The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club

by Sophie Green

Genres: General Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

'The perfect novel to curl up with on a cosy night in' Hello

'Brimming with atmosphere and warmth' Jenny Ashcroft

'An absolute gem of a novel' Better Reading Australia

***THE TOP TEN KINDLE AND AUSTRALIAN BESTSELLER***

In 1978 in Australia's Northern Territory, life is hard and people are isolated. Telephones are not yet a common fixture. But five women find a way to connect.

Sybil, the matriarch of Fairvale Station, misses her eldest son and is looking for a distraction, while Kate, Sybil's daughter-in-law, is thousands of miles away from home and finding it difficult to adjust to life at Fairvale.

Sallyanne, mother of three, dreams of a life far removed from the dusty town where she lives with her difficult husband.

Rita, Sybil's oldest friend, is living far away in Alice Springs and working for the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

And Della, who left Texas for Australia looking for adventure and work on the land, needs some purpose in her life.

Sybil comes up with a way to give them all companionship: they all love to read, and she starts a book club. As these five women bond over their love of books, they form friendships that will last a lifetime.

Books bring them together — but friendship will transform all of their lives. Perfect for lovers of The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Little Paris Bookshop.

____________

Book lovers LOVE The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club:

'Will make you appreciate the little things in life'

'A story that took me on an emotional journey'

'A wonderful book that will sink into your heart'

'Absorbing and delightful, not a book to be missed'

'Warm and atmospheric. I enjoyed it so much'

'I LOVE this book!! There aren't enough stars — it deserves MANY more. It is so beautifully written . . . I laughed and cried with these amazing ladies'

Release date: August 8, 2017

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 384

Sample

The morning sky was its usual muted dry-season blue as Sybil paused to gaze out of the kitchen window. Before she’d moved to the Northern Territory she’d thought it would be a land of perpetual brilliance: blood-red dirt, sapphire skies and emerald trees, and a luminous, pendulous sun reigning over the land. All of that was true – just not at the same time.

The palette of the place changed with the seasons. The light of the dry season was pallid at dawn and dusk, and during the wet the sky was often so heavy with cloud that it was hard to say what sort of blue it was. When it rained – and rained and rained – the trees turned so bright and the earth, even the rocks, became so alive with new growth that it was like living in a greenhouse; but during the dry season the colours of the trees seemed subdued, almost as if the persistent foliage felt like it didn’t have permission to be any more vibrant. The wet season was the star up here: it had the power to turn the Katherine River into a swollen force, waterfalls cascading down the sides of the gorges; it made the air leaden with moisture and turned people into molasses. And it could kill.

Everyone knew of someone who had died trying to cross a river during a wet, or a child who had wandered off to a waterhole or creek they thought they knew well, only to discover that the usual friendly trickle was now a roiling torrent in which lurked traps for small feet: tangled branches, rotting animal carcasses, strong currents. It was too easy for the wet to claim an unwary child – or adult. That’s what had shocked Sybil the most when she’d arrived here. She’d grown up in Sydney, with all its traffic and bustle and urgency, but she’d never known anyone to die because of the weather. Yet in her first year here on Fairvale Station, she knew two. It had been an unwelcome lesson: the Territory would always be the boss. Humans could try to bend the land and the seasons to their will, but they would fail. They would fail forever. All they could do was surrender completely and make the best of what was there. And the best was plentiful.

It was impossible not to fall in love with the place. So many colours and contradictions; so many secrets and surprises. She had been here for twenty-six years, since she was twenty-five, and she knew enough to realise that she would never know the Territory completely, even though it felt like the Territory knew her. It knew her weaknesses, that was for sure; it also brought out her strengths. Of all the relationships in her life, this was the one that seemed to contain the most challenges and rewards. Not that she’d tell her husband that.

As if on cue, Joe walked into her field of vision. She smiled as she saw him lift his battered Akubra and scratch his head. He did that a lot, usually when he was trying to work out how to say something stern to a worker without actually sounding stern. He was a gentle man, in so many ways. She was lucky to be married to him; lucky that he had taken her away from a life that was pressing in on her. She hadn’t loved him then but she loved him now. And it was time to call him in to breakfast.

She waved vigorously through the window, hoping to catch his eye; his lifted finger was the sign that she had. She saw him turn towards the cattle yards and cup his hands to his mouth, no doubt calling to their son Ben, who had also started the day early. Everyone on Fairvale was up with the sun, if not before, and they worked long after the moon rose. Sometimes Sybil wondered whether she’d have chosen this life if she’d known that it was relentless: seven days a week, so many hours a day. There seemed to be very little time even to read a book, because they were all so tired they’d fall into bed at night. Except they did end up making time for the things that mattered, and if Sybil thought she was missing out on being a lady of leisure she was also aware that life wasn’t made for sitting around and doing nothing. Human bodies were built to work, and the hard, long toil of each day made the snatched hours of relaxation all the more precious.

Sybil watched as her husband and son pushed open the gate to enter the garden. Despite the fact that they lived in the middle of hundreds of thousands of hectares with apparently no need for fences, where the land threw up its own natural barriers, the gate kept out the working dogs and any stray cattle that might trample through the green-lawned garden that Sybil had defied nature and good sense to create. That garden still carried the signs of the lush growth of the wet season just past. Before too long, though, the dry would start to bite and she’d need to draw on the bore water to keep the garden at its best.

She’d fashioned it – perhaps ridiculously – as if it was a garden belonging to a quaint English cottage instead of a large, squat outback home. Fairvale’s big house had a generous verandah that wrapped around three of its sides, but it was no more genteel than that. The garden was Sybil’s attempt at bringing something refined into her immediate world. She had fashioned long garden beds to border the lawn. A bird bath sat in the middle of the grass; instead of swallows dipping their beaks into it, however, the local cockatoos used it as a swimming pool, raucously announcing their activities every time. It often sounded like they were laughing at her – laughing at her delusions of order and grace – and they probably were. She’d started this garden as a bride, trying to bring something of her old, organised life into her new. If she’d waited five years, it wouldn’t have mattered so much. By that point in her marriage she had realised that she would never be able to control anything much around here, apart from herself.

After the beds had been dug she had, at great expense, ordered poinciana saplings and a jacaranda tree from a supplier in Darwin. African trees, she’d thought, might have a chance of surviving here. She had installed some camellias, hoping they would reach a fair height even if this wasn’t their natural habitat. They had survived, although they weren’t always happy about it.

Maidenhair ferns hugged the ground; she’d planted them hoping they would keep the beds together, and moist, to encourage the other plants to grow. The ferns loved the wet season and hated the dry; some years Sybil thought she’d lose them all, yet they’d endured. She supposed that plants that had been growing on earth for millions of years could outlast the tough seasons.

The lawn had been the hardest part. It was a risk, when the wet season was likely to turn it into mush, but Joe had gone to Darwin one day and returned with enough lawn to cover the patch of dirt that was left after the beds had been planted. Sometimes he’d laugh at her, slowly shaking his head, as he watched her curse the weather and offer up the occasional prayer that her lawn would be saved.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she’d said once, irritated that he could be so amused while she was so annoyed.

‘Because that lawn is the only thing that can make you believe in God.’ He’d laughed more heartily then and she’d wanted to stomp away from him – because he was right. Instead she’d pressed her lips together, turned away and started pruning a camellia.

The garden had been many things to Sybil over the years: a source of pride and frustration; a refuge when she needed a few minutes to herself; a place for her children to learn to take care of nature; and a spot where she and Joe could sometimes sit quietly as the sun set on a dry-season day, listening to those cockatoos, still laughing at her.

Mainly, though, the garden was her work of art – the only one she had. Out here on Fairvale, two hours from the nearest town and a long way from the culture and sophistication of her childhood, Sybil needed something to gaze upon. Something that wasn’t stampeding cattle and mangy dogs, coals in a fire or a creek bed full of animal skeletons.

As the two men approached the flyscreen door, she could hear them talking about one of the workers. It was as she’d suspected: Joe needed to pull the man back into line and he didn’t have the heart to do it.

‘If you don’t, I will,’ she could hear Ben saying. ‘And I won’t be half as nice as you.’

‘Now, now,’ came Joe’s deep, measured tones; he sounded just as he had when Ben had misbehaved as a boy and Joe had tried to discipline him. Now, now, Ben, he’d say. You don’t really want to do that, do you? Amazingly, this tactic had often been effective. As it no doubt would be with the worker.

‘Hello, love,’ Joe said as he opened the door, removing his hat and hanging it on the hook by the door. Sybil liked the way he always greeted her as if he hadn’t seen her just half an hour ago, wrapped in her towel as she exited the shower, her hair wet, her face unadorned. He always made it sound as though seeing her was an occasion.

‘Smells good, Mum,’ Ben said as he pulled out a chair and sat.

‘There’s nothing cooking yet, Ben,’ she said.

‘I know.’ He winked. ‘Get a wriggle on.’

‘You can go and eat with the others in the dining room if you don’t like it,’ Sybil said. The residents of Fairvale – the community of stockmen, workers, and their wives and children if they had them – usually ate together, with all the food cooked by Ruby, who had been with them for years. Sybil always liked to make breakfast for her family in their home, however. The days could become so frenetic for Joe – so many people wanting to talk to him, to ask him things, to have him do things for them – that providing him with a quiet start, with a meal where he could eat in peace, was, she felt, important.

Joe tapped his son on the shoulder. ‘Be kind to your mother,’ he said. ‘We’re lucky to have our breakfast made for us.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Ben grinned at his mother, taking off his own dusty Akubra and putting it on the table. Sybil knew that grin: it was Ben’s good-luck charm, his means of getting out of trouble. He’d been using it on her since before he could talk and she always fell for it, even though she tried not to let him see that.

‘Do you reckon the rain’s finished?’ Sybil said, turning her head briefly towards the kitchen window.

‘Could be a bit more.’ Joe squinted at the sky. ‘Sometimes we get fooled. It’s been a good wet, though, so we shouldn’t be greedy. The bores are full. We’ll last through the dry.’

‘Where’s Katie?’ Ben said to his mother.

‘She’s your wife, Ben,’ Sybil replied. ‘How should I know?’ Her son was twenty-three years of age – old enough not to be lazy. Although she had a motherly impulse to want to take care of everything, he was a grown-up.

‘Because you’ve been in the house together.’ He tried his grin again.

‘And I’ve been in here,’ Sybil said.

‘All right,’ Ben said, sounding weary and getting to his feet. ‘I’ll get her.’

‘Thank you,’ Sybil said, turning to a loaf of bread next to the stove, picking up the knife so she could start to hack out the many slices she’d need just for this one meal.

‘Ka-aaate!’ Ben called as he walked through to the rest of the house, and Sybil turned to Joe and raised an eyebrow. Only he could understand the paradox of loving Ben and being exasperated by him at the same time.

Joe smiled. ‘Cup of tea, love?’ he said and Sybil nodded.

‘Thank you,’ she said as she started to slice.

Another day on Fairvale was beginning.

Sallyanne sat in the car with the ignition off, turning her wedding ring round and round on her finger, feeling the sun already burning through the side window. It wasn’t even ten o’clock.

The car was almost new, although that didn’t make her love it any more. It had been her husband’s choice, but Mick rarely drove it; he had a ute for work and he’d drive that on weekends too. Sallyanne would rather have had one of those little Japanese numbers instead of a burnt-orange 1976 Kingswood station wagon that felt as wieldy as a truck and was as hot as an oven inside.

She sighed and kept turning her ring. She didn’t know why she did that when she was nervous; it wasn’t as if the ring looked any different whichever way she moved it.

The ring was a plain platinum band. Platinum, her mother had once told her, was more valuable than gold. That had been years ago, of course – her mother had been dead for half of Sallyanne’s life. She never forgot anything her mother told her, though. Or anything her mother did.

Sallyanne remembered arriving home from school and finding her mother cackling – yes, actually cackling, almost bent over with laughter – in the presence of other women who crowded their small sitting room. There were cups of tea in her mother’s best china and half-full plates of Arnott’s biscuits. Lemon Crisps, Scotch Fingers and Venetians. Her mother had barely noticed her only daughter arriving, apart from saying, ‘Hello, darling, it’s just the CWA,’ before she continued laughing.

There had never been another meeting at their house but her mother had remained a member of the Country Women’s Association until she died. Sallyanne had always thought it was an organisation for women far older than her who wanted to talk about their grandchildren, but her mother hadn’t been that old. Not that much older than Sallyanne was now.

The blast of a horn made her jump and she looked up to see a woman waving at a car in the street. It was the same wave her daughter, Gretel, had given her as she’d left this morning, her fingers waggling as she’d chewed on some of her hair, a new habit that Sallyanne would have to stop.

She’d left Gretel with Mick’s mother, who was a reliable babysitter, if a somewhat unenthusiastic one. Colleen had never been keen on watching Gretel’s brothers, Tim and Billy, declaring boys to be ‘nothing but trouble – and exhausting, Sally, they’re exhausting’, although she’d softened once Gretel had arrived. However, Sallyanne reflected with another twist of the ring, the woman had never learnt to call her daughter-in-law by her proper name.

The boys were at school now. Probably looking forward to recess. And here was their mother, acting like it was her own first day of school.

Sallyanne had thought about doing something with her days ever since Billy had started kindergarten. With only Gretel at home, she’d really had no excuse not to try to make better use of her time. So when she’d seen the little advertisement in the local paper, announcing the next CWA meeting and welcoming new members, she had called the number in the ad and stammered out her question about whether she could attend. Of course she could, a kindly lady had told her.

‘And you sound young, dear,’ the lady had gone on to say. ‘We need some young ones.’

Sallyanne was glad she sounded young because she had been feeling so old lately. Her body was worn out from carrying and feeding three babies, from running a household of five people. This morning had been like all the others: she was up early to make Mick his tea and toast, never receiving any words of thanks, just the glowering that now seemed to be a fixture. He was drinking more and smiling less, and she didn’t know why – she knew only that he’d decided it was her fault that he needed six beers in quick succession at night, which was probably why he was morose in the mornings. That was her fault, too, apparently. He’d always had a temper, arriving quickly and violently and gone in the same way, but this latest turn in his personality was settling into his foundations and she didn’t like it. Didn’t like the way he looked at her, as if she was provocation and prey. Didn’t like the way he snapped at the kids, when their only offence was to be young.

So she made the best of it: she would be chirpy with the children as they woke and tumbled into the kitchen for their breakfast and Mick grunted his goodbyes. She would bustle around, packing the boys’ lunches, making sure their shoes were polished, answering Gretel’s constant questions about why puppies barked and trees were green. It was exhausting and she always felt there was nothing left over for her. No time, no energy, no motivation.

Still, she had to make an effort. Thirty-four years of age was too young not to try. Not to live.

She’d decided to drive past the front entrance of the building on the main street. She could have parked out the front. Instead, her throat feeling like someone’s hand was on it, she’d turned left at the corner and gone around the block to First Street, thinking she’d park out the back. She wouldn’t feel so exposed if she was waiting there.

Yet she could see there was a rear entrance to the building, and now two women walked past her car, laughing, as they headed for it. They had the short haircuts that were so practical in this hot place and the short-sleeved cotton dresses that were also advisable, but she was sure they were wearing stockings. Sallyanne looked down at her own cotton dress and her bare legs. Was she meant to have worn stockings? Was that what proper CWA ladies did? Even in a place where the air was so stifling that people sat in the hot springs – a pool of water that was thirty-eight degrees Celsius – in preference to being on dry land?

It was too late now for stockings so she’d just have to hope no one would notice. Maybe this particular cotton dress hadn’t been such a good idea, though: her belly, so slack after three babies had grown in it, was pushing out prominently with nothing to hold it in. If she’d worn a different, more structured dress – if she wasn’t so fond of biscuits and cakes – she wouldn’t look so plump. Those other women didn’t look plump. They looked like they’d been working out in the sun every day of their lives: sturdy and strong and hearty. She’d never been hearty.

Feeling sick with uncertainty about what would happen once she stepped inside the building, Sallyanne pushed open the creaky car door and put one tentative foot onto the road. She tucked her wispy blonde hair behind her ears, licked her lips, and then sent a silent plea to her mum to give her strength as she emerged fully from the car and slammed the door shut – it was the only way to get it to stick. Trying to remember to keep her shoulders back, she walked across the sparse lawn at the back of the building, then, falteringly, opened the screen door that took her into a room that was smaller than she had imagined.

Sallyanne guessed that there were about twenty women standing around – she’d never been good at estimating the size of a crowd, though. They were all older than her, although some not by much. There was an array of dresses in various unremarkable patterns, and sturdy handbags placed on or next to the large table that dominated the space.

Almost to a woman they had short or shoulder-length hair, which made Sallyanne conscious of her own long locks, which she had wanted to cut for years except Mick kept telling her not to. She looked like Rapunzel, he’d say; certainly there were days when Sallyanne felt like her, too.

Sallyanne realised that a moderately tall, middle-aged woman was looking at her curiously. She was sure she’d never seen the woman before – she’d have remembered such a striking face. The woman looked like Ava Gardner before Frank Sinatra got to her. She had short grey hair cut close to her head and she was wearing something no one else in the room was: boots, and a Western shirt tucked into her slim waist above a pair of sensible-looking pants with a flare at the hem. Sallyanne had seen those shirts in cowboy movies, always worn by men. A large silver buckle adorned the woman’s belt. She looked like she was about to go to work on a property, which meant she probably wasn’t from town. Sallyanne was sure she’d have noticed her if she was – she knew pretty much everyone by sight. That’s what happened when you’d lived your whole life in one place.

‘You’re Sallyanne Morris, aren’t you?’ the woman said.

‘Yes,’ Sallyanne replied cautiously. ‘How did you know?’

The woman smiled enigmatically. ‘I’m Sybil Baxter. From Fairvale.’

Sallyanne knew about Fairvale. Everyone in the area did. The Baxter family had lived on Fairvale for so long that no one in town could remember them not being there. Well, no one except the local Aboriginal tribe, but people didn’t really talk about that.

‘And you’re joining us?’ Sybil’s smile was more generous now.

Sallyanne nodded and let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding onto.

‘It’s my first meeting,’ she said, sure she was spluttering.

Sybil nodded towards the women gathering around a table laden with cups, saucers and scones. ‘Shall we?’

Sallyanne felt herself relaxing, just a little.

‘What made you want to join us?’ Sybil said, walking slowly.

Because I need some new friends, Sallyanne almost said but realised how that would sound. ‘I heard that you talk about books sometimes,’ she said instead, and was rewarded with a look of delight on Sybil’s face.

‘You like to read?’ Sybil said, stopping before they reached the table.

Sallyanne nodded vigorously. ‘I love it,’ she said. ‘It’s my escape. It gives me—’

She bit her lip. She would sound loony if she told this woman that she loved books because they let her exist in different worlds, far from the dusty, hot town in which she’d grown up. In books she could live in London and Crete and New York City; she could inhabit the eighteenth century or New Kingdom Egypt. In books she could find tips on how to be a proper lady, what it felt like to have a grand romance, how to say ‘fiddle-dee-dee’ when you really wanted to tell someone to get lost. Not that Sallyanne said ‘fiddle-dee-dee’ to anyone. She’d tried it when she was a teenager, convinced that Scarlett O’Hara was her role model, and her friends had teased her for a week.

The quizzical look Sybil was giving her told Sallyanne that she’d let her mind wander again, in full view of another human being. Her mother always used to say she was ‘off with the fairies’, which she’d never quite understood – fairies didn’t interest her so much as pharaohs.

‘Sorry,’ Sallyanne said quietly.

‘For what?’ Sybil now looked amused.

‘I lost my train of thought.’

‘That doesn’t need an apology.’ Sybil smiled sympathetically and Sallyanne felt a pang of something she recognised from her earliest school days: the desire for a friendship.

‘So you’ve grown up in Katherine?’ Sybil said, although her intonation suggested she knew the answer.

‘Yes. Born here. Raised here.’ Sallyanne grimaced. ‘It sounds boring when I say it like that.’

‘Not at all,’ Sybil said. ‘It’s a fine town. I wish I could spend more time here.’

‘And you’re from …?’ Sallyanne guessed it was somewhere far away. Sybil held herself as if she knew her place in the world and was comfortable with it. It wasn’t the sort of confidence that came from growing up in a country town – one glance around the room at the slightly rounded shoulders and the universally deferential postures, even on the most robust-looking women, could tell anyone that. All these women, with lives and families they’d made their own, holding themselves as if they had something to apologise for.

‘Sydney,’ Sybil said.

‘I’ve always wanted to go there,’ Sallyanne said. ‘Some of my favourite books are set there.’

‘Oh? Which ones?’

‘Harp in the South is the main one. I—’

‘Sybil!’

A short, wide woman with a rigidly set perm was waving at them, and Sallyanne felt immediately disappointed that her conversation with Sybil Baxter was clearly about to end.

Sybil gave her an apologetic look and touched her arm lightly.

‘Come and I’ll introduce you to Peg,’ she said, waving briefly at the other woman. ‘And … I may have an idea.’

Sallyanne frowned.

‘A book-related idea,’ Sybil said. ‘I’ll ring you, if that’s all right?’

‘Shall I give you my number?’ Sallyanne said, not daring to hope that it was this easy to make a friend.

‘I don’t need it. I’ll just ask the operator to connect me.’ Sybil squeezed her arm. ‘Come on. Peg’s a hoot.’

Perhaps it was that easy. Or perhaps Sybil felt sorry for her. Whatever the truth, Sallyanne allowed Sybil to lead her into the CWA fray.

In the stillness of the evening the house was quiet – apart from the noise of her husband’s heavy feet coming down the hallway. Kate smiled and felt the same thrill she always did whenever Ben was near.

The door creaked open and there he was: six feet one, dark curly hair, skin tanned dark brown and the biggest smile in the Northern Territory. She loved the way one of his eyes almost closed each time he smiled at her – as if he was trying to make his smile even bigger, pushing it as far up his face as he could. His teeth were improbably white against his skin and his eyes danced.

‘Aren’t you a picture,’ he said, walking in and closing the door behind him, starting to pull his shirt over his head.

She glanced down at herself: her long hair, also dark, tumbling over her chest, her nightdress almost threadbare because she needed to buy a new one and there hadn’t been a chance to go into town for months. Her skin was drying up now the wet season was over and she felt as though the red dirt that seemed to get into everything on Fairvale had seeped into every pore. When she looked in the mirror – less often than she used to, because increasingly it seemed a ridiculous vanity in a place where everyone was subject to the same conditions – she would loom close, checking to see if there was dirt inside her upturned nose, or inside the rims of her eyes, which used to look so big and round, and which she now squinted against the sun so often that she worried they’d turn into slits. She lamented the high forehead that she’d once thought aristocratic: now it seemed like just another location for dirt to collect.

Kate could hardly believe she’d survived her first wet season, but she had, even though it had meant ending every day feeling like a limp tea towel that had been used to mop up one too many messes. Before they’d arrived in Australia Ben had told her how the seasons in his part of the Northern Territory worked: there were not four seasons but two. The wet season lasted from November to April and brought with it torrential rain and the probability that creeks and rivers would keep people trapped on their properties. The dry season was a blessed relief but sometimes it was too dry, and their water supplies could run down. Then there were two unofficial seasons: the build-up and the build-down.

‘The build-up,’ Ben had said, shaking his head and starting to laugh, ‘it makes people go troppo.’

‘Troppo?’

‘Short for “tropical”. The place is tropical so the weather makes people …’ He’d shrugged.

‘Go troppo,’ she’d finished. ‘But what does it mean? What happens?’

‘You go a bit crazy. The humidity gets … It’s hard to describe.’ He’d grinned quickly. ‘You’re the first person to ask me.’

She’d found out for herself when they’d arrived in that October of 1977. The humidity had shocked her, the first week it came. She’d spent a bit of time in France, growing up – the ferry to Calais had been as close to a rite of passage as she’d ever managed – but she’d never been anywhere else, let alone anywhere tropical. She’d never even thought about tropics beyond what she’d read of British colonies in Singapore and Malaya and India, and in those stories the English people were always being fanned by servants and given cooling drinks. There were no servants on Fairvale – there were ‘workers’, not even Ruby the cook was to be called anything else – and they couldn’t keep anything cool because they didn’t have a refrigerator.

Somehow, she’d made it through that build-up without going troppo – looking back, she suspected she was simply too shocked at how different everything was to properly succumb – and the wet season had come and gone. Now that the dry had arrived she had to learn to adjust to that as well.

‘I wouldn’t say I’m a picture,’ she said, thinking that it was Ben who looked as if he was not so much picture as sculpture, his chest and arms so perfectly proportioned that sometimes Kate suspected a joke was being played on her: he was too attractive to be real.

‘I look frightful,’ she added.

‘You’ll never look frightful to me.’ Ben pulled his jeans off and then he was naked, jumping onto the bed beside her and kissing the tip of her nose. ‘You’re my English rose,’ he said. ‘Always blooming.’

‘Ben,’ she said. ‘That’s so corny.’ She rolled her eyes.

‘Not if it’s true, baby.’ Now he kissed her cheek, and her neck. She sighed as his lips moved to her collarbone.

‘The English part is,’ she said, giggling as he tickled her belly.

‘Just take a compliment, would you?’ He kissed her on the lips, hard, undoing something in her. And as he kissed her arms, her fingers, her feet, back up to her neck, along her jaw, she felt the work of the day leaving her.

Kate had travelled a long way to be here, with Ben. Some days she felt it more than others. Some days her body ached with the effort of living in this strange country that was so far from what she knew that at first she had almost thought she’d moved to another planet rather than