Logan wasn’t especially vain for a sixteen-year-old girl. But she was especially beautiful, a fact she understood and accepted with the same calm appreciation that another girl might feel for a sunny day, or a better-than-expected mark at school. Her looks didn’t particularly interest her. They were a means to an end, a useful weapon in her romantic armoury. At least, they were supposed to be. So far they’d been no bloody use at all.
Tall, almost five foot eleven in her riding boots, with long, slender legs, a tiny waist, and the sort of glowing, translucent skin that rich older women spend their lives trying to recapture, Logan Cranley was now officially employed as a stable hand at Wraggsbottom Farm. It was, without reservation, her dream summer job. And she had Laura Baxter to thank for it.
‘We may as well employ her, as she’s here all the time,’ Laura observed to Gabe over breakfast one morning, pushing away a plate of untouched scrambled eggs.
‘I’ll employ her if you eat something,’ said Gabe sternly.
‘I can’t,’ Laura groaned. ‘Truly.’
After five long years of fertility treatment and three miscarriages, each more heart-breaking than the last, Laura Baxter was finally twenty weeks pregnant. It was the furthest along she’d ever been, and she felt sicker than the proverbial dog. Having Gabe flapping around her day and night like a useless chicken didn’t help matters either, although Laura could see how delighted he was, and how terrified of something going wrong. They’d been through hell these past five years, but they’d been through it together.
Tired of passively watching while Gabe sailed their marital ship into bankruptcy, Laura had sat down at her computer one winter morning and not got up again, other than to eat and sleep, until she’d finished a new teleplay. An Archers-esque drama about farming life, it was the best thing she’d written in years. Within a month she’d sold it to Sky TV, and been commissioned to write a further two daytime soaps. The money wasn’t spectacular, but it was decent, and steady, and it had meant the difference between the business surviving or Gabe’s farm being repossessed. Deeply grateful, but with his manly pride more than a little wounded at having to be rescued by his wife, Gabe had thrown himself into diversifying Wraggsbottom to try and protect against another run of bad harvests. He’d begun by converting six outbuildings into holiday lets, a business that had started generating income almost immediately. Stage two had been to open up a livery stables and riding school. That had taken longer, but it hadn’t required much investment to get it started. The stable blocks and paddocks were just sitting there, waiting for a lick of paint, and some fencing, jumps and a few tons of sand had been all he needed to create an outdoor ‘school’. Within two years the stables had become the most profitable business on the estate, as Gabe proudly now thought of the farm, and not without reason. He and Laura now had almost as much land as Furlings, and were one of the most successful mixed farms in the Swell Valley, if not in all of Sussex.
The only downside to the great Baxter turnaround in fortunes was that both Gabe and Laura worked all the hours God sent, which left neither time nor energy for romance. When they did have sex, it was always under the gun of Laura’s ovulation test stick, the pressure to conceive hanging over them like a dark, oppressive, profoundly un-erotic cloud. Between that and the exhaustion and Laura’s wild hormone swings – the IVF injections were murder – it had been a gruelling time.
But now, at long last, all their hard work was bearing fruit, both literally and metaphorically. The farm was in the black, Laura’s writing was ticking along nicely, and they were finally, finally, about to become parents. To someone other than Logan Cranley, whom Laura had come to think of almost as a surrogate daughter over the past few years. Albeit a daughter with a lot of attitude.
‘You realize if we give her a job she’ll be here every day,’ said Gabe, removing the offending egg and handing his green-faced wife a ginger biscuit, one of the few foods she could still stomach. ‘I don’t want her bugging you when you’re trying to rest.’
‘I won’t be trying to rest. I’ll be trying to write. Besides, she’ll be working in the yard, so it’s you she’ll be bugging.’
Gabe rolled his eyes.
‘What’s the matter?’ Laura teased him. ‘Tired of being the object of desire, are we?’
‘I’m not any more,’ said Gabe. ‘She’s over me. Brett told me she’s going out with Seb Harwich.’
‘Oh, is she?’ Emma brightened. ‘That’s wonderful. I love Seb. He’s so funny and sweet.’
‘Hmm,’ said Gabe, grumpily. ‘I’m not a fan of all the beads. He’s turned into a proper pothead since he got back from India.’
The younger brother of Emma Harwich, Fittlescombe’s first home-grown supermodel and all-round brat, Seb Harwich was an easy-going twenty-one-year-old with a love of cricket and girls (in that order) whom everybody in the village adored. Including Gabe, for all his disapproval of Seb’s year-off fashion stylings.
‘Maybe Logan will get him back on the straight and narrow,’ said Laura, tongue in cheek.