The House in the Clouds - Victoria Connelly Page 0,6

there was a house in Kent, close to the coast: a weather-boarded property with lots of character and a small walled garden which was very pretty indeed.

All of these properties were lovely and each would have made a perfect home and, perhaps, Abi might have been happy in any one of them. But they all had one fatal flaw. They weren’t Winfield.

Once back in her London home after yet another trip to see a house, she kicked off her shoes and rubbed her eyes. She was tired and not just from the travelling to see all the recent properties. It was more than that. She felt heart weary. It was as if she knew that the home for her was off the market and she wasn’t going to find another. She’d have to make do with second best. Which was silly really because there couldn’t just be one perfect home for somebody, could there? There were bound to be dozens if not hundreds of places where a person could be happy. That’s what she tried to tell herself.

She even thought that perhaps she should stay in London. Maybe the universe was steering her in a direction she couldn’t quite make out yet. And then she’d close her eyes and think of those green lanes and chalky footpaths of the downs. There was something about that countryside that had resonated so strongly with her and she simply couldn’t fall in love with anywhere else. Not for the time being, anyway.

‘You’re acting like a spoilt child,’ she said to herself. There were any number of beautiful places she could afford. So she couldn’t get her first choice – so what? Luck or fate or whatever it was hadn’t meant it to be so she needed to pull herself together, that was all.

But, as often as she told herself that, she couldn’t help harbouring just a little self-pity over the beautiful home that wasn’t to be hers. And so she switched off from property hunting for a while and focussed on her work.

It was a strange, transitory time for Abi because she’d recently sold her company – the company she’d started from a few illustrations of sunflowers she’d idly sketched at her kitchen table. When she thought about it now, she’d had no idea of the crazy times that lay ahead of her. If she had, perhaps she would have torn the illustrations up into a million tiny pieces because, for Abi, it was all about the art. She had never planned on being an entrepreneur, but fate seemed to have plans for her and, within a few short years, she found herself at the head of a company that was making more money than she’d ever dreamed of.

Abi still couldn’t believe there was so much money to be made from tea towels, wallpaper and tablecloths, but there had been something special in her designs – something unique and fresh that the world was ready for and Abi had been flattered and had gone along for the ride. She would have been crazy not to. And how wonderful it had been to see her designs in shops. At first, she opened a small concession in a department store, but it had done so well that it soon became apparent that she would need her own shop. So she slowly built a team around her and they had managed very well to begin with, designing a website and handling each and every order themselves. They felt that they knew their customers individually and there was a real sense of family about the business.

Then the crazy times began with more shops opening and more staff being hired, staff that other staff were hiring. Branches began opening all over the country and then abroad, with their first shop in Paris. It had been such an exciting time and Abi had genuinely loved seeing the international appetite for her designs. But things had moved so far away from what she wanted now and, for the past couple of years, she hadn’t felt in control anymore. She’d slowly morphed from creator to business woman and it was a role she didn’t feel cut out for. On top of that was the fact that she was surrounded by so many people who were there to make decisions for the company – decisions that Abi couldn’t make on her own. It all felt so big. That might have seemed like a feeble complaint to most people and some might have