Free Well Groomed by Fiona Walker Page A

ladder was already threading its way up her tights.
    ‘What’s the occasion?’ She smiled. ‘I thought you’d just popped in for a coffee.’
    ‘Niall’s taking me out for dinner at the Olive Branch tonight.’ Tash was staring at one of Zoe’s daughter’s GCSE drawings which was curling its way from its Blu-tacked position on the wall. ‘That’s a great picture – India just gets better and better.’ She glanced at Zoe again. ‘I was hoping the others would be here.’
    ‘Well, Gus and Pen should be back any minute – they’re raiding Tesco’s wine department for New Year’s Eve. You two are coming, aren’t you?’
    ‘To the party?’ Tash grinned at her. ‘Try and stop us.’
    ‘Hugo will be back from Oz by then too – in fact, I think he’s due back today, so he’ll add to the glamour.’
    ‘And to the drinks bill,’ Tash sniffed.
    ‘You two still not talking?’ Zoe cocked her head critically. With her blonde, blunt-cut hair and thoroughbred features, she bore a rather startling resemblance to Joanna Lumley as Purdey. The cool, velvet voice and cat’s eyes added to the illusion. There were moments Tash almost ducked for fear of getting a karate kick in the eye.
    She pursed her mouth uneasily. ‘Not sure. I’ve avoided him since the end of the season.’
    ‘Mmm.’ Zoe eyed her thoughtfully. ‘I think Gus mentioned that you wouldn’t even go hunting in case he was out with the field and tried to run you into a ditch.’
    ‘Something like that,’ Tash muttered. Although she had used the excuse of avoiding Hugo for not hunting this year, Tash had other reasons as well. A childhood accident and a general disapproval of the barbarity of the sport kept her away more than her tall, arrogant bête noire.
    Hugo Beauchamp ran an eventing yard just a few miles away from Lime Tree Farm. He’d known Penny and Gus Moncrieff for years and they were mutually reliant upon one another, trading horses between the two yards, swapping advice, sharing the transport to many of the more distant events and helping one another out in a crisis. Hugo, who had a private income and a fat sponsorship deal, often benefited from the relationship more than the Moncrieffs, buying their best youngsters for the cash they desperately needed to keep the yard running. As a result, he was ranked amongst the top five riders in the country and had clocked up a large number of international honours to prove it. He even had an Olympic medal as the chain of his downstairs loo, which Tash thought horribly ostentatious.
    Initially helpful when Tash had entered the sport, Hugo Beauchamp had been growing increasingly unpleasant of late. All had been well when she was a clumsy novice who seldom made it to the end of the cross-country phase, let alone into the money. Hugo, one of the sport’s biggest stars, had coaxed her through her first year with rather condescending largesse, selling her his good novice, Drunken Hunk, giving her hours of coaching and ferrying her to events in his five-star lorry when Penny and Gus needed their dilapidated box elsewhere. But now that Tash was so regularly placed that she was climbing the overall leaderboard and getting ever-closer to making it into an international team, Hugo had gone right off her. He’d won last year’s British Championship at the Gatcombe Open Trials just a weekend after Tash had moved into the forge with Niall, loudly rumour-mongering that she had done badly because she was thinking about kitchen cabinets and not the course. When she had beaten him into second place at Burghley three-day-event two months later, he had grown actively hostile, cutting her dead or putting her down at every opportunity. Hurt by his about-face, Tash now thought he was unspeakably spoilt and petty.
    ‘Try to make friends again, huh?’ Zoe uncurled her feet from beneath Wally the collie and stood up to put the kettle on.
    ‘He’s the one being unfriendly,’ Tash pointed out tetchily.
    ‘Well, I