The Secret Seaside Escape: The most heart-warming feel-good romance of 2020 from the Sunday Times bestseller! Read online

  Praise for

  Heidi Swain

  ‘Sweet and lovely. I guarantee you will fall in love with Heidi’s wonderful world’ Milly Johnson

  ‘Wise, warm and wonderful – a real summer treat!’ Heat

  ‘Sparkling and romantic’ My Weekly

  ‘The most delicious slice of festive fiction: a true comfort read and the perfect treat to alleviate all the stress!’ Veronica Henry

  ‘A fabulous feel good read – a ray of reading sunshine!’ Laura Kemp

  ‘Sprinkled with Christmas sparkle’ Trisha Ashley

  ‘A story that captures your heart’ Chrissie Barlow

  ‘Fans of Carole Matthews will enjoy this heartfelt novel’ Katie Oliver

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  To Michael, my dad,

  who I don’t see nearly often enough,

  but who is forever in my thoughts

  and always in my heart

  Chapter 1

  If I closed my eyes and concentrated, I could see the sea stretching ahead of me, all the way to the distant horizon. I could breathe in the fresh salty air and almost taste the tang of it on my lips. If I stood in that exact spot, I could see the sun rising, quickly reaching the glistening rockpools, tempting me to explore their secret depths. And if I concentrated even harder, I could hear the waves lapping the shore, gulls wheeling overhead and feel the warm, soft sand, pushing up between my bare toes . . .

  ‘Tess?’

  I concentrated that little bit harder.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I screwed my eyes up tighter still, hoping to catch sight of my mother. She would be sitting in a deckchair, wearing her favourite yellow sundress and waving with one hand, a well-thumbed paperback clasped firmly in the other.

  ‘Earth to Tess. Do you read me?’

  It was no good. The spell was broken. No amount of focused concentration could block out the noise of the office and my colleagues who, I discovered when I finally opened my eyes, had crowded around my desk, concern etched across their brows.

  Apparently, it wasn’t possible to close your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears without drawing a certain amount of attention, but I had been deeply immersed in my moment of mindful meditation and would have been happier if they’d just left me to it. That said, I supposed I should have been grateful that my team had even noticed my ‘absence’. Considering the week we’d had, I was surprised any of them actually cared for my wellbeing at all.

  ‘Oh, you are still with us then?’ Chris snapped.

  Not that Chris’s tone was particularly caring, but given the fact that it was now seven forty-five on a Friday evening, and we still had work to do, it was hardly surprising that tempers were frayed.

  ‘Where else would I be?’ I told him, as I smoothed my hair, sat up straighter and tried my level best to look, at least, present.

  It wasn’t easy when I could still hear the call of the sea in the distance and imagine the warmth of the sun on the back of my neck. My body might have been behind my desk in the offices of Tyler PR but my mind was very much elsewhere. Every atom of me was craving the freedom of a holiday, a three-day minibreak even, but as senior project manager in my father’s firm the chances of that happening were pure fantasy.

  Judging by the enormity of my current workload, it was looking more and more likely that I would end up sacrificing the larger chunk of my holiday entitlement again this year. I couldn’t deny that my role came with what looked like, on paper at least, an extremely generous holiday quota, but I had never managed to take it all. In fact, the higher up the pay scale I had worked so tirelessly to climb, the less opportunity I’d had to recharge my batteries.

  And if I was being honest, that had been exactly how I liked it, especially during the last year and a half since my mother’s unexpected death. Powering through whatever life threw at me had felt like the right way to go then, but not now. Now I was in danger of a meltdown because I had the wherewithal to recognize that I was heading towards burn out and that marching on had brought me no closer to accepting my loss at all.

  Conversely, my father had no idea about my fragile mental state. He just noticed the parts of my life he wanted to and had always derived great pleasure in telling his contemporaries that he was incredibly proud of my commitment to the business. He abhorred nepotism, had consequently made me work twice as hard as everyone else to prove myself and loved the fact that my work ethic matched his own. He was completely clueless that this latest project had brought me to the brink and had me dreaming of an escape even during my waking hours.

  ‘We thought you were going to pass out,’ frowned Lucy, my assistant, as she handed me a glass of water and fanned me with a file.

  ‘You thought she was going to pass out,’ tutted Sonya, another colleague.

  Relatively new to the role, efficient and eager, Lucy had a tendency to flap when the stress ramped up but I was working on ways to calm her. A cool and collected head was needed in this business, even if only on the outside.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, taking a sip of the water and waving the file away. ‘I was just gathering my thoughts.’

  ‘Come up with anything useful?’ Chris asked.

  He didn’t sound very hopeful and I knew he was desperate to get home. We all were, but we needed to have a damage limitation strategy firmly in place before we thought about our plans for the weekend. Not that I was particularly looking forward to mine.

  ‘Possibly,’ I nodded. ‘Meet me in conference room one in twenty minutes.’

  *

  As usual, I was the last to leave and it was almost midnight before I let myself into my apartment, kicked off my heels and poured a glass of restorative wine. Had anyone believed that being the boss’s daughter came with perks I could have quashed their assumptions with any one of my time sheets from the last few months.

  I couldn’t remember the drive home. My mind had been miles away from the road – not at the seaside this time – but trawling through the atrocious pics in the red-tops which had sent my week into a tailspin. What had the guy been thinking? I ignored the sharp knotted-up pain in my stomach and flopped down on the sofa.

  When I had interviewed for the job in Dad’s public relations firm, after graduating with a first in marketing seven years ago, I could never have foreseen that I would be trying to untangle anything like the mess which had descended during the last few days.

  When I had been tasked with nothing more taxing than the morning coffee round and the daily sandwich order (Dad was a firm believer in learning the business from the bottom up), I had dreamt of working with prestigious clients on million-pound projects and taking on the unusual role of matching their specifications to the perfect ‘celebrities’ to endorse their brands, but had I known that my biggest project to date was destined to go belly-up just weeks before it was due to launch, I would have stuck to ordering the egg and cress.

  ‘Shit,’ I muttered, spilling some of the wine as my mobile began to trill, dragging me back to the present and making me jump.

  I picked up my bag with my free
hand and shook it out on the sofa, scattering the contents and at the same time praying it wasn’t more bad news. I shuddered as I recalled the graphic images of my high-profile footballer with his tongue down the throat of some scantily clad girl, splashed across the front pages.

  The clever journalist had put them alongside the studio image of him with his wife and daughters which I’d ensured was released just days before to further bolster his ‘reformed character’ image ahead of the family values advertising campaign my client had employed him for. It had been the ultimate humiliation, and not just for his wife and girls.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, when I eventually located my phone. ‘Hi.’

  ‘All sorted?’

  As ever, he was straight down to business. Sometimes I found it hard to believe that the father he had turned into was the same, formerly so laid-back one who carried me about on his shoulders when I was little.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think so?’

  I felt myself bristle.

  ‘We’ve done all we can for now,’ I added a little tartly. ‘We have a plan in place and I’ll pick it up again on Monday.’

  ‘Oh right,’ he said. ‘There was no way of wrapping it up tonight?’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I couldn’t reach any of the advertising team after ten, so we thought we’d call it a day.’

  Truth be told, for the sake of my team’s sanity, I hadn’t tried to ring out again after our last in-house meeting of the evening.

  ‘And you’re sure you don’t want me to step in?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  Of course, I didn’t want him to step in. How ridiculous would that make me look? He was quiet for a second and I held my breath. For an awful moment I thought he was going to say he was going to anyway.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then,’ he eventually said.

  I slowly breathed out and closed my eyes. Now I was the quiet one.

  ‘You still there, Tess?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, clearing my throat, ‘yes, I’m still here.’

  It was me who had broached the subject of sorting through Mum’s things. It was me who had insisted we had to make time in our packed schedules to start properly going through everything. I had read somewhere that the process could be cathartic, offer some level of closure and I could definitely do with a dose of that, even just a small one.

  Initially, Dad had kept saying that it wasn’t a good time, but I had quickly countered his argument by pointing out that it never would be and he had reluctantly agreed to setting the date for this weekend. It was ironic that after all my reading up on the subject, I was now the one who wasn’t ready.

  It was now heading towards two years since Mum had died of a heart attack that no one had seen coming, but she was still everywhere. Her clothes still hung in the wardrobes, her jewellery was all laid out and sometimes, in her bathroom, I could still smell Chanel. It was utterly impossible to believe that she was gone for ever when her possessions appeared poised to welcome her back. It was impossible to believe that she was gone for ever when I hadn’t spent anywhere near enough time with her in recent years. Had I known the sand in her hourglass had all but run out I would have ensured things had been different.

  In my heart, she would always be the woman from my childhood. The smiling mum on the beach in her yellow sundress with her hair in a ponytail and a book in her hand, but in my head, I knew she hadn’t been that woman for years. As the business had grown, she, like Dad, had turned into a completely different person. A person it was too late for me to get to know now.

  ‘You’d better come early,’ said Dad, ‘there’s a hell of a lot to do.’

  *

  I didn’t stop to pick up a paper the next morning and I didn’t turn my phone back on again either. If there was more bad news to come about my failing footballer, then I wanted to delay hearing about it for as long as possible.

  I pulled off the road, onto the gravelled drive and buzzed the intercom. The iron gates swung slowly inwards and I drove through. The impressive house, set among towering oaks, hadn’t been our original family home. Up until my late teens, we lived in a three-bed detached, but my parents then felt this prestigious corner of Essex was more befitting the stylish new Tyler image when the business began to thrive.

  It was beautiful, but far too big. Dad had no need for the five en suite bedrooms but Joan (the housekeeper) and her husband, Jim (the gardener and handyman) were happily ensconced in the staff flat and I knew Dad would never leave. As far as he was concerned, the house was the icing that crowned his success, even if he could only occupy a fraction of it at a time.

  ‘Tess,’ he said, striding out to meet me as I cut the engine, ‘here you are at last.’

  It was barely eight, hardly the latest of starts for a weekend which followed an extremely stressful week.

  ‘Any more news?’ I stole myself to ask.

  ‘Nothing in the papers this morning,’ he said.

  ‘Thank god,’ I exhaled, my shoulders dropping a good three inches.

  ‘Breakfast!’ Joan called from the kitchen.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ Dad asked, guiding me towards the house.

  ‘Not since yesterday morning.’

  He nodded but didn’t say anything. He had never understood how stressful work situations curbed my appetite, because they fuelled his. The smell of bacon wafting through the house made my very empty stomach grumble and the knot of pain tightened in response. It was a vicious circle – my anxiety stopped me eating and the resulting cramps made it too painful to eat.

  ‘To be honest, Dad,’ I blurted out, before I had a chance to check myself, ‘it might be longer than that. I’m really not sure I can carry on working like this.’

  Given how quickly he had sent me to have my heart checked after we lost Mum, surely he would get the gist of what I was trying to say. It had been an intense few months – long working days and almost impossible deadlines – and I feared that if I didn’t slacken the pace soon, I would end up doing myself some irreparable harm. After this current campaign was in the bag, I really was going to have to take a break. Surely, he would understand that?

  ‘Of course you can,’ he said stoically, drawing himself up to his full height as we stepped into the palatial kitchen. ‘You’re a Tyler, Tess. We don’t give up, remember? We thrive on stress. Our ability to power through is what keeps us one step ahead of the competition.’

  I wanted to point out that I used to thrive on stress. Channelling my grief into my work was the very thing that had given me the strength to put in the increased hours, but now my mental as well as my physical energy was spent. I’d had enough and if I was being honest (to myself at least), it wasn’t just my grief that I was struggling with.

  More and more often I was having to justify, cover up and even lie about certain so-called celebrities’ lifestyles and behaviours in order to make them an attractive enough proposition to match with our clients, and I didn’t like doing it. The pay cheque my position in the firm afforded me might have given me a fabulous car and an admirable apartment, but what did any of that matter if I couldn’t sleep at night?

  ‘Look,’ he said, when I didn’t defer to his tough Tyler ethos, ‘maybe you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. You dropped the ball this time, but—’

  ‘Dropped the ball?’ I interrupted.

  I knew I sounded indignant but, surely, he wasn’t going to try and pin the footballer’s fall from grace on me?

  ‘It was his agent who gave him leave to go out and celebrate those goals,’ I said defensively. ‘I had no idea—’

  ‘But you should have,’ Dad interrupted, ‘and you know it. You should have known his schedule better than your own.’

  I bit my lip to stop myself announcing that I was sick of babysitting adults who should know how to behave. This was clearly not the time to try and get my point across. The day was going to be tough enough and I didn’t need to fall out with ‘the boss’ on top of ev
erything else.

  ‘Well, he’s on a tight leash now,’ I said instead, swallowing down my annoyance. ‘He won’t be straying again.’

  ‘But you can’t use him for the campaign, Tess,’ Dad countered. ‘The public won’t have an ounce of faith in him now.’

  I thought of the elaborate damage limitation plan my team had been working on late the night before.

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts,’ said Dad, holding up his hand before I could explain. ‘We have the Tyler reputation to think of and I know you said not to, but I did make a couple of calls last night. I think Vicky Price might be a possibility.’

  ‘Vicky . . .’

  ‘Price. She plays football for England and is available to step in.’

  I knew who she was, I just couldn’t believe Dad had ‘stepped in’ when I’d specifically asked him not to.

  ‘She’s just had her second baby and I thought it would be an interesting twist to have a woman spearheading the project. Her agent was very keen.’

  ‘Have you approached the advertiser?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I thought I’d leave that to you,’ he said bluntly, piling the eggs Joan had scrambled on to a plate. ‘Now come on, eat up.’

  I couldn’t believe he had gone ahead and done that. Bringing Vicky Price in was an inspired idea, but in doing it he had made me look completely inept.

  *

  After some cajoling from Joan, I did manage to eat a modest breakfast which was just as well, given the amount of work involved in sorting through Mum’s things. Had my belly stayed empty I would have probably ended up keeling over.

  ‘Half of this hasn’t even been worn,’ Dad grumbled, as he shifted outfit after outfit into the hanging boxes sent by the charity taking the clothes. ‘These have all still got the labels on.’

  He was right and flicking through them I could see the amounts Mum had spent was breathtaking. The charity would make a fortune at the fashion show they were holding later in the year to auction off their very best donated stock.

  ‘No wonder her credit cards were always stretched to the limit,’ Dad moaned on. ‘Your mother had transformed into a professional shopper.’