Page 1 of Coming Home to Sturcombe Bay
Chapter One
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“Well, here we are. Home sweet home.”
Cassie leaned over and kissed her brother on the ear. “Thanks for picking me up. You’re a sweetheart.”
Paul laughed. “That’s not what you used to call me.”
“That was ten years ago.” Her eyes danced. “But I’m not guaranteeing I won’t call you a few choice alternatives again — especially if you’re still as irritating as ever.”
“Me — irritating? Never!”
“Huh!”
They both climbed out of the car, and Paul went round to the boot to fetch Cassie’s backpack.
“You really do travel light,” he remarked, hoisting it onto one shoulder.
“You get further that way.”
Halfway round the world. And now she was home.
The house rose above her, big and solid. Most of the large Victorian townhouses on Cliff Road had been converted into holiday flats, but not number nineteen. Three storeys of ruddy-brown brick, trimmed with sandstone quoins, with dormer windows in the roof.
Three stone steps led up to the front door, bay windows on each side. The front garden had been gravelled over to provide extra off-road parking space, but several tubs of bright geraniums lent it a defiant touch of colour.
But her first move wasn’t towards the house. Instead, she walked across the road and stood for a moment by the cliff wall, her hands resting lightly on the rough stone, still warm from the sun that was setting across the bay.
Sturcombe. Her home for the first eighteen years of her life — until the need to see more of the world than this little seaside village in South Devon, however pretty, had sent her off in search of adventure. Which she had found — in spades.
She had seen the sun set over the Golden Gate bridge, over the wide planes of the Serengeti, over the huge red monolith of Uluru in the dry, dusty outback of Australia. But though they had all been spectacular, there had never been a sunset to compare with the sunsets of home.
The sky was deepening to a soft cobalt blue, streaked with idle paint strokes of magenta and gold. Far out across the bay the sun was sinking slowly below the horizon, a great golden ball casting a path of shimmering sequins across the sea.
Some thirty feet below her the waves were breaking in frills of white lace that whispered softly across the sand. A couple of black-headed terns were swooping down to look for a late dinner, their mournful wheep-wheep cries echoing across the water . . .
A man was riding a horse along the edge of the beach, the last long rays of the sun gleaming on the horse’s russet flanks. The man had risen in the stirrups, perfectly balanced, moving as one with the powerful animal as it galloped through the shallows, all smooth, elemental power.
“Who’s that?” She really didn’t need to ask.
Paul strolled across and glanced down at the beach. “That’s Liam. You remember him? Liam Ellis.”
Liam Ellis. Oh yes, she remembered him very well. At seventeen, eighteen, she had thought he was the love of her life, but the tug of the great wide world had been equally strong.
Liam had had a different dream. He loved horses — he’d had no interest in travelling the world. He’d started helping out at the local horse rescue society from when he was about ten years old, and his commitment to them had grown over the years.
It had led him to train as a vet, like his parents and his brother, with the intention of taking over from the society’s elderly vet who was past due for retirement. She’d known she couldn’t ask him to give that up.
Which had left her with an almost impossible choice — leave him behind and follow her dream of adventure, or give up on it and stay here with him. She had known that she couldn’t have both. And though it had almost torn her heart in two, she had known that at eighteen she was too young to settle down.
So, in the week when she would have been starting at Exeter University, she had taken off in a big white bird from Heathrow for the long flight to Orlando. Gazing out of the window at England’s green fields rolling past beneath the wing, she had wished that she could go up to the cockpit and beg the captain to turn the plane around and fly it right back home again.
But by the time they had landed at Orlando’s stunning airport she had forced herself to look to the future, not the past. And within a week she had been so absorbed in completing her advanced PADI Divemaster certification that she had been able to tuck her memories into a small corner of her heart, only to be revisited rarely.
She turned at the sound of the front door behind her opening. Her mum and dad, and her sister Lisa, piled out of thehouse to welcome her. She found herself instantly swamped in hugs, her mother’s warm arms around her, her father standing close by trying to pretend that wasn’t a tear in his eye.
