by Ally Blake
Her eyes fluttered closed. ‘I’ve jogged my last. I refuse to let wheat grass touch my lips ever again. And there is no way I’m getting up before the birds every day. Not even for you.’
‘And chocolate, and coffee…’
Her voice was breathy as she said, ‘Will for ever be a staple in my diet. You want me, you take my predilections.’
‘Oh, I want you all right,’ he said, stealing a kiss on her beautiful pale neck.
She shivered. ‘And are you sure you really understand that you get my family too. They live over an hour away, but they aren’t backwards about dropping in unannounced.’
‘I actually liked your family, those I met anyway. Your mum was wonderful with Ruby. Truly. And your brothers are all sporty types, right?’
Her eyes opened in time for her to roll them. ‘They’ll see you as manna from heaven. Thank goodness for Rye and Tabby and my new sisters-in-law, all sensible indoor-type women.’
‘Thank goodness for indoor-type women everywhere.’ He reached out and switched off the lamp.
‘Well, what just happened there?’ she said into the darkness.
‘Just in case,’ he said. ‘Guests have been known to come wandering to this part of the resort on occasion.’
‘How impolite.’
‘How indeed.’
Thankfully the moon was not obscured by a single cloud so he could still make out Meg’s shape, her soft curves, her smile. He kissed the end of her nose. The corner of her lush mouth. The curve of her cheek. When he found the edge of her ear lobe her head lolled back on her neck as though her muscles had turned to liquid. ‘You’re too easy.’
‘Try playing me at any board game on the planet and you’ll be singing another tune, my friend.’
Instead he chose another indoor game, which left them both winners.
And afterwards, scads of coffee or no coffee, Meg fell asleep on the floor of the pool house, wrapped in his old, warm, soft, favourite, red, woollen blanket and in his arms. Her face peaceful, the dark rings beneath her eyes gone.
Content. Happy. Home.
EPILOGUE
SIX weeks after making Juniper Falls her home, and a little over a month after Quinn Kelly’s colossal and extremely moving state funeral—attended by no less than three foreign heads of state—Meg stood waiting at the gates of the Juniper Falls resort. Her high ponytail bounced about her shoulders as she hopped on the spot, and her hot-pink high heels kept getting stuck in the grass.
She glanced down at her brand-new engagement ring—a pink diamond solitaire as chosen by fashionista-in-the-making Ruby—glittering beautifully on her left hand and thought for about the hundredth time that her life couldn’t feel any different than it had two months before.
Quite apart from becoming more at home with her spectacularly beautiful new digs, her new man, and the new little girl in her life, she was still attending sporadic events as Meg Kelly, the face of the Kelly family, ones she had hand-picked herself. She was still volunteering at least twice a week at the Valley Women’s Shelter, only now she did so without any kind of disguise, internal or external, and the satisfaction it gave her had increased a hundredfold.
But this day, at the beginning of the next to last week of the summer school holidays, she was going to work for her new family’s business.
A big white bus finally came through the Juniper Falls gates. It had barely pulled to a stop when what seemed like a thousand kids spilled out. Bedraggled urchins the lot of them. With dark eyes all but popping out of their pale faces as they took in elegant Waratah House and the lushly encroaching rainforest.
Meg clapped her hands loud enough for the group to quiet down. ‘Okay, guys, I need you to do me a big favour and get yourself organised in one long line, alphabetical by first name.’
‘What if two of us have the same name?’ a big kid with a missing front tooth asked.
‘Excellent question. Then the one with the longest big toe goes up top. Right?’
A couple of kids whipped off their shoes and holey socks, just in case.
Meg grinned. ‘If you have it done in five minutes, there’s ice cream waiting for you in the restaurant.’
The loudest whoop she’d ever heard had her holding her hands over her ears and running for the side of the bus as the kids frantically introduced themselves to one another, which was the actual point of the exercise.
After the bus driver, whom Meg waved up the hill towards food, Zach was the last to hop off the bus. He looked as raggedy and wide-eyed as the rest of them. After an hour’s trip up the mountain with this lot she wasn’t surprised.
She sidled up to him and wrapped her arm around his waist. ‘There’s my big, brave, manly man. You survived.’
He said, ‘The week’s not over yet.’
Together they watched the Juniper Falls ground crew, headed by Felicia—now the resort’s official Children’s Activities Co-ordinator as well as Ruby’s some time babysitter—keeping the kids whipped into an eager frenzy.
‘I never thought I’d say this, but thank goodness Ruby’s a reader not a runner,’ Zach said.
Meg bit her lip. She knew better. The first time she’d seen Ruby she’d been swinging up a storm, her clothes covered in evidence of further adventure. But that was another mystery her dad would never have to know about. Now there was an extra pair of eyes looking out for Ruby, eyes experienced in the ways of feisty young girls, those mysteries ought to become fewer and further between.
Meg laid a hand on Zach’s chest. ‘I’ve babysat Brendan’s girls a thousand times. Believe me, let them run it out and they’ll sleep where they fall come dark.’
‘From your mouth to God’s ears.’
They watched on in silence as the rowdy kids walked single file towards the restaurant.
‘Can you believe they’re really here?’ she asked.
Zach shook his head.
An idea Zach had thrown out over dinner one night had become Meg’s obsession. The whole week at the resort had been booked out for a hundred pre-teens, some treading water in the foster system, others from families who’d been through Meg’s shelter.
Zach had put out word within the Olympic fraternity and several well-known athletes would run them ragged. The resort’s staff would teach them things like how to resolve issues with words not fists. Rock-star mates of Meg’s were to host a couple of dance parties, celebrity chefs to cook up healthy, fun food. And they’d be spoilt rotten.
But best of all, exposing these kids to Zach’s story, and subsequent success, would broaden the horizons they dared to reach for. Exposing Meg to these kids had already broadened hers more than she’d thought possible.
She leaned her head on his shoulder as a mass squeal of delight echoed from the restaurant.
Zach said, ‘I hate that Ruby’s missing this.’
‘She’ll be back in a couple of days, so she won’t miss much. I know I’ve said so a hundred times, but thanks for letting Mum have her. Ruby will be a brilliant influence on Brendan’s girls, and having all three girls has been the highlight of Mum’s month. She’s promised not to mention croquet lessons, or Baroque appreciation classes or a course in commedia dell’arte.’
Zach nodded silently, his back ramrod straight.
‘You’ve got used to having her home these holidays, haven’t you?’ she asked.
He slid a hand over her hair, tugging the end of her ponytail, and nodded.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Me too. We don’t really have to send her back to school next week, do we?’
He kissed the top of her head. ‘You’re the one who came from the good family—how did you end up being the bad influence?’
‘I’m Libran. I will do anything to make people love me.’
‘Mmm, and there I was thinking people couldn’t help loving you just because you’re you. And all along it was the accident of your birth.’
‘Happy accident?’ she asked, looking up at him again.
He appeared to t
hink about it for a moment. Then two.
Meg moved to pinch his arm, but he caught her hand in time and held it behind her back. Heat slid through her centre, the kind that still caught her off guard after all these weeks, the kind she didn’t see herself ever getting used to.
And then he kissed her with the kind of sweet, sensitive, all-consuming passion she never planned on getting used to.
Eons later they pulled apart when the sound of big tyres crunching against the white gravel drive split the peaceful silence.
The next of the four remaining buses was pulling in, and Dylan’s harrowed face was peering out the front window. Tabitha bouncing about next to him the likely reason.
Meg grabbed Zach’s hand and pulled him inside the first bus. They jogged to the back bench seat and hunkered down with Meg atop Zach’s lap, her arms about his neck so that they could watch from a covert vantage point as Tabitha, Dylan and his fiancée, Wynnie, attempted to corral their group.
‘You should have let Rylie do a series on her TV show about what we’re doing here this week, you know,’ Meg said. ‘The publicity would have been amazing.’
‘It would have. If we wanted publicity.’
The public figure and the private benefactor in Meg both struggled to be given free rein. ‘But think of the fundraising opportunity—’
‘I have more than enough funds to do this any time I want.’
She sat up straight. ‘As do I. But I wish the world knew what an amazing man you are.’
‘So long as you know, and Ruby has a vague sense of it, and your family suspects, then the world can think whatever it wants.’
‘You know what else?’ Meg asked, curling closer. ‘This way I get to keep you all to myself. And talking of having you to myself, how many sleeps till we head off to St Barts for the Grand Opening?’
‘Ah, twelve.’ He ran a finger down her nose before sliding it beneath her chin. ‘We still have time for it to be a honeymoon instead, you know.’
Though the idea felt just as thrilling now as the first time he’d suggested it, she knew that she wanted her family, her whole extended family, to be a part of the happy day when it finally came.
‘A quickie wedding?’ she said. ‘A four-day honeymoon? Sometimes I think you don’t know me at all.’
The finger beneath her chin moved to slide behind her ear and she struggled not to purr.
‘Fine. Then when we get back,’ he said, his voice gentle, ‘can we continue that talk from the other night?’
She nodded. Her next breath in shook. And then she smiled. ‘We can do better than that. I made an appointment with a fertility specialist at Monash IVF in Melbourne for not long after we come home. They practically invented the procedure, so if we’re going to start finding out the possibilities of maybe one day having another child, then that’s where we start.’
Zach leaned in to plant a kiss on her lips. Talk about heart-warming. ‘No matter what happens, always know I’ll always love you.’
She kissed him back. ‘Always know I’ll always love you too.’
He nodded. Promise sealed. He moved in for another kiss, when Meg stayed him with a finger.
‘I just had a horrible thought,’ Meg said, biting back a grin.
Zach’s eyes narrowed. ‘Do I really want to know?’
‘What if Ruby asks for commedia dell’arte classes?’
‘I’m not going to be the one to say no.’
‘Yeah, me neither. They were actually kind of fun. Oh, look.’
The next bus pulled up and Cameron and his wife, Rosie, stood at the front clapping madly and singing some travel song they’d forced on the poor kids in their bus.
‘You know what else is fun?’ Zach said, nuzzling against Meg’s ear.
She turned back to face him. ‘Do I really want to know?’
Zach slowly pressed Meg down against the leather seat, waved at her the keys he’d used to lock the bus door, and grinned. ‘Yeah, you really want to know.’
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II BV/S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
® and TM 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.
First published in Great Britain 2010
Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited,
Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR
© Ally Blake 2010
ISBN: 978-1-408-91975-0
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Excerpt
Dear Reader
Title Page
About the Author
Dedication
Prologue
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
Epilogue
Copyright
