Being Shirley by Michelle Vernal Read Free Book Online

the next morning when I woke up with a stonking headache. So now you know why I am never drinking again. It’s gotten late here, Kas, and I have work in the morning, so it’s time I went off to bed. Na-night.
     
    Lots of love and kisses to you and all the Bikakis family
     
    Annie
     
    xox
     
    She clicked Send and waited a moment before going through the motions of closing down her laptop. Her hand stretched over to switch the lamp off on the desktop but hovered there for a moment as her eyes alighted on the photo framed beneath it. In front of their boutique Cretan hotel, Eleni’s stood, its namesake the short, rotund Mama Bikakis. She had insisted on wearing widow black since her husband dropped dead some ten years earlier. With her cheeks puffed out proudly, she was flanked on either side by her handsome sons. On her left was Kas’s husband Spiros and on her right his younger brother Alexandros. The latter was a somewhat clichéd, tall, dark, and handsome with straight white teeth set against the deep olive of his skin. Hence his rip snorting success with the female tourists who came to stay at their family-run accommodation. Spiros was slightly shorter than his brother and although his hooded black eyes gave him a serious look, the smile that twitched at the corners of his mouth belied his good humour. At his side was Kassia.
    Annie smiled involuntarily as she always did when she saw her dear friend. Her two sons had rounded her figure out in the last few years but her face was still that of the girl she had first started writing to nearly twenty years ago. Thick, long black hair she insisted on getting her hairdresser to curl framed a strong face. Almond-shaped brown eyes behind which a wicked sense of humour to match that of her husband’s lurked to soften her features. She wasn’t pretty as such but she was arresting in her own unique way and her looks would stand the test of time far better than mere prettiness would.
    Nikolos, the baby, was perched on his mother’s hip and Mateo stood in front of his parents, who each had a restraining hand resting on his little shoulder. Both boys had an unruly shock of black hair and an impish grin to match their Bambi eyes. They looked every inch as cheeky as the tales their mother relayed in her letters.
    Annie sighed and blew the family a kiss before she flicked the light off. She’d dearly love to give those two little boys a hug from their honorary New Zealand aunty but a visit to Greece wasn’t on the cards. Not with saving for a house, and the never-ending bills that went hand in hand with the cost of living. Who knew? There might be a wedding to organise too, one day, one day very soon if she had her way.
    “We’ll get there, Jazz,” Annie murmured and scratched behind the old tomcat’s ear. He’d curled up on her lap as she typed her email. At the sound of his beloved’s voice, he sighed contentedly, opened one beady yellow eye and fixed it on her. “Well, actually, you won’t but don’t fret. I’d never leave you for longer than a couple of weeks and Best Cats is rated a five-star in the world of catteries, so you’d be well looked after.”
    Jasper narrowed his eye, not liking the sound of the word cattery before he stretched and left one paw dangling lazily in midair. Annie looked down at his tattered gingery fur. He’d never win any cat beauty pageants, that was for sure, but he’d needed a home and she had needed the unconditional affection he provided.
    When he’d disappeared for three whole weeks after the second big earthquake they’d had back in February 2011, she had been beside herself. It was enough that the city she had grown up in had been destroyed in a fateful few minutes but people had actually died too. So, trying to make sense out of something that made no sense at all, she had pounded the pavements, night after night. She called Jasper’s name and pictured him quivering in a corner of some stranger’s garage or worse, crushed