Elle wasn’t bothered by her grumpiness. She had a pretty good idea of what was getting to her sister. She was falling for English Colin, but didn’t want to make a fool of herself by admitting anything. Elle was torn between letting things take their natural course, or giving things a helping hand. She remembered how Penny had meddled with her and Rob when she first arrived. That hadn’t had a happy ending, but it was patently obvious that Colin and Penny were nuts about each other.

What Rob and Elle had . . . well, it wasn’t hard to see that it had meant nothing. He had someone else already.

And try as she might, she couldn’t dislike Celeste. She had no reason to, of course. But often it felt as though she should, as though the other girl had something that was rightly hers. But Rob wasn’t hers and hadn’t been for a long time. She had given him up freely.

Elle laughed at Penny. ‘Never fear, little sister,’ she said. ‘I am determined to get this precisely right. I will be here every waking hour from now on. But I need a favour,’ she added and Penny looked at her. ‘I need you to get Dad out of the way for the next couple of days.’

‘But how can I do that? What on earth would possibly make him want to leave?’ Elle watched Penny’s face as she came to the same realisation.

It was time to tell Ned about the albums.

Chapter 29

Penny sat in the passenger seat of Ned’s Cortina, while her father drove. She could feel her nerves kick into gear the closer and closer that they got to their destination. She had been somewhat successful in tuning out her father and Colin from the backseat, who were currently in a battle of wits and mini-war of words over how good/bad the Beatles were.

Ned had reacted predictably to Penny’s announcement that she was trying to track down and restore his old music collection.

‘I had almost forgotten about that,’ he’d said, but Penny had seen the way his face changed when she’d mentioned it.

‘Lovely.’ She put her hand on her hips. ‘So I should just sell back the ten or so I’ve already found then, should I?’

‘That many?’ For once in her life, Penny felt she’d truly got her father’s attention and seeing his face light up as he looked through the records she’d already procured, was a heady feeling.

And then, out of nowhere Ned began humming a Beatles tune that Penny recognised instantly, but hadn’t heard her father use in many, many years.

In fact, the awareness of that song in particular instantly sent her right back to her childhood, to those lazy summer days she and Elle had spent running around outside from dawn to dusk.