You Said Forever Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Susan Lewis

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Charlotte Goodman is living the dream.

  Surrounded by family, friends and a stunning vineyard overlooking the ocean, it would be difficult for anyone to believe that she has a troubled past.

  However, haunted by the theft of a young girl, Charlotte begins to realise the enormity of something she did many years ago, and soon finds herself having to make the most harrowing decision any woman would ever have to face.

  About the Author

  Susan Lewis is the bestselling author of thirty-six novels. She is also the author of Just One More Day and One Day at a Time, the moving memoirs of her childhood in Bristol. She lives in Gloucestershire.

  To find out more about Susan Lewis, visit her website www.susanlewis.com, or join in on www.facebook.com/SusanLewisBooks.

  Susan is a supporter of the breast cancer charity Breast Cancer Care: www.breastcancercare.org.uk and of the childhood bereavement charity Winston’s Wish: www.winstonswish.org.uk

  Also by Susan Lewis

  Fiction

  A Class Apart

  Dance While You Can

  Stolen Beginnings

  Darkest Longings

  Obsession

  Vengeance

  Summer Madness

  Last Resort

  Wildfire

  Cruel Venus

  Strange Allure

  The Mill House

  A French Affair

  Missing

  Out of the Shadows

  Lost Innocence

  The Choice

  Forgotten

  Stolen

  No Turning Back

  Losing You

  The Truth About You

  Never Say Goodbye

  Behind Closed Doors

  Too Close to Home

  No Place to Hide

  The Girl Who Came Back

  The Moment She Left

  Books that run in sequence

  Chasing Dreams

  Taking Chances

  No Child of Mine

  Don’t Let Me Go

  Series featuring Laurie Forbes and Elliott Russell

  Silent Truths

  Wicked Beauty

  Intimate Strangers

  The Hornbeam Tree

  Memoir

  Just One More Day

  One Day at a Time

  You Said Forever

  Susan Lewis

  To my dear friends of more than twenty-five years, Vanessa and Richard Owen

  Chapter One

  ‘May I ask how Chloe is?’

  Though Charlotte had heard the question she kept her eyes down, giving the impression her mind was elsewhere.

  ‘I’ve always said,’ the woman chatted on, undaunted, ‘that it was a wonderful thing you did. Very courageous.’

  Charlotte attempted a smile, but her hand was tightening on the bottle she was holding, not to smash it against a wall. She’d never do that in front of a customer, indeed had never done it, but this woman was making her tense. ‘As you can see,’ she said, pouring a soupçon of pale lemon-coloured wine into a clear glass, ‘our Pinot Gris has a delicate tinge of green …’ She broke off as a random kick of emotion stole her words, but her movements remained fluid as she poured another sample of the vintage into a second glass and handed one each to the woman and her husband.

  Swirling the wine to release the bouquet, the man put his nose to the rim and inhaled deeply. ‘Pear,’ he declared, inviting contradiction and receiving only a friendly nod of agreement from Charlotte. Frowning curiously, he added, ‘With a hint of … ginger?’

  Charlotte’s sea-green eyes showed approval. He’d missed out the trace of citrus blossom, but who, other than a seasoned professional, would have picked up on that? She only knew it was there because Will, their winemaker, had told her.

  ‘Cellaring, three to five years,’ the man murmured, reading from the tasting notes Charlotte had handed him.

  These visitors were English, Charlotte could tell from the accent, though she had no idea if they were tourists or residents of New Zealand.

  She was doing her best to ignore the woman’s scrutiny, but it was so powerful, invasive, it might go right through her skin. Whoever she was, she clearly wasn’t interested in the wine, but at least her husband was making a good show of it.

  ‘Am I right that she’s called Chloe now?’ the woman asked, apparently not bothered by Charlotte’s discomfort, or simply not noticing it.

  Once again Charlotte bypassed the question. ‘As you can see from the notes,’ she said to the man, ‘our philosophy is to make artisan wines that are food friendly, have texture …’

  ‘Is she here?’ the woman wanted to know, attempting to peer past the walls of floor-to-ceiling wine racks and chalkboards to the hidden office beyond. She turned around, as though her quarry might be creeping up on her from behind.

  With the frontage of the tasting room, known as the cellar-door area, rolled wide open there was nothing – and no one – between the tasting counter and courtyard, where guests were welcome to sit under the jacarandas while sampling Tuki River wines. If they came at the right time of day they might also be served a small tray of canapés, courtesy of Rick’s Bistro across the way. Although each table was covered in a crisp white linen cloth, it was easy to see they were fashioned from barrels – puncheons in fact – and the empty wine bottles acting as candleholders all bore the Tuki River Winery label. Earlier, on her way from the house, Charlotte had gathered some sprigs of lavender to liven up the tables, but a gently insistent breeze wafting in from the ocean had soon carried them off.

  ‘You can see she’s not here,’ the husband muttered under his breath.

  The woman turned back to Charlotte.

  ‘She’s at school,’ Charlotte said, trying to sound friendly while feeling resentful. For heaven’s sake, she wanted to shout at the woman, the girl is eight years old, so where the heck do you think she is?

  ‘Of course,’ the woman smiled, seeming to think the notion sweet. ‘And how’s she doing?’

  Starting to wonder if this apparently random visitor was actually a reporter, Charlotte picked up another bottle to continue the tasting. ‘Perhaps you’d like to try the Reserve Chardonnay,’ she suggested. ‘It’s a 2014 vintage, and we don’t have much of it left now …’ If only that were true.

  ‘Mummy! I’m home,’ an excited voice called across the courtyard from the parking area.

  The woman spun round immediately to find Cooper, Charlotte’s almost four-year-old son, hanging out of a car window, all wayward dark curls, dusty face and sky-blue eyes. Behind the wheel of the car was Rowan, his nanny.

  ‘Have to go to the bathroom,’ Cooper announced, giving a telltale shiver as Rowan drove on.

  ‘Oh, he’s adorable,’ the woman cried, clasping a hand to her chest. ‘And how wonderful that Chloe has a brother now.’

  She also had a sister – Elodie, aged eighteen months – but Charlotte wasn’t about to confide that. ‘The Reserve Chardonnay,’ she continued, ‘
was left in barrel, on full yeast …’

  ‘Do you get your oak barrels from France?’ the man interrupted, apparently wanting to show off some knowledge.

  ‘Of course,’ Charlotte replied.

  ‘They’re the best,’ he informed her, as though she might not have known.

  ‘Could I get a photograph with you?’ the woman asked, taking out her iPhone. ‘You’re quite a celebrity back home, you know. I expect you are here too.’

  ‘Yvonne, we’re here to taste the wine,’ her husband growled.

  ‘Of course, but …’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Charlotte said as her mobile rang, and seeing it was her half-brother, Rick, she eagerly clicked on. He was nothing if not an expert at coming to her rescue, even when he had no idea she was in trouble. ‘Tuki River Winery,’ she announced, making it sound like a business call.

  Twenty minutes later Charlotte watched, with no small relief, as the couple wound their way through the still-empty tables across the courtyard to the rustic, herb-bordered parking area beyond. They’d bought three bottles, two Pinot Gris and a Chardonnay, which she’d packed up in a smartly branded carrying box and tied with a dark green ribbon. It was important to give the appearance of being successful and upmarket, even if they were struggling to stay afloat.

  Gathering up the used glasses, she put them in the sink behind the beechwood countertop and turned on the tap. Images of Chloe were fluttering out of the past: Chloe shrieking with joy as she ran into the waves; her eagerness to help build a beach fire; eyes lighting up at the prospect of a surprise; delight at being accepted into a poi dance class; laughter as she and Charlotte practised the dance moves at home; pride on receiving a gold star at school; hanging limply in Anthony’s arms as he carried her to bed.

  How was it possible for Charlotte’s heart to melt and freeze at the same time?

  Melt with love; freeze with fear of the way Chloe had changed in the last year.

  She gave a small gasp, taking in the air of now, returning herself to the task at hand.

  The irritating English couple – the woman anyway – could well prove the last visitors of the day, although Charlotte sincerely hoped not, since Tuki River Winery could do with selling a whole lot more of 2014’s vintage than they were currently managing. Not that random drop-ins, or even sizeable tour groups were ever going to sort the problem. However, there was never any knowing who might be amongst them, disguised as a tourist but with the purchasing power to change Tuki’s fortunes completely.

  It didn’t happen that way, and she knew it, but clutching at straws was one way of keeping her hopes alive as she tackled the hectic, chaotic demands of each and every day. Another was to carry on believing in her dynamic and undaunted husband, who owned and ran this idyllic – scenery-wise, anyway – vineyard in the Special Character Zone of New Zealand’s Hawkes Bay.

  The original plan, almost five years ago, had been to move from England and buy a vineyard near Charlotte’s mother and stepfather in the Bay of Islands. Unfortunately, that had fallen through at the eleventh hour, almost crushing the dream, until her stepfather, Bob, had put them in touch with Kim Thorp and Andy Coltart, the owners of Black Barn Vineyard, a multi-award-winning estate in the heart of Hawkes Bay. Kim and Andy had more or less brokered Charlotte and Anthony’s purchase of this two-hectare vineyard, now renamed Tuki River Winery. The modest twelve parcels of vines were spread randomly and hopefully amongst endless acres of fruit orchards, cornfields and thousands upon thousands of hectares of long-established vines belonging to some world-famous estates.

  It had never been anyone’s intention to use Charlotte and Chloe’s ‘celebrity’ to help pull in the punters. It wouldn’t even have crossed the minds of the serious businessmen involved in getting them started; for them it was all about the product, as it was for Charlotte and Anthony. However, that wasn’t how the average tourist, or even some locals saw it. For them, the cellar-door area of Tuki River Winery was a golden opportunity to get a look at the mother and daughter who’d been all over the news almost five years ago.

  It was rarely they got to see Chloe; she was either at school or up at the house, which was a good fifteen-minute walk from the cellar door through a lush two-acre parcel of reserve Chardonnay vines. Charlotte, on the other hand, was almost always to be found organising wine tastings at the cellar door, or checking in guests who’d come to stay at one of Tuki River’s three holiday retreats nestled around the estate.

  Four years might have passed since they’d come here, and Hawkes Bay might be a good seven hundred kilometres from her mother’s home town of Kerikeri, but Charlotte’s sensational arrest for child abduction in Northland, followed by the forced return to England, apparently remained a source of deep fascination. It was shocking just how intrusive and insensitive some people could be. It was as though, because Charlotte and Chloe had been on their TV screens and in their newspapers, not to mention all over social media, they felt entitled to know all the details of their lives. Charlotte Nicholls, joint owner of Tuki River Winery, was the same Charlotte Nicholls, social worker (known at the time as Alex Lake), who’d snatched a child from an abusive family in the UK and got away with it! That was how a lot of people put it, got away with it, and Charlotte couldn’t argue with that because she had taken a child, namely Chloe – although she’d been called Ottilie back then – and she had got away with it. This wasn’t to say she hadn’t been tried for the crime, with a very strong chance of being sent to prison at the end of it. As it turned out, the jury had gone against all the evidence that proved her guilty, and set her free. To them all that had mattered was Chloe, the small child of four, who’d been so badly abused by her father and neglected by her mother that she’d only started to speak when Charlotte had come into her life. Chloe needed Charlotte perhaps even more than most children needed their mothers. Charlotte – and Charlotte’s mother Anna – were the only people the sweet, but terribly damaged little girl had the confidence to relate to, so who in their right mind was going to send Charlotte to prison and condemn Chloe to a life in care?

  As soon as her freedom was assured Charlotte had applied to the family courts for an adoption order, so Chloe was now legally hers and no one, but no one, could tear them apart.

  Since thinking about Chloe could cause her to feel breathless, and often brought dark butterflies to her heart, Charlotte did what she usually did when the world seemed to be closing in on her; she buried herself in work. This wasn’t difficult, for there was always so much to do. Consequently she was hardly seeing anything of her children these days, and could only thank god for Rowan, her stepfather’s twenty-three-year-old niece, who’d come down from the Bay of Islands to help out. Without her Charlotte’s family might well have fallen apart by now, although Charlotte kept telling herself that no matter what, she’d never let that happen. If it came right down to it, she’d turn her back on the business and tell Anthony that he had to find someone else to help run it. The thought of doing that made her feel sick, for she wanted, with all her heart, to support him, to be able to put him first and be at his side when they managed to turn his dream into a dazzling reality. Tuki River Winery meant the world to her too, but not more than her children – or her marriage. The trouble was they were all so tied up in each other that she hardly knew where one began and the other ended.

  Going to her laptop, in a niche below the chalkboard she updated each morning with the special offers of the day, she was about to check on their Internet orders – please god let there be some – when Rowan pulled up in the old Range Rover and a scrub-faced, barefoot Cooper came tearing across the courtyard, his angelic little sister in wobbly pursuit.

  ‘I made cakes at kindi today,’ Cooper cried as she swung him up in her arms. ‘They’re not real so you can’t eat them, but they look real so we could pretend and see if we can trick Daddy.’

  Laughing, Charlotte planted a smackeroo on his cheek and stooped to gather up Elodie.

  ‘Mummy,’ Elodie be
amed, her adorable little smile spreading all over her pixie face. She was proving much slower in talking than Cooper had, and didn’t seem to exude his boundless confidence, but she was still a baby and the reasons behind her delayed development didn’t necessarily have to be as sinister as Charlotte sometimes feared. Certainly the doctor had found nothing to concern him, not on the physical front anyway. On the psychological front … That was something Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to go into. Not yet, but she would, as soon as things calmed down a little, and in the meantime she was doing everything in her power to make sure Elodie knew how much her mummy loved her.

  ‘You don’t suppose your attachment to Elodie has something to do with the fact that she looks like you?’ Anthony had teased when it had become evident that Elodie was going to stay blonde like her mother, with the same aquamarine eyes and delicate features. She didn’t have freckles yet, but with her creamy fair skin she would undoubtedly develop them soon enough, while Cooper, with his father’s olive complexion and inky dark hair was, according to Anthony, a little demon amongst the vines.

  Chloe bore more of a resemblance to Anthony and Cooper, though her eyes were a velvety chocolate brown, while theirs were varying shades of blue or grey depending on their moods. Her hair, russet-brown and curly, cascaded halfway down her back and was almost as impossible to brush as it was to tame into slides or elastics. She was a strikingly pretty young girl who’d lately become alarmingly unpredictable and far too worldly for her years.

  ‘So where are you all off to?’ Charlotte asked, as Cooper whizzed across the yard to the children’s playground where he’d spotted his uncle doing something to a swing. Rick’s Bistro was sprawled across a small north-facing slope the other side of the playground, and was a popular eatery for both locals and tourists. Out of loyalty Rick and his partner Hamish always encouraged clients to choose a Tuki River wine with their meals. If it weren’t for the bistro a whole week could go by without Charlotte and Anthony selling a single bottle.

  ‘Are you going to answer Mummy?’ Rowan prompted Elodie. Rowan was a sweet, round-faced girl, part Maori, part Kiwi, with a shock of coppery curls, unevenly set brown eyes and a colourful tattoo of a butterfly on her left shoulder that fascinated the heck out of Elodie. Chloe was so desperate for one too that she’d tried inking one on herself, until finding it impossible she’d decided to draw one on each of Elodie’s cheeks instead. That would have been bad enough, but being Chloe she’d had to add a moustache and spectacles, and all in indelible ink. Chloe and Cooper had hooted for days, which was as long as it had taken for the mask to be washed off without taking Elodie’s tender skin with it.