Kat French - The Bed and Breakfast on the Beach - A gorgeous feel-good read from the bestselling author of One Day in December

‘He didn’t tell you?’ Panos frowned as they all looked nonplussed. ‘This is very bad.’ Turning to look over his shoulder, he called out for his mama.

They watched in silence as a small, slight woman dressed in black appeared. Panos let forth a stream of fast Greek smattered with their names, gesticulating across towards Villa Valentina in the distance.

Panos’s mother fired back something equally breakneck fast, speaking with her hands as much as her voice. Panos paused for a moment while he decided how to translate what she’d said.

‘She say that it’s always been brewed at the villa ever since she was a child. If you live in the villa now, you have to do it. It’s the law.’

‘The law?’ Winnie said, alarmed. ‘Are you sure?’

Panos’s mother nodded vigorously, speaking again, and they all waited for Panos to translate.

‘Island law,’ Panos shrugged. ‘The plants only grow in the garden at the villa. You make it, I sell it.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t have a clue,’ Stella said, deciding that she much preferred drinking the gin to making it.

‘Is there even a recipe to follow?’ Frankie asked, unsure if they were being wound up, some kind of odd welcome-to-the-island ritual, sort of similar to how she’d been sent to buy a bubble for a spirit level when she was a fifteen-year-old Saturday girl at the jewellers in the local shopping precinct.

Panos asked his mother Frankie’s question, but it was clear from her facial expressions and shrugging shoulders that they weren’t going to get a clean-cut answer.

Winnie sipped her drink and closed her eyes. God, it was good stuff. ‘It isn’t right that the world should run out of this,’ she said. ‘It’s possibly the best drink ever.’

It was difficult to say what it was about the gin that made it so delicious. It was rhubarb-pink in colour but not in flavour, and aromatic from the stem of rosemary Panos had pushed through the ice cubes exactly as Ajax had.

‘We could try to find out from Ajax?’ she offered, although she wasn’t entirely certain that they even had his details.

‘You must, you must,’ Panos urged, opening a wall cupboard behind the bar. ‘This is all I have left and I’ve never run out yet.’

There looked to be a dozen or more bottles in Panos’s stash, all bearing a handwritten and illustrated label. They looked like magic potions.

‘Well, we’ll look into it,’ Stella said. ‘Maybe we should have another taste just so to be clear.’

Panos looked at her through narrowed eyes, and then started to laugh. ‘You will be the troublesome one. I see these things.’

Frankie and Winnie nodded as Panos obligingly topped up their glasses.

‘So you’re … sisters?’ He gestured between them.

‘No,’ Winnie said. ‘We’re great friends.’

‘And you will all stay here? You won’t just come for a few weeks and then run back home?’

Winnie nodded, Frankie smiled diplomatically and Stella sighed into her glass without comment.

Panos didn’t miss any of their reactions. ‘You will stay. Skelidos does that to people.’

‘Like Jesse?’ Winnie said suddenly, faltering when Panos’s eyebrows lifted. ‘We met him already. He … he looked after our donkey for a while.’

‘Jesse came for a summer too.’ Panos poured himself a beer. ‘But for him it was different. He was …’ Breaking off, Panos’s face relaxed into a wide smile as a woman came into the bar with a clatter of high heels and a cloud of dark curls bouncing on her shoulders.

‘So this is the new blood everyone is telling me about!’

‘Corinna,’ Panos said warmly. ‘Word travels fast as usual, I see.’

Winnie thought she detected the hint of an American accent behind the woman’s tone. Older than they were, forties at a guess, Corinna was one of the most naturally glamorous women Winnie had ever met. She could pass as Sophia Loren’s daughter, all dark eyes, lush lips and legs that went all the way up to her backside. It would have been easy to be intimidated were it not for her warm smile and the way she made a beeline to gather each of them in turn into an excitable, expensively perfumed hug.

‘Tell me, what are three gorgeous young women like you girls doing on a sleepy island like this? Are you criminals hiding from the mob?’ Her eyes glittered with humour. ‘Please say you are!’

As she spoke Panos poured her a drink and slid it over the bar to her.

‘Nothing quite that glamorous, I’m afraid,’ Frankie said. ‘It was just a good time for a change for all of us, for different reasons.’

Good-natured curiosity filled Corinna’s eyes. ‘Would it be too rude to ask what they were?’ she asked, and Panos immediately jumped in.

‘Absolutely, yes, it would indeed be very rude,’ he chided, shaking his head at them to let them off the hook.

‘I left my husband because we didn’t love each other any more,’ Frankie said suddenly, then took a huge gulp of her drink. ‘I’ve come here for an adventure.’

Some people might have felt uncomfortable at such a candid revelation from a stranger, but not Corinna. She clapped her hands, her gold bracelets jangling on her wrists. ‘Bravo for you, my darling! A marriage without love is a dead dodo!’

Stella nodded, a little morose. ‘And I got fired from my job. I came here because I don’t know what else to do.’

‘Ah, now that is interesting,’ Corinna said, looking intently at Stella. ‘Because you look to me like a woman who always knows what she should do. I think you’re here because you know that this is exactly where you need to be.’

In front of Winnie’s eyes, Stella’s shoulders straightened a little, as if Corinna had applied soothing balm to her injured pride. Winnie decided that she really quite liked Corinna. Emboldened, she threw her hat into the ring.

‘My husband was having an affair with the girl in the work canteen, even though we were trying for a baby and he claimed to be perfectly happy.’

The words left her in a rush, because they stung less if she said them quickly. Left to linger in her mouth they grew thorns and cut into her, leaving her raw and sore for days. Hence the fact that she hadn’t told anyone new her sorry story – not until now, anyhow. Surprisingly though, this time she found herself unscathed, and on closer reflection she might even feel slightly liberated from the long shadow Rory’s infidelity had cast over her.

Behind her, Panos clicked his tongue in disgust and poured an extra shot of gin into her glass.

‘Now, that is an unfortunate situation.’ Corinna shook her head. ‘But my darling, how much worse would it have been if you’d had a child before you realised that he was a feckless fool?’

Winnie nodded, downhearted. She’d thought the same herself, although she sometimes wondered if she’d pressured him too much about getting pregnant and that had been the reason for his affair. But what would that say about him if so? If the effort of supporting her was too much hard work to bother?

‘Pah. I expect he was a man with a little …’ Corinna crooked her little finger and winked, making them all laugh despite the gravity of Winnie’s marital woes. ‘And so now you’re all three footloose, fancy-free and ready for adventure. How delicious!’ Corinna rubbed her hands together and then turned to Panos, sparkly-eyed with mischief. ‘Panos here is one of our most eligible bachelors,’ she said. ‘He has the best bar on the island, and who wouldn’t fall in love with that face?’

Right now, that face had turned puce with embarrassment.

‘Corinna,’ he muttered, slamming clean glasses away onto the shelf above his head.

‘And there I was thinking I was the most eligible bachelor on the island,’ someone else said, and they all turned to see Jesse had strolled into the bar. Dressed in faded, frayed denim shorts and a lived-in T-shirt, he looked every inch the relaxed holidaymaker rather than the fiery, ill-tempered farmer who’d banged on their door earlier.