The Mills & Boon Christmas Wishes Collection. Maisey Yates

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СКАЧАТЬ But you could read it on them as surely as if it was tattooed how happy family life made them.

      Bennie shrugged. “Football seems a lifetime ago. We’re happy here. We are complete. Well… except for a little boy. Sherri isn’t keen on trying again, but who knows, after a few glasses of wine maybe I can convince her.” He gave her a look loaded with suggestion.

      “Clamp that mouth of yours closed.” She shook her head, and guzzled more wine. “He thinks you can put an order in, one little boy please, and once he’s delivered our baby-making days will be over… but what if we have another set of twins? Golly, sleep is so underrated when you don’t have kids.”

      “Sleep is for amateurs,” Bennie said. “We can sleep when we’re dead!”

      Sherri eye-rolled. “Easy for you to say, mister. Don’t think I don’t know you nap at the gym. Micah told me!”

      Bennie turned to at Micah. “You told her?”

      Micah lifted his hands in surrender. “It was an accident. It slipped out.”

      Sherri stared her husband down. “Sleep is for amateurs, right?”

      Bennie colored. “Right.” The jukebox in the back played one of our high-school faves, a pop ballad we used to croon to. I caught Timothy’s eye and smiled.

      Micah slapped Bennie on the back. “My gym fees just went up, didn’t they?”

      “Tenfold,” he laughed.

      We lapsed into silence as a waitress walked over. “Can I get you drinks?” We ordered a bottle of wine, and some beers. It felt good to fall back into old routines. Jesting, joking, making light of every little thing, Bennie making us cackle with kid-wrangling tales, and Sherri telling us the truth after his exaggerations. Most of my friends in Manhattan were childless, and planned to stay that way, and I wondered if they’d regret it later. Would I? It wasn’t too late, but with no relationship on the horizon, it didn’t seem like an option either. Their stories warmed me through, and part of me yearned for a family I didn’t have.

      More drinks were served and Timothy scooted around the table and sat beside me. “Tell us about the life you left behind…”

      There was something in the way he said it, or the way he arranged the words, that gave me pause. Did he suspect something, what with my hasty arrival in town?

      “Well…” I paused to work out which part to tell. “It truly is the city that never sleeps. Everyone works hard and plays hard too. Ambition is what drives the place, that and cocktail hour.” I laughed, trying to appear relaxed and make light of it all. “It was fun, but not the kind of place you want to stay for ever.” But I had. How I’d wanted to stay. I’d loved the high drama of New York, and the speed with which lives were lived. But maybe Amory was right and, if I’d stayed, I would have been heading for burnout. My sleeping patterns had been interrupted by hosting parties that carried over to the next day, and there was always the worry about the next one. Making it perfect. Keeping clients happy. Would Cedarwood be the same? Somehow I doubted it. While I’d still have a lot to do and organize, the pace would be different, I was certain of that.

      “What about you?” I asked. “Your kids are like little rays of sunshine.” Sort of.

      He gave me that same smile, the one reserved only for me. Did he use that on his wife? Puppy love, I reminded myself. And a million years ago at that.

      “They’re going through a bit of a stage at the moment. Testing the boundaries and all that jazz. It’s not their fault,” he said, when I urged him on with a nod. “I’ve recently split with their mom, and it’s been a big adjustment for them. For all of us.”

      At the bar the tender wiped down the bench, and looked around at the all-but-empty tables with a sigh of resignation. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.” I was dying to prod him for answers, and wondered why… was I simply curious? Or was it something more?

      “We tried to make it work for the kids’ sake but we were just too different in the end. We were so young when we got married, too young, really, and it was never quite right, but we stuck at it until it was obvious we were making each other miserable. Melanie left, and it’s been a trial.”

      Please, not that Melanie. “Melanie?”

      “Melanie Locket. You know, dancer Melanie? We got married a year or so after you left.”

      I stiffened. So he had got married a mere twelve months after we broke up? There I was calling it puppy love between us, and he’d gone and walked down the aisle with her? Micah had certainly kept that on the down low. And no wonder. Melanie had been my nemesis at school. She’d bullied me and the other gangly girls at school. The archetypal blonde-haired, blue-eyed cheerleader with an added evil streak. How could he have married her?

      “I see,” I said lamely. “So…” Words escaped me. Had I really known him at all? How could he have married the girl who’d made my life hell at school? Many a night I’d lain sobbing in his arms, rehashing something she’d done that day to torment me. Thank God I wasn’t that pushover type any more, the one who bruised easily.

      He sipped his beer and then said, “Yeah, it all happened so fast. Driven by hormones, I suppose. Now Melanie’s moved out of town, and I’m sole parent. You can see how the kids are struggling. They think they did something to warrant her leaving, but she moved away for work, and sees them every other weekend.”

      Was he still pining for Melanie? It was hard to tell, but I thought I could see a trace of hurt in his eyes.

      I changed tack; I’d ruminate about it all later. “So what do you do for a job?” He’d been applying for colleges when I left, and had never been fully decided on what to be ‘when he grew up’, as he dubbed it.

      “I’m a real-estate agent. I was kicking myself that I hadn’t heard about Cedarwood being put up for sale. It was all done cloak and dagger, wasn’t it?”

      I settled back into my seat. The rest of the gang were joking around, playing rock, paper, scissors to settle an argument. “I did wonder why – after all this time lying vacant – it was finally offered for sale,” I said. “What’s the story with the previous owners? Does anyone remember?”

      Timothy shrugged. “As far as I recall, the husband left and she stayed on, but closed the doors to guests. A few years later she moved on and it lay abandoned until you arrived.”

      “But what’s the story behind that?”

      Their faces were blank. Bennie said, “No idea. It’s weird, isn’t it, that no one mentions them?”

      I hadn’t found any of the former owners’ personal belongings. There’d been not even a scrap of paper left behind, only some antique furniture – that was it. Odd, if they’d moved on so hastily. No books, no clothes, nothing. Maybe there was detritus in the basement. I’d have to have a more thorough search.

      “Do you think the town is behind some kind of cover-up?” Micah asked, his voice jocular, but underneath I detected a hint of wonder. Was the tiny town of Evergreen hiding their secret? If so, why, since they weren’t here any more? Why had we never questioned it as kids? It had been dubbed the abandoned lodge and that had been that in our eyes.

      “Well, СКАЧАТЬ