The Country Escape

Fiona Walker lives in rural Worcestershire with her partner and two children, plus an assortment of horses and dogs. Visit Fiona’s website at
www.fionawalker.com

French Relations

Kiss Chase

Well Groomed

Snap Happy

Between Males

Lucy Talk

Lots of Love

Tongue in Cheek

Four Play

Love Hunt

Kiss and Tell

The Love
Letter

Sealed with a Kiss (e-book short story)

The Summer Wedding

Table of Contents

• About the Author
  
• Also by this author
  
• COPYRIGHT
  
• Dedication
  
• Prologue
  
• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Chapter 13
  
• Chapter 14
  
• Chapter 15
  
• Chapter 16
  
• Chapter 17
  
• Chapter 18
  
• Chapter 19
  
• Chapter 20
  
• Chapter 21
  
• Chapter 22
  
• Chapter 23
  
• Chapter 24
  
• Chapter 25
  
• Chapter 26
  
• Chapter 27
  
• Chapter 28
  
• Chapter 29
  
• Chapter 30
  
• Chapter 31
  
• Chapter 32
  
• Chapter 33
  
• Chapter 34
  
• Chapter 35
  
• Chapter 36
  
• Chapter 37
  
• Chapter 38
  
• Chapter 39
  
• Chapter 40
  
• Chapter 41
  
• Chapter 42
  
• Chapter 43
  
• Chapter 44
  
• Chapter 45
  
• Chapter 46
  
• Chapter 47
  
• Chapter 48
  
• Chapter 49
  
• Chapter 50
  
• Chapter 51
  
• Chapter 52
  
• Chapter 53
  
• Chapter 54
  
• Chapter 55
  
• Chapter 56
  
• Chapter 57
  
• Chapter 58
  
• Chapter 59
  
• Chapter 60
  
• Chapter 61
  
• Chapter 62
  
• Chapter 63
  
• Chapter 64
  
• Chapter 65
  
• Chapter 66
  

For my wise owl, hacking buddy,

fast-Googling iPhone researcher and Buddha

in a Dalai Lama, with love and thanks.

‘Is this thing working?… I think it is. The red light’s on. Blast… get
off
the recorder, Daphne. Lie over there. No, not on the
Telegraph
– I haven’t finished the crossword. That’s better. Good girl. Where was I? Ah, yes, Katherine. Hello, Katherine. This is Constance
Mytton-Gough.

‘I was intending to compose a letter to you “to be opened in the event of my death” – such a wonderful, self-indulgent sentence to write because it affirms one is still alive – but as you know my wretched fingers are too arthritic to hold a pen for long nowadays and I don’t trust that girl from the solicitor’s to take this down verbatim – she’s always adding whereforeins and
whenceforths. I’ve borrowed this recording apparatus from dear Miriam, whom I trust to be utterly discreet in passing my message on to you. You must listen very carefully – I’ve always wanted to say that too, what fun! Where was I? No, Daphne, leave the cushion alone. Ah, yes, my death. We won’t dwell on it, but when one reaches one’s ninety-fifth year it is rather closer than it is in one’s ninety-fourth,
and I need to get my ducks in a line before I go. Where was I? I have a list somewhere.

‘Ah, yes. As you know, the animals will all need looking after when I’m gone – yes, that’s you, Daphne, and you two, my darlings, along with your disreputable lurcher chums wherever they are, plus the horses, of course, and all the other stock here, which is why I have made provisions. It’s all legal
and signed and, of course, you and I have spoken about it often, Katherine, but this letter… recording, whatever it is, will help verify my wishes should anybody contest the will, and I rather fear they might. The solicitors are clearly convinced I’ve lost my marbles. You are totally over-qualified to take on this role, but you were also over-qualified to come here and look after me, and we both
know why you did that. Ignore the doubters who say a nurse from the suburbs cannot be a Herefordshire small-holder. You are young and strong and quick to learn. You love animals and are frightfully practical. Gosh, this is exhausting. I must take a breather.’

‘… must be this one, eh, Daphne? There we go. Red light.

‘Katherine, I do have several additional wishes that I want
to – Hello? Oh, you’re here. How awkward. Is it the yardarm already, Katherine? What joy! Set it down over there, will you?… What? This thing? It’s a Dictaphone. Now, take these dogs out for a run, there’s a good girl.

‘Good. You’ve gone. That rather interrupted the flow, but while I remember please do something about your appearance. It’s easier for you to hear this when I’m dead. One
hates to criticize so take this as a back-handed compliment. You’re a very pretty girl, but you give out a rather wanton message, not to mention a frightful colour clash with all that ridiculous cherry red hair and whatever it is you use to make your skin orange. Scrub up, have a bob and knuckle down to country life. Male suitors will distract you, especially at first. They’ll all be circling once
I’m gone and you’ve got Lake Farm, but I’ve thought of a way of protecting you on that front. Marry and you lose the lot. Tough but fair, I feel.

‘Where’s that blasted piece of paper? Ah, here! This must be to do with it…

‘
Unlike the rest of my estate, which will pass to my heirs
…
Lake Farm to be held in trust after my death
… blah…
managed by the Constance Mytton-Gough Memorial Animal
Sanctuary charity
…
for the purpose of caring for the family pets and other domestic animals that survive me so they may live out their lives in peace amid familiar surroundings
…
blah…
looked after by my former nurse Miss Katherine Mason, who has the right to live in the property known as Lake Farm until such time
– This isn’t my Letter of Wishes. This is the change in the will. You know about
that. The Wishes are just as important. Ah, yes. Here they are.

‘First, and forgive an old bat a frightful romantic indulgence here, you must promise me that you will only marry for love. You may think me quite unreasonable insisting upon it, but it’s such a simple thing and I regret not doing it. The clause about losing the farm in the event of your marriage is rather counter-intuitive
– but it’s a forfeit you must be prepared to pay, and is only there for your own protection.

‘My second wish is rather more eccentric and requires a great deal of dedication on your part, but I think it will be the making of you. Blast. I do wish we had a bit more time to train you up, Katherine. Think I’ll enjoy my snifter now.’

‘… think I’d remember how to turn on the
wretched thing by – ah, light!

‘The Bolt. Katherine, you must ride the Bolt! It’s in the Letter of Wishes. I know you said you want to do it before I die, which is terribly sweet of you, but it’s jolly hard and quite dangerous and you have to learn to ride first. I want you to do it for a greater reason than my entertainment, or for the Eardisford Purse, which naturally is a part of the
reward. I want you to do it because it will set you free. You will understand what I’m talking about when it happens.’

Kat dodged Daphne the dachshund’s cold wet nose as she tried to change as close to the halogen heater as humanly possible, its glow making her pale skin appear curiously orange. It made her think of the weekly Fake Bake ritual she’d
once endured, her freckled body smelling faintly of burning tyres while it transformed to Mediterranean bronze. When her friend Dawn had left nursing to retrain as a beauty therapist, she’d used Kat as a guinea pig and taken over the task of copper-plating her with professional zeal, first at a boutique spa, and later at her own salon above a Nascot Village florist, where Kat had also enjoyed cut-price
manicures, pedicures, facials and waxing. For a long time, she’d been the glossiest, smoothest, most unfeasibly conker-skinned redhead in Watford.

Today she would be seeing Dawn for the first time in two years and worried she was now the palest, scruffiest yokel in Herefordshire, although at least she had clean jeans and a new fuchsia pink fleece, courtesy of a local promotional printing
company that donated overstock and seconds to the sanctuary. Kat’s new hoodie had Fresh’n’Up Thrush Relief emblazoned on the back, but its warmth was all she really cared about. On windswept and bitter February days, Lake Farm felt as though it was held together with ice. She hoped Dawn had brought plenty of layers.

A quick check in the mirror confirmed that pink definitely didn’t go with
cherry red hair, a trademark she refused to surrender amid the russets and olives of country life, although her natural copper would have been perfect camouflage. Kat had inherited it from her father. She sometimes wondered if that was why her mother had treated her so diffidently through childhood, this visual reminder of a failed marriage. Kat also shared her father’s rebellious, daredevil streak,
and entirely lacked her mother’s flirtatious glamour. The many boyfriends coming and going through the Mason household during tomboy Kat’s teenage years had been her mother’s. It wasn’t until she’d met Nick that she’d briefly become a swan.

A loud splash immediately outside the front windows made the terriers shrill with alarm, joined by enraged door-snarling from the lurchers. The splashing
grew louder. Kat hurried to her gumboots: no Canada goose could generate such noise unless it weighed six hundred kilos. There was only one creature around here capable of making a splash of that magnitude. ‘Please tell me I shut the gate to the spinney!’

She rushed outside, dogs at her heels, pulling on her hood against the chill wind.

It was blowing a gale, branches groaning and
the roar from the millstream weir as loud as busy traffic. Black rainclouds were muscling around overhead, the lake already pitted with the first drops of a downpour as Kat scanned its choppy grey surface, seeking a familiar face.

There she was, limpid eyes glazing ecstatically as she wallowed in the shallows. Usha the water buffalo – ‘the lady of the lake’, as the locals called her – had
been in residence on the Eardisford Estate for almost twenty years. Dating back to an experiment in farm diversification in the nineties, Usha had declined to leave Eardisford when the rest of the mozzarella-making herd were deemed unprofitable and sold on. Instead she’d waded into the deep oxbow lake and refused to budge. Admiring her tenacity, landowner Constance Mytton-Gough had decided to keep
her as a parkland curiosity and estate mascot. The old buffalo still spent a great many of the summer months in the lake, wallowing contentedly, but in winter she sheltered in a wooded enclosure with two cheery alpacas, a cantankerous llama and a few determined pygmy goats that guarded the hay feeder jealously. This meant that she spent a long time staring over the post and rails to the lake,
plotting her escape back into the water she loved.

‘It’s far too cold for you in there!’ Kat shouted, remembering with horror that the last time Usha had done this she’d ended up with colic.

When rattling a bucket of pony nuts from the bank did nothing to coax the old buffalo on to dry land, Kat realized she’d have to take more drastic measures. The sanctuary’s self-appointed animal
expert, Russ, would no doubt suggest a patient approach. He was very hot on mimicking species’ natural behaviour to try to befriend the animal kingdom – the only monarchy he acknowledged – but Kat knew there was no time for that. It had recently taken him ten hours to catch the Shetland ponies using his intelligent horsemanship techniques when they’d escaped into a field of winter wheat, and Usha
was a lot more stubborn. Kat was already running late to meet Dawn’s train.

‘I’ll use the rowing boat.’ She was already running towards the jetty.

The terriers crowded around her feet on the slippery boards, tripping her, as she untied the boat and tugged it alongside the wooden walkway. The wind was now so high and bitter the boat was slamming against the jetty.

Kat looked
into the boat and across the lake, the familiar panic rising. Last time she’d taken the boat to shoo Usha out – many weeks ago when the water had been much warmer – she’d only made it to the first island, where she’d been forced to wait until rescue arrived.

Legs like jelly, she clambered in, shooed the terriers away and pushed herself from the jetty with an oar. Usha was only a few metres
away and she drifted alongside her easily.

‘Get out!’ Kat pleaded, splashing the surface with the oars.

Watching her with interest, raindrops bouncing off her head, the water buffalo was already looking uncomfortably cold.

‘Scram!’

The dogs barked furiously from the jetty. The rain was hammering down now and Kat could hardly see.

Usha’s thermostat finally kicked
in. With a bad-tempered bellow, she flailed towards the bank, sending up such a rip tide that the boat shot backwards, prow rising out of the lake like a giant shark’s fin.

‘Shit!’ To Kat’s horror, she was capsizing. Heart pounding, she lunged towards the front, dropping the oars. At the same moment, half a ton of alarmed water buffalo reared overhead as Usha charged back to her wooded
harbour, knocking the boat neatly up the bank and tipping Kat out on to dry land.

Drenched and muddy, she lay deeply stamped into the soft bank like a cake decoration in chocolate icing, winded and disoriented. Then she heard laughter and realized Russ was watching her from his bicycle.

‘’Mazing! How ’mazing was that?’ He was pedalling towards her. ‘You can take that back about not
being an animal communicator. Kat Mason, you’re a natural!’

‘You’re late,’ she grumbled, squelching her way upright to shoo Usha back to her enclosure, embarrassed that he’d seen her, yet again, struggling to cope alone.

‘Are you okay?’ He abandoned his bike and loped alongside. ‘I know you’re scared shitless of water.’

‘I’m fine.’ Russ’s dark eyes were anxious so she raised
her smile to its brightest setting, reluctant to admit just how terrified she’d been. Kat’s smile was a lethal weapon, a thousand watts of positivity and kindness that hypnotized all-comers. By contrast, Russ never smiled unless he found something genuinely funny or moving. When they’d first met the previous summer his hair had been dyed white with a black cross on it – something to do with a protest
he’d staged with some friends outside an embassy – and she had found it absurdly funny. Russ didn’t find it easy to laugh at himself, but her irrepressible giggles had captivated him and the two had shared hours of mirth over pints in the Eardisford Arms.

Officially Russ was a sanctuary volunteer. Unofficially he was much more. Theirs was still a fledgling relationship, from the laughter-laced
high summer five months earlier, through an autumn of burgeoning friendship to a winter of mounting flirtation. The two had been crowned Eardisford’s Wassail King and Queen in the apple orchards on Twelfth Night, sharing their first kiss after drinking a cup of spiked punch procured by Russ’s uncle Bill, who was eager to see his nephew settle down at last. Russ was the black sheep of the cider-making
Hedges dynasty, a free-spirited music lover, conservationist and sometime animal activist who lived in a caravan amid the fruit trees he lovingly tended.

‘It’s dangerous here on your own. I’ll stay over.’

‘I have Dawn coming.’

‘You’ll hardly know I’m here.’

‘Is the caravan leaking again?’

‘Like a sieve. Don’t worry – I’ll kip on Uncle Bill’s sofa.’ He dipped
his head, smiling up at her. ‘You need your space.’

The dye had almost grown out now, leaving amazing white tips at the end of his dark brown mop, rather like a pint of Guinness. It should have looked ridiculous, but the effect was edgy fashion shoot, setting off the unique square beauty of his jaw and the fierce ursid eyes. Russ was full of visual contradictions: the neatly trimmed beard
was theatrically cosmopolitan, the wild mane urban jungle, the clothes rural vigilante and the dark eyes martyred. Some locals found him frightening, and his face certainly had a devilish quality, but he stood out as much as Kat did.

‘No, stay. You’ll like Dawn. We’ll all go out later. God, I’m running so late.’ She looked down at her mud-caked torso and legs. ‘I thought you’d forgotten
about helping this afternoon.’ Russ wasn’t the most reliable sanctuary volunteer, often going AWOL for days on end. By the same token, he wasn’t a standard-issue boyfriend, but that suited Kat, who was wary of being tied down. He called himself a ‘free-range lover’. When he was
in situ,
which was increasingly often now the weather was colder, he was a hard-working ally and an aficionado of sensual
shoulder rubs and long, breathless kisses, as he demonstrated now.

He was an extraordinarily skilful kisser: tall, sweet-tongued and tactile, with a way of putting both hands to her face when his mouth sealed softly with hers, thumbs beneath her jaw, that drew down her insides with desire. She’d once thought beards off-putting, but Russ’s was so soft and the long hair that framed his face
so heroic that it was like being kissed by a medieval hero, her own Robin of Sherwood. She just wished she wasn’t going to be quite so late.

‘I’ve been here ages,’ he pointed out, as they surfaced for air. ‘I was putting feed in the woods for wildlife. Mags gave me a load of bar snacks that were past their sell-by date – the badgers love them.’

Kat eyed him suspiciously. ‘Was it
you who left the gate to the spinney open?’

He looked shifty. ‘I know better than that.’

But Kat had no time to cross-examine him as she raced inside to change again, diving into a broken-zipped bomber jacket with Official Event Farrier on it and her only remaining clean trousers, the ageing green velvet joggers she wore to run her fitness and Pilates classes in the village hall.

Kat could no longer drive up through the parkland as she once had: the vast wrought-iron gates at the end of the lime walk on her side of the lake were now kept padlocked by order of the Big Five, denying her access to the tracks that ran around Herne Covert to the old stableyards, coach houses and kennels and on to the Hereford road gatehouses. Instead, she was forced to off-road
through the woods that ran alongside the millstream.

The Big Five were the main beneficiaries of the late Constance Mytton-Gough’s estate, her four daughters and only son. The quintet were all well beyond sixty and based across several time-zones with children and grandchildren of their own. None had shown any desire to take up their late mother’s mantle by returning to run Eardisford,
instead rushing with near-indecent post-funeral haste to have the estate catalogued and discreetly marketed to the few of the world’s super-rich able to afford the eight-figure asking price.

Selling the historic Herefordshire house and its ten thousand acres was a monumental challenge, even setting aside the endless legal clauses protecting the integrity of the estate and its many tenants.
Too far from London to appeal to Arabs, too expensive for pop-stars and too decrepit for corporate use, sceptical locals predicted that Eardisford would languish on the market for years. The great house’s contents had been stripped out and sold to cover inheritance tax and feed the Big Five’s appetite for a return from their mother’s long life. In the year since her death, interested parties had
come and gone, but it was clear that one thing more than any other was putting them off. Among the minefield of codicils in Constance’s will that prevented Eardisford being broken up was one that had bequeathed a farm in the middle of its magnificent parkland to the Constance Mytton-Gough Animal Sanctuary, now in the care of her former nurse and occupied by the elderly animals that had survived
her.

The sanctuary – known locally as the Hon Con’s Zoo – had an elected committee, a constitution, audited accounts and charitable status, but the Big Five knew that this was just a legal force-field to protect it from their attempts to fight Lake Farm’s exclusion from their mother’s estate. The ancient steading – part parkland folly, part historic monument – was in direct view of the
main house. Purchasers clearly had no desire to look out at a cherry-haired figure feeding pensionable pot-bellied pigs and decrepit horses.

The legacy might have been disastrous, were Kat not so hard-working, adaptable and uncomplaining. She genuinely loved the unique peace of Lake Farm and its elderly, demanding occupants. For the past year, she had learned on the job, sought help where
it was needed and weathered real and virtual storms.

The Big Five had made it clear from the start that they wanted Kat out, so when attempts to take their battle to court failed and Kat refused to be paid off, they’d resorted to bullying. Isolated and prone to flooding, the farm was reliant upon the Eardisford Estate for services, utilities and access, all of which were denied to Kat during
one of the wettest autumns on record. For weeks, she had survived on borrowed generators and bowsers, forced to access her home via public footpaths, the villagers rallying to her aid while the committee fought to get her rights reinstated. When her erstwhile ally, estate manager Dair Armitage, had turned traitor, paid by the Big Five to launch a campaign of intimidation, she’d confronted him
in the Eardisford Arms and demanded it stopped.