It's Raining Men
Milly Johnson is a
Sunday Times
top ten bestseller, poet, columnist, joke-writer, radio presenter-in-training and winner of
Come Dine With Me
.
She likes cruising on big ships, owls, Peller Icewine, shopping for handbags in Venice, Ikea meatballs, the sea and having her hair done. She hates marzipan, doing accounts and sandpaper. Her
novels are about the universal issues of friendship, family, betrayal, babies, rather nice food and a little bit of that magic in life that sometimes visits the unsuspecting.
It’s Raining Men
is her ninth book.
Find out more at
www.millyjohnson.com
or follow her on twitter @millyjohnson.
Also by Milly Johnson
The Yorkshire Pudding Club
The Birds & the Bees
A Spring Affair
A Summer Fling
Here Come the Girls
An Autumn Crush
White Wedding
A Winter Flame
First published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd 2013
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Millytheink Ltd., 2013
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Milly Johnson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Australia TPB ISBN: 978-1-47111-460-1
PB ISBN: 978-1-47111-461-8
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-47111-462-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
As this book has the fortune to be officially launched on Yorkshire Day, I just have to dedicate it to all the wonderful lovely kind friends I have in God’s Own County.
Too many to name, but I hope you know who are you (blows kiss).
Into each life some rain must fall.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Chapter 1
Lara Rickman took a large gulp of coffee and then swallowed hard and fast before she could spit it out. It was as cold as a tub of ice cream in a polar bear’s freezer.
How had it cooled so quickly? Surely her PA had only just brought it in for her and the first sip had been piping hot. She checked the clock in the corner of her monitor to find that, in fact, an
hour had gone by – sped by at warp speed, as the hours seemed to these days. And not just hours, but days and weeks and months. Had she really been seeing her darling James for three whole
months? Had it really been five months since she’d been up to Yorkshire to see her parents, arriving late Christmas Eve, driving back to London early Boxing Day morning on what could only be
described as a whistle-stop trip? Had it been nearly two months since she’d last spent proper face-to-face time with her work friends May and Clare? Even then it had been only for a rushed
sandwich in the staff restaurant when their three schedules made a rare crossover, like planets happening to align. They’d eaten so fast it was a wonder that the Benny Hill theme tune
hadn’t been playing in the background.
Even though they had all worked for the same company for years, Lara, May and Clare had not met before they gravitated towards each other at a conference a year and a half ago, after ending up
in the same discussion group. But then again, Cole and Craw Finance was a massive organization which employed over three thousand people and operated from four adjacent buildings in the City; still
in the process of being united into one. The three women were amazed to find that they were all from Yorkshire – Clare from York, May from Leeds and Lara from Barnsley – had all been
involved with setting up or trying to rescue businesses, and were all born within six months of each other. Enough common ground to kick-start a fledgling friendship between them. They arranged to
meet for lunch occasionally when their busy diaries allowed it. All three of them were hard-working and driven career women, who hadn’t had close female friendships for years. In each other
they found a little of what they had been missing.
Lara was in charge of rescuing ailing businesses or sending them to the brokers’ yard. May was a business advisor who helped set up new companies from scratch and Clare was an accountant
for the subsidiary firm Blackwoods and Margoyles, which benefited from being part of the Cole and Craw group yet had an independent set of ruling partners. Blackwoods and Margoyles were renowned
experts at trying to turn around businesses teetering on the edge of bankruptcy – the last-chance saloon.
At their last sandwich-sharing, the topic of holidays had arisen and all of them confessed they hadn’t had a proper break for years. So they made a mad and impulsive decision to book time
off together and escape to a spa. And there and then, they’d whipped out their diaries, blocked in the time and Lara had volunteered to find them somewhere wonderful, luxurious, relaxing and
indulgently expensive. To her shame, she still hadn’t booked it. She had been too busy with either work or her new mad passionate relationship, which was also speeding along at a rate of
knots. She was moving in with James that coming weekend. She realized that was fast, but he had been so seductively keen to rush things to the next stage that she hadn’t resisted.
She clapped her hands together. She had ten minutes until she went into her next meeting with a trio of ancient accountants; it promised to be an afternoon of total and utter boredom. Lara had
lost her work mojo. She was very good at what she did, in fact too good, and promotion after promotion had elevated her into a career of meetings, conferences and supervising other people doing the
nitty-gritty parts of the job that she loved to do herself. Lara was fabulously well-paid for what she did, but she was extremely fed up and overworked.
She checked her make-up in the small magnified mirror she kept in her drawer and wished she hadn’t. Her make-up was fine but the face underneath it looked tired, her once bright hazel eyes
were dull with no hint of a sparkle. Oh boy, did she need a holiday. She gave her short blonde wavy hair a primp with her fingers – it didn’t obey combs, never had – and put the
mirror away.
She pulled up Google on her screen, whilst taking her Visa card out of her purse, then in the search bar she typed
Superior Cottages
, praying that they still had vacancies. She knew the
exact place she wanted to book – she’d seen it recommended in the
Escape From It All
section of a glossy mag she’d read on the train weeks ago. Before the meeting with
the Three Stooges she would book the holiday.
First hurdle: the site was down. But at least there was a message informing any would-be customers that one of their operators would be happy to handle their query over the phone. Lara rang the
booking line. As luck would have it, a Miss Becky Whiteley answered.
‘Superior Cottages,’ Becky drawled in her automaton greeting. ‘Becky Whiteley speaking. How may I help you?’
‘I want to book a cottage but your website appears to be down,’ said Lara.
‘Yeah, we’re having problems at the moment,’ said Becky. ‘Sorry about that. Can I take your name, please?’
‘Lara. Lara Rickman.’
‘And which of our cottages were you interested in booking and when?’
‘Wren Cottage in Wellem, from August the tenth to August the twentieth.’ A beautiful olde worlde log cabin in the grounds of a manor house which had been converted into a spa and
advertised every sort of massage under the sun – foot, neck, elbow, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Bognor Regian, bamboo, hot stone, salt scrubs, hopi candles, being slapped on the back with a cold
salmon . . . This place did everything. It had an inside swimming pool the size of Wales, bubbling Jacuzzis, a Michelin-starred restaurant. It was heaven on earth if the hype was to be
believed.