Winter at Pretty Beach by Polly Babbington (inspirational books txt) 📕

arrive in Alaska with him waiting for her at the airport. He’d told her it was more dangerous getting on a bus in London and when she’d taken on board what he had said, and analysed it for herself she’d had to agree.

Sallie scrolled through his texts and replied.

Just looking at my timeline now. I think I can possibly make it.

His message came straight back.

Wonderful. I know you’ll love it. It’s got your name all over it.

Will it be really expensive though if I leave it until the last minute to decide?

I’m not even going there Sals. Ridiculous, I’m paying. The end.

OK. It does look lovely! I’ll have a look at flights - I had a brief check and looks like the Seattle route is the best.

You don’t need to do that - I’ll get Charlie to do it all

OK, love you. Got to go - video me later. Xxx

Ben sent back a love heart emoji. Sallie put her phone on the table and started to go through the dates more thoroughly. With Lucian being super-efficient and borderline more organized than her, he was making it extremely easy to work with him. She could see that there was a small window, after the initial announcement of the competition and podcast drop, but before they had to decide who the bridal party were. If everything went smoothly she would be able to go.

Ben had told her it was super comfortable on the plane, there was internet access so she would still be in contact with Lucian if she needed to, and when she wanted to go to sleep all she would have to do was push the button and the seat would magically transform into a bed.

As she thought about that, going to sleep in a bed on a plane, she’d thought to herself how very different Ben’s life had been to hers, and that he didn’t bat an eyelid at his fortune. He was used to having what he wanted, when he wanted and although he worked really hard there was no doubt that he was also afforded the luxury of making decisions when a lot of the really hard ones had already been made for him by another generation in another life.

His privilege was something he just had, and although he moved between different worlds and did it very well, he didn’t, and wouldn’t, ever know the realities of how other people lived their lives.

Sallie thought about some of the things she had experienced in her life and realised that he just hadn’t had anywhere near the same - he’d grown up surrounded by wealth, good education, a loving family, beautiful homes and siblings who really seemed to care about him too.

Compared to her, he could almost be from another planet.

Chapter 25

Sallie trudged up the lane past Juliette’s cottage turned right and opened the gate to the Orangery. The snowfall had blanketed the whole of the driveway, the roof of the Orangery and the little shed down the side in white. The icy snow crunched underneath her feet and bitterly cold air stung the end of her fingers and occasional flurries of snow landed on her coat.

She walked down the side of the Orangery, her boots leaving footprints in the snow, moved a fallen down branch off the path and pulled open the beautiful old vintage door at the back. Stepping in the warmth hit her, the snow melted off her boots and slid down onto the floor and the scent of the ferns and herbs hit her nostrils.

The combination of the snow outside, the evergreen plants and the citrus trees inside amalgamated to a wonderful, botanical scent - it was like Christmas had enveloped the whole of the Orangery.

Sallie took her slippers out of her basket, yanked off her boots, pulled her thick socks up over her jeans and put her boots on the mat by the door. First things first - her job for the day was to make the ‘gin room’ a reality. The vision of it had been sitting in her head since she’d first viewed the place with Shane Pence the estate agent.

The long, narrow room running behind the main room to be christened ‘The Gin Room at the Orangery’ looked completely different from the first time she and Shane had walked in, when they had been overpowered by the heat and the old musty smell of the space and had sat down on the decrepit cast-iron table and chairs, looking around in wonder.

Back then, the room had been covered in layers and layers of cobwebs, five rusty old industrial pendant lights with broken fittings had hung through the centre and ferns and herbs poked up through mounds of weeds and stinging nettles.

Since that day, she’d pulled every weed out, the lights had been cleaned of rust, the fans underneath them fixed and the electrician, after a bit of a battle, had got the globes working again. She’d painted the old sleepers refreshing the beds with a wash of stain, all the old bricks were painted in antique white and she and Ben had scrubbed the slate floor tile that ran through the middle on their knees with a small wire brush until it was like new.

She’d collected two more similar cast-iron tables to the one they’d found in there already which she had cleaned, restored and painted white.

Down the far end, using two of the old potting tables, Ben had made a bar. With no budget for the bar area they'd scoured around the grounds and found a pile of old fruit boxes in the tumbledown shed which Sallie had cleaned up, and Ben had used them to make open shelving on the wall behind. After an astronomical quote from a tiler, Ben had taken a crash course in subway tiling on YouTube, Sallie had sourced the cheapest tiles she could find on the internet and Ben had tiled the whole of the bar area on his