Susannah stood by the fireplace a moment, the bland oil paintings replaced with splashy modern art on canvases that broke up the clean white lines of the walls as she’d redone them. The days and nights they’d worked in here, her one great frustration had been that Jimmy was reluctant to modernize. Now she had the freedom to do just that, but still the obstacles came on every side.
The office also had the benefit of a crystal decanter filled with a fine single malt, not to mention the overstuffed sofa by the huge windows, where her next stack of paperwork was crying out for attention.
“Here’s to you, my old man,” Susannah said after pouring a generous measure into a heavy-bottomed glass. No ice, no splash of soda. Just the unadulterated peaty taste of a twenty-year-old whisky that she’d taken a shine to. “I rather think if I’m going to piss off your sister, I’m going to go all the way with it. It’s time I stopped hiding behind the details of keeping this place afloat and tried the full-steam-ahead approach.”
The views out over the stunning, peaceful gardens were a balm every time she looked at them. They were all in the order of manicured lawns and geometric hedges.
Her parents had never made it to Midsummer to spoil the idyll with their entitled, drunken behaviour and pointed homophobic remarks. They’d passed in a boating accident just a few weeks before Jimmy made his proposal-cum-business-arrangement, and the prospect of a fresh start had helped Susannah through her very complicated grief. Yes, this was the place to take refuge. And the place to revive her old, ignored plans.
The first note on the pile was a reminder of her earlier appointment at the vet’s. Susannah sipped her drink and snorted at the sad little sticky note. She was about to scrunch it up and toss it into the wastepaper basket, but her hand stilled before letting it fly.
Were they really so bad? Enthusiastic in the wrong ways, perhaps, but Susannah already knew how the stables would run, as a planned sanctuary for former racing and workhorses. She had the money to throw at it, but the real costs would be the veterinary care for those poor animals who’d lived a life of exertion and stress. The estate had always kept horses, but just for family riding or the odd local hunt, back in the dark days when those had still been legal.
Was it so terrible to take a chance on the plucky local vets? And even if that Tess woman was new in town today, she was almost certainly from around the area. Susannah had grown up far enough away to notice the difference. What was her story? She was not that young, close to Susannah’s own forty-two years at a glance, so there must have been a life somewhere up until this point.
It was just another headache in a day full of them. The crunching of tyres on gravel signalled that Robin and Jonathan had finally gone, with their lawsuits and threats.
Susannah wished she had more people around to talk to—one of those rambling families with an aunt or a cousin just down the road. She was in the wrong part of the country for that now, even if her family could have provided the numbers. She took her phone out and skimmed the contact list. Friends left behind in Leeds, Manchester, that brief spell in London. Then the “couple friends” she’d gone out with, most often business associates of Jimmy’s, who had been all right in a small-talk kind of way. No one who would appreciate a mid-afternoon rant about the difficulties of running a country estate.
Before long, she was lost in the stack of invoices and letters offering services she neither needed nor fully understood. Just another sign to push forward with her own way of doing things. If her thoughts occasionally turned to the feisty vet in a pale green sweater that hadn’t hidden a single curve, well, that was just the novelty of something new disrupting sleepy countryside life.
Susannah sipped at her drink and started signing papers with a sigh.
Chapter 3
Tess was on her hands and knees on the spotless linoleum of the smallest examination room, the one that would technically be her office from now on. The dark green material of her scrubs felt familiar, like maybe her life hadn’t actually changed beyond all recognition. Meanwhile, there was a six-month-old tabby kitten wedging himself under the medication locker in the corner, and his owner was already panicking that he’d escaped the table.
“Does this often, does he?” Tess asked.
“He gets into everything,” the kitten’s owner groaned, trying to juggle the bags she was carrying and a toddler who thought hide and seek with kitty was the funniest thing he had ever seen.
Tess suspected that Mr Giggles up in his mother’s arm was probably what kitty was hiding from, far more than the vet. “Come on, little fella,” Tess encouraged, wedging her hand under the cabinet and scraping her knuckles through her latex glove in the process. It was worth it when she got hold of the loose skin at the back of his neck.
In a protesting jumble of fur and skinny legs, the tabby rejoined them in the world.
Tess snuck a peek at his back end while transferring him back to the metal table to examine him. “Vaccinations today, yes? But he’s getting quite mature. You’ll need to book
