My second romantic novella,
School Ties, can be downloaded for
free on Amazon this weekend – just in time for Mother’s Day in the UK. Here are
the opening paragraphs. I’d love to know what you think, and look out for the sequel, Lessons in Love.
Will Hughes slammed his pen
down in frustration. It was ten fifteen on a rainy September night and he’d
been marking Hamlet essays for more than an hour. And what a bloody shambles
they were too. Admittedly he was teaching the bottom set, but he was stunned by
the quality of the teenagers’ work. Some could barely string a sentence
together, let alone use an apostrophe properly. Only one had produced work that
showed any understanding of Shakespeare’s most famous play.
Trying hard to stay awake,
he took a gulp of cold instant coffee. He was less than halfway through the
pile of scripts and at this rate he’d be hard-pressed to finish them by
midnight. Worse still, he’d promised to take the first XV rugby squad on a
training run at dawn.
For the umpteenth time,
Will wondered why he had returned to teaching. He’d left his last school a year
ago to join an up-and-coming Shoreditch advertising agency. Yet now he’d had
another change of heart and given up his skinny lattes and generous expense
account to return to the chalkface.
Not that Downthorpe Hall
was a tough place to work. It wasn’t. Compared to the early years of Will’s
career, when he’d been a young English teacher at a tough inner-city
comprehensive, Downthorpe was the cushiest number imaginable. A private school
dating back two hundred years, it was housed in an elegant Cotswold mansion,
complete with castellated turrets, a winding two-mile drive and acres of
playing fields. It had once been an all-boys school, but had gone co-ed twenty
years ago. The decision was deplored by the old guard but had succeeded in
giving the school’s academic results a much-needed shot in the arm.
Will stretched his arms out
wide to keep himself awake, then stopped. He could have sworn he heard a loud
whirring noise outside the window. It sounded like a helicopter. But that was
impossible. Not at this time of night. And not so close to the school...
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