His Cinderella Next Door
Page 1
CARA COLTER shares her life in beautiful British Columbia, Canada, with her husband, nine horses and one small Pomeranian with a large attitude. She loves to hear from readers, and you can learn more about her and contact her through Facebook.
Also by Cara Colter
The Wedding Planner’s Big Day
Swept into the Tycoon’s World
Snowbound with the Single Dad
Cinderella’s Prince Under the Mistletoe
Tempted by the Single Dad
Cinderella’s New York Fling
Matchmaker and the Manhattan Millionaire
Cinderellas in the Palace miniseries
His Convenient Royal Bride
One Night with Her Brooding Bodyguard
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.
His Cinderella Next Door
Cara Colter
www.millsandboon.co.uk
ISBN: 978-0-008-91026-6
HIS CINDERELLA NEXT DOOR
© 2021 by Cara Colter
Published in Great Britain 2021
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.
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
EPILOGUE
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
Come.
MOLLY BENTWELL CLOSED her eyes. How could a single word evoke so much feeling? The word removed her—thankfully and completely—from the chaos all around her.
Her small Frankfurt flat currently looked as though it had been burglarized. Boxes were stacked haphazardly. Clothes were strewn on the floor. There were bright empty squares on the walls, where the paint had not faded, where not so long ago all the pictures had hung.
She was getting ready to move, again. She wasn’t quite sure where. Paris was too expensive. Ditto for London.
It didn’t really matter where, though. Moving was an excellent antidote for pain.
She closed her eyes against the fresh wave of hurt that hit her. Ralphie was gone. Even now, eight months, one week and two days later, it seemed impossible.
He had been the one constant in her life. He had been the one it was safe to love. Every single day, no matter where her photography had taken her, he had been her touchstone. She would check the time differences and it didn’t matter if it was the middle of the night where she was, if it was eight in the morning where he was, she called.
And the sun came out in her world when she heard his voice. When he told her news of Georgie, the cat he’d inherited from her.
The first thing Molly had done, in every single destination she had arrived at, was take a photograph of some special thing like an alligator, an elephant, a flower or a tree. Mostly she emailed them, and Ralphie would reply to the email with a picture of the cat that was beloved to both of them.
Now, the message she had grown up with—that love was the most dangerous thing of all—had been reinforced in the most terrible way.
She opened her eyes, and that single word jumped out of the email in front of her again.
Come.
The word filled her with longing to be with him. Oscar Clark, Ralphie’s brother, the only other person in the world who would totally get the sharp ache of this never-ending pain.
Oscar. Truck, she’d called him the first day they’d met, in kindergarten. She’d been reading since she was four, and she had picked the word car out of his carefully printed name on his bright yellow sunshine-shaped tag.
“Truck is a better name,” she’d informed him, full of the officiousness of being the only one in the kindergarten class who already knew how to read. “My daddy says he would never own a car. Never.”
And so, Truck it was.
As it turned out, Oscar lived on the estate next to the ramshackle farm that Molly and her father, Jimmy, used as a home base when Jimmy wasn’t working on a film as one of the most sought-after stuntmen in the industry. Her mother, who had died when Molly was very young, was a vague memory of good smells and soft words read from a large picture book. Her mother was also Jimmy’s cautionary tale to his daughter about the dangers of love.
“Beware of love,” he’d tell her, made melancholy by a few drinks. “It is hiding daggers in its magical cloak.”
And he’d been right. Because she had loved him, her father—and all of his magic and chaos—madly, and still felt the dagger of that loss in her heart daily.
Now, Ralphie.
And now, Oscar, asking her to come. She was aware of wanting what he promised—comfort, commiseration—with a yearning that was both compelling and frightening.
She thought, again, of that first day of school. Standing there, in the classroom, Molly had already been aware she was different than the other children, and not because she was the only one who knew how to read. The girls
were in pretty dresses and had ribbons in their curled locks. All the children had a shiny fresh-scrubbed look about them. Nobody else’s father was there.
Molly was in bib overalls, with a rip in one knee and a brand new white T-shirt, with which she had been inordinately pleased. Her dad had clumsily contained her unruly mop of curly hair into a braid so tight it felt as if her skin were being stretched. She had bathed last night, but on the way to school, her hand firmly in her father’s—terrified of this strange institution she was being turned over to—she had seen a frog. And had to have it.
Her dad had helped her catch it and put it in his pocket for her to have later because, according to him, frogs weren’t allowed in school. This astonishing declaration intensified Molly’s feeling of being sent to some kind of joyless dungeon, like the ones princesses in fairy tales so often ended up in.
Molly and her father presented themselves to the kindergarten teacher thirty minutes late, and with smudges of mud puddle on their faces and hands. Her new T-shirt was nowhere near white anymore.
Halfway through that torturous first morning, the frog had decided to announce his escape from her father’s pocket with giant hops down the row between the desks, croaking loudly, and relieving the pure tedium of learning the words for colors, which Molly already knew.
Miss Michaels jumped on her chair in an astounding show of hysteria. The girls in the class, apparently looking to Miss Michaels for what Molly already considered somewhat dubious leadership, began to scream.
The boys abandoned their seats and took after the frog, creating pandemonium. Soon, the classroom floor was littered with papers and books, pencils and crayons, one overturned desk and a broken chair.
He’d emerged with the frog—that boy with the big glasses and the sun-shaped name tag that said Oscar on it—and held it to his chest, protectively, away from the other boys. Truck had held that frog with tenderness that won Molly’s young heart.
If she were a princess confined to a dungeon, he was the prince who would rescue her.
They had been friends ever since. Oscar was quiet, smart, steady, the class geek, even in kindergarten, and Molly was the bold one, the rambunctious one, the one who was always either in trouble or looking for it.
And then there had been his brother, Ralphie, the third member of their circle. Her throat closed as she remembered his laughter, and she felt a sting behind her eyes. Eight months, one week and two days. How was Oscar surviving the loss?
Come.
Even now, a world away, six years from the last time she had seen him, Molly could feel the longing for the comfort of his presence, the steadiness of him, the feeling of being safe and cared about, liked exactly as she was.
Those feelings crowded out a sense of danger that had entered their relationship unexpectedly. When her prince had kissed her, making them both aware of each other in a new way.
A way that had made her understand love had a dimension to it that was as terrifying as her father had so dourly warned her all those years.
Looking at Oscar’s invitation now, Molly was aware all those feelings he evoked in her—not to mention the added dimension—should be the exact thing she should run away from right now.
But life had stolen her strength. Molly let her eyes drop to the temptation of the next line.
I’ve broken up with Cynthia. Why don’t you come to Vancouver for a few days? My place is huge. We could just hang out and have some fun, and do what best friends do, which is help each other through a rough time. I don’t know how I’m going to handle Ralphie’s birthday.
Just like that, she could picture Oscar, the way he had been when she last saw him, tall and lanky, like a puppy who had not yet grown into its feet. That shock of dark hair—the perfect mad scientist doo, she used to call it affectionately—falling down over one eye. Oblivious to peer pressure—you could afford that when you were born a Clark—he was always dressed as if his clothes were an absent-minded afterthought. She had seen him have on shorts in the winter, or different colored socks. Occasionally, his shoes didn’t match, either. Sometimes his shirts were inside out.
When one of those popular girls—why did they always have such mean eyes—had tried to mock him for that inside-out shirt, he had looked down at himself with surprised interest and said, ever so mildly, “In Belize, they would say I am hunting witches.”
Who knew that kind of thing? Oscar, that’s who.
Six years since she had seen him. She felt the ache of missing him. But after her father’s death, life had changed so quickly, her world had been upended so fast. She’d learned the hard way about love’s daggers. And her feelings for Oscar... Molly frowned. She didn’t want to think of that anymore.
As much as she had embraced keeping in touch with Ralphie, she had kept things deliberately at a distance with Oscar.
They sent each other the odd email, he always called her on her birthday, and she always called him on his, they exchanged Christmas gifts each year, the funnier the better. She usually added to his beloved, and ever so nerdy, science T-shirt collection, and he usually found her the worst photographs imaginable and had them elaborately framed.
Those photographs always hung in places of honor wherever she lived. Now, she’d taken them off the walls in preparation for her latest move.
She looked back to Oscar’s email.
I need to do something for Ralphie. His birthday would be a good time, but I don’t know what to do. I’m lost.
She had always counted on Oscar to be unchanging; she had relied on his steadiness. He was lost? It seemed unimaginable.
But she felt lost, too, ever since he had called her to tell her Ralphie had died. She had planned to go home for the service, but it turned out Mrs. Clark, Ralphie and Oscar’s mother, had decided against a service. But how did they arrive at closure without that important marking place? Without holding some occasion to celebrate Ralphie’s too-short life?
Molly let her eyes drop to the final line of the email.
I need you.
She had always needed Oscar—even from afar, his steadiness was there, in the background—but had he ever needed her before?
Come.
It felt as if she were a sailor on a boat that had been tossed about by a stormy sea and suddenly, by way of Oscar’s unexpected invitation, she had spotted a lighthouse.
She clicked on the attachment that Oscar had sent with the email.
Molly wasn’t sure what she was expecting. A recent picture of him, perhaps?
Her jaw fell. It was a first-class ticket to Vancouver from Frankfurt. It had her name on it and tomorrow’s date.
She stared at it.
She couldn’t possibly go. But why not? The move could wait. She hadn’t given notice, yet. She was undecided exactly where to go, anyway.
Maybe being around Oscar’s steadiness would help her crystalize her own plans for the future.
Ever since she was a child, she had traveled on short notice, and as a photographer, the pattern continued. In fact, she was scheduled to go to Africa at the beginning of next week, so it was not as if her passport was not up to date. She was an absolute expert at throwing a few essentials into the carry-on bag that she prided herself on being able to live out of—anywhere—for a week, or even two.
She glanced around at the mess of unresolved issues in her apartment.
She thought of Oscar—Truck. The warmth in his eyes, the easiness of his smile, his calm way of being in the world.
She thought of them needing each other to say a proper goodbye to Ralphie.
She sent a text to her contact in Africa. Molly hesitated, took a deep breath, hesitated for a few more seconds, then pushed print on the airline ticket on her screen. Only after she’d printed it, did she notice there was no return flight information.
Molly was a woman who did scary things for a living. Sh
e was a woman who welcomed the charge of the elephant, and who would eagerly hang from her knees from the tallest branch of a tree if it meant getting the picture perfect.
So why did the airline ticket, with no return, being spit out by her printer, feel like one of the scariest adventures she would ever embark on?
CHAPTER TWO
“TRUCK!”
Hearing the name only Molly had ever called him coming through the throngs at Vancouver International Airport, did a funny thing in the region of Oscar’s heart. Since his brother had died, it felt as if his heart were a stone in the center of his chest. He didn’t want it fluttering back to life.
It was so much easier to feel nothing at all. But if he had wanted to feel nothing at all, why ask Molly, the person who made him feel everything so intensely, to come?
Because she had navigated the sea of grief over her father. Because she had loved Ralphie as dearly as he. There was a hope she would know what to do.
And under that, it was a bit of a test for him. He was a scientist. He enjoyed tests. He needed to prove theories. And his theory—since the death of his brother and the end of his engagement—was that relationships sucked, and that he would not be having another one.
No, he would remain single. He would hike high mountains and explore the world on his own. No one could show you how to turn life into an adventure more quickly than Molly could.
That, and he was pretty sure she was the only person in the world who understood what he was feeling for Ralphie.
And it was that mutual love of Ralphie that made it so he could not hold himself back. He didn’t walk to her. He ran. He scooped her up, and her weight felt familiar to him, featherlight, and yet there was that supple strength as she wrapped her arms around his neck. Her fragrance denied nine hours or more of travel, and was intensely familiar, sharp and sweet at the same time, like high-mountain huckleberries. It made him want to bury his nose in her hair.
Instead, he swung her around until her laughter—and his—rang out, joyous.