Annie Groves - Where the Heart Is

ANNIE GROVES

Where the Heart Is

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2009

Copyright © Annie Groves 2020

Annie Groves 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 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 nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book 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 hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication .

Source ISBN: 9780007265923

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007353217

Version: 2017-09-12

For my readers who have so kindly and generously supported me. I hope you are all enjoying reading about the Campion family as much as I am enjoying telling their story.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

Christmas Day 1941

Katie Needham couldn’t wait any longer. It was Christmas Morning, after all, even if it wasn’t even six o’clock yet, and she had been soooo very patient, promising herself that she wouldn’t open Luke’s letter until it was Christmas, hoping that saving it to read then would help to make up for his being so far away in Egypt, whilst she was here in Hampstead.

Her small attic bedroom in the house where her parents were currently living with friends, now London was being heavily bombed, was freezing cold, and Katie thought longingly of the cosiness of her room in her fiancé, Luke’s, family home in Liverpool. She was missing the warmth and bustle of the Campion household already and she had only arrived here yesterday, she acknowledged guiltily. She felt under her pillow for Luke’s letter, her guilt dissipated by the heady warmth of her love and excitement as she retrieved her precious letter, and then reached out to switch on the bedside lamp.

A tender smile curled her mouth as she traced her own name on the envelope. One day, when this awful war was over, she would be Mrs Luke Campion.

Mrs Luke Campion.

Quickly she opened her letter – from the side as she had been taught to do working for the Postal Censorship Office – her heart skipping a beat when she saw Luke’s signature at the bottom.

Oh, Luke. Tenderly she pressed her lips to it, closing her eyes as she did so, as though somehow she could conjure up Luke himself, to put his strong arms around her, his dark head bent over her own, his warm lips on hers, kissing her.

Oh, Luke …

She mustn’t cry. After all, there were thousands of young women who, like her, were facing Christmas without the men they loved – some of them knowing that their men would never be coming back to hold them and kiss them.

Katie’s hand shook slightly as she smoothed out the airmail letter and began to read.

‘Katie …’ Just Katie? Not even ‘Dear Katie’, never mind ‘Dearest’. But then Luke was on active service in the desert.

Katie,

I am writing to tell you that I wish to bring our engagement to an end.

What? No! There must be some mistake.

Frantically Katie read the cold matter-of-fact sentence again, and then a third time, her distress growing with each read, tears of shock and disbelief blurring her vision as she tried to read on.

Through the good offices of ‘a concerned friend’ I have been warned that you have been seeing someone else – no doubt believing yourself safe from discovery with me out here in the desert.

A concerned friend . Who? A horrible certainty, mixed with a dreadful sinking feeling, invaded her tummy. Carole. It had to be. But surely not; she knew how much Katie loved Luke. She and Carole had been such good pals, working together and Carole dating one of the men under Luke in his role as the unit’s corporal. But then Carole had got involved with an Irish boy they had met at the Grafton dance hall and her head had been turned by his attentions.

Katie hadn’t deliberately got Carole into trouble when she had told their supervisor about these Irishmen asking so many questions, but the reality was that Carole had broken the Censorship Office rules of secrecy and she had been dismissed.

She had blamed Katie for that, and had threatened retaliation. But to write lies to Luke about her …

There’s no point in you writing to me saying that it isn’t true, as I won’t be opening your letter. I should have known something like this would happen. After all, I saw what you were like that time you flirted with that cyclist.

The cold words almost leaped off the page like physical blows.

‘That’s not true,’ Katie protested aloud. ‘You know it wasn’t like that.’

Luke’s jealousy had been the one flaw in their relationship and her happiness. Sometimes she had felt as though he almost wanted to find her out in some kind of betrayal. It had hurt her dreadfully that he didn’t trust her love for him.

If we’re honest we did rather rush into things, and I dare say that without the war we’d have realised pretty quickly that we weren’t suited.

The last thing a serving soldier needs is the worry of wondering if his girl is being unfaithful to him behind his back, and it seems to me that I shall be a good deal happier without that worry.

Tears welled in Katie’s eyes and splashed down onto the letter, making the ink run. Surely if Luke had loved her as much as he had said he did he would never have been so unkind and hurtful. Instead he would have understood how much she loved him and that she would never ever so much as look at another man because of that.

Before they had fallen out, Carole had told her that Andy, her boyfriend, had written to her that Cairo was filled with pretty girls. Perhaps Luke was glad of an excuse to break off their engagement. Perhaps in fact he had already met someone else …

A savage pain gripped her, tightening her chest and trapping her breath.

I am writing to my parents to tell them that our engagement is over, although for their sake, especially my mother’s, I don’t intend to tell them what you have done. I shall simply say that we have grown apart and the engagement is over.