Christmas at Carriage Hill. Carla Neggers

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СКАЧАТЬ and bright and the scenery as beautiful as she imagined a New England winter would be. The nor’easter had fizzled, or blown out to sea. Something. She knew her grandmother would be watching the forecast. Philippa had managed to wriggle out of providing details about her rake of a man, but Alexandra hadn’t pressed her, fearing her grandmother would want details about her rake of a man. Alexandra had enjoyed their evening together in London before her departure the next day. Her grandmother was unconvinced that her only granddaughter’s move to the country was in the best interests of her career. Philippa had been out to the Cotswolds with Alexandra’s parents, but they hadn’t met Ian. He’d been off flying fighter jets or drinking with his pilot buddies. Alexandra didn’t know, didn’t ask, didn’t care.

      Well, at least she didn’t know and didn’t ask.

      Not caring would take time.

      Lost in thought, she wasn’t aware the car had turned off the main road until it hit a bump and she noticed an open field blanketed with snow glistening under the cloudless blue sky. She breathed in deeply, transfixed as the road wound into the small village of Knights Bridge. She took in the oval-shaped village green, surrounded by mostly nineteenth-century homes, a library, town offices, a handful of shops. Children and a few adults were ice-skating on a seasonal rink on one end of the green, a picturesque sight that conjured up simple pleasures and pushed her worries and doubts to the back of her mind.

      This will be a wonderful week. I won’t think about Ian at all.

      Alexandra settled into her seat as the car turned onto a back road. In a few minutes, they passed what had to be the house and “barn” Dylan and Olivia were building on the site of Grace Webster’s former house, a structure too far gone to save from demolition. The new buildings seemed to spring naturally from the rural surroundings. The house wasn’t too close to the barn, which, Alexandra knew, would serve as the headquarters for Dylan’s new ventures—adventure travel and the occasional entrepreneurial boot camp. Dylan might have ended up in Knights Bridge because of his grandparents—and his treasure-hunter father—but he was wealthy because of his own hard work and his friendship with Noah Kendrick, a high-tech genius. They had forged an incredibly successful business partnership, transforming Noah’s fledgling NAK, Inc., into a profitable enterprise. Noah, whom Alexandra had yet to meet, was serving as Dylan’s best man.

      This, Alexandra thought, was where Grace Webster—Philip Rankin’s last love—had moved as a young woman, pregnant with their child, not knowing if her RAF pilot would ever return to her. Decades later, Duncan McCaffrey had traced his birth mother to Knights Bridge and bought her crumbling house when she moved into an assisted-living facility. Duncan had died suddenly, leaving his only son, Dylan, in the dark about Grace and Knights Bridge. Two years later, Dylan had arrived in Knights Bridge himself to sort out what was behind his father’s mysterious purchase of a property in the out-of-the-way little Massachusetts town. In the process, he fell in love with his Knights Bridge neighbor, Olivia Frost.

      Funny how life turns out, Alexandra thought as her driver continued down the narrow road to a classic center-chimney house with creamy clapboards and a cheerful blue front door. A hand-painted sign decorated with a cluster of blossoming chives announced they had arrived at The Farm at Carriage Hill. She knew from Olivia and Dylan it was the last house on the road, which had once led into the Swift River Valley towns but now dead-ended at a gate leading into the reservoir watershed and ultimately to the reservoir itself. The house was situated among established gardens and mature shade trees, their branches bare and gray with winter, and tall evergreens drooping with snow. Across snow-covered fields a hill—Carriage Hill, presumably—rose against the blue sky.

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