And Sam pulled both hands free and pointed, ‘Boat!’
‘Sam is beside himself,’ Eve said, as Hannah put him down and let him run to the other side of the gazebo to gaze out between the slats at the sailing boat lazily cruising past the bay.
‘Culshaw’s the same. Asking him to give you away has made his year, I’d say.’
‘I like him,’ she said, as they watched him animatedly tell Mrs Willis a story. ‘He feels like family to me.’
‘Canny old devil,’ he said as he folded his arms around her. ‘Did I tell you what he said when I tried to apologise and tell him that we hadn’t really been engaged that weekend in Melbourne? He actually said, “poppycock, everyone knew you were destined to be together”,’ and Eve laughed.
‘Maureen told me the same thing.’
‘And they were right,’ he said, drawing her back into the circle of his arms, kissing her lightly on the head. ‘You are my destiny, Eve, my beautiful wife.’
‘Oh,’ she said, turning in the circle of his arms. ‘Did you hear the Alvarezes’ news?’
He frowned, ‘I’m not sure I did.’
‘Felicity is pregnant. They’re both thrilled. I couldn’t be happier.’
He nodded. ‘That is good news, but at the risk of trying to make you happier, I have a small present for you.’
‘But you’ve already given me so much.’
‘This is special. Culshaw’s agreed to sell Mina Island. It’s yours now, Evelyn.’
‘What?’ Her eyes shone bright with incredulity. ‘It’s mine? Really?’
‘Yours and Sam’s. Everything of mine is now yours, but this is especially for you both. It’s a wedding gift and a thank you gift and an I love you gift all rolled into one. And it guarantees you can bring Sam back when he’s older any time you want and show him everything he missed out on now.’
‘Oh, Leo,’ she said, her eyes bright with tears, ‘I don’t know what to say. It’s too much. I have nothing for you.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s nowhere near enough. It was here that you gave me the greatest gift of all. You gave me back my heart. You taught me how to love. How can I ever repay you for that?’
She cupped his cheek against her palm, her cereulean eyes filled with love, and he took that hand and pressed his lips upon it. ‘I love you, Evelyn Zamos.’
‘Oh, Leo, I love you so very, very much.’
They were the words he needed to hear, the words that set his newly unlocked heart soaring. He kissed her then, in the white gazebo covered with sweetly scented flowers, kissed her in the perfumed air as the breeze set the palm tree fronds to rustling and the sail boat gracefully cruised by.
‘Boat!’ yelled Sam to the sound of wobbly footsteps, suddenly tugging at their legs, pointing out to sea. ‘Boat!’
And laughing, Leo scooped the boy up in his arms and they all gazed out over the sapphire blue water to watch the passing vessel. ‘How long, do you think,’ he whispered to the woman at his side, ‘is the perfect age gap between children?’
She looked up at him on a blink. ‘I don’t know. Some people say two to three years.’
‘In that case,’ he said, with a chaste kiss to her forehead and a very unchaste look in his eyes, ‘I have a plan.’
Helen Brooks
HELEN BROOKS lives in Northamptonshire, and is married with three children and three beautiful grandchildren. As she is a committed Christian, busy housewife, mother and grandma, her spare time is at a premium, but her hobbies include reading, swimming and gardening, and walks with her husband and their two Irish terriers. Her long-cherished aspiration to write became a reality when she put pen to paper on reaching the age of forty and sent the result off to Mills & Boon.
MELANIE stared at the letter in her hand. The heavy black scrawl danced before her eyes and she had to blink a few times before reading it again, unable to believe what her brain was telling her.
Didn’t Forde understand that this was impossible? Absolutely ridiculous? In fact it was so nonsensical she read the letter a third time to convince herself she wasn’t dreaming. She had recognised his handwriting as soon as she’d picked the post off the mat and her heart had somersaulted, but she’d imagined he was writing about something to do with their divorce. Instead…
Melanie breathed in deeply, telling herself to calm down.
Instead Forde had written to ask her to consider doing some work for him. Well, not him exactly, she conceded reluctantly. His mother. But it was part and parcel of the same thing. They hadn’t spoken in months and then, cool as a cucumber, he wrote out of the blue. Only Forde Masterson could be so spectacularly outrageous. He was unbelievable. Utterly unbelievable.
She threw the letter onto the table and began to open the rest of the post, finishing her toast and coffee as she did so. Her small dining room doubled as her office, an arrangement that had its drawbacks if she wanted to invite friends round for a meal. Not that she had time for a social life anyway. Since leaving Forde a few weeks into the new year, she’d put all her energy into building up the landscape design company she had started twelve months after they’d married, just after—
A shutter shot down in her mind with the inflexibility of solid steel. That time was somewhere she didn’t go, had never gone since leaving Forde. It was better that way.
The correspondence dealt with, Melanie finished the last of her first pot of coffee of the day and went upstairs to her tiny bathroom to shower and get dressed before she rang James, her very able assistant, to go through what was required that day. James was a great employee inasmuch as he was full of enthusiasm and a tirelessly hard worker, but with his big-muscled body and dark good looks he attracted women like bees to a honeypot. He often turned up in the morning looking a little the worse for wear. However, it never affected his work and Melanie had no complaints.
Clad in her working clothes of denim jeans and a vest top, Melanie looped her thick, shoulder-length ash-blonde hair into a ponytail and applied plenty of sunscreen to her pale, easily burned English skin. The country was currently enjoying a heatwave and the August day was already hot at eight in the morning.
Before going downstairs again, she flung open her bedroom window and let the rich scent of the climbing roses outside fill the room. The cottage was tiny—just her bedroom and a separate bathroom upstairs, and a pocket-size sitting room and the dining room downstairs, the latter opening into a new extension housing a kitchen overlooking the minute courtyard garden. But Melanie loved it. The courtyard’s dry stone walls were hidden beneath climbing roses and honeysuckle, which covered the walls at the back of the cottage too, and the paved area that housed her small bistro table and two chairs was a blaze of colour from the flowering pots surrounding its perimeter. In the evenings it was bliss to eat her evening meal out there in the warm, soft air with just the twittering of the birds and odd bee or butterfly for company. It wasn’t too extreme to say this little cottage had saved her sanity in the first cru-cifyingly painful days after she’d fled the palatial home she’d shared with Forde.
The cottage was one in the middle of a terrace of ten, all occupied by couples or single folk and half of them—like the ones either side of Melanie—used as weekend bolt-holes by London high-flyers who retreated to the more gentle pace of life south-west of the capital, where