window. Olive groves, mellow fields and always the still, glittering Mediterranean in view too.

‘This is the island’s only main road,’ Jesse said. ‘It follows the coast all the way around, and the lanes that lead off it all run in towards Skelidos town at the centre. It’s a blessedly simple layout, unlike the crazy one-way systems you’re no doubt used to back home.’

‘Sounds straightforward,’ Winnie murmured.

‘You’ll find that much about Skelidos is like that. Uncomplicated.’ Jesse indicated to turn off the main road, leaving the sparkling sea behind them. ‘It’s one of the big things that I love about the place.’

‘Can I ask how you came to live here?’ she asked, curious and unguarded.

He flicked his dark eyes towards her over his sunglasses. ‘You can ask, but I’ll lie about the answer.’

Winnie held his gaze for a second before he looked back towards the quiet lane, and she saw there that although his answer had been delivered in an off-the-cuff tone, he wasn’t joking. God, he was a prickly fish.

‘Just don’t answer at all then,’ she said. ‘Lies are one thing I’ve had more than my fill of.’

This time when he glanced her way he didn’t look flippant. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

They lapsed into silence for the rest of the ride, Jesse concentrating on the bumpy, dusty lane and Winnie taking the chance to see the more agricultural heart of the island away from the coast.

‘Is it mostly olive farms on the island?’

Jesse nodded. ‘Olives. Cattle for dairy produce, and vegetables in season of course. I wasn’t exaggerating about the simple pace of life here. Farmland has stayed in the same families for generations and property rarely comes up for sale. You guys are about the only new people here in as long as I can recall.’

‘Wow,’ she said, taken aback. No wonder Corinna had been so eager to get a look at them. Life in England had been so entirely different; neighbours came and went and people did any number of things to make their living. Here there was an actual community, a sense of family and of history. Even in the short time she’d spent on Skelidos so far, Winnie was already starting to feel that it suited her bones more than the complicated, fractured society back home in the UK.

Home. It was a word that didn’t seem to apply to anywhere for Winnie right now. Her parents’ house would always be her childhood home, but living there again for even a short time had proved glaringly that it was no longer her home these days. Her home had been the house she’d bought with her husband and built into their love nest, but also the place where she’d discovered his infidelity, and so it was no longer somewhere that she held any keys or affection for.

It was too soon to confidently refer to Skelidos as home either though. She hoped that one day it would be in her blood and her heart, but at the moment it felt more like they were visiting the island than emigrating to it. Perhaps it was because the others, Stella in particular, seemed to view this as an experiment, a short-term stopgap to get them all out of crisis points at home. They’d all been in need of something and Villa Valentina had practically fallen into their laps.

They hadn’t realised at the time how rare it was for property to become available on the island; they certainly hadn’t counted on being the only newcomers in the last decade.

‘Is tourism fairly new here?’ Winnie asked.

Jesse nodded. ‘Very much so. None of the tour operators come here, thankfully. We’re happy to leave the crowds over on Skiathos, and on Skopelos too now thanks to Mamma Mia!’

‘They filmed it there?’

‘Sure did, and their tourism shot off the scale as a result. I’m just glad they didn’t glance our way instead.’

Winnie had seen the movie several times over. Her mother had even mentioned it when she’d broken the news about the B&B, in order to fret that life wasn’t like the movies and they were asking for trouble buying a slice of some unknown island. Winnie’s parents valued routine and order; the concept of their daughter upping sticks across the globe to somewhere they’d never even heard of had filled them with unease.

Skelidos did share some of its bigger sisters’ beautiful traits, though. Lush green pine-forest-clad hills surrounded by sleepy agricultural lands, all fringed with pale, sugar-soft sands sliding seamlessly into the gleaming turquoise sea. Given the ever-present overhead sun, it was a surprisingly verdant place, with creamy wildflowers awash through the hedgerows and the familiar, abundant ramble of bright cerise bougainvillea in evidence everywhere. For a small island, it certainly packed a visual punch; it was picture-postcard Greece without the crowds or the neon bars, an off-the-beaten-track paradise that few people seemed to have discovered as yet.