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Meet Me at the Lighthouse: This summer’s best laugh-out-loud romantic comedy
Mary Jayne Baker
‘One of my top books of 2017… side-splittingly hilarious’ The Writing Garnet’The day I turned 28, I bought a lighthouse and met the love of my life’Bobbie Hannigan’s life in a cottage by the sea with her dog and her twin sister is perfectly fine … until she decides the logical thing is to buy a lighthouse and open a music venue with Ross Mason, the first boy she ever kissed.Bobbie tries to be professional with Ross, but the happily-ever-after they’re working toward is too good to resist. That is until someone from his past crawls back to cause trouble. Can Bobbie look past the secrets Ross has been keeping from her? Or will the boy, the lighthouse, and the dream all slip away?Escape to the Yorkshire coast this summer with this laugh out loud romantic comedy from Mary Jayne Baker!
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HarperImpulse
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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2017
Copyright © Mary Jayne Baker 2017
Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com (http://www.Shutterstock.com)
Cover design © Books Covered 2017
Mary Jayne Baker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008258313
Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008258306
Version: 2017-06-15
Robert Fletcher, this one’s for you. To Crazy Golf, Cheeky Vimtoes and the carefree seaside days of our youth. Cheers.
Table of Contents
Cover (#u0e9b8d72-d2cd-5679-a03d-d6b0a37afd8e)
Title Page (#u1e527e7e-22e1-5bdb-87cd-7cc839912795)
Copyright (#uf249ec7c-ffa2-5425-aee1-f9cb8f0d0dc3)
Dedication (#ua4ec04ca-90c1-590e-81d9-8b8a8c9b9d19)
Chapter 1 (#ub2b09d46-823b-55d5-a5cc-55169327fb14)
Chapter 2 (#ub2c98968-c9ef-5f80-a629-e49829a18041)
Chapter 3 (#ua50abb20-17ca-544c-ad9b-fc4aca34e328)
Chapter 4 (#u42221052-00ce-5775-b120-2968176ba1fc)
Chapter 5 (#u7561ca60-3e2d-5dea-9f97-1975384f1208)
Chapter 6 (#udeb5269b-9f42-5afe-b335-a83cb8c4e45a)
Chapter 7 (#uee0678ca-f5a4-5e67-9c48-77a9c65c9524)
Chapter 8 (#uac1bce73-9ceb-57e8-a193-4d3a4001dc58)
Chapter 9 (#u2a51fb01-8311-5b9c-94ab-ba714a51f4e0)
Chapter 10 (#u62bd2d0d-df2d-5ae6-8daf-1ec00af6ea18)
Chapter 11 (#u75ff8204-a39e-5d6c-b6cd-40d2b826116f)
Chapter 12 (#uc1abe7fb-ca6a-57dd-b793-132da40efb94)
Chapter 13 (#uf428af17-3595-5c98-be35-a1f551e2f770)
Chapter 14 (#ucef79a86-1dc0-5bec-8c13-4c2862025728)
Chapter 15 (#u1139454b-9bdb-58f6-b59a-2d7db600d836)
Chapter 16 (#u7f366168-b20c-5378-975d-365e207405d9)
Chapter 17 (#u2dfb87dc-c49d-534a-929b-1ce1e21ee7da)
Chapter 18 (#ud1925822-50d2-5a92-961a-05029e49a398)
Chapter 19 (#u324c07ec-375d-546b-9cf0-ede2621fe60b)
Chapter 20 (#uf557f1b2-dacf-5950-823c-45a19cfcc8d2)
Chapter 21 (#ucbac87a1-076e-557c-b334-03e6bf65d1fd)
Chapter 22 (#ud9cf7173-39d0-5c98-96c3-fcde27026929)
Chapter 23 (#uc3ac7438-71ba-5daa-ac6a-03f4e6b8d8c3)
Chapter 24 (#u244eef67-a3a1-57cb-8124-afc2e2f7638d)
Chapter 25 (#ud81a65a5-0172-5241-9f78-563d36467fee)
Chapter 26 (#u789a00d1-a824-57ec-bbf2-b430f749b9f0)
Chapter 27 (#u33fb1ed6-2ee7-5c79-94de-0106228a65da)
Chapter 28 (#u9ec3ad50-12eb-5a61-87e7-3392b8c689ba)
Chapter 29 (#u6520e07b-423d-56e6-9e74-f6de16cc8a00)
Chapter 30 (#ubf0200e6-4724-53ea-88b3-282c1fd053cd)
Chapter 31 (#u9c7ab573-e292-559e-a919-b545e31c6744)
Chapter 32 (#u4a9a3fd4-2c37-5368-ae86-d6569e52a71d)
Chapter 33 (#u0f7210dd-e152-5f1e-834b-672d5758c3a1)
Chapter 34 (#u775451df-8c39-5268-a588-dd735c78d736)
Chapter 35 (#u3d71a4ab-19eb-5760-94c4-175abc51c37a)
Chapter 36 (#ua9f69c33-2e6a-508a-80e5-1e52910df739)
Acknowledgements (#uc26b4d10-33bd-58ac-bf41-bb417fa6cecc)
Also by Mary Jayne Baker (#u3485d10c-3086-5f66-bba3-32da3558c0c8)
About the Author (#u7f46c172-c7ae-5cc7-ab61-f5f1100064f9)
About HarperImpulse (#u81497f71-84d3-5d1d-b3e5-03158261c659)
About the Publisher (#uc33267ca-48f0-58b2-8f0e-8833d720ac7c)
Chapter 1 (#u63a381f1-0bfb-5cd3-a738-aec7dc9436e8)
The day I turned 28, I bought a lighthouse and met the love of my life.
I mean, as you do. Get up, have boiled egg, meet love of life, buy lighthouse. We’ve all been there, right?
Of course I didn’t know, when I was right in the fog of it, that I was meeting the love of my life. I didn’t know I was less than an hour from buying my very own lighthouse either. Sometimes these things just jump out at you with a tummy-flopping, life-changing “boo!”.
Cragport’s Victorian lighthouse stuck up out of the chalk cliff that jutted into the North Sea’s foam-crusted swill, rotting itself quietly into the ground just as it had for years. A red-and-white-swirled job like a fairground helter-skelter, half bleached by slashes of seagull guano. It was about 90ft high and indecently phallic, arched windows long denuded of glass at intervals all the way up and a round knob crowning the lantern room on top.
Once upon a time, this beacon-that-was had beamed Cragport’s fishermen safely home. But its light had gone out for good decades ago, and these days all locals saw was an eyesore – if they noticed it at all. Cracked and graffiti-covered, the one-time colossus was just another broken thing in a town full of them.
I passed it every morning walking Monty. Barely noticed it, like everyone else. It was just furniture for a background, marked daily as Monty’s property through the medium of a sly little wee up the side.
That day a man was there, nailing a notice to the half-rotten wooden door at a little distance from us. I put Monty on his lead before he decided both man and lighthouse belonged to him and it was damp trouser time.
“Morning.” The man turned to flash us a bright smile that had no place on any self-respecting person’s face at that time on a damp Saturday. It was like he wasn’t even hungover. Surreal.
“Morning.” I nodded to him as we passed, but something in his smile made me stop.
I hadn’t seen him around Cragport before, though he had the town’s own Yorkshire twang. Squinting at him in the sun’s white glare, I could just about make him out: tall, broad, with longish hair and a rash of stubble, dressed in jeans and a padded jacket to keep out the chill nor’wester.
And he was gorgeous, really bloody gorgeous. I mean, if you went for that chiselled, rough-hewn look. He wasn’t my type, but still, it was hard not to stare. You didn’t see many bodies like that around town, not since Jess had dragged me off to see The Dreamboys last year.
“What’s it say?” I asked him, pointing to the notice. I had to raise my voice a little so he could hear me over the yammerings of an increasingly toothsome clifftop wind. “They’re not pulling the old thing down, are they?”
“They can’t.” He tapped in the last nail and turned to face me. “Listed building.”
“Oh. Good.” I wasn’t quite sure why I said that. Something about the derelict lighthouse disappearing from my skyline rankled. “So what’s the notice for? Is it for sale?”
“Yep.” His face broke into a broad grin. “Why, you want to buy it?”
“A lighthouse?” I laughed and gestured down at my scruffy stonewash jeans and too-big hoodie-with-fashionable-bleach-stain combo, my hungover dog-walking costume of choice. “Don’t let this well-heeled exterior fool you, mate. I don’t start the day with a swim in a Scrooge McDuck money bin, you may be surprised to learn.”
“You don’t need to. Here.” He beckoned me to his side and I skimmed the laminated notice fixed to the door.
LIGHTHOUSE FOR SALE
£1
First offer gets it – NO TIMEWASTERS
Call 01947 482704 to enquire
“A quid?” I said to the man with a puzzled frown. “Oh, and it’s Bobbie, by the way.”
I was hoping he’d tell me his name in return so I could stop thinking of him as “the man”.
“I know,” he said, bending to stash his hammer in a small toolbox on the ground.
I cocked a quizzical eyebrow. “You know what?”
“I know you’re Bobbie.”
Er… what? Unless the extra year I’d added to my age that morning had just shoved me arse-first into a full-on senior moment, I was pretty certain I’d never seen this bloke before in my life. Monty was tugging at his lead, keen to claim the rest of his walk, but I ignored him.
My stomach gave a sudden lurch. Could there have been some drunken hook-up I’d forgotten about? If so it’d have to have been a bloody long time ago: it was getting on for nine months since I’d last seen any action in that department. I mean, yes, it was only six months since the big break-up – but that was a whole other story.
The man straightened to face me. Now the blinding sun had disappeared behind a cloud, I could see him more clearly.
The deep green eyes were flecked silver, lightly sparkling as he squinted into the wind. And there was something in his face, a crinkle round the eyes … as if he was enjoying a private joke at someone else’s expense. He reached up to push away the rusty brown hair that was whipping round his forehead.
That face… it did seem familiar. A half-remembered smile…
“Ross?” I said, blinking.
