скачать книгу бесплатно
Nice To Come Home To
Liz Flaherty
Will an apple at day keep love at bay?For Cass Gentry, coming home to Lake Miniagua, teenage half sister in tow, is bittersweet. But her half of the orchard she inherited awaits, and so does a fresh face—Luke Rossiter, her new business partner.Even though they butt heads in business, they share one key piece of common ground: refusing to ever fall in love again. But as their lives get bigger, that stance doesn’t feel like enough…
Will an apple a day...
Keep love at bay?
For Cass Gentry, coming home to Lake Miniagua, teenage half sister in tow, is bittersweet. But her half of the orchard she inherited awaits, and so does a fresh face—Luke Rossiter, her new business partner. Even though they butt heads in business, they share one key piece of common ground: refusing to ever fall in love again. But as their lives get bigger, that stance doesn’t feel like enough...
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...over forty years’ worth of stuff? It’s not happening!
She’d love to hear from you at lizkflaherty@gmail.com.
Also By Liz Flaherty (#ua867f1a3-851d-5e33-8062-ccf214bd147f)
Back to McGuffey’s
Every Time We Say Goodbye
The Happiness Pact
Nice to Come Home To
The Debutante’s Second Chance
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Nice to Come Home To
Liz Flaherty
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-08586-1
NICE TO COME HOME TO
© 2018 Liz Flaherty
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
“In my experience, there’s always a shoe about to drop somewhere.”
She raised her head as he lowered his, and their lips met in a sweet version of an age-old dance.
“What do you do,” he asked slowly, “when the shoe drops?”
“Oh.” Her voice sounded reedy. “It depends.”
“On?”
Cass laughed, not very convincingly. “On whether it’s a combat boot or a flip-flop.”
“What about a nice, comfortable loafer? How do you react then?”
“To tell the truth, usually it’s the combat boot, in which case I turn tail and run.”
“Well, what’s between you and me doesn’t have to do with the orchard or the coffee shop,” he whispered. “It’s courtship simply for the pleasure of it. Nothing more and nothing less. No promises, no demands. No permanency.” He kissed her again, treasuring her sweet response. “No shoes.”
Dear Reader (#ua867f1a3-851d-5e33-8062-ccf214bd147f),
When people ask if I write about friends and family, I usually say, “Not really” (with a couple of notable exceptions). There will be characteristics and habits I borrow from time to time, but nothing identifiable. However, when Luke Rossiter, the hero of Nice to Come Home To, showed up with a guitar, it was my husband’s fingers I saw on the strings, tugging the notes out without benefit of a pick. When Cass, the heroine, sat at the corner table in a coffee shop with her laptop, she was every writer I know. It was a reminder of how deeply personal our Heartwarming stories are and how beloved the people that we write about are. I hope you love them, too.
Liz Flaherty
Although their help was unwitting, I am grateful to McClure’s and Doud’s, the local orchards I visited to give Keep Cold Orchard its sense of place. I’m grateful to every barista in every coffee shop I’ve written in over the years—I hope the book does you justice. Thanks to Cheryl Reavis for giving the orchard its name and introducing me to the Robert Frost poem from whence it came. And thanks, Charles Griemsman, for everything.
To Nan Reinhardt, friend and writer extraordinaire—this one’s for you.
Contents
Cover (#ue20d5a04-4ca3-58b1-8fff-147ad98c1fc1)
Back Cover Text (#u85a0b86f-31c4-550d-8287-f5be6ba18fd3)
About the Author (#u3c158116-adfd-5e69-b74d-4575dfc77ab0)
Booklist (#u892225af-2bf9-5270-a5d3-52d78a80aa17)
Title Page (#u25d9fbd1-7989-5e3c-b0db-927d3165461f)
Copyright (#uf7e5c1b9-e362-502a-a08c-bfe4823ed203)
Introduction (#u976a8312-1f1a-5d74-ba76-e59cae8c5474)
Dear Reader (#uc6754578-38da-5ee5-9cf4-7fdfa8b4fb08)
Dedication (#u129d828a-b40c-595a-bdf3-bff7bc92134c)
CHAPTER ONE (#u03748034-fa44-560a-9ad1-412487905eb7)
CHAPTER TWO (#u31de2ccb-eb10-56d5-9711-9e2bdd2d6219)
CHAPTER THREE (#u00e001e3-e122-5e0f-aaf2-458ed9f814ea)
CHAPTER FOUR (#ubd66e2e6-01d3-50cd-bfd1-43ee00379ddd)
CHAPTER FIVE (#ubb8800b0-6b43-5612-b8da-30816e546164)
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)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ua867f1a3-851d-5e33-8062-ccf214bd147f)
“WHY DIDN’T YOU ever come back here?”
They were the first voluntary words Royce had spoken since they’d left the Missouri hotel early that morning. She’d read for a long time with her earbuds in, eaten a drive-through lunch in sullen silence or monosyllabic responses to questions, then stared out at Illinois until she fell back to sleep.
Cass Gentry looked over at the half sister she sometimes felt she barely knew. “The orchard is where my mother and aunt grew up, not me. Mother and Aunt Zoey inherited it from my grandparents and when Mother died, she left her half to me.” How many times did she have to say this? Royce was sixteen, not six.
“Why didn’t you sell it and stay in California?” Royce looked out the passenger window again, at the seemingly endless fields of corn, soybeans and hay that filled this part of central Indiana. Barns and silos and old windmills, some of them in disrepair, sat spare and silent sentinel over farmhouses.
There weren’t as many fences as Cass remembered. Not nearly as many cows, either, which could explain the reduction in fences. A few miles from the highway they traveled, she could see the eerie moving silhouettes of a wind farm. She didn’t remember that being here before.
“There’s nothing here.” At the back of Royce’s disgruntled voice was a thread of fear. Cass recognized it. Remembered it. She wanted to say something sympathetic, but sensed it wouldn’t be welcome.
“I know.” People had been saying that eighteen years ago, too, when Cass had spent that utopian year in the little community that surrounded Lake Miniagua.
“This isn’t a place people move to,” her stepcousin Sandy had said as they’d kayaked around the lake’s six hundred acres. “It’s one they leave.”
That had been true then and probably still was. When the summer people left the lake, its population was sparse, its activities on the slim side. The bed-and-breakfasts and Hoosier Hills Cabins and Campground shut down between October and April. The closest supermarket, movie theater and department store were in Sawyer, five miles away from the lake.
But. “It’s the only place I was ever happy.” A sad truth speaking from the downhill slope of thirty-five, but a truth nonetheless. Memories of the childhood visits to the orchard and the year in the lake house had saved her sanity on more sleepless nights than she wanted to contemplate.
Royce’s expression was both disbelieving and disdainful. “Come on, Sister Smart One. You were married. You didn’t have to follow Dad all over the world with the army and make new friends every couple of years. There had to be some happiness in there somewhere. You had a life. You had choices.”
“I did my share of Dad-following, too, but I did have a life. You’re right. Let me change what I said. The year on the lake was the happiest I’ve ever been.” She’d had choices, too, and she’d too often made the wrong ones. She hoped this move wasn’t one of those.
“You chose to divorce Tony and let him keep most of everything you guys had.”
“It’s called a prenup.” And she’d given up more than she had to, just because she thought it had somehow all been her fault, but Royce probably wouldn’t understand that. Cass wasn’t sure she understood it, either.
“My mother told Dad he should come and help you, but he wouldn’t. He said you’d made your bed and you could lie in it.”
“She has always been very kind to me.” This couldn’t be said about all of Cass’s stepmothers. The one after her own mother had been determined to marry an army officer, regardless of the cost to anyone else. She’d had a handsy son who had made life difficult for the pubescent Cass. The next one had borne shocking similarities to all the stereotypes ascribed to a Barbie doll, a fact made worse by the fact that her given name was Barbara Ann and Cass’s father’s name was Kenneth.
Royce’s mother, Damaris, came into the picture when Cass was eighteen and married to Tony Moretti, and had been a friend from the very beginning—even more so after she divorced Cass’s father. That Damaris and Cass’s mother had become friends as well had made them into a quirky but workable family.
Royce snorted. “Until she foisted me off on you, right?”
“She’s deployed to Afghanistan. Not exactly her choice. Would you rather have stayed with Dad?” Cass heard the exasperation that laced her voice. Royce’s smirk said her sister heard it, too.
She supposed this was the good side to why she and Tony hadn’t had children. If they had, their progeny would be about the age of Royce, give or take a few years. Divorce had been bad enough as it was, when there hadn’t even been pets to decide the custody of. How would Cass have handled Tony’s defection and a harrowing battle with breast cancer at the same time if grumpy teenagers had been added to the mix?
She rubbed her arm absently. It didn’t hurt much anymore, but less than a year past chemo and radiation, she still expected it to.
“Are you all right?”
The solicitude in Royce’s question surprised her. It was nice to hear. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“Where will we live?”
