Be Careful What You Wish For by Alexandra Potter Read Free Book Online Page A

flicks open the brass cover. ‘Well, that’s about it for today, everyone,’ he declares. ‘It’s twelve thirty on the nose. Time for a spot of lunch.’
    Lunch is back at the house. An imposing Regency building torn straight from the pages of a Jane Austen novel, it stands high on a hill in the centre of Bath, offering spectacular views of the town and surrounding villages. Built from honey-coloured stone, it boasts large sash windows that look out on to the walled garden filled with rosebushes, a gazebo and one of those vast lawns that have been mown into immaculate stripes. By anyone’s standards, it’s a truly beautiful house.
    I, however, hate it. It belongs to Rosemary and, like its owner, it’s cold and unwelcoming. Before she and Dad were married, he was living in our cosy cottage in Cornwall, with its uneven walls, tiny porthole windows and thatched roof. Now its used only for holidays and family get-togethers – Rosemary complained it was too small for her furniture.
    What she’d meant was that the house reminded her of my mother.
    Lionel bought it when Mum was first diagnosed. Hoping that the warmer climate and sea air might do her good, he sold our house in Yorkshire and moved the whole family hundreds of miles south to Port Isaac. Ed and I were still children, and had hated being uprooted, leaving our friends, Leeds United football team and Fred, our pet gerbil, whom we’d buried in the back garden. Our mother, however, fell in love with the place and her happiness was infectious, changing our minds but never her diagnosis. She had died less than three years later.
    ‘So, how long are you staying?’
    We’re all sitting round the kitchen table. There’s my dad, me and my stepmother, who’d greeted my appearance with the customary tight-lipped kiss on the cheek, then complained that they probably wouldn’t have enough food as she hadn’t been to the supermarket. ‘I wasn’t expecting guests.’ She’d smiled woodenly, barely keeping the accusation out of her voice.
    I turn to my father who’s cutting himself a large slice of Brie, his meaty hands gripping the cheese knife like a saw.
    ‘Just for the day,’ I say. ‘I’ve got to be back in London by tonight.’
    ‘Tonight?’ Disappointment clouds his face.
    ‘Oh, what a shame,’ coos Rosemary.
    She doesn’t fool me. I know she’s delighted.
    ‘Aha, I get it!’ His face springs back up again and Lionel pounds his fist on the table. ‘You’ve got a date with a young chap.’
    ‘Not exactly,’ I admit, plucking a few grapes from the bunch on the cheeseboard and popping them into my mouth one by one.
    ‘Not still mooning over that scoundrel, are you?’
    ‘His name’s Daniel,’ I remind him calmly. It’s only now, a year later, that I can even say his name without that awful breathless sensation, as if I’ve dived into the deep end of a swimming-pool and I’m trying to swim up to the surface. ‘And, no, that’s all in the past.’
    OK, so I sent him that text last week I remember shamefully, but I was drunk so it didn’t count.
    ‘When do we get to meet your new fella, then?’
    ‘Lionel,’ I gasp, suddenly feeling about thirteen again. Back then he would pick me up from the youth club and quiz me about boys as we walked back to our tiny slate-roofed cottage by the harbour. It was just after Mum had died, and suddenly he was taking me through puberty, first boyfriends, sex education. It had been a learning process for both of us.
    Lionel had never been a hands-on dad – when we were little my brother and I had learned quickly that he answered to Lionel rather than Daddy, although when he was in his studio, painting, he went for days without answering to anyone – so it had been something of an eye-opener for him to become a single parent. This was a man who’d never changed a nappy but was having to buy sanitary towels for his teenage daughter.
    Somehow we got through it. As he told me when, in tears, I’d barricaded