‘You mustn’t.’ She glanced out of the window and wondered how it was that she was still here, still in the family home, when this was supposed to have been a temporary retreat, somewhere to lick her wounds before carrying on with her life. That had been three years ago. Since then, in a fit of lethargy, she had accepted the job offer at the local vet’s and persuaded her parents to put all plans to sell the cottage on hold. Just for a little while. Just until she got her act together. She would pay them a monthly rent and, once she’d got herself on a career ladder, she would leave the Cotswolds and head down to London.
And now here she was, with unemployment staring her in the face and a house that would have to be sold sooner rather than later because, with each day that passed, it became just a little more run down. How long before the small leak in the roof expanded into a full scale, no-holds-barred deluge? Did she really want to wake up in the middle of the night with her bed floating?
So far, she hadn’t mentioned the problems with the house to her parents, who had left for France five years previously, shortly having been joined by Alice and her husband. She knew that if she did the entire family would up sticks and arrive on her doorstep with tea, sympathy and rescue plans afoot.
She didn’t need rescuing.
She was an excellent vet. She would have a brilliant recommendation from Norman, the elderly family man who owned the practice and was now selling to emigrate to the other side of the world. She would be able to find work somewhere else without any problem at all.
And besides, twenty-seven-year-old women did not need rescuing. Least of all by their younger sibling and two frantically worried parents.
‘Shouldn’t I be the one worrying about you?’
‘Because you’re three years older?’
Becky heard that wonderful, tinkling laugh and pictured her beautiful, charming sister sitting in their glamorous French gîte with her legs tucked under her and her long, blonde hair tumbling over one shoulder.
Freddy would be doing something useful in the kitchen. Despite the fact that he, like her, was a hard-working vet, he enjoyed nothing more than getting back from the practice in which he was a partner, kicking off his shoes and relaxing with Alice in the kitchen, where he would usually be the one concocting the meals, because he was an excellent cook.
And he adored Alice. He had been swept off his feet from the very first second he had been introduced to her. At the time, she had been a high-flying model on the way to greatness and, whilst Becky would never have believed that Freddy—earnest and usually knee-deep in text books—could ever be attracted to her sister—who was cheerfully proud of her lack of academic success and hadn’t read a book cover to cover in years—she had been proved wrong.
They were the most happily married couple anyone could have hoped to find.
‘I’ll be fine.’ Becky decided to put off all awkward conversations about job losses and collapsing roofs for another day. ‘I won’t venture out in the middle of a snowstorm in my pyjamas, and if anyone out there is stupid enough to brave this weather on the lookout for what they can nick then they won’t be heading for Lavender Cottage.’ She eyed the tired décor in the kitchen and couldn’t help grinning. ‘Everyone in the village knows that I keep all my valuables in a bank vault.’
Old clothes, mud-stained wellies, tool kit for the hundreds of things that kept going wrong in the house, enviable selection of winter-woolly hats...just the sort of stuff any robber worth his salt would want to steal.
‘I just thought, Becks, that you might venture out here and have a little fun for a while before summer comes and all those ghastly crowds. I know you came over for Christmas, but it was all so busy out here, what with Mum and Dad inviting every single friend over for drinks every single evening. I... I feel like I haven’t seen you for absolutely ages! I mean, just the two of us, the way it used to be when we were younger and...well... Freddy and I...’
‘I’m incredibly busy just at the moment, Ali. You know how it is around this time of year with the lambing season nearly on us, pregnant sheep in distress everywhere you look... But I’ll come out as soon as I can. I promise.’
She didn’t want to talk about Freddy, the guy she had met at university, the guy she had fallen head over heels in love with, had he only known, the guy who had turned her into a good friend, who had met Alice, been smitten in the space of seconds and proposed in record time.
The guy who had broken her heart.
‘Darling, Freddy and I have something to tell you and we would much rather tell you face to face...’
‘What? What is it?’ Filled with sudden consternation, Becky sat up, mind crash-banging into worst case scenarios.
‘We’re going to have a baby! Isn’t it exciting?’
* * *
Yes, it was. Exciting, thrilling and something her sister had been talking about from the moment she had said I do and glided up the aisle with a band of gold on her finger.
Becky was thrilled for her. She really was. But, as she settled down for one of the rare Saturday nights when she wasn’t going to be on call, she suddenly felt the weight of the choices she had made over the years bearing down on her.
Where were the clubs she should be enjoying? Where was the breathless falling in and out of love? The men in pursuit? The thrilling text messages? When Freddy had hitched his wagon to her sister, Becky had turned her back on love. Unlike Alice, she had spent her teens with her head in books. She’d always known what she’d wanted to be and her parents had encouraged her in her studies. Both were teachers, her father a lecturer, her mother a maths teacher at the local secondary school. She had always been the good girl who worked hard. Beautiful, leggy Alice had decided from an early age that academics were not for her and of course her parents—liberal, left wing and proud of their political correctness—had not batted an eyelid.
And so, while Becky had studied, Alice had partied.
‘Everyone should be free to express themselves without being boxed into trying to live up or live down to other people’s expectations!’ had been her mother’s motto.
At the age of eighteen, Becky had surfaced, startled and blinking, to university life with all its glorious freedom and had realised that a life of study had not prepared her for late-night drinking, skipping lectures and sleeping around.
She had not been conditioned to enjoy the freedom at her disposal, and had almost immediately developed a crush on Freddy, who had been in her year, studying veterinary science like her.
He, too, had spent his adolescence working hard. He, too, had had his head buried in text books between the ages of twelve and eighteen. He had been her soul mate and she had enjoyed his company, but had been far too shy to take it to another level, and had been prepared to bide her time until the inevitable happened.
Only ever having watched her sister from the sidelines, laughing and amused at the way Alice fell in and out of love, she had lacked the confidence to make the first move.
And in the end, thank goodness, because, had she done so, then she would have been roundly rejected. The boy she had considered her soul mate, the boy she had fancied herself spending her life with, had not been interested in her as anything but a pal. She had thought him perfect for her. Steady, hard-working, considerate, feet planted firmly on the ground...
He, on the other hand, had not been looking for a woman who shared those qualities.
He had wanted frothy and vivacious. He had wanted someone who shoved his books aside and sat on his lap. He had wanted tall and blonde and beautiful, not small, dark-haired and plump. He hadn’t wanted earnest.
As the dark night began to shed its first flurries of snow, Becky wondered whether retreating