A Winter’s Tale: A festive winter read from the bestselling Queen of Christmas romance. Trisha Ashley

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СКАЧАТЬ up.’

      At the time that had hurt and I had wondered why he had gone to the trouble of finding us at all, but then he had added that he wasn’t in the best of health and had just wanted to assure himself that we were all right.

      Which we were, of course—totally penniless, but all right.

      ‘Who’s Lucy?’ Jack asked.

      ‘My daughter. She’s twenty-two, and out in Japan teaching English for a year…at least, I hope it’s only a year, because I miss her terribly.’ I cupped my hands around my own mug and stared down into it. ‘But you did say that Grandfather left me Winter’s End, didn’t you? I didn’t imagine that? Only I’m sure you can’t be right because—I mean—why on earth would he? It’s too incredible to be true! And in any case, surely I would have been told about it by now if he had?’

      ‘You haven’t, because the solicitor had strict instructions from my uncle to wait until the estate was settled before contacting you—or telling the family where you were. He knew there would be a fuss because, you see, I was brought up expecting to take on Winter’s End as the next legitimate heir…even if you turned up again, which of course you didn’t. But it wasn’t entailed on the next male descendant, so he was free to leave the estate to who he liked.’

      ‘So, why did he do it?’ I asked, ignoring this slur on my birth.

      ‘My uncle and I didn’t see eye to eye about some things: he just couldn’t understand modern business methods, for a start. And he’d been draining the money that should have gone to keep the house in good repair into his garden restoration schemes instead, but when I remonstrated with him, he flew right off the handle.’

      ‘So when the will was read you naturally assumed I’d schemed to get him to leave Winter’s End to me?’

      ‘Yes—sorry about that! But you can understand how I felt, can’t you? The old man must have been senile to do such a thing—I love the place and I’d grown up believing it would one day be mine, that’s what made me so unreasonably angry. As soon as I managed to find out where you lived I thought I’d come up here and make you an offer for Winter’s End, but temper got the better of me!’

      ‘Make me an offer?’ I’d started to be convinced I was in some strange dream and would wake up again any minute. ‘You mean, you want me to sell Winter’s End to you?’

      ‘Yes, just that. I could challenge the will because William was clearly unhinged when he wrote it—but this way seems more civilised.’ He leaned forward and took my hand in his, looking down into my eyes in a way that made the caravan seem suddenly very much warmer. ‘Listen, Sophy, it’s the only practical thing you can do, because I’m afraid you’ve inherited a total white elephant and all the liabilities that go with it. Winter’s End is falling down and has been for years, because of all the income being diverted into the garden restoration. He even took out a bank loan against the house to fund the final stages. It’s got wet rot, dry rot, woodworm…you name it, and it’s got it. And there aren’t even any major assets you could sell off. There was one decent painting, a Stubbs, but William arranged for it to go to the nation in lieu of death duties.’

      Despite the mesmerising effect his nearness and those devastating blue eyes were having on me, it occurred to me that Grandfather seemed to have had it all worked out—not the actions of a senile man.

      ‘But you still want Winter’s End?’ I asked him curiously.

      ‘Yes, it’s my family home, after all, where I was brought up…I love it. And I’m a property developer, a very successful one, so I know what needs to be done and I can afford to do it.’

      ‘I understand. I was just starting to feel the same way about my cottage, even though it didn’t belong to me.’

      He looked seriously at me, his eyes frank and earnest: ‘Please let me buy it back, Sophy! I’ll even pay well over the market value—how about that? It can’t mean anything to you, can it, since you left it when you were a small child? And I don’t suppose you could afford the upkeep, anyway.’

      I said slowly, ‘No, I—no, how can it mean anything to me? I was eight when I last saw it.’

      ‘Liar!’ said a voice in my head—Alys’s voice, tenuous and far away, as if speaking down a very bad telephone line, but instantly familiar to me even after all these years.

       Alys, are you back again?

      But if she was, she was now silent. Maybe my subconscious had simply ascribed her voice to my innermost thoughts? For of course I did long for Winter’s End—but the Winter’s End of my childhood, before Jack took my place and everything changed—and there was no way back to that.

      ‘You could come and visit whenever you liked anyway,’ he offered, with another one of those glorious smiles. ‘We’re family, aren’t we? And now I’ve found you, I’ve no intention of letting you get away again!’

      I sighed and shook my head. ‘You know, it’s so ironic! I was waiting for an angel to come to the rescue—but now it’s too late. Only a week ago I’d have jumped at the chance without a second thought, because I could have bought my cottage and not had to move out.’

      He looked puzzled, so I explained what had happened, and then he suggested I could still make the new owners of the cottage an offer they couldn’t refuse.

      ‘I could, but they are rich City types who’ve bought it for a holiday home and I don’t think they would be likely to sell it even at more than its value. They’re busy ripping out every original feature and tossing the cottage’s entrails into a skip, so all the things I loved about it have already gone. If there is one thing my early life has taught me, it’s that when everything changes, you move on—and you can never go back and expect things to be the same.’

      Not even at Winter’s End, except in my dreams…

      ‘But you could buy somewhere new?’ he suggested. ‘I expect you’ve got friends here?’

      ‘Not really. I know a lot of people but I’ve only got one real friend, from way back, and she tends to move around a lot.’

      In fact, she moved around permanently; but Anya, with her dreadlocked red hair and her home made from an old ambulance, was probably a world away from the sort of people my cousin Jack knew.

      ‘Well, now you’ve got me,’ he said, giving my hand another squeeze and then letting it go. ‘Whatever you decide, we’ll always be friends as well as distant cousins, I hope. But I know, when you have thought it over, you’ll realise that the right thing to do is to sell Winter’s End to me, to keep it in the family.’

      ‘I expect so, but—well, none of this seems real at all yet. I need time to think—and hear the news officially from a solicitor, too, before it sinks in properly and I start to believe it!’

      ‘You will. Hobbs is the family solicitor, though he is semi-retired, and he said he was going to call in and see you personally on his way up to Scotland. I expect he’s hard on my heels. Oh, by the way,’ he added casually, ‘I promised Aunt Hebe that I’d ask you if you had the book, and if you have, take it back with me.’

      ‘The…book?’ I stared at him blankly while the clanging of alarm bells sounded in my head. ‘Do you mean СКАЧАТЬ