The Season of Change Read online

  Copyright © 2006 Sheila O’Flanagan

  The right of Sheila O’Flanagan to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 as Connections by HEADLINE REVIEW

  An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  First published in paperback in 2006 as Connections by HEADLINE REVIEW

  This edition published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2019

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  Cover images by Shutterstock: parasol © mirelle; deck-chairs © olrat; beach © Food Travel Stockforlife; bag © Neirfy; palm-tree © Akugasahagy

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 6150 2

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Sheila O’Flanagan

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Room 404 Corinne

  Room 217 Bree

  Room 403 Esther

  Room 105 Jennifer

  Room 205 Gala

  Room 608 Isobel

  Room 311 Rudy

  Room 316 Tara

  Reception June

  Room 522 Gráinne

  Room 505 Dee

  Coco Villa Sahndhi

  About the Author

  Sheila O’Flanagan is the award-winning author of over twenty bestselling novels, including Her Husband’s Mistake, The Hideaway, What Happened That Night, The Missing Wife, My Mother’s Secret, All for You (winner of the Irish Popular Fiction Book of the Year Award) and Bad Behaviour, as well as the bestselling short story collections The Moment We Meet, Connections and Christmas with You.

  Sheila has always loved telling stories, and after working in banking and finance for a number of years, she decided it was time to fulfil a dream and give writing her own book a go. So she sat down, stuck ‘Chapter One’ at the top of a page, and got started.

  Sheila lives in Dublin with her husband.

  Praise for Sheila O’Flanagan:

  ‘An exciting love story with a deliciously romantic denouement’ Sunday Express

  ‘Romantic and charming’ Candis

  ‘A fabulous tale with refreshingly inspiring heroines’ ***** Heat

  ‘I read the book in one sitting as it was so enjoyable, full of romance and kept you riveted until the last page’ Woman’s Way

  By Sheila O’Flanagan and available from Headline

  Suddenly Single

  Far From Over

  My Favourite Goodbye

  He’s Got To Go

  Isobel’s Wedding

  Caroline’s Sister

  Too Good To Be True

  Dreaming Of A Stranger

  Anyone But Him

  How Will I Know?

  The Moment We Meet

  The Season of Change

  Yours, Faithfully

  Bad Behaviour

  Someone Special

  The Perfect Man

  Stand By Me

  All For You

  Better Together

  Things We Never Say

  If You Were Me

  My Mother’s Secret

  The Missing Wife

  What Happened That Night

  The Hideaway

  Her Husband’s Mistake

  About the Book

  Where do you go to solve all your problems?

  Where would you go if you were a singer fed up with the fame you never desired? Where would you choose to get married if you didn’t want a certain high-maintenance, nightmare guest in attendance? Where would you go to pretend your marriage wasn’t the sham you always thought it was? And if you were a writer looking for a gripping new plot, where could you find it?

  At the beautiful White Sands resort the Caribbean sunshine works its magic – just so long as its guests’ troubles haven’t followed them all the way to paradise . . .

  To Colm

  Author’s Note

  The number one question I’m asked by readers is ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ For this collection of short stories, I’m able to answer that!

  I was lucky enough to stay in a lovely hotel on a Caribbean island some time ago. It was an extremely popular wedding location and one evening I noticed a bride-to-be having a heated discussion with her partner. My imagination started to run away with me as I wondered what on earth they were arguing about and suddenly I was making up stories about the wedding couple and everyone else who stayed there – Connections is the result!

  Additionally, many readers have asked me about sequels to some of my novels. I don’t generally like sequels myself, but from time to time I’ve thought about characters I’ve created and wondered what might have happened to them. So I’ve included two stories here with characters from Isobel’s Wedding and He’s Got To Go. I hope readers who have asked about Isobel and Bree will be happy with how things turned out for them! You may also pick up references to a couple of other characters from previous novels. I hope you’ll enjoy recognising them too.

  I’d like to thank Ciara Considine for insisting that I write more short stories and editing these so meticulously, and Jess Whitlum-Cooper for all her work on this edition. Thanks also to Breda Purdue and Ruth Shern for being so unfailingly positive about my writing. More thanks to Isobel Dixon and everyone at the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency who have carried on Carole Blake’s legacy of work and fun being the same thing.

  A special thank you to my family who are so wonderful – particularly my lovely nephews David, James, Hugh and Oisín.

  And again, to all my readers, thank you for your support. I hope you enjoy this collection and that, no matter where you are, it transports you to tropical climes! You can keep in touch with me through my social media accounts:

  http://www.facebook.com/sheilabooks

  www.facebook.com/sheilabooks

  www.twitter.com/sheilaoflanagan

  www.instagram.com/sheilaoflanagan

  Room 404 (Corinne)

  Jennifer Jones sat at the table on her balcony.

  No, thought Corinne, that’s too boring. It doesn’t say anything, doesn’t let people know where she is. Or what sort of person she is. Or what might be about to happen to her.

  Jennifer Jones watched the crystal-clear water from the chair on her balcony.

  But what’s she doing sitting down? Corinne asked herself. Why is she sitting around like a lame-ass when she’s somewhere gorgeous and exotic? And when she’s supposed to be gorgeous and exotic too? And especially when she’s supposed to be a sassy action heroine? She shouldn’t be sitting anywhere just looking at the sea like a feeble pensioner. (Though pensioners don’t have to be feeble. Note to self: how about a pensioner heroine for a future novel? Mightn’t that be interesting? Or is that too Agatha Christie? Miss Bloody Marple, of course. Nobody can do a pensioner like Miss Bloody Marple, can they?) Corinne frowned as she looked at her revised open
ing sentence again. I haven’t even said that it’s the sea she’s looking at, have I? Crystal-clear water could be a lake. I’m still not giving any information about what’s going to happen to her at all.

  Jennifer Jones . . . Jennifer Jones . . . Corinne stared at the open laptop in front of her. Oh bloody hell, she thought. What the hell is going to happen to her? I’ve no damn idea. She pushed the laptop away from her in disgust and stared out over the blue and white wooden rails of the balcony of Room 404. She sighed deeply. Bloody Jennifer Jones. She loathed the woman. Detested her. Hated her. Abhorred her. Corinne pulled the laptop towards her again and clicked on the thesaurus. Abhor. Abominate. Deplore. Detest. Dislike. Execrate. She frowned. Was execrate a verb? She wasn’t sure. She’d never heard of it before. But it would do. If it meant what it was supposed to mean, then she absolutely totally and utterly execrated Jennifer Bloody Jones.

  Corinne snapped the laptop closed and got up from the table. She walked back into the air-conditioned bedroom and picked up the pile of books on her bedside locker. They all had a black jacket with the silhouette of a tall, extremely thin woman etched on the front. The silhouette was in various colours. Vivid green. Pillar-box red. Shocking pink.

  Jennifer Jones and the Jealous Journalist by Corinne Doherty. The Number 1 Bestseller. A new and exciting addition to the slick-chick genre. Jennifer Jones and the Jade Jester by Corinne Doherty. Further Adventures of Europe’s Sassiest Private Eye. Jennifer Jones and the Jellybean Jackpot by Corinne Doherty. Ms Jones Rides High!

  Why in God’s name had she called the woman Jennifer Jones? It was getting harder and harder to come up with clever titles – not that the ones she’d come up with before were all that clever, but the publisher loved the alliteration – and it was becoming even more difficult to think of a half-decent plot to go with them. How many murders could one woman solve, for heaven’s sake? How many times could her heroine save the day? Heroine, hah! Jennifer Jones wasn’t a heroine to Corinne. She was a bloody weight around her neck.

  But Jennifer Jones was apparently a beloved heroine to loads of other people. What had started out as a kind of niche private eye caper had turned into an unexpectedly big seller and had, astonishingly, been bought by readers of the darker kind of crime novels too, propelling Jennifer Jones towards the top of the charts and fostering a clatter of Jennifer Jones fan-sites on the internet. (Corinne worried about some of Jennifer’s fans. They seemed to know more about her than she did herself!)

  Of course she hadn’t expected anything like that to happen. When she’d tentatively sent off the first novel to an agent and had waited, with fingers crossed, to hear back from him, she’d loved the idea of her long-legged, beanpole-bodied supermodel private eye. And she’d loved the plot of the Jealous Journalist too, a plot that had come to her all of a sudden as she sat in the bath, so that she jumped out, towelled down and started writing straight away. But she hadn’t intended to write a damn series. The whole concept was a one-off as far as she was concerned. She hadn’t (if she was really truthful with herself) even expected the book to ever hit the shelves at all.

  She flopped across the queen-sized bed and closed her eyes. When Arnie, her agent, had called to tell her about the publishing deal, she’d almost collapsed with the excitement. And when he’d told her that Dagger Press, the publishers, wanted a second book about the private eye from her, she’d barely hesitated before agreeing. After all, she reckoned, the Jealous Journalist had been easy to write. And even though she hadn’t intended another novel with Jennifer, well, she could manage it. So she did. The Jade Jester had been a bit more difficult to put together, but she’d suddenly found a cracking plot and, of course, Jennifer did her exotic thing the whole way through. That book had sold even more than the first. And then – well, everything should have been perfect. Most people would have said it actually was.

  Arnie had called her, barely containing his excitement, to say that Dagger Press wanted more of Jennifer Jones. Lots more. And so did the reading public. They loved her. She was becoming a guaranteed bestseller. Dagger Press wanted to keep Corinne and Jennifer Jones on their list. Other publishing companies wanted her too. She was hot property. And – Arnie had paused for dramatic effect here – the TV people were interested. They loved cosy crime, he told her. Or glossy crime. Particularly for Sunday nights. Stuff like Midsomer Murders, where nothing was too gory or horrible but where there was a ridiculously high body count and an engaging sleuth. Jennifer Jones would fit that bill perfectly in a modern way. She would update the whole vista of Sunday-evening viewing. She was more than slick-chick territory – she could nab the older viewer too.

  Corinne had always wanted to be hot property, although she’d never expected that it would really happen. And the idea of her stories being used as Sunday-evening TV was very exciting. But she felt a nervous flutter in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘I’ve only written two books,’ she told Arnie anxiously. ‘They can hardly make a series out of two books.’

  ‘What we’re talking about is adapting the books,’ he said. ‘Three- or four-parters. They can do the first two and by then you’ll have produced the third. After that we’ll see how to progress. There’s a lot of mileage in Jennifer Jones. You can do more books but the TV could equally be standalone, just using the character. You don’t have to write the TV stuff, of course.’

  ‘But . . .’ Corinne looked confused, ‘how can they do something when we don’t know what’s going to happen to the character? I mean, what if Jennifer Jones decides to get married?’

  Arnie looked at her sternly. ‘Don’t do anything stupid like marry her off,’ he said. ‘The great thing about her is the chemistry between herself and the people she’s investigating. You can’t marry her off. And be careful who she sleeps with too. You don’t want to alienate anyone.’

  Corinne blinked.

  ‘The public love her,’ said Arnie, a little more gently. ‘They’ve invested time and interest in her. You don’t want to piss them off.’

  ‘She’s my detective,’ said Corinne defiantly. ‘I can do what I want with her.’

  ‘Not when we sign this deal,’ Arnie told her. ‘She’ll become a brand name. You can’t mess with a brand name.’

  Corinne hadn’t wanted Jennifer Jones to become a brand name. But when Arnie told her the amount of money involved for another three books, she took out her special contract-signing fountain pen and scrawled her signature straight away before the honchos in Dagger Press changed their minds. The money meant that she could pay off all of her debts (and put an end to those letters from her credit card company reminding her about the necessity to make the minimum payment every month); buy a new car and put a deposit on a lovely apartment; pay for her mother’s hip operation and her father’s glaucoma one; and give her adorable, but totally hopeless younger brother some cash towards setting up his own plumbing business. Although as she wrote out the cheque for Bill, Corinne couldn’t help thinking that it was money down the drain. Literally.

  ‘You’re the best, sis.’ His eyes were bright as she handed him the money. ‘I’ll make you so proud of me.’

  She wrote Jennifer Jones and the Jellybean Jackpot in a haze of delight, thinking of all the great things she could do for her family with the money she was going to bring in over the next few years. But Jennifer Jones and the Jellybean Jackpot didn’t sell quite as well as Jennifer Jones and the Jade Jester. It made a quick appearance in the bestseller charts but was then bumped out by a flood of Nordic Noir crime books and a celebrity novel written by a stunning former catwalk model. In Corinne’s (admittedly biased) opinion, Model Murder was a blatant rip-off of Jennifer Jones, although the critics called it ‘grittier’. She was enraged that a grittier rip-off of her book was being paraded as a must-read for millions of TV viewers, and even more enraged when the interviewer on the programme told them that Model Murder was the best piece of crime fiction she’d read in years and that it was a definite number one.

  C
orinne had thought about making Jennifer Jones grittier herself but had been persuaded against it. She kept having wonderful ideas about her private eye getting hooked on designer drugs (after all, she moved in circles where recreational drug use was perfectly acceptable. As were uppers, downers and appetite suppressants), or taking a lesbian lover, or developing bulimia; but when she mentioned this to Arnie he’d nearly had a heart attack.

  ‘Jennifer Jones is a role model,’ he’d hissed at her. ‘Role models don’t have drugs issues or lesbian lovers. And they certainly don’t have bulimia.’

  ‘Princess Diana did,’ Corinne pointed out.

  ‘Yes. And she’s dead.’

  Sometimes, thought Corinne, Arnie could be ruthlessly businesslike.

  ‘What about this Model Murder, though?’ asked Corinne. ‘Everyone thinks it’s brilliant. Rowena Roselli has taken over my spot!’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Arnie snorted. ‘She’s a one-hit wonder. I have it on good authority that her next book is a crock of shit and the publishers are tearing their hair out over it.’

  ‘Yes, but she was on all the TV programmes,’ wailed Corinne. ‘Flaunting her jail sentence.’

  Rowena, the author of Model Murder, had served a few months for supplying drugs. She’d been on Loose Women and The Graham Norton Show and a whole range of other TV programmes talking about her ‘lapse’ and how it had made her a better person. When she told her story everyone whooped and cheered and agreed that she deserved a second chance.

  ‘It’s a selling point, that’s all,’ said Arnie.

  ‘Well maybe I need a selling point too!’

  Corinne had thought long and hard about what her selling point could be, but she couldn’t actually come up with anything. She’d led an unfortunately blameless and boring childhood. It was disgraceful, in fact, how boring her childhood had been, and now it had become a real drawback because it was so damn competitive out there – people wanted to read novels by authors who’d been abandoned by their parents or overcome some awful disease or done something really extraordinary in their lives (as though serving a jail sentence for drug-pushing was anything to be proud of, Corinne thought bitterly); it just wasn’t enough to have written a damn book any more.