скачать книгу бесплатно
Back to McGuffey's
Liz Flaherty
The one that got away Could Kate Rafael's day get any worse? First she lost her job, then her house burned down and now her ex is back in town. Apparently, Ben McGuffey's taking a break from being a big-city doctor to help at his family's tavern and reassess the choices he's made for his career.Ben ends up giving Kate a hand…then giving her kisses…and finally, a second chance. But when a local teenager shows them both a glimpse of what it means to be a family, Ben wonders if having kids in small-town Vermont would clash with his ambitions. Or can he truly come home again…to Kate?
The one that got away
Could Kate Rafael’s day get any worse? First she lost her job, then her house burned down and now her ex is back in town. Apparently, Ben McGuffey’s taking a break from being a big-city doctor to help at his family’s tavern and reassess the choices he’s made for his career.
Ben ends up giving Kate a hand…then giving her kisses…and finally, a second chance. But when a local teenager shows them both a glimpse of what it means to be a family, Ben wonders if having kids in small-town Vermont would clash with his ambitions. Or can he truly come home again…to Kate?
“Since you have clothes now,” Ben said, “I might consider taking you out to dinner in Burlington.”
“Well, you know—” Kate inserted the key into the lock and looked up at him. Even in the darkness, she saw the green gleam of his eyes, but she couldn’t read his expression “—you don’t have to do me any favors, Dr. McGuffey.” She didn’t know whether to laugh or not.
His hand covered hers before she could get the door unlocked. “Oh, come on, Katy.”
“Come on where?” she said, the words and her breath both catching in her throat at once so that she squeaked when she spoke.
“It wouldn’t be a favor, unless it was to me,” he said, turning her so that his arms surrounded her. “Don’t you ever wonder?” he asked, pulling her close. And closer. “What would be the same between us? What would be different?”
Then he kissed her.
Dear Reader (#ulink_c026323b-79c3-5961-9874-56a70be8b4dc),
I have lived in Indiana my entire life. This is fine with me—it’s home and I love it here. I also love traveling, and my favorite place to go is Vermont. Since our younger son and his family lived there for fifteen years, I got to go at least once a year. Every time I went—especially after the grandkids came along—it was like going home.
On one visit a piece of a story and a couple of people I hadn’t met before decided to keep me and my notepad awake one night. I love second chances both in books and in real life, so when high school sweethearts Kate and Ben introduced themselves and their Northeast Kingdom hometown, I was compelled to follow along. To see how the guy who really wanted to be a world-class skier ended up as a doctor, and the girl who only wanted to be a mom never became one.
Then, just when I thought things were falling into place, Jayson Phillip Connor entered the picture. Sixteen, with Down syndrome, a penchant for juice boxes and a great, loving heart, Jayson changed everyone he met.
I hope you enjoy finding out how.
Liz Flaherty
Back to McGuffey’s
Liz Flaherty
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
LIZ FLAHERTY
retired from the post office and promised to spend at least fifteen minutes a day on housework. Not wanting to overdo things, she’s since pared that down to ten. She spends nonwriting time sewing, quilting and doing whatever else she wants to. She and Duane, her husband of…oh, quite a while...are the parents of three and grandparents of the Magnificent Seven. They live in the old farmhouse in Indiana they moved to in 1977. They’ve talked about moving, but really…thirty-seven years’ worth of stuff? It’s not happening!
She’d love to hear from you at lizkflaherty@gmail.com.
For the Wednesday Women.
We’ve known each other since we all knew what our natural hair color was, couldn’t write our names in cursive and had no idea where we would find our happily-ever-afters. We’ve gone from passing notes in elementary school to comparing pictures of grandchildren, mourned each other’s losses and cheered every success. If we don’t see each other for ten years or so, we have no problem picking up right where we left off.
Thanks for the friendship. See you at lunch.
Contents
Cover (#u596a372c-5721-57d2-bdfb-bed83afd4ccc)
Back Cover Text (#u8097fd17-9af9-5742-8d43-9ab2612f22f1)
Introduction (#ue20e99a4-3624-5bf6-b366-623f12a0bf2f)
Dear Reader (#u55d8c6ad-7066-56eb-a1ac-1e2c8bcc7ea1)
Title Page (#u8f59611c-d908-5de1-86f7-ba6775458085)
About the Author (#u315a64ed-d905-5beb-956a-fb7ff1f9eb24)
Dedication (#u4d33ff9e-58fe-5f06-a30f-cada8f3da0c4)
CHAPTER ONE (#u620fb821-c147-5a34-90d9-57f4550b0dae)
CHAPTER TWO (#ua15268c0-20d7-561f-9d5e-b42af50eaa7b)
CHAPTER THREE (#uee38796a-63c6-5edc-bc66-76d83b8f712d)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_f212db0b-5440-57a1-8755-3282a4afa84b)
“TWENTY YEARS,” KATE Rafael lifted her glass and squinted at its contents. “I went to Schuyler and Lund straight out of high school. Just to work a year before college, you know, because I was going to be a nurse. A four-year-degree one—I could have learned to stop fainting at the sight of blood. Really I could. And then I was going to marry Ben and have four children. You know, two boys and two girls like you did only my boys were going to be older than the girls.”
Penny Elsbury listed to one side and sat up straight on the bar stool in her kitchen. “Is it just me or is it getting really tired in here?”
Kate frowned at Penny. “I’m not tired. It must just be you.”
“And they let you go why? Nobody ever bled there, so they didn’t know about your problem.” Penny squinted at her glass, too, then gave Kate a confused look that would have been funny if Kate had been sober. Which she wasn’t exactly.
“They said they couldn’t afford me.” Kate nodded sagely. “That poverty-level salary they were paying me for six-day weeks was more than the law firm of Shyster...Schuyler...Schuyler and Lund could stand.” She set down her glass. “I don’t know what to do. I never did go to college, you know. I meant to, but I didn’t.”
“I know.” Penny nodded sadly. “Me neither.”
“And I never married Ben and had babies.” Oh, no. Three glasses of very cheap wine weren’t enough to stop that particular pain. Kate had to concentrate on holding her mouth steady and keeping her eyes from tearing up. Not marrying Ben—she could live with that. But no babies? Not nearly so easy. She wouldn’t have been insistent on four—just a couple would have been enough. Even one.
“Me neither.” Penny nodded again. She was still tilting on her stool.
“You couldn’t. You married Dan and had his babies. He wouldn’t have liked it if you’d married Ben, too,” Kate said.
“Nah, he wouldn’ta cared if I married Ben. Would you, darlin’?” Penny smiled at Dan when he came into the kitchen and steadied her on her stool.
“Probably would have. Ben’s a family practice doctor and we have more need of an orthodontist.” He kissed the back of Penny’s neck and reached across the counter for Kate’s glass. “More, Katy?”
“Please.”
Dan poured the last drops of the wine into the women’s Shrek glasses and sat on the stool beside his wife’s. “You heard he’s moving back to town? At least for the summer.”
Kate blinked. “Who?”
“Ben.”
“But he left. He practices down in Boston.”
“He says spring just isn’t the same without Vermont mud.”
She thought—albeit not clearly—of Ben McGuffey and the last day he’d been her boyfriend. They’d sat on bar stools similar to these in his father’s tavern on her twenty-fourth birthday and he’d said he didn’t think he’d be able concentrate on both her and his residency and he needed to break up. For a while.
She’d sat there sipping diet cola with a maraschino cherry garnish and a shot of grenadine in it and wondered why he didn’t hear her heart breaking. Surely it made a splintering sound, didn’t it?
“I wonder why he really wants to come back. He doesn’t like spring. He only likes it on the mountain when he can ski.” Deciding the last little bit of wine might be crossing her own personal line, she slid off her seat and went to pour herself some coffee. She filled a cup halfway and returned to the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room.
Dan shrugged. “All I know is that he’s staying the summer.”
Penny frowned at him. “You bicycle and ski with him every time he comes back to see his folks. How can you not know?”
“It’s been months since the last time he was here. Christmastime, as a matter of fact.”
Kate didn’t like thinking about Ben, about what might have been, although she’d spent an uncomfortable amount of time doing just that.
Ben had gotten married after he joined a practice in an affluent Boston suburb—she’d even sent a gift—but he and the pretty socialite had been divorced a few years later.
Kate had been engaged for a time in her mid-twenties, but had given Tark Bridger’s ring back due to a mutual lack of interest. They’d broken up in the same bar as she and Ben had, talking over Maeve McGuffey’s potato soup about a future they didn’t want to share. The next time she saw Tark, she introduced him to the woman he married six months later.
She’d been busy in the way that people were. She’d worked, gained and lost the same twenty pounds several times over the years and been inordinately proud of Penny and Dan’s children as they arrived. When she passed thirty, she started to think maybe it was time for her to get married and start a family, but no one had been around to help complete the equation. As a thirty-seventh birthday gift, her gynecologist had said if she had childbearing in mind, she’d better get to it.
Kate tried not to hear that particular ticking clock. She didn’t like to think about the babies she’d wanted and never had.
She was finding that a few glasses of wine made that a little difficult. More than a little.
She and Ben had seen each other often over the years. They always smiled, talked and exchanged looks that were at once familiar and bemused. They danced together at weddings and avoided each other’s eyes at christenings, or at least Kate avoided his. They held hands at funerals in a way that was comforting but lacking the chemistry of their youth. She thought maybe magic wasn’t meant for her at all.
“I’m a spinster, and the fact that I even use that word in conversation means I spend too much time reading historical novels.” She made the announcement to the contents of her coffee cup, overwhelmed by sadness. “And now I’m unemployed on top of it. What else can happen?”
“Now there’s a loaded question.” Penny shook her head at her. “I think the last time Dan asked that was when I told him I was pregnant for the fourth time. The washing machine heard me say it and broke down immediately.”
Kate snorted. “Washing machines don’t have ears. They might sense things, but they don’t hear them.”
“It really worries me,” said Dan, “that not only do I listen to the conversations you two have, sometimes they almost make sense to me.”
“Aunt Kate?” Dan and Penny’s second daughter, Mary Kate, stood in the kitchen doorway, the cordless phone clutched to the flat chest of the Denver Broncos pajamas she wore to upset her Patriots-fan father. Her eyes were wide and horrified. “The fire department buzzed in on call waiting. They called here figuring Mom and Dad would know where you were. I guess the lady who lived in the other half of your duplex fell asleep while she was cooking and the whole place burned down.”
Kate stared at her goddaughter, not quite comprehending. “Burned down? My house? Are you sure?”
“Yes, ma’am. They said it twice.”
“Come on.” Dan tossed Kate her coat and put Penny’s around her shoulders. “I’ll drive you over.”
A few minutes later, they stood at the charred remains of the saltbox house Kate had bought ten years ago. Firefighters, their faces streaked with soot, were checking the site for new flames shooting out of places still glowing hot in the darkness. The yard was a mire of mud and hopelessness.
Neighbors in pajamas hugged her, relieved to see her in one piece. The tenant who’d lived in the other half of the house had left with friends. She’d left carrying the plastic bowl of cookies something had compelled her to rescue.
Kate stood unmoving as near the rubble as the firefighters allowed. Her cat leaped from her next-door neighbor’s arms and came to stand against her legs as though to protect her.
She felt as though a block of lead was lodged in her chest. It wasn’t exactly heartbreak—everyone was safe, after all—but the sense of loss was overwhelming. Loss and loneliness. Her parents and sister lived in Tennessee, and she always missed them, but never this much.
“Do you have insurance?” Dan stood between Kate and Penny with an arm around each.
“Yes.” Her precious laptop computer was in her car. Family pictures and important legal papers had been reproduced on computer disks by her electronically savvy brother-in-law. No one had been hurt. Even Dirty Sally, the ancient one-eyed cat who stood sentinel against her legs, hadn’t been in the house. That was what mattered. Really it was.
