Christmas at Rosewood. Sophie Pembroke

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СКАЧАТЬ just hoped that I would find it again one day, too. Eventually.

      ‘You’re here!’ he called, as I clambered out of the car, Max following behind me tablet still in hand. Edward rushed around to help Mum out the other side, as I slammed my door after me and looked up at Rosewood.

      Somehow, it was even more imposing without the windscreen between us. Suddenly I could understand how a house could find out secrets. This house, I sensed, could do anything.

      ‘Freya! It’s so lovely to meet you.’ Saskia stepped forward to give me a cautious hug – the sort you give family who you’ve never met before. The same sort of hug Darren and I exchanged for the last year or two of our marriage. She had tiny snowflakes on her eyelashes, and she blinked them away as she moved away again. ‘Edward’s told me so much about you.’

      Like how my husband walked out on me after thirteen years of marriage, I supposed. And how my mother was scared I was going to fall apart without him and be unhappy forever. Maybe even how Max was getting into trouble at school for the first time, and everyone knew it was because of the divorce. That it was my fault for letting my husband go. For not trying harder to keep him. For not giving him a second chance when he asked for it, two weeks after he left.

      ‘You too,’ I said, trying to smile. It was only fair, I guess. I knew all her secrets, after all.

      ‘Come on inside, it’s freezing out here – and this snow isn’t getting any lighter!’ Saskia put an arm around my shoulder and led me towards the door, Mum and Max following behind with Edward, crunching over snow and gravel. Uncle Edward had always been a big favourite with Max. Maybe he’d be able to get through to him.

      I figured I was due a Christmas miracle.

      ‘We held off decorating the tree until you got here,’ Saskia went on, as we approached the steps. ‘Isabelle and Therese have been inventing Christmas cocktails in the drawing room this afternoon. They claim they got them from an old book from the good old days, but they look bloody lethal. Feel free to turn them down. Oh, and Ellie’s been making mince pies, and Dad’s cooking something spectacular for Christmas Eve dinner. So basically, all the fun starts now you’re here!’

      I paused, just for a second, at the threshold to Rosewood House. I couldn’t shake the feeling that once I stepped through that doorway, and the heavy wooden door closed behind me, I’d be trapped. Caught in a world that would pull every last secret from my heart, and leave me a different person.

      Which was crazy, of course. I knew I shouldn’t have stayed up re-reading Biding Time the night before.

      ‘Hurry up!’ Edward called from behind us. ‘We’re turning into snowmen out here, aren’t we Max?’

      I took a breath and stepped inside, then stopped again, almost immediately.

      The hallway was impressive, I was sure. The empty tree huge and imposing. But right then, I didn’t notice any of that.

      I could only see one thing. One person.

      There, at the top of the wide, curving staircase, stood Aiden Waites. I might not have seen the man in fourteen years – at which point he was barely eighteen, and only just scraping into the ‘man’ category in the first place – but I’d have known him anywhere. Even if his photo hadn’t been plastered on tube adverts beside the cover of whatever his latest book was for the last three years.

      His dark hair curled a little longer than in his author photo, covering the tips of his ears and almost falling into those bright blue eyes. He looked not just older than I remembered, but more worldly too. Which I suppose made sense.

      When I’d met him, he’d been a virgin. When I’d left him two weeks later, he really, really wasn’t. And given his aptitude for it, I couldn’t imagine he’d given up sex for very long after our fortnight together.

      ‘Freya.’ He smiled, moving down the stairs without pointing out that I was staring, which was unexpectedly polite of him. Especially given the way he was glowering at me. ‘It’s good to see you again.’ The words didn’t match his expression.

      ‘You too.’ The words came out too fast, a reflex lie. ‘I didn’t know you were going to be here.’ A follow-up shot of honesty to explain my staring. And the way my heart was hammering against my ribcage. What the hell was he doing here at Rosewood?

      ‘Seriously, Mum. Can we come in now? It’s freezing.’ Max’s voice shocked me into movement, and I took a few quick steps into the hall, towards Aiden, to let the others in behind me.

      Saskia, I realised belatedly, was looking between us with far too much interest. Edward, thank God, didn’t seem to have noticed anything.

      ‘I forgot you two had met,’ he said, grinning. ‘Your mum and Aiden went to the same university up in Lancaster, Max.’

      ‘Three years apart,’ I added quickly.

      ‘I asked her to take him under her wing, but by the time she finally found time to answer my email he’d already been there a full term,’ Edward went on, and I realised that given all the ways I’d embarrassed him over the years, he was very capable of using this whole Christmas break to show me up in front of my son and Saskia’s family. With Aiden there, he wouldn’t even have to try that hard.

      Had Aiden told him? As far as I knew, he never had, honouring my request that we keep our fling a secret. But if Aiden was here, that might have changed…

      No, really, what the hell was he doing here? I needed to get an answer to that pretty damn quick.

      ‘But since we were both stuck in town over that Christmas, we caught up eventually,’ Aiden said, his gaze never breaking away from mine. His eyes blazed with a deeply buried fury, simmering under his smile. I wondered if the others could see it. ‘We kept each other company – watching Christmas movies when we weren’t working, that sort of thing.’ He’d been avoiding going home to a stepfather who hated him, and I’d been stuck working an internship that I hoped would make my career, but didn’t. With everyone else I knew gone home for the holidays, it felt like we were the only two people on campus, just for those two weeks. Alone in our snow-covered world. I shivered, remembering it.

      ‘Until her boyfriend came back, anyway,’ Aiden said, and broke the spell of my memory. ‘Then she forgot all about me, and left me to pine alone for what might have been…’

      I forced myself to roll my eyes. ‘I see fame hasn’t beaten that sense of the overdramatic out of you, then?’ A tight, uncomfortable feeling swelled up inside me. He wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t telling the whole truth either. And if anyone asked too many questions…

      I’d never told Edward that I’d seduced his best friend. That we’d had a brief, but intense, fling that Christmas – or that I’d avoided him until I’d graduated and moved away the next summer. He didn’t even know that Darren and I had broken up that December, or that we’d only made up in the January when he proposed.

      As far as Edward knew, Aiden and I had kept each other company watching The Muppet Christmas Carol and eating turkey pasties on Christmas Day.

      Which was only a tiny fragment of the real story.

      ‘I make things up for a living,’ Aiden pointed out. ‘Being overdramatic is kind of compulsory. Besides, I didn’t say it was a bad thing. It let СКАЧАТЬ