Wild Oats Read Online Free

rooms in the later wing of the house, each with an en-suite bathroom. No doubt he was in one of those.
    She sat on the bed, suddenly exhausted, and debated whether food or a bath was the more important. Neither of them had featured prominently on the shoestring budget she’d set for herself on her South American tour. Finally she decided that, for the sake of public interest, she’d make herself presentable first. There was nothing but an ancient box of Radox in the bathroom on her floor, but somehow she felt inhibited about prowling round the house in search of something more exotic, in case Olivier appeared miraculously with an assortment of luxury toiletries. She wanted time alone to gather her thoughts – if there was one thing Jamie hated it was being wrongfooted – so she made do, emptying the remnants of the box under the taps.
    She dropped her dusty, sweaty clothes on to the bathroom floor and climbed into the blissfully hot water. She’d been lucky to get a tepid shower in most of the places she had dossed, and the water had often been suspiciously murky in colour. She slid down until she was submerged up to her neck, closed her eyes and began to try and make sense of the strange turn of events. Of all the scenarios she had envisaged on her homeward journey, finding Olivier Templeton in her kitchen had not been one of them.
    Jack Wilding and Eric Templeton had met as boys, while incarcerated together at a minor public school. There they’d run scams and wheezes for the benefit of their pockets rather than their fellow pupils, and had narrowly avoided expulsion on several occasions. From then on they’d been partners in crime, terrorizing the streets of Chelsea in the Swinging Sixties with their contrasting good looks and charm: Eric dark and swarthy and dangerous, Jack golden-haired and smooth and suave, both dressed to kill and ready to pounce. They were bad boys together, heads filled with dreams and schemes that, because of their boldness and daring, often came to profitable fruition. Their flat off the King’s Road was a notorious sin bin, where a stream of glamorous girls came to lose their virginity and their hearts.
    Eventually, they grew up. Jack had fallen in love with the bohemian and almost-aristocratic Louisa, a student at Chelsea Art School. He’d found her sketching passers-by in a coffee bar on the King’s Road.
    He’d demanded she do his portrait, and she’d willingly agreed. The sitting had blossomed into a full-blown love affair, and before he knew it he was married. Five years later they’d taken up residence at Bucklebury Farm in Shropshire, handed over to Louisa by her parents, who insisted they were far too old to manage the place any longer.
    To his surprise, Jack found he didn’t miss London and took to country life like a duck to water, rather enjoying being something of a squire in the village, with his own silver tankard in the pub. Big fish, small pond, Eric had teased, with his cosmopolitan lifestyle dealing in second-hand sports cars. Then he’d settled down too: on one of his trips abroad he’d come back with Isabelle, allegedly the daughter of a French count. They’d married, and lived in a luxury penthouse in St John’s Wood, all mirrored ceilings and leather and glass and chrome, a million miles from Bucklebury Farm.
    Louisa and Jack stayed with Eric and Isabelle whenever they went to London, which was often. Isabelle neither understood nor liked the countryside, so the visits were rarely reciprocated, but the four of them went on an annual holiday to the south of France for a fortnight of sybaritic sunbathing and drinking. This ritual had a hiatus when children arrived: first the Templetons had Emile, Delphine and Olivier in quick succession, then Jamie had come along – and they all agreed the French Riviera lost some of its charm when one had screaming infants in tow. But onesummer, when Olivier was seventeen and Jamie fifteen, Eric was given the use of a huge