by Sarah Morgan
‘Not like a sister.’ His gaze dropped to her mouth and lingered there. ‘Nothing like a sister.’
It was becoming hard to breathe. ‘I’ve been under your nose for ever.’
‘So maybe I’m just a bit slow.’ He stroked her hair away from her face with a gentle hand. ‘Or maybe, subconsciously, I always thought that you were out of bounds. You were my baby sister’s best friend. Then you were a colleague.’
‘You’ve kissed just about every girl on this island, Logan MacNeil. But you never kissed me until last Saturday.’
‘If I’d known how good it was going to be, I would have been kissing you in the playground, right under Ann Carne’s nose.’ He hesitated. ‘Perhaps I didn’t kiss you because you were the only one that mattered to me. Our relationship was too important to risk messing it all up.’
She couldn’t listen. She couldn’t allow herself to believe it. ‘Logan, you’ve had a terrible year, and—’
‘Stop.’ He covered her lips with his fingers. ‘If you’re going to suggest that this is rebound or therapy or anything like that, don’t waste your breath. What I feel for you is real, Evanna. And it’s for ever.’
‘But—’
‘It doesn’t make sense, does it? You’re going to ask me why I suddenly know I love you when you’ve always been in my life. Why haven’t I felt it before? And I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know why I haven’t realised it before.’
‘You loved Catherine.’
‘Yes, I did.’ His voice was soft. ‘I won’t lie to you about that. I did love Catherine. But she’s gone. And now I’m in love with you. I’m crazy about you and I can’t let you leave the island. You told me that I should grab happiness and I agree with you. But you’re my happiness, Evanna.’
She struggled to speak. ‘Logan.’ Her voice shook and she tried again. ‘I’ve dreamed about you for so long—wanted you for so long …’
‘I never knew. I never knew that you felt like that.’ He gave a groan and lowered his mouth to hers, his kiss warm and insistent. Then he lifted his head just enough to speak. ‘I must be blind and stupid. Will you marry me?’
How could it happen? How could a person go from misery to happiness in one bound? ‘It’s too soon—you need time to think about things.’
He shook his head. ‘Evanna, I’ve known you for twenty-six years. How much more time do you think I need? Will you be my wife? Will you be a mother to my daughter?’
Kirsty.
Tears filled her eyes. ‘I’ve wanted this for so long I can’t believe that it’s true.’
‘Believe it.’ He muttered the words against her mouth. ‘And then say yes. You said that you wanted a home and a family, a man who loves you, here on Glenmore Island. You have it, Evanna. If you want it, it’s all yours.’
She slid her arms round his neck and buried her face in his neck. ‘I want it. I want everything.’ She lifted her head and melted into the heat of his kiss, excitement burning away the exhaustion and misery of the past few days. ‘I love you, Logan. I can’t believe you want me to be your wife and a mother to Kirsty. And your practice nurse.’
He gave a slow smile. ‘For now.’
‘What do you mean, for now?’
He kissed her once again. ‘You can be my practice nurse until I find you something better to do. I’m planning on keeping you fairly busy in the bedroom, Evanna MacNeil. We’re going to have a large family.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’ He brushed his lips over hers. ‘How many children is a good number, do you think? Nine? Ten?’
She giggled. ‘Ann Carne would have a fit if we gave her ten little MacNeil children to teach.’
His eyes gleamed. ‘We have a duty to maintain the population of rural communities.’
Evanna felt a warm glow of happiness. It felt as though someone had touched her dreams with a magic wand and turned them into reality. ‘You called me Evanna MacNeil. Have you any idea how many times I scribbled that name in my textbooks?’
‘Did you? Well, I’m glad to hear it.’ His mouth was still close to hers. ‘It means that you won’t need any practice writing it down once we’re married.’
Her heart jumped. ‘Married.’
‘Yes, married. I love you, Evanna Duncan MacNeil. Are you going to say yes to me?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled and smiled. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes-s-s.’
‘MUM, where are we spending Christmas?’
Christy glanced up from the letter she was reading. ‘I don’t know. Here, I suppose, with Uncle Pete and your cousins. Why do you ask? Christmas is ages away.’ And she was trying not to think about it. Christmas was a time for families and hers appeared to be disintegrating.
And it was all her fault. She’d done a really stupid thing and now they were all paying the price.
‘Christmas is a month away. Not ages.’ Katy leaned across the table and snatched the cereal packet from her little brother. ‘And I don’t want to stay here. I love Uncle Pete, but I hate London. I want to spend Christmas with Dad in the Lake District. I want to go home.’
Christy felt her insides knot with anguish. They wanted to spend Christmas with their father? She just couldn’t begin to imagine spending Christmas without the children. ‘All right.’ Her voice was husky and she cleared her throat. ‘Of course, that’s fine, if you’re sure that’s what you want.’ Oh, dear God, how would she survive? What would Christmas morning be without the children? ‘I’ll write to your father and tell him that you’re both coming up to stay. You might need to spend some time at Grandma’s because Daddy will be working at the hospital, of course, and it’s always a busy time for the mountain rescue team and—’
‘Not just us.’ Katy reached for the sugar. ‘I didn’t mean that we go without you. That would be hideous. I meant that we all go.’
‘What do you mean, all? And that’s enough sugar, Katy. You’ll rot your teeth.’
‘They go into holes,’ Ben breathed, with the gruesome delight of a seven-year-old. He picked up the milk jug and tried to pour milk into his cup but succeeded in slopping most of it over the table. ‘I learned about it in school last week. You eat sugar, you get holes. Then the dentist has to drill a bigger hole and fill it with cement.’
‘You are so lame! What do you know about anything, anyway?’ Katy threw her brother a disdainful look and doubled the amount of sugar she was putting on her cereal. ‘Stupid, idiot baby.’
‘I’m not a baby! I’m seven!’ Ben shot out of his chair and made a grab at his sister, who immediately put her hands round his throat.
‘Why did I have to be lumbered with a brother?’
‘Stop it, you two! Not his throat, Katy,’ Christy admonished, her head starting to thump as she reached for a cloth and mopped up the milk on the table. ‘You know that you don’t put anything round each other’s throats. You might strangle him.’
‘That was the general idea,’ Katy muttered, glaring at Ben before picking up her spoon and digging into her cereal. ‘Anyway, as I was saying. I don’t want Ben and I to go home for Christmas, I want all three of us to go.’
The throb in Christy’s head grew worse and she rose to her feet in search of paracetamol. ‘This is home now, sweetheart.’ Thanks to her stupidity. ‘London is home now.’
As if to remind herself of that depressing fact, she stared out of the window of their tiny flat, through the sheeting rain and down into the road below. There was a steady hiss as the traffic crawled along the wet, cheerless street. Brick buildings, old, tired and in need of repainting, rose up high, blocking out what there was of the restrained winter light. People shouted abuse and leaned on their horns and all the time the rain fell steadily, dampening streets and spirits with equal effectiveness. On the pavement people jostled and dodged, ears glued to mobile phones, walking and talking, eyes straight ahead, no contact with each other.
And then, just for a moment, the reality disappeared and Christy had a vision of the Lake District. Her real home.
The sharp edges of the fells rising up against a perfectly blue sky on a crisp winter morning. The clank of metal and the sound of laughter as the mountain rescue team prepared for another callout. Friendship.
Oh, dear God, she didn’t want to be here. This wasn’t how it was supposed to have turned out.
As if picking up her mood, Ben’s face crumpled as he flopped back into his chair. ‘It isn’t home. It’ll never be home, it’s horrid and I hate it. I hate London, I hate school and most of all I hate you.’ And with that he scraped his chair away from the table and belted out of the door, sobbing noisily, leaving his cereal untouched.
Feeling sick with misery, Christy watched him go, suppressing a desperate urge to follow and give him a cuddle but knowing from experience that it was best to let him calm down in his own time. She sat back down at the table and tried to revive her flagging spirits. It was seven-thirty in the morning, she had to get two children to a school that they hated and she had to go on to a job that she hated, too. What on earth was she doing?
She topped up her coffee-cup and tried to retrieve the situation. ‘London at Christmas will be pretty cool.’
Katy shot her a pitying look. ‘Mum, don’t try and communicate on my level. It’s tragic when grown-ups do that. I can say cool, but it sounds ridiculous coming from anyone over the age of sixteen. Use grown-up words like “interesting” or “exciting”. Leave “cool” and “wicked” to those of us who appreciate the true meaning.’ With all the vast superiority of her eleven years, she pushed her bowl to one side and reached for a piece of toast. ‘And, anyway, it won’t be cool. The shopping’s good, but you can only do so much of that.’
Christy wondered whether she ought to point out that so far her daughter hadn’t shown any signs of tiring of that particular occupation but decided that the atmosphere around the breakfast table was already taut enough. ‘I can’t go back to the Lake District this Christmas,’ she said finally, and Katy lifted the toast to her lips.
‘Why not? Because you and Dad have had a row?’ She shrugged. ‘What’s new?’
Christy bit her lip and reflected on the challenges of having a daughter who was growing up and saw too much. She picked up her coffee-cup, determined to be mature about the whole thing. ‘Katy, we didn’t—’
‘Yes, you did, but it’s hardly surprising, is it? He’s Spanish and you’re half-Irish with red hair. Uncle Pete says that makes for about as explosive combination as it’s possible to get. I suppose things might have been different if you’d been born a blonde.’ Katy chewed thoughtfully. ‘Amazing, really, that the two of you managed to get it together for long enough to produce us.’
Christy choked on her coffee and made a mental note to have a sharp talk with her brother. ‘Katy, that’s enough.’
‘I’m just pointing out that the fact that you two can’t be in a room without trying to kill each other is no reason to keep us down here in London. We hate it, Mum. It’s great seeing Uncle Pete but a short visit is plenty. You hate it, too, I know you do.’
Was it that obvious? ‘I have a job here.’ In the practice where her brother worked as a GP. And it was fine, she told herself firmly. Fine. Perfectly adequate. She was lucky to have it.
‘You’re a nurse, Mum. You can get a job anywhere.’
Oh, to be a child again, when everything seemed so simple and straightforward. ‘Katy—’
‘Just for Christmas. Please? Don’t you miss Dad?’
The knot was back in her stomach. Christy closed her eyes and saw dark, handsome features. An arrogant, possessive smile and a mouth that could bring her close to madness. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, she missed him dreadfully. And, at this distance, some of her anger had faded. But the hurt was still there. All right, so she’d been stupid but she wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been so—so aggravating. ‘I can’t discuss my relationship with your father with you.’
‘I’m eleven,’ Katy reminded her. ‘I know about relationships. And I know that the two of you are stubborn.’
He hadn’t contacted her. Pride mingled with pain and Christy pressed her lips together to stop a sob escaping. He was supposed to have followed her. Dragged her back. He was supposed to have fought for what they had. But he hadn’t even been in touch except when they made arrangements about the children. He didn’t care that she’d gone. The knowledge sat like a heavy weight in her heart and stomach. Suddenly she felt a ridiculous urge to confide in her child but she knew that she couldn’t do that, no matter how grown-up Katy seemed. ‘I can’t spend Christmas with your father.’
She’d started this but she didn’t know how to finish it. He was supposed to have finished it. He was supposed to have come after her. That was why she’d left. To try and make him listen. ‘A wake-up call’, a marriage counsellor would probably call it.
‘If I have a row with one of my friends you always say, “Sit down, Katy, and discuss it like a grown-up.”’ Katy rolled her eyes, her imitation next to perfect. ‘And what do you do? You move to opposite ends of the country. Hardly a good example to set, is it?’
Christy stiffened and decided that some discipline was called for. ‘I’m not sure I like your tone.’
‘And I’m not sure I like being the product of a broken home.’ Katy finished her toast and took a sip from her glass of milk. ‘Goodness knows what it will do to me. You read about it every day in the papers. There’s a strong chance I’m going to go off the rails. Theft. Pregnancy—’
Christy banged her cup down onto the table. ‘What do you know about pregnancy?’
Katy shot her a pitying look. ‘Oh, get a life, Mum. I know plenty.’
‘You do?’ She just wasn’t ready to handle this stage of child development on her own, Christy thought weakly. She needed Alessandro. She needed—
Oh, help.
‘And don’t write to him. Ring him up.’ Katy glanced at the clock and stood up, ponytail swinging. ‘We’d better go or we’ll be late. The traffic never moves in this awful place. I’ve never spent so many hours standing still in my whole life and I don’t think I can stand it any more. I’ll ring him if you’re too cowardly.’
‘I’m not cowardly.’ Or maybe she was. He hadn’t rung her. Gorgeous, sexy Alessandro, who was always wrapped up in his job or his role on the mountain rescue team, always the object of a million women’s fantasies. Once she’d been wrapped up in the same things but then the children had come and somehow she’d been left behind.
And he didn’t notice her any more. He didn’t have time for their relationship. For her.
‘Ben’s upstairs, crying. I’m here eating far too much sugar and you’re ingesting a lethal dose of caffeine,’ Katy said dramatically as she walked to the door, her performance worthy of the London stage. ‘We’re a family in crisis. We need our father or goodness knows what might happen to us.’
Christy didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘You haven’t finished your milk,’ she said wearily. ‘All right, I’ll talk to him. See what he says.’
It would be just for the festive season, she told herself. The children shouldn’t suffer because of her stupidity and Alessandro’s arrogant, stubborn nature.
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Yay!’ Katy punched the air, her ponytail swinging. ‘We’re going back to the Lake District for Christmas. Snow. Rain.
Howling winds. I’ll see my old friends. my phone bill will plummet. Thanks Mum, you’re the best.’
As she danced out of the room, no doubt en route to pass the joyful news on to her brother, Christy felt her stomach sink down to her ankles. Now all she had to do was summon the courage to phone Alessandro and tell him that they were planning to return home for Christmas.
How on earth was she going to do that?
*****
Read on for an extract of Some Kind of Wonderful, Sarah Morgan’s incredible new novel.
CHAPTER ONE
ZACHARY FLYNN SHOULD never have been born.
His conception, as
his mother was fond of telling him, had been the result of an excess of alcohol and a burst condom. She’d spent the first eight years of his life blaming him for everything from poverty to bed bugs. Who she’d blamed after that he had no idea because at the age of eight someone had asked questions about the recurring bruises and broken bones and he’d been sent to live with a foster family. As churchgoing, God-fearing Christians they’d deserved better than a messed-up reject from a rough neighborhood of Boston who’d been raised to believe the only way to stop someone from screwing you was to screw them first. He’d had the distinction of being the first foster kid to snap the patience of these good, kind folk. After that he’d been handed from family to family like a baton in a relay race, everyone eager to pass him on.
He’d been on the fast track to a life on the wrong side of the law when he’d discovered flying.
Twenty years later he still had a clear memory of the exact moment everything had changed.
It had been an unbearably hot day at Camp Puffin, the air in the forest thick with the scents of summer and the hum of insects. Zach had committed mass murder as he’d chased mosquitoes the size of small birds around the airless cabin he’d shared with seven other kids. Seven kids whose families cared enough to send them to camp with enough food and gear to smooth the rough edges of parting.
Zach had been given his place as part of a scholarship program and they’d made sure it was something he didn’t forget. He’d taken revenge for their endless taunting by dumping their stuff in a tide pool. Most of it had been washed away and furious parents had demanded the culprit be duly punished.
Zach couldn’t imagine having a parent who gave a damn, least of all about stolen candy and a few sweatshirts with fancy logos.
His punishment had been a date with Philip Law, the director of Camp Puffin.
Zach, who viewed all authority with suspicion and was never going to be comfortable around a man whose name was “Law,” had expected to be sent on his way. He’d pretended not to care, but in truth he would have endured being bitten by a thousand mosquitoes if it had meant living on an island where the forest met the sea. Anything was better than having to spend his days looking over his shoulder in the sweltering city and although he wouldn’t have admitted it, Puffin Island was a cool place. There was something about the clean air and the way the ocean melted into the horizon that made him feel less like killing his neighbor.
