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A new job, a new life.
‘It’s so far away, Kate,’ her dad had said.
‘We will miss you,’ her mum had said.
Kate fought free of the memories. Just because she had stepped off the path she’d been on did not mean, as her brother had claimed, she was punishing Mum and Dad. It was good to get out of your comfort zone, especially if you were trying to get to grips with your life when everything that made you feel safe and who you were had vanished.
Comfort zone, she mused with a wry twist of her lips as she looked around her surroundings, thinking,And then some.
The post had been advertised as live-in and though she hadn’t been expecting a room in the attic, given who her employer was, she had been taken aback, pleasantly, when she had arrived at the palace to be shown to a self-contained luxury apartment. Self-contained up to the point there was an adjoining door to the nursery occupied by her new charge, Princess Freya, a shy five-year-old with big blue eyes who she had met very briefly when she had arrived.
Raising herself on one elbow, she reached for her phone and groaned when she saw the time. Every cell in her body was aching from exhaustion but her brain was buzzing. Flopping back down, her flame red hair spread across the silk pillow, she swept back with the crook of her elbow a tangled shiny strand of long golden auburn that was tickling her nose, and sighed before levering herself upright once more and shaking her head to free the fiery strands that were sticking to the dampness of her skin.
Renzoi, she had read during her fact-finding Internet frenzy after she had got the job, enjoyed an enviable temperate climate.
This didn’t feel temperate, it felt clammy and stiflingly hot. Pushing back the covers, she swung her legs out of bed and padded barefoot across to the window and, pulling aside the heavy curtains, she stood on tiptoe to unfasten the window latch and settled back on her heels as the warm air rushed in. At least the light breeze was welcome. She pulled at the neck of her loose cotton nightgown and, head back, she breathed, lifting her hair from her neck to give the breeze access to her hot sticky skin. Her nostrils flared as the room was filled with the strong night-time scents redolent of mint and rosemary. Her reading matter had told her that both grew wild on the hills of the island.
She wandered out of the bedroom and through the pretty living room, into the fitted kitchen with its stone worktops. In the morning she would tackle the coffee machine, which looked impossibly complicated. She opened the fridge, which was stocked with an assortment of essentials, and enjoyed the cool as she filled her glass with iced water from the dispenser.
As she gulped down the water she caught sight of her reflection in one of the shiny cupboards. She looked like a pale wraith, a ghostly vision in need of a comb, some concealer for the dark shadows under her eyes and a good meal. Not that the meal part would matter—no matterwhatshe ate her collarbones stood out, leaving delicate hollows above. She envied other women their lush curves, not that her lack of them kept her awake nights.
She was firmly of the mind that you worked with what you had. From nowhere the tears welled in her eyes, emotion kept locked inside spilling out in the form of salty liquid that slid down her cheeks.
She gave a loud sniff. ‘Oh, God, Kate, what are you doing?’
Running away? Trying to find herself?
Her lips twisted in a grimace of self-mockery. A few weeks earlier she would have poured scorn on both options. She was proud that she never avoided reality even when it was not palatable.
Take her early obsession with ballet, not in itself so unusual for a young girl, but what set her apart was the fact she didn’t drift away like most of her friends and become distracted by the latest craze or boys. The only thing that had made her walk away from her dream was the realisation that she lacked the indefinablesomethingthat a top-class dancer needed. She would only ever be competent.
Competent wasn’t good enough, the brutal truth was her best wasn’t good enough, so she had diverted her passion into something that she didn’t have to be second-best at: her schoolwork. And then, after she won a scholarship to a top university, gaining a degree in teaching.
Kate knew she was a good teacher. Her natural aptitude for engaging children’s interest and her work ethic had been recognised.
The youngest deputy head at the prestigious primary school, being groomed, everyone knew, to take over when the head retired in two years. Not that she’d necessarily intended to take the post—she’d had a tentative approach from a failing inner-city school in a deprived area. They needed someone with an innovative approach to turn the school around, someone who thrived on a challenge.
She was no longer the person who had been excited by the idea, the person who had known who she was and where she was going. Now, shaking her head and brushing the last cooling tear from her face, she closed the fridge door.
Bed, she decided, calculating that if she fell asleep in the next thirty minutes she could still get five hours’ sleep in before she had to get up again.
She had barely taken a couple of steps when a sound made her pause. Head tilted to one side, she listened, straining to make it out.Music?Her brow furrowed. Or avoice?
There was nothing but silence. She shrugged. She had imagined it. A few moments later, her hand reaching for the handle of her bedroom door, she stopped. This time there was no doubt: another noise, a thump and even a muffled curse, emanating from the speaker on the wall that, as had been explained to her earlier, was wired into the nursery. It was one piece of the massive amount of information she had received that her time-zone-whacked brain had retained.
It was not the sort of sound a child made...it was...
There was someone in Freya’s room and the only way to find out who was to go in. She stared, her thoughts racing, at the wall that separated the room from the nursery, seeing the layout in her head, rows of books, their spines colour-coordinated, educational toys and...well, actually it looked like a very expensive toy store glossy advert. Everything looked pristine, brand new, neatly arranged on shelves and in labelled boxes. A world away from her own childhood bedroom or, for that matter, her brother’s.
Thinking of her brother brought a half-smile to her face. It lasted a split second before she remembered the row they’d had before she left.Like she would ever forget?The spark left her eyes as the sense of betrayal resurfaced.
It had been enough of a life-changing blow to learn that her parents, who had always taught her the importance of truth and honesty in life, had been lying to her, but discovering that her brother had been party to the conspiracy of deceit had been worse somehow.
She would never forget the expression she’d seen in his eyes when she had broken it to him, but before he’d said a word she’d known that this was not news to him.
He’d known they were adopted, that he wasn’t even her brother.
They had argued before but nothing like the argument that had followed. Jake, she’d discovered, had found out by accident too, but years ago and he couldn’t see why she had a problem.
