KAT FRENCH
The Stained Glass Heart Part of the Love…Maybe Eshort Collection: The Enchanting One
Avon
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015
Copyright © Kat French 2015
Kat French asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780008136277
Version: 2015–01–23
Table of Contents
For my lovely mum and fellow book lover,with lots of love xx
‘No way. It’s this house or me, Helen. I’m not even joking.’
Ian looked around the old house in disgust, his eyes lingering on the old-fashioned wiring, the yesteryear decor, the dusty light fittings. Helen watched him, taking in the brow that furrowed too often, the eyes that mocked more than they loved, and the spiteful curl of his lip, which now she came to really look at it, was a little on the thin side. Ian had mean features. They really ought to have served as more of an early warning system.
How could he not look at this place and see potential in its high ceilings, its deep skirting boards, and that grand sweeping staircase in the centre of the chequer-board tiled hall? How could he not yearn to paint the peeling walls, wax the unloved boards, flood the place with light and warmth from those huge picture windows?
Ian turned his irritated blue eyes to her, and she met his gaze head on.
‘I choose the house, Ian. And I’m not even joking.’
*
The moment she said the words, a weight drifted off Helen’s shoulders. She felt it go, floating up through the three floors of the house and out through the long unused chimney in the small attic bedroom. Well goodbye, and good riddance. She’d buy this house alone, thank you very much.
Helen didn’t know it at the time, but she wasn’t the first woman to be relieved of a lover by number seventeen Delaney Street. There hadn’t been a man living successfully under that roof in the last hundred and thirty-eight years.
As she left, she stroked a hand over the doorframe, admiring the way the sun caught the old stained glass inlaid above the entrance. Squinting at it, she tried to make out what lay beneath the dust … words of some kind, maybe? Cleaning that would be one of the first things she’d do. She’d love to see what lay beneath the dirt.
*
The sale went through like a dream, and with almost indecent haste the house belonged to Helen. Her friends and family thought she’d lost her mind buying the big old house on Delaney Street alone, but she held firm. Never in her life had she been so sure of anything.
‘I still think you were a little hasty, Xanthe,’ Alice said, sprinkling diamond heart’s-ease dust along the cracks in the bedroom floorboards from Xanthe’s tiny, old glass vial. ‘He might have actually loved her, given time.’
Xanthe perched on Helen’s new bed that had been delivered to seventeen Delaney Street earlier that day and shrugged her delicate shoulders, thoroughly unrepentant. Her floor-sweeping, simple empire line black dress rippled as she moved.
‘Poppycock. He was no Clark Gable,’ she said.
Alice got on her knees and blew the pale, glittery dust into the cracks, her pencil-skirted backside balanced over her stiletto heels.
‘Clark Gable,’ she muttered, loading her tone purposefully with sarcasm. ‘You might be a witch, Xanthe, but you’re so out of touch.’
‘Well, excuse me for dying eighty-three years ago,’ Xanthe said archly. ‘They just don’t make men like they did in my day.’
Alice swivelled around. ‘Yes they do, and I was having a good time with several of them until you sodding killed me.’
The air around Xanthe turned yellow with mirth. ‘It was your own fault. If you hadn’t insisted on bringing home a different man every week I’d have let you live to a ripe old age. It was wearing me out having to get rid of them all.’
‘Have