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

Winnie hauled herself up and then stretched out her hands to pull the others up.

‘Come on. Let’s all go in together for the first time.’

Stella brushed sand from the bum of her shorts. ‘I’m not carrying either of you over the threshold.’

‘Too right,’ Winnie snorted. ‘I tried that once with Rory and I think it jinxed us from the beginning.’

‘Gavin tried it too. I was seven months pregnant at the time and he put his back out for the first month of our marriage.’

‘You two are enough to put a girl off marriage for life.’ Stella took the keys from Winnie and studied the bewilderingly large collection. ‘Any idea which one it is?’

Winnie shook her head. ‘Not a clue.’ Studying the door, she added, ‘Probably something big and old.’

‘They’re all big and old,’ Stella muttered, sliding one after the other into the lock and giving it a hopeful jiggle. Finally, the last but one key slid into place more easily than the others, and it turned with a satisfying clunk. ‘Looks like we’re in, ladies,’ Stella said, turning the doorknob and pushing the door open.

Even though they knew what lay on the other side of the door, it felt completely different stepping inside Villa Valentina knowing it was their new home instead of their temporary reprieve from the daily grind. Frankie closed the door and they all stood in the centre of the high-ceilinged space, gazing around in silence.

‘Is it a bit eerie?’ Stella said, screwing her nose up at the stale air.

‘Don’t say that!’ Winnie said, frowning. ‘It’s just empty. It’s been waiting for us to arrive.’

‘Don’t go all hippy on us, Win,’ Frankie said, laying her hat down on the reception desk. ‘Let’s get some windows open and air the place through. It’s like a bloody oven in here.’

Frankie’s calm, practical approach got them all moving, flinging open windows and doors, then dragging their luggage inside. Winnie spotted an old radio behind reception and switched it on, instantly transported back to their first stay on the island by the familiar Radio Skelidos jingle. The mix of Greek and international pop music added life and movement to the place, wiping away the stillness that had spooked Stella.

‘I found the kitchen!’ Frankie called, and the others followed her voice down the hallway to the back of the building. Ajax had given them a brief guided tour, but it was a big old place and it was going to take some getting used to before any of them knew it like the back of their hands. Stella and Winnie found Frankie unscrewing a fresh two-litre bottle of water, and she’d magicked up three tall glasses and filled them with ice.

‘Ajax left the electricity turned on and a few things in the fridge for us,’ she said. ‘We have ice, we have water and we have wine. What more could a girl want?’

Winnie’s tummy rumbled. ‘Food?’

Frankie shook her head. ‘We need to go shopping.’

‘I don’t think I can face the walk,’ Stella grumbled, gulping down water. ‘The last one nearly killed me. Can I ride the donkey?’

‘Who do you think you are, the Virgin Mary?’ Frankie grinned, adding slices of lemon to their glasses as Winnie jumped off her stool and crossed to open the wooden shutters covering the windows.

‘We need to check on The Fonz,’ she said, craning her neck to look in the garden. ‘God, it’s a bit of a mess out there. I can’t see him.’ She rattled the back door and found it locked.

‘The key’s there,’ Stella nodded towards a hook on the wall and watched as Winnie grappled with the old lock and then threw the bolts. ‘Watch out for snakes in the long grass,’ she said at the last minute.

Winnie turned back, startled. ‘Really?’

Stella shrugged then shook her head. ‘Pulling your leg.’

Winnie rolled her eyes and stepped gingerly out onto the cracked, crazy-paved patio.

‘Donkey,’ she called, in an inviting, sing song voice. ‘Mr Fonz …’ She moved to check down the side of the building, and then ventured further across the parched grass. The garden looked to stretch back quite a way and be walled around the edge by a low, pale, rough stone wall. ‘I think we’ve got fruit trees out here,’ she called back. ‘But I can’t see any sign of a donkey.’

Perplexed, she picked her way along a path haphazardly tiled into the grass, making her way down the length of the garden to the wall at the bottom. Along the way she passed bright wildflowers that would be great on the tables out front and several different types of fruit tree, but no donkey in sight. God, what if he’d keeled over somewhere? She cautiously scanned the ground beneath the trees and bushes but to no avail. It was perplexing really, because there was no obvious exit for a donkey, and the waist-high wall seemed much too big for The Fonz to scale. Wandering back towards the villa, she made a makeshift apron from the bottom of her T-shirt, filled it with fruit plucked from the trees and pondered the missing animal.

‘Plums, I think,’ she said, giving up the search and unloading her haul onto the big, scrubbed kitchen table where the other girls were sitting. ‘And cherries.’

Frankie picked up one of the plump apple-green plums and sniffed it. ‘Greengages,’ she said, then bit it. ‘Oh my God!’ She rolled her eyes in bliss. ‘So sweet.’

The others helped themselves, and for a few moments they all sat around the table eating fruit from their garden and feeling the welcome rush of sugar in their veins.

‘I feel like Barbara from The Good Life,’ Stella said. ‘Have we got any chickens I can kill?’

Frankie loaded the rest of the fruit into a wide, shallow ceramic bowl on the table. ‘You wouldn’t be Barbara. You’d be the what’s her name, the neighbour. The posh one.’

Stella considered it for a second, and then laughed. ‘You’re right. Winnie can be Barbara and kill the chickens, you can be Nigella and roast it, and I’ll be the snooty one in the kaftan who drinks G&T.’

Frankie held her hand up and high-fived Stella silently.

‘I think I could get into gardening,’ Winnie said, warming to the role of Barbara. ‘And I have some cut-off dungarees. I can pull it off.’

‘Barbara wouldn’t lose her donkey though,’ Frankie said, shaking her head.

They all jumped as someone knocked on the back door.

‘Maybe it’s the donkey,’ Stella whispered, making them all laugh as Winnie crossed the kitchen and pulled the door wide.

It wasn’t the donkey. It was a man, and by the looks of his scowl, an unimpressed one. He looked dressed for farming in breeches, braces and a loose cheesecloth shirt, and if he wasn’t scowling he’d probably be quite attractive.

‘Kalimera,’ Winnie said, hesitantly trying out her rudimentary Greek.

He let forth a torrent of fast, unintelligible Greek. When he’d finished, she frowned and shook her head regretfully.

‘Err … signomi … my Greek is awful.’

He stared at her in irate silence.

‘Signomi …’

Winnie glanced over her shoulder for help from the others, but found them both wide-eyed and tongue-tied by the arrival of the stranger in their midst.

‘Help me out here?’ she muttered.

‘Feliz navidad?’ Stella tried from her seat at the table, and the stranger lifted his eyebrows and sighed heavily.

‘You just wished me Merry Christmas in Spanish. It’s early May, and this is Greece.’

‘You speak English,’ Winnie said, thinking that he might have made that clear right away rather than let her struggle for his own amusement.

‘Better than you speak Greek, evidently,’ he said. ‘I take it you’re the new owners?’

Frankie came to stand beside Winnie. ‘We are. I’m Frankie, and this is Winnie. And you are …?’ Winnie admired her friend’s polite, cool tone.

‘I’m the guy who rescued your bloody donkey. Poor darn thing would have died in this heat without any water.’ There was an unmissable hint of an Australian twang to his pronunciation. ‘He’s in my olive grove with Chachi when you can be arsed to fetch him.’

Oh, right. Winnie felt her fists ball until her fingernails dug into her palms. ‘Look, Mr … I don’t know your name because you didn’t bother to tell us … we only arrived half an hour ago and I’ve already been out to look for the donkey. It isn’t our fault that Ajax didn’t make proper arrangements for him.’

The guy looked bored. ‘Typical women. Blame someone else and it’ll all be all right.’

Winnie drew in a sharp breath. She’d had enough of men pissing her off back home, there was no way some stranger was going to rain on her parade on the first morning of their brand-new life.

‘Typical man, shooting your mouth off without knowing the facts.’ She stuck her chin out at him and crossed her arms across her chest as Stella came to stand on her other side.

He looked at all three of them for a second, and then seemed to lose interest and turned to leave.

‘I won’t charge you for the olives he’s eaten. Consider it a neighbourly welcome-to-the-island gift.’

He didn’t even turn around as he spoke, and Stella said ‘Rude bastard,’ more than loud enough for him to hear as she closed the door with a pointed slam.

‘He’s our new neighbour?’ Frankie said, pulling three wine glasses out of the wall cupboard.

‘Sounds that way.’ Winnie reached to get the chilled bottle of white out of the fridge.

Stella rooted around in the cutlery drawer until she pulled out a corkscrew and waved it in the air in triumph. Flopping back at the kitchen table, she cracked the wine and filled their glasses. After a pause for them all to take a much-needed first sip, she held her glass out between them in a toast.

‘To our first day on Skelidos.’

‘And the fact that our donkey isn’t dead,’ Frankie said, touching her glass to the others.

‘And the fact that we have a grotty ass of an Australian neighbour,’ Winnie added. ‘Bloody man and his generalisations.’

Stella eyed Winnie slyly over her wine glass. ‘He was quite hot though. In a grotty-ass kind of way.’

‘Was he?’ Winnie took a good gulp of wine. ‘I didn’t notice.’

‘You so did,’ Frankie laughed. ‘All that red-faced, stuttery Greek and Lady Diana eye flutters.’

Winnie rolled her eyes. ‘All right, so maybe I thought he was OK until he opened his mouth. Now I just think he’s an arrogant gobshite who’s kidnapped my donkey.’ She shot a look at Stella. ‘At least I didn’t wish him Merry Christmas. In Spanish.’

Stella shrugged. ‘Pity I didn’t know how to say piss off instead.’

‘I’m going to learn before I go and get The Fonz back.’

Frankie started to laugh. ‘His donkey’s name is Chachi. Fonzy and Chachi?’

‘Someone around here was clearly a Happy Days fan.’ Stella grinned. ‘I wonder where Joanie is?’

Winnie reached for the bottle and topped up their glasses. ‘She probably upped and left because she couldn’t stand living with a misogynistic pig.’

Stella and Frankie both looked at her levelly across the table. They didn’t say as much, but Winnie knew from their eyes that they were hoping that she wasn’t going to stay angry for ever.

‘Shall we go and burn our bras in his olive orchard?’ Stella said.

Frankie nodded. ‘Or chain ourselves to his trees until he apologises?’

Winnie shook her head, laughing softly into her wine glass. She might not have much time for men at the moment, but these two crazy, fabulous women restored her faith in the world every damn day.

Pushing her chair back with a satisfying scrape against the stone flags, she stood up and rolled her shoulders.

‘Hold my coat, girls. I’m going to get our donkey.’

CHAPTER THREE

Winnie marched out of the villa, buoyed up by a mixture of wine, lingering first-day euphoria and indignation. What happened to welcoming new neighbours with a cup of sugar and a smile? What happened to the famed Greek hospitality? But then he wasn’t Greek by the sound of it, and there probably wasn’t any sugar in his cupboards either; he didn’t strike Winnie as a man with an ounce of sweetness about him. From their first meeting she’d already deduced that he had no manners and even less in the way of small talk. His only redeemable feature seemed to be the fact that he was passably attractive, and if she was pushed, she’d acknowledge that he must have a shred of decency because he’d taken The Fonz in when he wasn’t obliged to.

Meandering through the tables out front on the beach-bar terrace, she paused to get her bearings. Where did he live anyway? Right led directly down onto the beach, so she struck out left and followed the sandy path around the villa and into the fields behind. Gosh, it was hot. Winnie made her way along the track, wishing she’d thought to slather on extra sun cream; she could almost feel her skin frying. She was one of those people with a pale and interesting complexion; achieving anything close to a sun-kissed glow required diligent application of factor 30 and short, careful interludes of exposure to the sun. Anything more intensive was likely to turn her into a walking, talking beetroot, and that really wasn’t the look she wanted to achieve before sundown on day one. Nothing marks you out as a tourist quite like a classic dose of sunburn, does it?

Lifting her sunglasses, she paused beneath the shade of an olive tree and looked first one way and then the other. Back home, her house had been a semi-detached in a suburban cul-de-sac, and her closest neighbour had probably been sitting three feet away on the other side of the party wall. Out here her nearest neighbour wasn’t even in sight, which, given the fact that he was so rude, was probably just as well.

Movement flickered in her peripheral vision, and she squinted between the trees. Bingo. Not just one donkey. Two.

‘At bloody last,’ Winnie muttered, shaking her leg to flick the irritating grit out of her flip-flop. A low stone wall ran around the perimeter of his olive grove, so she swung herself over it and started picking her way through the gnarled trees towards The Fonz. As she drew nearer, neither of the animals took the remotest bit of notice of her.

‘Hello, Fonzy,’ she said, in the quiet, polite manner with which she might greet an elderly relative. Nothing. Not so much as the flicker of an ear from either of them.

‘Chachi?’ she said, more uncertain this time as she moved within a few feet of the donkeys. One of them was pure white and considerably bigger than the other, and he lifted his head and gazed briefly in her direction before returning peacefully to grazing.

‘OK,’ she said under her breath, walking closer to the smaller, grey donkey. ‘If he’s Chachi, then I guess that must make you The Fonz.’ She reached out a tentative hand and stroked him between the ears. ‘I’m Winnie, your new owner, and I’ve come to take you home.’

He really did seem very indifferent to her. As a non-rider, she’d vaguely imagined that he’d have a saddle on, or a harness at least, something that she’d be able to lead him by, but he didn’t. He was, for all intents and purposes, naked.

‘How are we going to do this then?’ she asked, walking around him slowly. Running an experimental hand over his flank, she tried giving him a little two-handed push from behind but he didn’t even seem to register it. She tried a second time, this time with a little more effort, and he swished his tail as if a fly might have landed on his backside.

‘Bloody hell, Fonzy,’ she grumbled. ‘You need to go on a diet, buddy. You weigh a bloody ton.’

‘Why are you fondling my donkey?’

Winnie didn’t need to turn around to know who was behind her.

She was quite glad that it wasn’t The Fonz after all. ‘Might have known this one was yours,’ she said to the neighbour. ‘He seems as stubborn and unwelcoming as his owner.’ She moved across to stand behind the larger, white donkey. He really was big, practically a pony, really.

Winnie wiped her sweaty palms on the back of her denim skirt and patted the white donkey on the rump in a way she hoped was friendly enough before attempting the two-handed push on him too. It was hopeless. After a couple of increasingly effortful attempts, she swung around with her hands balled on her hips, first dashing away several beads of sweat running from her hairline into her eyes.

‘Would it kill you to help me out here?’

He looked at her levelly with his arms folded across his chest. ‘You look like a prawn that’s been chucked on the barbie.’

Winnie shook her head and huffed. ‘Could you be any more stereotypically Australian?’

‘I could call you Sheila. Could you be any more passive-aggressively English?’

Yanking her sunglasses off, she stared at him. ‘Trust me, Mr … Mr I don’t know your name because you couldn’t be bothered to introduce yourself, there’s nothing passive about my aggression right now; I’m just about ready to beat you to a pulp with my bare hands.’

He didn’t look even the smallest bit threatened. ‘I’m not surprised the donkey doesn’t want to go with you. You give off a negative vibe. You clearly have anger-management issues.’

‘Anger-management issues?’ she half yelled. ‘I didn’t until I met you, you condescending asshat!’

‘In some countries this passes as foreplay,’ he said, and for the first time Winnie caught the faintest trace of humour behind his tone. ‘My name’s Jesse, seeing as you asked so nicely. Although I quite like “condescending asshat”, so you can stick with that if you prefer. I’m easy.’

‘Jesse as in the outlaw,’ she muttered. ‘Or donkey rustler.’

‘He was also a bank robbber, a gang leader and a murderer.’ He said it tonelessly, leaving Winnie to draw her own conclusions as to whether she was supposed to feel menaced. She didn’t.

‘Nice namesake.’

‘I was named after my father, seeing as you mention it. Wonderful guy, and surprisingly, he’s never robbed a bank in his life.’

Great. Now she felt shitty for insulting his dad. How did that happen?

‘So, Jesse,’ she said, thinking actually he looked like a Jesse, now she’d said it aloud. Jesse suggested bad boys and motorbikes and leather jackets, scowls, cigarettes and bad manners. Not that she’d seen him smoke, but she wouldn’t be surprised if he pulled a box out and lit up. ‘Would you mind telling me how to make my donkey move, please?’

He scrubbed a hand over the dark stubble along his jaw and gave a non-committal ‘huh’. ‘Now there’s a question.’

Here we go again. ‘And does it have an answer?’ she asked, sweet as apple pie.

Jesse shrugged. ‘Not an obvious one, no.’

Winnie could feel the threads of her temper unravelling. ‘So give me the complicated one. It would appear that I have time to listen.’

‘Would you like a drink?’

Whoa. That volte-face was so violent it’d be a miracle if he didn’t give himself whiplash. In truth, Winnie was gasping for a drink; she hadn’t thought to bring any water with her as she’d expected her neighbour to be closer than he was, and the sun overhead was making her feel every inch the barbecued prawn he’d likened her to. Nonetheless, she still considered saying no, because there was every chance he was being sarcastic.

‘I don’t suppose it’d go amiss,’ she said, feigning indifference.

His full mouth turned down as he shrugged. ‘It was just a neighbourly offer. Don’t force yourself.’

Winnie sighed and gave in. ‘Some water would be very nice if you wouldn’t mind.’

He inclined his head, then turned away and started to stride through the trees. ‘This way.’

Was it OK to follow a stranger into his house in a foreign land? It’d seem terribly rude if she didn’t now she’d accepted.

He stopped walking and swung around. ‘Are you coming or not?’

‘You’re not going to kill me, are you?’

‘Fucking hell, woman. I think I might if you carry on like this.’ He rubbed his hand through his dark, slightly too long hair, clearly exasperated. ‘I’ve lived on Skelidos for the last ten years without murdering anyone and I don’t plan on that changing today, but if you’d rather stay out here just in case while I fetch you a glass of water, then be my guest.’

They’d reached a low-slung farmhouse, and he gestured towards a table and chairs set out under the shade of a veranda.

Winnie considered her choices and decided that on balance he was unlikely to bump her off; he knew that she wasn’t here alone and, technically, she’d been trespassing on his land and inadvertently tried to steal his donkey so she wasn’t really in a position to be judgmental. He led the way through a stable door directly into his kitchen. Winnie wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting; something rustic and manly, if she’d been pinned down to take a guess. It wasn’t rustic. It was sleek and minimalist, a complete contrast to the traditional stone exterior of the building. Cool and uncluttered, his air-con was blessedly fridge-cold and his drinking water, when he passed it over, was as cool and clear as if he’d just dipped the glass in an icy mountain spring.

‘Thank you,’ she said, taking a seat when he pulled out a chair at the glass dining table.

‘It’s safe. I’m fresh out of arsenic,’ he said, dropping into the seat opposite hers.

Winnie smirked and took a welcome drink as he watched her.

‘So what’s going on over at the B&B?’ he asked. ‘Are you three doing a Thelma and Louise?’

God, he was annoying. ‘Meaning?’

He lifted one shoulder. ‘Bitter women running off together for an ill-advised adventure?’

‘Way I remember it, Thelma and Louise were badasses who murdered a man because he behaved like a cock and then killed themselves.’

Jesse cupped his glass between his hands on the table. ‘This could be an interesting summer for all of us then.’

‘And we’re not bitter,’ Winnie added, correcting him belatedly. ‘We’re three modern, perfectly happy women who spotted a shrewd business investment and snapped it up.’

Jesse nodded, then lifted his glass and downed the entire contents. Something about the action disturbed Winnie; for a few brief seconds she found herself noticing the physicality of him, as if she were watching a movie. He could pass for Greek; the sun had burnished his skin that deep bronze that could never be attained on a package holiday, and if his hair wasn’t black, it was as near as damn it. He’d changed from the billowy shirt into a faded red T-shirt that had either shrunk in the wash or been given to him by a lover who enjoyed the way it fit him a little too well; either way Winnie couldn’t help but be aware of his long, lean biceps and the generous width of his shoulders. All that fresh air and olive farming clearly agreed with him.

‘Speaking of badasses,’ she said, because getting her mind off the fact that he looked hot was a good idea. ‘How do I get that bad ass out there to walk back to the B&B with me?’

Jesse shook his head. ‘There’s no way you’re going to win him over in five minutes, or five hours even. Five days, possibly, or five weeks, I’d say it’s almost a definite. He has to trust you. To like you, even, before he’s going anywhere with you.’ He paused. ‘Hard work. Bit like a woman, really.’

Winnie curled her lip at him. ‘You just don’t stop, do you?’

He lifted his hands palms up. ‘Just sayin’.’

‘I don’t know about us being bitter women,’ Winnie said. ‘It sounds to me as if you’re the one with the chip on your shoulder.’

He laughed and rubbed the heel of his palm into his eye socket. ‘On the contrary. I love women. You all just drive me fucking crazy with your complications and contradictions.’

‘That is so incredibly rude and ignorant,’ Winnie said, bridling. ‘So what, you hide out on your farm drinking beers with your donkey?’

‘I’m not a monk. I fuck sometimes. I even make breakfast afterwards. I’m one of the good guys; I don’t promise the moon on a string, because strings strangle relationships.’ He made a yanking gesture that clearly indicated a noose being tightened around his neck.

Winnie stared at him. ‘Well, say it like it is, why don’t you?’ she said, taken aback by his frankness.