CLAUDIA CARROLL
A Very Accidental Love Story

Copyright

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Claudia Carroll 2012

Claudia Carroll asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

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 ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, 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: 9781847562722

Ebook Edition © September 2012 ISBN: 9780007453405

Version: 2016-02-18

Dedication

For Anita Notaro, with love.

Watch your thoughts, for they become words,

Watch your words, for they become actions,

Watch your actions, for they become habits,

Watch your habits, for they become character,

Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

Anonymous

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part One: Eloise

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Three: Eloise

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Part Four

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Five: Eloise

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

Keep Reading …

Acknowledgements

Read on for an exclusive Daily Echo feature by Eloise Elliot

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

They say no man is an island, but Eloise Elliot was.

Not that this particularly bothered her most of the time, but tonight was different.

It was her thirtieth birthday, and, bar a few stragglers from the accounts department who’d famously go to the opening of a fridge door if they thought they might scab a free drink out of it, no one had turned up.

No one.

Not a single one of the Board of Directors she worked so slavishly for; nor any of her senior editorial team, colleagues she’d known and worked shoulder-to-shoulder with for the past seven gruelling years. Not even the few – the very few – co-workers who, if she didn’t exactly think of them as friends, at least didn’t physically hurl furniture at her as she passed them by.

And so this was it. This was how Eloise Elliot came to mark her thirtieth year: upstairs in The Daily Post’s conference room, surrounded by a few mangy-looking helium balloons and trays of dismal egg and watercress sandwiches that were already curling up at the edges, making faux-polite small talk with a bunch of semi-strangers. All of whom, for the record, then cried off early, pleading early starts the next day and in all likelihood only dying to get out of there the minute the free gargle ran out.

‘Sure you wouldn’t like a vol-au-vent?’ Eloise asked a smiley-faced blonde girl, whose name she hadn’t quite caught. ‘Go on, look, there’s loads left. You can’t leave now, look at all this grub! You’ve got to help me get rid of at least some of it.’

‘Emm,’ Blonde Girl said uncertainly, glancing at the others for support, ‘well … I’d love to stay, but … I’ve got this really early meeting in the morning.’

‘Mini vegetarian frittata then?’ said Eloise, wafting an untouched tray under her nose. Like this might make a difference.

‘I’m so sorry, I really have to go …’

‘Yeah … me too, it’s so late,’ said her pal, a tall modelly-looking one who Eloise vaguely recognised from seeing in the staff canteen a few times.

‘Go on, just have a slice of birthday cake before you go. You know you want to!’ Eloise offered, trying her best to keep the slightly hysterical note out of her voice. And not succeeding very well.

‘Can’t, I’m afraid. I live miles away and if I miss my bus …’

‘How about yourself?’ Eloise said to a new intern, whose name she thought might be Susan, as she thrust a plateful of vanilla sponge gateaux at her.

‘Oh … ehh … thanks so much,’ Susan answered politely, the only one to look even slightly sympathetic, ‘but you see, I really do need to make tracks as well, been a really long day …’

Lost cause, Eloise thought. Waste of her time even asking them to stay. Instead she stood and watched the three of them clatter out the door and on towards the lift bank in their too-high heels, getting giddier by the minute it seemed, the further they were away from her.

So this was it, she thought, this was the start of a brand-new decade for her. And so far, it was her worst nightmare come true.

She hadn’t even wanted a party in the first place – no time, thanks very much – but then Eloise was famous for rarely socialising with anyone unless it was a) work related, b) would involve making several important new business contacts or c) there was just no possible way out of it. Even then, she’d be the last to arrive, the first to leave and would impatiently nurse a glass of still water for the hour or so that she was there, all while checking emails on her iPhone approximately every ten minutes or so.

Oh sure, she’d put in an appearance at the staff Christmas party mainly because she didn’t really have a choice after all, she was the boss and even she knew how crap it would look if she didn’t. But by and large, she was her own best friend and perfectly happy to be so. She was an island and islands are rarely bothered about popularity. Which at that particular moment in time, as she sat all alone on an empty desk beside rows and rows of untouched wineglasses, was probably just as well.

Absent-mindedly, she started to play with the string hanging off the end of a gaudy pink ‘Congratulations!’ helium balloon anchored beside her and for the first time in years, allowed herself a rare moment of introspection.

Welcome to my life, she thought. Thirty years of age and utterly alone. No friends, no ‘significant other’, no office colleagues who, perish the thought, might actually want to spend some non-work-related time with her – no one. When it came down to it, she was basically living the life of a nun on a six-figure salary.

Sure she had family, but she saw them so rarely, they barely even figured. Her darling dad had passed away years ago and her mother now lived in Marbella with a duplex, a perma-tan and a worrying habit of drinking during the day. But although they’d have a weekly chat on the phone and in spite of countless invitations to ‘jump on a plane and come and get some sun for yourself,’ Eloise really only got to see her mum once a year, when she’d fly home for Christmas. If work permitted even that much. Last Christmas Day, a story had unexpectedly broken in the Middle East and Eloise ended up having to rush back to the Post to cover it.

She had a younger sister too, Helen, but she’d upped sticks and moved down to Cork a few years back. Besides, it was unspoken between the sisters, but deep down each knew they’d next to nothing in common. They saw each other rarely, spoke even less and even that was just for form’s sake, little more.

In fairness, most of the time, Eloise didn’t particularly miss having friends, mainly because how can you miss what you never really had in the first place? Dating right the way back to primary school, when she continually came top of her class, the other kids, viciously cruel as small kids usually are, would ostracise her and call her a freak, mainly because no one wanted to be pals with the girl who constantly badgered the teacher about their homework load being insufficient and unchallenging.

Eloise read at Junior Cert level by the age of four, was declared a member of Mensa at five and by nine, had composed a violin concerto to accompany the senior school’s production of Romeo and Juliet.

For God’s sake, even the teachers were a bit scared of her.

And so unsurprisingly, she grew up being utterly self-reliant and not really needing other people, thanks very much. Totally married to her job; in fact, she was the job. Youngest senior editor the Post had ever had, by the way, with all the stress ulcers to prove it, and in the space of a few short years she had not only trebled their circulation but completely turned their readership around, a la Tina Brown. First at her desk every morning, last to leave at night; this is not a woman who did down time, friends, family or socialising, ever. Sorry, no time.

Small wonder people didn’t warm to her. She had a clatter of various nicknames behind her back among subordinates at her office, none of which stuck, mainly because the very phrase ‘Eloise Elliot wants to see you in her office, now,’ delivered just like that, unfrilled and straight up, was pretty much enough to terrify any poor unfortunate who worked for her into white-faced, trembling, silence.

And now on this of all nights, Eloise was suddenly seeing the rest of her whole life stretching right out in front of her. Seeing it as vividly as if she’d already lived it. Clear as crystal, she could see herself at forty, then at fifty, then right up all the way to retirement age, still editing the paper, still working eighteen-hour days, and still alone.

Pretending to celebrate a day she didn’t particularly care about, while a handful of strangers looked at her the way everyone seemed to look at her these days; with a mixture of pity and terror.

Sometimes we don’t recognise the most significant moments of our lives till they’ve long passed, but not Eloise. Hard to believe that miserable night would change the whole course of her carefully ordered existence, and yet that’s exactly how it would pan out.

Years later, she’d look back and pinpoint this as the precise moment when heaven whispered in her ear and when she suddenly knew what needed to be done to kill this life, to fix this problem. Because to someone with Eloise’s keen mathematical brain, that was all this was; a problem to be solved, like a simple maths equation.

And make no mistake: solve it, she would.

So with that same dazzling clarity that you only ever get on rare, road-to-Damascus moments in life, Eloise Elliot rubbed sore, red eyes, took a deep breath and made one of the lightning-quick, clear-headed decisions for which she’d become legendary.

It was time to take action.

PART ONE

THREE YEARS LATER

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