The Runaway Wife

  Praise for Rowan Coleman’s novels

  Lessons in Laughing Out Loud

  “An engaging tale of a woman’s unexpected journey to self-discovery. . . . The unpredictable outcome is immensely rich and satisfying, as is the heroine’s transformation.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “[Rowan Coleman has] a wonderful combination of imagination, acute real-world social observation, and an elegant way with words. . . . Lessons in Laughing Out Loud sweeps you into its world with faultless ease. A truly loveable central character, a secret you really want to uncover, and a huge cast of people from wildly different worlds who mesh and work together with impressive ease.”

  —Serena Mackesy, author of Hold My Hand and The Temp

  “The wit woven throughout the book will surely win over any reader.”

  —Tulsa Book Review

  “One of those quotable books . . . [that] offers up so much good advice and humorous as well as serious dialogue that the reader will have a hard time forgetting even a small scene.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  The Home for Broken Hearts

  “Coleman displays her usual charm and wit as she creates genuine characters and explores love, life, and sisterhood.”

  —Booklist

  “A mature, thoughtful story [that] successfully juggles a large cast of characters and creates men and women alike with balance and humor. . . . An engaging cast and heartwarming story.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Will make you laugh, cry, and look at your sister in a whole new light.”

  —The Daily Record

  “Paced to perfection, it’s hard not to get emotionally involved.”

  —News of the World

  “Well-written, emotionally satisfying, and engaging.”

  —Daily Mail

  The Accidental Family

  “Winning . . . turns up the heat on Coleman’s trademark humor.”

  —Booklist

  “A tale of romance and love that is fast-paced and sure to keep you speculating.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Great escapism, with a good mix of humor and tension.”

  —Candis

  “I could read about Sophie, Louis, Bella, Izzy, and all, all day long.”

  —Chick Lit Reviews

  Mommy by Mistake

  “Entertaining . . . will have readers laughing and crying.”

  —Booklist

  “A lovely book, a gentle read with lots of romcom factors.”

  —Trashionista

  “Everyone who is a mother will recognize all the emotional highs and lows that the characters in this book experience after having a baby. . . . A poignant story.”

  —Hertfordshire Life

  “Comic and easy to read.”

  —In the Know

  The Accidental Mother

  “Fun, poignant.”

  —OK! magazine

  “A disarmingly sweet tale of motherhood and reluctant love.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Witty and endearing characters . . . an exceptional and touching read.”

  —Booklist

  “A charming tale . . . sophisticated chick lit.”

  —Heat magazine

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  For Stanley Edward and Aubrey John,

  born April 10, 2012

  Dearest Rose,

  Our meeting, though brief, has stayed with me and I wanted to write and thank you for your hospitality when I came to see you a few days ago. You didn’t have to be so kind to a stranger turning up unannounced, but you were and I am so grateful. Although you were not able to help me find the painting, everything you told me about your father was both fascinating and heartbreaking. Why is it, I wonder, that artists are so often capable of creating such beauty whilst doing such harm to themselves and others? I hope that one day you will perhaps be able to reconcile with him and find the answers to all of your questions.

  I hope you will forgive me when I write that you are a remarkable woman and you deserve all the happiness, contentment, and love in the world. I, for one, know that I have never met anyone quite like you.

  Yours,

  Frasier

  Chapter

  One

  “Do you know what time it is?” An irritated woman’s muffled voice was just about audible from the other side of the door.

  “I . . . I know, but this is a B and B, isn’t it?” Rose asked. Her seven-year-old daughter, Maddie, snuggled into her neck, weighing heavily on her hip as she shivered against the cold. Despite it being the height of summer, fine needles of icy rain were driving down into the tops of their heads, and Rose had forgotten to bring Maddie a coat. There hadn’t been time to think about coats; there hadn’t been time to do anything but leave, grabbing a few damp and muddled items from the wash basket in the kitchen, and one oddly wrapped package, bundled up and secreted long ago, perhaps waiting for just this moment.

  “Doors are locked at nine p.m. sharp!” the voice called back. “It’s in all the literature. It’s three o’clock in the morning. I’ve got a good mind to call the police.”

  Rose gasped in a ragged breath, determined not to cry. She’d made it this far without crying; she wasn’t going to let this disembodied voice break her when nothing else had.

  “I know, but, please, I’ve come a long way and I’ve got a little girl with me. We just need a place to stay. I would have booked ahead, but I didn’t know I was coming.”

  There was some more muttering, a man’s voice too, Rose thought, drawing Maddie even nearer into her body, trying to suppress the child’s shivers with her embrace. As she did so, she tightened her arm on her other, less precious package, which was tucked underneath it: a smallish rectangular object that Rose had hurriedly wrapped in a blanket.

  “A child?” The woman’s voice came again.

  “Yes, she’s only seven.”

  With a mixture of fear and trepidation, Rose waited as she heard bolts being drawn back and locks being released. Finally the heavy-looking, thickly painted wooden door drew back to let a slant of yellow light cut through the rain, making the drops dazzle and glitter. A woman of indeterminate age peered through the gap at the sodden pair, and then after a moment took a step back and opened the door wider.

  “This is really most irregular,” she told Rose as she hurried into the hallway. “Knocking on the front door at all hours of the day and night. I’ve got my other guests to think of.”

  “There are no other guests.” The owner of the male voice, a well-built bearded man in his late fifties, sporting a vest and jogging bottoms, smiled at Rose. “Don’t you fret about it, love. It’s no bother. I’m Brian and this is my wife, Jenny. Jenny, you take them up, give them towels, and I’ll bring you both up a nice warm drink. Hot chocolate do you, little one?”

  Maddie drove her face deeper into Rose’s chest, her frozen fingers clinging on for all they were worth. Maddie was not a child who settled easily into strange surroundings, particularly when the circumstances that had brought them here had already been so traumatic.

  “That really is so kind,” Rose said gratefully. “We’d love a hot chocolate, wouldn’t we, Maddie?”

  “Like I said, no bother.” Brian smiled. “Now, got any luggage you want me to bring in for you?”

  “I . . . don’t. No. There’s no luggage.” Rose smiled weakly, lifting one elbow awkwardly to reveal her oddl
y wrapped package. “Just us and this.”

  Jenny raised a skeptical brow, and clearly saw that nothing good could come of her latest and only guest. “I usually ask for cash up front, twenty-five a night. Presumably you’ve got cash?”

  “Yes, I . . .” Rose attempted to reach into her pocket while still cradling Maddie and the package.

  “For God’s sakes, woman,” Brian said, shaking his head, “let the lass be. We’ll sort the payment in the morning. Right, now . . . ?” He looked at her questioningly.

  “Oh, I’m Rose, Rose Pritchard, and this is Maddie.”

  “Right then, well, Rose here needs to get little Maddie into bed!”

  “For all you know she might be an axe murderer,” Jenny muttered not entirely under her breath.

  “Well, if she is, I’ll wager she’s too tired to chop us up tonight. Now stop going on and get up them stairs.”

  It was only as Rose followed Jenny’s considerable behind up the narrow stairs that she realized her landlady was wearing a rather risqué pink negligee, which floated above her on the steep incline like a jellyfish, showing flashes of her ample dimpled thighs. Dimly it occurred to Rose that perhaps Jenny and Brian were the axe murderers, but she was so tired, her body exhausted by the hours of driving and her mind reeling from everything that had happened, that if they were, she didn’t think she could be bothered to run away twice in one day. After all, it had taken her most of her life to find the courage to make this first escape. Millthwaite, without any particular renown or importance, lost deep in the heart of the Lake District, was a village very few people had heard of. Except it was here, in a place that could perhaps most accurately be described as the middle of nowhere, that Rose was hoping against hope to find her second chance.

  Jenny opened the door on a room at the top of the house, flicking on the light. It was a neat, clean little room, with narrow twin beds set about a foot apart, covered with pink candlewick bedspreads. The small rose pattern on the wallpaper was repeated on the curtains and on the swags that hung over them, a style that had been fashionable about thirty years earlier.

  “I’ve put you in here because it’s got its own loo,” Jenny said as Rose sat down on a bed, still holding Maddie tightly as she laid her package down beside her. “There’s clean towels there, and I’ll put the immersion on, I suppose, if you want a shower.”

  “Really, all I want to do is sleep,” Rose said, closing her eyes for a moment.

  “And you’ve got no luggage but that thing?” Jenny asked her, standing in the doorway, her nightie floating around her with a life of its own. “Where have you come from again?”

  “Broadstairs, in Kent,” Rose said, easing Maddie onto the bed and taking one of the folded towels from the pillow to rub her wet hair. Rolling onto her tummy, Maddie refused to show her face to the strange woman, or even the strange room.

  “All that way and not even an overnight bag?” Jenny asked, her curiosity almost as naked as her considerable cleavage.

  “No,” Rose said, hoping she was making it clear that she would not be drawn on the subject.

  “Well, then, as you’ve ruined my and Brian’s special night, anyway, I’ll go and find you something to wear . . .”

  “Oh, please, don’t go to any trouble,” Rose called after Jenny, but she had already left, leaving the door open so that Rose could get the full effect of her righteous stomp down the stairs.

  When she returned, minutes later, she had a few clothes over one arm, and two mugs of hot chocolate in the other hand.

  “My youngest one, Haleigh,” she said, dropping a pink nightshirt with the words “Sex Bomb” emblazoned across the front in glitter. “She’s on a gap year in Thailand, although don’t ask me what a gap year is, as if you get time off from having a proper life to mess around in a foreign country. Anyway, she’s only a slip of a thing, so about your size. And these belong to my grandson, my eldest’s boy. They’ve got Spider-Man on but I shouldn’t think she’ll mind.” Jenny set down the mugs of chocolate on the bedside table. “She all right? Very quiet.”

  “Very tired,” Rose said, stroking Maddie’s dark hair. “And confused.”

  “Right, well, breakfast’s between eight and eight thirty. I don’t take orders, you get what you’re given, and if you want coffee you’ll have to go to the shop and buy it. I don’t hold with the stuff. Unnatural. Oh, and here’s a key for the front door. Do not lose it.”

  “Thank you,” Rose said, breathing a sigh of relief as Jenny gave her one more look of disapproval and then closed the door. Leaving Maddie sitting huddled on the bed for a moment, Rose went over and locked it, and then, turning back to her daughter, eased the little girl’s damp top off over her head.

  Maddie squealed in protest, resolutely keeping her eyes closed, refusing to acknowledge her radical change in circumstances. Change was the very thing that Maddie hated the most, and yet a few hours ago Rose had decided to rip her out of her home, away from everything she knew, and bring her here. Had she done the right thing? At the time it had felt like the only thing she could do, but was that ever true?

  “Come on, darling, let’s get you changed and we can get some sleep,” Rose said, doing her best to keep the tension and uncertainty out of her voice.

  “Where’s Bear?” Maddie asked, opening one eye.

  “Bear’s here. We never go anywhere without Bear, do we?” Bear was in fact a very flea-bitten rabbit that Maddie had been given as a baby, but Bear he had always been known as and Bear he would remain.

  “Where’s my book?” Maddie was referring to her history book on Ancient Egypt, which she’d begged Rose to buy after a day trip to the British Museum. Maddie had become obsessed by mummies, pyramids, and everything else Egyptian, poring over anything she could find on the subject, until she became almost as expert as any curator at the museum. She had read the book she was referring to literally hundreds of times and knew it by heart, but still Rose knew she would read it hundreds of times more. It was just one of her myriad rituals that she had developed recently that Rose had scarcely had time to dwell on or worry about. Young children were eccentric, that’s what everyone said. This same everyone said that Maddie’s obsessive behavior was nothing to worry about, and Rose chose to believe them, even though her instinct told her otherwise.

  “It’s here,” Rose said, pulling the tatty book out of her bag. Thank God it had been in there already, from when she’d taken Maddie to have an asthma checkup that afternoon, otherwise Rose was sure she wouldn’t have remembered to take it with her.

  Content for the book to lie unread on the pillow beside her head, Maddie let Rose pull off her crumpled and damp clothes and put on the pajamas. “I don’t like Spider-Man,” she protested dimly, her lashes dropping with every rise and fall of her chest. Carefully, Rose eased her daughter under the covers, turning off the overhead light that glared from beneath a pink fringed lampshade, and after waiting for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the lack of light, she slipped the package, still wrapped in its ancient blanket—one that had used to grace Rose’s cot when she was a very small child—under Maddie’s bed, took one lukewarm cup of chocolate, and climbed into the other bed, the smooth cool sheets very welcome against her hot, aching skin. Hoping that sleep would come quickly, Rose closed her eyes, yet even though her body shuddered with exhaustion and her eyes screamed to be shut, sleep would not come. Wearily, Rose leant back against the quilted-velour headboard, stared out the window into the dense wet night, and wondered, not for the first time since she’d started the ignition of the car and pulled away from home, what on earth she was doing.

  • • •

  A persistent knocking at the door finally forced Rose to drag her eyelids apart. She wasn’t sure when she had finally fallen asleep, but it felt like only a few seconds ago as she rubbed her eyes and looked around, her memory of where she was, and why, coming back to her in heavy persistent thuds, in time with the beat of her heart.

  “Hello?” she called out
, dragging herself up in bed.

  “Rose? Love, it’s Brian. It’s gone ten, darling. We didn’t like to wake you before. But Jenny’ll still do you a bit of bacon and toast if you’re hungry?”

  “Oh, sorry!” Rose called back, climbing out of bed and looking around for her clothes.

  “I’ll tell her ten minutes, then?” Brian checked, having obviously done some expert diplomatic work to secure her and Maddie breakfasts to go along with their beds.

  “We’ll be there in five!” Rose called, pulling on her knickers and skirt. Maddie was regarding her from her position partially hidden by the bedspread, her large blue eyes peering out over the top.

  “Come on, darling, toast!” Rose said, beaming at her daughter, hoping the promise of her favorite food would lure her out from under the covers.

  “It might not be my bread,” Maddie said, pulling the cover below her chin. “What if it’s not my special bread? I like toast at home, not toast . . . here.”

  “Well, it might be a different, nicer sort of bread. You won’t know what you are missing unless you try it. Here, shall I help you put your dress on?”

  “I don’t want it if it isn’t my bread,” Maddie said, referring to the only brand of sliced bread that she liked to eat.

  Rose closed her eyes for a moment and took a breath. Really, when she’d decided to run away from her home and husband, she perhaps should have given more thought to Maddie’s very particular dietary requirements. “Fussy” was how her teacher referred to her at school, but what she didn’t realize was that anything different on her plate caused Maddie real anxiety.