Sunrise Over Pebble Bay Read online

  Sunrise Over Pebble Bay

  Della Galton

  For my very dear friend and fellow 4 a.m. writer of emails, Molly Carney, with my love.

  Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  More from Della Galton

  About the Author

  About Boldwood Books

  1

  Olivia Lambert closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The smell of cake filled her senses. The glorious sweetness of vanilla, almonds and sugar with an underlay of richly spiced fruit. Gorgeous. She never got tired of that smell. It helped that she adored fruit cake, every single delicious bit of it, from the exotically dark sticky fruit to the sweetness of the thick fondant icing, she’d loved it all since she was small and had learned to mix the ingredients in Aunt Dawn’s kitchen. Her mother was a fine cook, but baking cakes had never come into her top ten list of things to do on your day off. Baking cakes, and indeed icing them, was one of Aunt Dawn’s many passions. Aunt Dawn had been the Queen of Cake Makers in their family until she had handed Olivia her crown.

  Olivia opened her eyes. This cake, which was a gloriously unashamed celebration of pink – no gender-neutral theme here – was three tiers high. The bottom and middle tiers were pale pink with a string of gold beads encircling them at their base – these were disguising the gap where the tiers were temporarily joined – and there was a big, slightly brighter, pink bow wrapped around the centre tier. The bow was made of sugar paste, beautifully crafted so it was impossible to tell it wasn’t real. The top tier, the smallest of the three, was ivory. A trail of pink roses cascaded over one side; the roses painstakingly fashioned, petal by petal, in delicate curves and dotted with diamanté sparkles. Proper bling, Olivia’s mother would have said, but classy with it.

  On top of the cake, in pride of place, looking for all the world as though they’d been carelessly discarded there, nestled a pair of pink sugar paste baby shoes with white sugar paste flowers fashioned to look like daisies on each buckle. The shoes were a little smaller than life size, but they were adorable and just looking at them brought a lump to Olivia’s throat. One day she would hold her own little girl in her arms and pop her foot into a tiny pink shoe made of some satiny material.

  Olivia blinked away the images swiftly. Creating christening cakes, especially for girls – not that she’d have minded a boy – always made her broody. She was now thirty-nine and very aware that her biological clock was ticking.

  She continued with her inspection, checking for imperfections, making sure everything was just as it should be. Sitting inside one of the baby shoes was a tiny caramel-coloured teddy bear with chocolate drop eyes and a heart-shaped pink nose. He’d been fiddly, especially his jacket, but, wow, he looked the part.

  The words, Arabella’s Christening Day were piped around the outside of the cake, above a date, 6 March, which was this coming Saturday. Today was Thursday.

  Olivia smiled. The cake was gorgeous – even if she did say so herself. Arabella’s parents were going to be very pleased.

  She hooked out her iPhone, took a series of pictures for the gallery on her website and then carefully separated the tiers, ready to put them into the three cardboard carrying boxes that lay waiting on her worktop. The work wasn’t quite over. The most nerve-wracking part of her job, by far, was the delivery. Whenever she could, she asked her clients to come to her, but Arabella’s parents, the Greys, had asked her to deliver this one. She was slightly regretting agreeing to that.

  The Greys lived in a very upmarket house (the type with griffins on stone pillars either side of the drive) in the pretty Dorset village of Puddletown. Olivia lived and worked close to Weymouth Quay in a mid-terrace house that overlooked a car park. According to the app on her phone, it was a twenty-three-minute drive, door to door. This was her next job, to deliver the cake safely, assemble and finish it on site, to gracefully accept the thanks of another happy customer – she hoped – along with the balance owing on their purchase and to wish them well for Arabella’s christening day.

  She leaned forward and gently lifted the top tier into the box, taking equal care with the other two. Then she lidded them all up carefully and pushed them back on the worktop, just to be safe. With infinite care, she carried the first box through her open front door, nudging it back with her hip as she passed, and into the March sunshine. She crossed the footway that ran alongside the public car park that abutted the row of terraced cottages, of which number five, where she lived, was the middle one. It was a lovely afternoon for March. Not as warm as yesterday, but apparently it was getting warmer at the weekend, which would be good for spring holidaymakers and perfect for Arabella’s christening, which was being held in a marquee in the Greys’ back garden.

  Olivia’s white van, which sported the sign ‘Amazing Cakes – you imagine it, I’ll create it,’ was in its usual space. There were advantages of living beside a car park, especially in the narrow streets around here that she and her aunt Dawn, who lived a few minutes away, dubbed the back streets of Weymouth.

  In the height of summer when the kids were off school, this car park got packed. At weekends, Olivia occasionally had to use her aunt’s spare space, which was behind Vintage Views – her aunt’s vintage clothes shop which fronted the quay. Vintage clothes, like cakes, were another of Aunt Dawn’s passions. Parking at her aunt’s wasn’t too much of an inconvenience. The trip back to number five on foot took less than three minutes, even including hurtling over Town Bridge, which was the lifting bridge across the harbour.

  Weymouth was jam-packed with pubs, cool cafes, interesting shops and a plethora of places to eat freshly caught fish and diver-caught scallops, not to mention fish and chip takeaways patrolled by hungry seagulls. There was even a handy Indian takeaway on the other side of the car park, which came in useful when she didn’t want to cook. She could also hire a dive boat or a jet ski, should she ever feel the urge. Olivia felt extremely lucky to live in such a fabulous spot.

  As she ran back to collect the next cake box, she caught a whiff of cardamom and garlic wafting on the breeze and her mouth watered. Maybe she’d get a takeaway later. She tried to restrict them to one a week, but it was tricky when she lived so close and was working flat out.

  Fortunately, one of her favourite ways of unwinding was to head off on regular 10K runs, which helped to offset a diet of king prawn madras, fish and chip suppers and cake.

  Olivia was on the third and final journey from kitchen to van when disaster struck. She tripped as she went out of her front door. She wasn’t even sure how it happened. She wasn’t hurrying. Knowing her tendency to be clumsy, especially when stressed, she never rushed a cake transportation, but somehow her foot caught on the raffia Welcome mat and the next thing she knew she was stumbling over her threshold. For a split second she thought she might save herself – o
r, more importantly in that moment, the top tier of Arabella’s christening cake. She stumbled, righted, then didn’t quite manage it and stumbled again clumsily and unstoppably, feeling as though she were falling in slow motion towards the tarmac walkway.

  There was nothing slow motion about the thump as she hit it. She yelped as pain shot through her wrist which she’d put down to save herself. The cake box landed a few feet away. The box, which was clearly a lot less sturdy than it looked, burst apart, and the cake bounced out and was now in more than one piece. Several ivory-edged fruit chunks on the dirty pavement.

  For a few seconds, Olivia stayed where she was, half lying, half sitting. The shock of the fall, the hurt in her wrist and the distress of wrecking so many painstaking hours of work competed for top place. The wrecked cake won hands down. She had a strong urge to burst into tears. She swallowed it down. Tears were not going to help. In her bumbag, which was strapped around her waist, a permanent fixture when she was working, she both heard and felt the buzz of her mobile.

  More immediately vying for her attention was an elderly female passer-by. Olivia had an impression of a greying head and a purple jacket arriving beside her. The woman was wheeling a tartan shopper and her kindly face was anxious.

  ‘Are you all right? Oh dear. Your lovely cake.’ As she spoke, she bent down as if to pick up the pieces. ‘It’s probably not as bad as it looks…’ Now crouched at the same level as Olivia, she broke off and bit her lip uncertainly. Even to the most optimistic of observers, it was clear she was wrong about this. The cake was a complete write-off. She turned her attention to Olivia. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No. I’m fine. Thank you.’ Olivia rubbed her wrist and realised, thankfully, that this was true. Apart from the initial shock and the ignominy of falling over, she didn’t seem to have done any lasting damage – small blessings – but she was aware that other people in the car park and on the walkway were now looking in their direction. The last thing she needed was a bigger audience.

  With a small sigh, she got carefully to her feet.

  The woman, who’d been so verbose at first, was now clearly unsure what to do. She was still shaking her head.

  ‘It’s nice of you to stop,’ Olivia told her. ‘But I’m fine, honestly.’

  ‘If you’re really sure.’ The woman sounded relieved.

  ‘I am.’ Olivia retrieved the split box and began to gather up the broken chunks of cake, even the quite small bits. A few feet away, an opportunist seagull was waiting hopefully. It hopped a couple of steps closer as the woman grabbed the handle of her trolley, gave Olivia one last sympathetic nod and went on her way.

  One of the baby shoes was damaged. The other was still in one piece. The teddy bear had lost an arm and now seemed to be eyeing her with a look of mild reproof.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Olivia told it. Oh my God, now she was talking to a sugar paste teddy bear. She was definitely losing the plot. Aunt Dawn must be right after all. She’d been working too hard. She’d been burning the candle at both ends. It was a bad habit of hers. This week had been frenetic – every single second of her time had been accounted for, up to and including all day tomorrow – especially tomorrow.

  Oh my God – tomorrow.

  Again, she fought the urge to cry as she took the remnants of the cake back inside, then retrieved the other two tiers from her van and carried them carefully into the kitchen. She could hardly rock up at the Greys’ with two thirds of a christening cake.

  Back in her sunny kitchen, the enormity of the disaster hit her.

  Delivering Arabella’s cake would have finished her working week – at least as far as Amazing Cakes was concerned.

  Olivia’s other profession, the one that didn’t pay as well as baking, but was where her heart truly lay, was acting. She’d been to drama school after passing her A levels and she’d had a fair bit of success. She’d earned her equity card, and had several small parts on television, as well as playing on stage when the opportunity arose. Last year, she’d played Gertrude in Hamlet with a small but brilliant company she’d acted with before – they’d done the summer at Brownsea Island. But all of this paled into insignificance compared to tomorrow.

  Tomorrow morning, she had a return ticket on the 6.55 a.m. Weymouth to London Waterloo to audition for a part in Casualty, the BBC’s award-winning hospital drama. She’d sailed through the first audition. This was a callback. Her agent’s voice echoed in her head, ‘They absolutely love you, darling. You’re perfect for the part.’ Now, she was down to the last two. She and another actress had been shortlisted. It was the door to her future and it had opened a tantalisingly big crack.

  She could not blow it. It was what she’d dreamed of since she was thirteen and had told her startled parents that she wanted to be a prostitute when she left school – having just watched Pretty Woman. They’d been mightily relieved when they’d found out she meant an actress.

  Olivia looked back at the wrecked cake. She had never, in the five and a half years since she’d launched Amazing Cakes, let anyone down and she didn’t intend to start now. But she could not be in two places at once. Casualty or Amazing Cakes? She was going to have to choose.

  2

  In her kitchen, Olivia ran through the conversation in her head with Arabella’s mother, Juliet Grey.

  Olivia: ‘I’m so sorry, but due to unforeseen circumstances, I’m afraid I can’t now deliver your christening cake.’

  Juliet: ‘Oh that’s fine, dear. I’ll pop into Waitrose and pick up another one.’

  Except, of course, she was not going to say that. Even in Olivia’s wildest dreams – which she had to admit, could get pretty wild – and no matter how much it cost her, she knew she had to somehow honour the promise she had made. The promise that was written on the side of her van – ‘You imagine it, I’ll create it.’ And, in the Greys’ case, ‘I’ll deliver it.’

  Her mobile buzzed again and she hooked it out of her bumbag. Two missed calls. One from Aunt Dawn and one from Juliet Grey, who she’d spoken to so often during the design and creation of this cake that she’d put her number in her contacts list. There was also a text from her boyfriend, Phil Grimshaw.

  Hey you. I’ve wangled tonight off. Shall I come over and make you some tea while we do a last-minute run through of the script?

  What a darling. Phil was in the ‘profession’ like her. They’d met last year on the set of Hamlet. He’d played the best Claudius she’d ever seen. He was the perfect villain – dark and brooding, with a natural presence both on and off stage. He’d been brilliantly malevolent as the evil Claudius and the audience had fallen silent every time he was in the spotlight. And Olivia had simply fallen for him.

  His other job – every actor Olivia knew had more than one job – was maître d’ at The Bluebell Cliff – a posh boutique hotel in Swanage. He must have pulled some strings to get tonight off to help her. That was lovely of him. He knew, better than anyone, how stressed out she’d been about tomorrow’s audition and usually the idea of seeing him would have made her heart leap. Half an hour ago, she’d have texted back, ‘YES!’ immediately. But this was not now going to happen.

  It was 4.20 p.m. She needed to make another cake, which would take about three hours to mix and bake and another three or four hours to cool and then she would be up all night decorating it. She’d be lucky if she was even done by the morning, not to mention delivering and setting up. No way would she be finished in time to catch the 6.55 to London, all fresh-faced and bright-eyed for the most important audition of her life.

  Her phone informed her that she had two voicemails, so one of them must be from Juliet Grey. A wild surge of hope swelled up. Maybe the christening had been cancelled. Maybe the vicar had double-booked. Or the catering company had failed to live up to Juliet’s incredibly exacting standards. Maybe there had been some freak weather in Puddletown and a small tornado had ripped through the Greys’ acres of posh garden and demolished the hired marquee and it would be too late to ge
t a replacement. Or the harpist who was playing background music while the christening guests mingled and ate canapés had suddenly found that she was indisposed.

  Olivia knew so many details about the christening she felt as though she was practically family. Her palms sweated as she dialled her voicemail and heard Juliet’s plummy voice say, ‘Good afternoon, Olivia…’

  All her hopes for a stay of execution were dashed with her client’s next words.

  ‘I’m just phoning to let you know that when you come into the private road, it forks to the left and right. You need to take the left-hand fork, and as I said, we’re the house with the griffins on the stone pillars. I wasn’t sure if I told you this and I didn’t want you to get lost. Thanks, love.’

  Juliet Grey was nice, as well as being plummy and pernickety. That somehow made it all feel so much worse.

  The phone rang again in her hand. Olivia dropped it in alarm on the worktop and then leaned forward nervously to look at the display.

  It wasn’t Juliet. It was Aunt Dawn.

  She snatched it up, shaking with relief.

  ‘Darling, I’m not interrupting you, am I, only I’m in a bit of a quandary…’

  ‘What quandary?’ There was something in her aunt’s voice that made Olivia’s heart clench. Oh no, please not more problems. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine, but Emmeline isn’t, unfortunately. I’ve just got in my car to take her to the vets, but it won’t start and I wondered maybe… but only if you’re free…’