Wish You Were Here by Victoria Connelly Read Free Book Online

been a very modest hotel break in the Lake District where she’d been rained on for an entire weekend, and a couple of nights in a youth hostel in Derbyshire where she’d had to share a room with a party of fifteen hyper schoolgirls. Not exactly the stuff of envy-inducing postcards. But here she was and it was a wonderfully sunny April day and the cold, grey days of the English winter that had seemed to drag on forever were now far behind her.
    She glanced around her room again and then decided to do a bit of exploring, gasping at the enormous bathroom with walk-through shower and roll-top bath and the window looking straight out to sea.
    Descending the staircase, Alice found an enormous modern kitchen with gleaming black worktops, a dining room with a table that sat twelve people and a living room filled with enormous white sofas. There were also doors out onto a terrace and Alice’s eyes widened in wonder when she saw the swimming pool beyond them. It was a traditional rectangular shape with a mosaic of pale tiles around it. There were sun loungers, an umbrella, a scarlet hammock and a barbeque – everything the holidaymaker could possibly want. There was even a large table and chairs under the shade of a pretty pergola over which clambered a magenta bougainvillea, its flowers dazzlingly bright against the blue sky above.
    Beyond the terrace was an olive grove before the land dipped down and headed steeply towards the sea, punctuated every now and then with the tall, dark spires of cypress trees. It was the stuff of fantasies and, for a moment, Alice felt guilty for being there. After all, Joe had booked this holiday and he must have paid an absolute fortune for it but Alice couldn’t help thinking that maybe he’d thought it was worth missing out on it to be shot of Stella.
    A huge bubble of excitement rose within her and, not wanting to waste a single moment, she decided that they should go straight down to Kethos Town and get something to eat, do a bit of shopping and stock up on supplies so they could cook at the villa.
    Walking back upstairs, she popped her head round Stella’s bedroom door. She was still on the bed and her eyes were closed.
    ‘Do you want to get something to eat?’ Alice whispered.
    ‘What?’ Stella croaked without opening her eyes.
    ‘I’m going to walk into town and get some food.’
    ‘Some
Greek
food?’
    ‘I imagine so.’
    ‘No thanks,’ Stella said. ‘I’ve brought some cereal bars with me.’
    Alice wrinkled her nose. Her sister had flown all this way to fall asleep and eat cereal bars.
    ‘Well, I’m going out, okay?’
    ‘Knock yourself out,’ Stella said before rolling over on the bed and burying her head further into her pillow.
    Alice returned to her bedroom and changed from the jeans she had been wearing on the plane and opened her suitcase to reveal the summery clothes she’d optimistically packed. There were T-shirts in cream and navy and – Alice’s hand hovered over a third –
grey
. She didn’t dare wear grey in Greece. Stella would kill her if she did and, for once in her life, Alice didn’t want to wear grey either. The brilliant colours of the island seemed to be whispering to her, persuading her to be a little more adventurous with her palette.
    Ditch the grey
, it seemed to say. Only she seemed to have an awful lot of it. Even one of her dresses had grey in it. It was only a background, mind, hiding behind the pretty pink roses but it was there all the same.
    ‘Best to avoid,’ she said to herself, her hands reaching under the layers of grey, white and navy and pulling out her one magnificent piece of colour. She caught her breath as she saw it because it was so un-Alice like. She remembered the day she’d bought it. She’d seen it on the sale rail of a shop she normally walked right by without even glancing at because it just wasn’t the sort of shop someone like Alice went into but it had beckoned her in, urging her to take it home with her and