# Yuletide Reunion

Sharon Kendrik

Mills & Boon are proud to present a thrilling digital collection of all Sharon Kendrick’s novels and novellas for us to celebrate the publication of her amazing 100th book! Many of these books are available as e books for the first time.The perfect recipe for Christmas….When cook Clemmie Maxwell returned to her childhood home in Ashford with her two daughters and without her ex-husband, she wanted a fresh start. But her teenage crush, Aleck Cutler and his daughter, seem to have other ideas in mind.Clemmie’s never been able to forget the intense, intoxicating taste of the kiss they shared all those years ago, and her fragile heart isn’t quite ready to risk the independence she’s only just regained.But Clemmie’s about to discover that the only ingredients she needs to make the perfect Yuletide reunion are three children, one gorgeous, powerful man, and one gold ring!

Dear Reader,

One hundred. Doesn’t matter how many times I say it, I still can’t believe that’s how many books I’ve written. It’s a fabulous feeling but more fabulous still is the news that Mills & Boon are issuing every single one of my backlist as digital titles. Wow. I can’t wait to share all my stories with you - which are as vivid to me now as when I wrote them.

There’s BOUGHT FOR HER HUSBAND, with its outrageously macho Greek hero and A SCANDAL, A SECRET AND A BABY featuring a very sexy Tuscan. THE SHEIKH’S HEIR proved so popular with readers that it spent two weeks on the USA Today charts and…well, I could go on, but I’ll leave you to discover them for yourselves.

I remember the first line of my very first book: “So you’ve come to Australia looking for a husband?” Actually, the heroine had gone to Australia to escape men, but guess what? She found a husband all the same! The man who inspired that book rang me up recently and when I told him I was beginning my 100th story and couldn’t decide what to write, he said, “Why don’t you go back to where it all started?”

So I did. And that’s how A ROYAL VOW OF CONVENIENCE was born. It opens in beautiful Queensland and moves to England and New York. It’s about a runaway princess and the enigmatic billionaire who is infuriated by her, yet who winds up rescuing her. But then, she goes and rescues him… Wouldn’t you know it?

I’ll end by saying how very grateful I am to have a career I love, and to thank each and every one of you who has supported me along the way. You really are very dear readers.

Love,

Sharon xxx

Mills & Boon are proud to present a thrilling digital collection of all Sharon Kendrick’s novels and novellas for us to celebrate the publication of her amazing and awesome 100th book! Sharon is known worldwide for her likeable, spirited heroines and her gorgeous, utterly masculine heroes.

SHARON KENDRICK once won a national writing competition, describing her ideal date: being flown to an exotic island by a gorgeous and powerful man. Little did she realise that she’d just wandered into her dream job! Today she writes for Mills & Boon, featuring her often stubborn but always to-die-for heroes and the women who bring them to their knees. She believes that the best books are those you never want to end. Just like life…

Yuletide Reunion

Sharon Kendrick


www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Dear Reader

About the Author

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

Copyright

## CHAPTER ONE

THE first time Clemmie saw Aleck Cutler, she knew she had to have him.

There was only one tiny obstacle in the way—he just happened to be dating someone else at the time.

Worse. He might only be eighteen years old, but apparently he was serious about the girl. Everybody said so. Very, very serious.

Clemmie didn’t believe them. Not at first. People didn’t get married at eighteen, for goodness’ sake, so it couldn’t be that serious, could it? Okay, people could fall in love at eighteen, but they didn’t generally get married. What would be the point?

And anyway, Clemmie thought, staring hard at her fountain pen. He couldn’t possibly be in love with Alison Fleming, even if he thought he was. Because that wasn’t part of Clemmie’s life plan. He was going to fall in love with her, just as she had fallen love with him the first time she saw him. When he had held the door open for her and said, ‘Hi,’ his greeny-blue eyes crinkling at the corners as he gave her the most irresistible smile imaginable.

It was like being touched by magic—there was no other way to describe it. And if Aleck hadn’t realised yet what was as obvious to Clemmie as the writing on the wall—namely, that they were made for each other—well, he soon would!

Clemmie gave a great sigh as she glanced down at the open textbook in front of her. She was bored; that was the trouble. She had been bored for a whole month—ever since she had joined the sixth-form of Ashfield High. A month of trying to get used to a new house, a new town, new school, new stepfather...

Clemmie bit her lip and picked up her pen to write, but found herself unable to concentrate and put it down again almost immediately. She stared out of the window across the school playing fields. It wasn’t as though she didn’t like her stepfather—she did. Dan was a good man, who loved her mother, and her mother deserved that love. Clemmie’s father had died when she was little, and it had been a real struggle for her mother. It was just...

Clemmie sighed once more as she retied the ribbon at the end of one thick, shiny plait. Did the two of them have to be quite so ecstatic about each other all the time, and in front of her?

It wasn’t that they were constantly pawing at each other, or kissing, or anything like that. Just that sometimes the way her mother gazed at Dan, and the way that he gazed back at her—well, it just made Clemmie think she shouldn’t even be in the same building, let alone the same room!

The school was fine, too, if she was being honest, and much more relaxed than the city school she had been used to in London. It had a good academic reputation and it wasn’t too big, though it had lots of playing fields where you could walk at lunchtime and lose your soul up into the sky. And the other girls in her year were friendly. The boys, too, thought Clemmie, wincing; some of them had been very friendly.

Except for Aleck Cutler, of course.

Apart from that one blinding smile on her first day, he had remained cool and polite and indifferent.

He was in the year above Clemmie, and the unrivalled star of the school. He was the kind of person you wanted to hate because he was so perfect, but ended up sighing over. He loved sport and hated books, but he had the best grades in his year. He never showed any personal vanity whatsoever—in fact, he never seemed to bother what he looked like—yet he never looked anything other than thoroughly delectable, whatever he was doing. Covered in mud and wearing a pair of short-shorts, he attracted large audiences of swooning schoolgirls who normally couldn’t tell one end of a rugby ball from the other!

He lived on his parents’ farm on the edge of Ashfield, and he worked there every weekend and all through the holidays—and the hard, physical work made him fitter and tougher than anyone else of his age.

He was wonderful in just about every way, Clemmie had decided. In fact, there was only one blot on the landscape, and that was Alison Fleming, his girlfriend.

Clemmie had found out as much as she could without seeming too obvious. The facts were simple. Aleck had been going out with Alison Fleming for six months, and in that time he had not looked at another female. Worse was to follow. Alison Fleming was very beautiful, with pale, turquoise eyes and a mass of honey-coloured hair which always hung in an immaculate gleaming bell to her shoulders.

Clemmie did everything in her power to get Aleck to notice her, motivated by a deviousness she’d been unaware she possessed. She hung around unobtrusively until she saw him leave the building—with or without Alison—and then she would saunter along home on the opposite side of the road, with her long red-brown hair flying wildly and her skirt rolled over twice at the waistband so that it showed yards of long, stockinged leg.

She joined the School Debating Society, of which he was the Chairperson. The only problem being that whenever he was in the room all Clemmie’s brilliantly thought-out arguments went straight out of her head, and she stared at him, totally tongue-tied. It certainly put her off a career in public speaking!

But as time went on, and the end of the year approached, Clemmie gradually began to accept that maybe the love affair she longed for just wasn’t meant to be. Aleck would be leaving soon, and going off to university. And not alone either—but with Alison. He obviously just wasn’t interested in any other girl. Although sometimes, sometimes, Clemmie could have sworn that she had seen him giving her a hard, slanting look from beneath the dark lashes which shaded those amazing blue-green eyes of his.

It might have all died a quiet death had it not been for the night of the Summer Ball on the last night of term, which was thrown in honour of all those who were leaving the school. Clemmie didn’t particularly want to go—seeing Aleck for the last time, with his arms draped around Alison, would be like subjecting herself to the most awful form of torture.

In the end, she was persuaded to go by her mother.

‘You must go, Clemmie.’ Hilary Powers frowned at her daughter. ‘You’re always complaining that there’s nothing to do around here, and now you’re turning down the opportunity to go to a really nice dance!’

Clemmie turned her mouth down. What could she say? That she’d fallen hook, line and sinker for a man who was besotted with someone else?

‘And I’ll give you money for a new dress,’ smiled Dan. ‘How about that?’

Clemmie couldn’t win.

She bought a dress which was absolutely beautiful but left very little to the imagination. A black silk slip dress, beneath which she could wear only the briefest of black lace thongs.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked her mother.

Her mother screwed her face up and looked at her daughter. Pale face, too many freckles, dark hair spilling down like mahogany satin—gorgeous! But the dress? ‘I’m not sure, darling. It’s a bit revealing.’

‘Gee, thanks, Mum!’ scowled Clemmie. ‘You do wonders for my confidence!’ What was it with mothers, sometimes?

‘Are you wearing a bra?’

‘I can’t wear a bra—it shows!’

‘Then I’ll lend you my black chiffon wrap,’ said her mother briskly. ‘You can throw that round your neck and look slightly more decent.’

Clemmie got ready with Mary Adams from her year, the two of them standing giggling and shaking with nerves as Clemmie swept unfamiliarly thick mascara onto her dark lashes. She was so nervous that she accepted a glass of wine from the cask in Mary’s fridge, and then another. By the time she arrived at the dance she was floating, floating—and danced with every single boy who asked her.

Too giddy and too excited to eat, she glugged back a glass of the fruity punch she was given and tried not to look at Alison Fleming, who was demure and stunning in virginal white. While Aleck looked like the only real man in the room, his height and build and bearing making him seem like warm flesh and blood, while the others all looked like cardboard cut-outs.

Clemmie was on her way back from the rest room, moving slightly unsteadily along the corridor with her eyes glittering darkly against the dead-pale of her cheeks, when she saw Aleck.

He was standing with his back to her, standing perfectly still by the window of an empty, unlit classroom. His old classroom.

Clemmie drew in a deep breath of longing. She should go straight past. He wasn’t interested. He had a girlfriend.

But the wine and the punch had loosened her tongue and this was probably the last time she would ever see him.

‘Hi,’ she said recklessly, standing illuminated in the bright light of the corridor.

Aleck turned round slowly, his eyes flickering over her in a way she didn’t quite understand. If he was surprised to see her, he didn’t show it. But then, his face rarely showed anything, and it certainly didn’t now.

‘Hi,’ he said coolly.

Clemmie gulped and walked over to stand beside him at the window, which overlooked the tennis courts and the soccer pitches beyond. She wondered what this school would be like next year, with no Aleck Cutler to gaze at, to think about, to fantasise over... It didn’t really bear thinking about.

‘So,’ she said, and stared out into the night as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. ‘What are you looking at?’

He gave a small laugh, then shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

Clemmie felt bold. ‘Yes, you were!’ she teased. ‘I saw you.’

He found himself smiling reluctantly. She was as exuberant as a puppy. ‘Okay, then,’ he admitted. ‘I was just looking out at that old house. See?’

She followed the direction of his eyes but she knew which house he was talking about. The tumbledown house which dominated the town. From her bedroom window in Dan’s house, Clemmie would look down at the overgrown lawns, the flowerbeds which were choked with weeds. In autumn, the fruit fell from the apple and pear trees, lying ignored and rotting on the ground. It was a sad house, she had often thought. A neglected house. ‘You mean the old grey one? Isn’t it supposed to be haunted?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe in all that stuff! It’s only spooky because no one’s lived in it for years.’

‘I wonder why?’ she queried softly.

Aleck looked at her, finding her ridiculously easy to talk to and yet sensing some unknown danger in the air. ‘Because it’s big. And it’s run-down—you’d need serious money to update it and run it. People with that kind of money don’t generally want to live in a small town like Ashfield.’

‘But you do?’ she asked perceptively.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

There was silence for a moment, though Clemmie could hear her heart booming out in a muffled thud. She saw the pensive set of his profile. ‘Feeling sad?’ she asked softly.

He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, like a man not used to being quizzed about his feelings. ‘Sad?’

‘About leaving.’ She noticed that he wasn’t looking into her eyes any more, just staring very hard at her silky black dress, and that a tiny muscle had begun to work in one cheek.

There was a pause. ‘A little. Closing a chapter of your life is always sad.’ He gave a low laugh, and abruptly turned his attention away. But not for long. He looked back into her eyes then, and Clemmie felt drawn in by the magnetism of that cool, mocking gaze. ‘Though maybe nostalgic would be a better word.’

‘Yes.’ Clemmie giddily swept her fingers back through her thick red-brown hair, so that it spilt in mahogany streams all the way down over her silk-covered breasts. Dizzy with wine and longing, she tried to think of something interesting and original to say, and failed dismally. ‘Will you be sorry to leave?’ She leaned back to perch her bottom on the wide window-ledge and smiled at him.

The movement distracted him as much as the invitation in her eyes, and Aleck found his eyes drawn once again to the pale gleam as her breasts thrust heavily towards him. He felt the slow, insistent throbbing of desire start to build up, felt it begin to pulse powerfully through his veins. ‘Sure, I’ll be sorry,’ he said, in a husky voice that didn’t sound like his own at all. ‘There’s a lot I’m going to miss.’

Drunk with the heady delight of his proximity, with the obvious appreciation in his eyes, Clemmie found herself purring like a parody of a sex-symbol. ‘And what are you going to miss most?’

Aleck felt his muscles tense as she lounged back negligently on the window-ledge. She might as well have been naked for all that dress was covering her up, the two inverted vees of the bodice taut and stretched as they struggled to restrain the lush young breasts. The silk lay smoothly against her flesh, except for where he could quite clearly see the outline of some outrageously flimsy G-string. Aleck swallowed. ‘Well, I’ll miss seeing you,’ he told her, in a throaty whisper.

Clemmie opened her dark eyes even wider, her surprise completely genuine. ‘Will you?’

‘Sure, I will.’

‘I didn’t think you’d even noticed me,’ she told him honestly.

He gave a hollow guilty laugh, as Alison’s memory slipped from his mind like sand through his fingers. ‘Not notice you?’ he demanded unsteadily. ‘Oh, come on. You’d need to be blind or pretty stupid not to notice you, Clemmie...’

His face gave him away.

Clemmie could see the fight that was taking place within him, yet she was too trapped by desire to heed it. Too flattered by the look on his face which must have mirrored her own. A look she had dreamed of, night after night, but never thought she would see in the flesh. Compelled by a need she did not recognise, she put her hands up behind her head to cushion her head on her palms, and the action did even more to accentuate her breasts. ‘You do say the nicest things,’ she smiled.

Appalled at his behaviour, and yet unwilling or unable to stop himself, Aleck took a step towards her. Why not just give her what she so obviously wanted? What he so obviously wanted, too. ‘Do I?’ he murmured. ‘I don’t just say the nicest things, Clemmie, I do them as well...’

He moved his lips towards hers, and Clemmie wondered if she had imagined the dark note of warning which had coloured the throaty whisper of his response. But then his mouth was covering hers and the effect was like lighting touchpaper.

He showed none of the finesse of the Aleck of her dreams, just pulled her into his arms and began a kiss which was so shockingly intimate and so unbelievably sensual that Clemmie felt she should have been outraged by it. Yet she found herself kissing him back as though she had been born for just this moment.

He pulled her closer, so close that her lush silken-covered breasts were crushed against his chest. God, he could feel those nipples digging into him like tight little rocks. He couldn’t help himself, and just briefly brushed his fingertips over each straining mound, expecting her to slap his face. But she didn’t.

She couldn’t. The moment he touched her, she was lost. His. Submerged and drowning in silky-dark erotic waters. She knew that she shouldn’t be letting him do this, that she should be pushing him away, insulted—but instead Clemmie nearly died with pleasure when he touched her breasts. The wine and her loneliness and the overwhelming emotion she had felt for Aleck Cutler since the moment she’d first laid eyes on him, all combined to become the most potent, sensual cocktail of her young life.

His mouth was still on hers as his thigh pushed its way insistently between hers, his fingers now straying beneath the silk of the bodice itself until they alighted on each exquisitely aroused nipple and he circled the bare skin of each painful peak with erotic triumph.

‘Clemmie,’ he moaned into her mouth.

‘W-what?’

‘God, you’re so beautiful,’ he managed to get out, from between gritted teeth.

Her head tipped back as he kissed her neck. ‘No, I’m n-not...’

’Beautiful,’ he contradicted, still in that dazed kind of voice. ‘And I want you. Do you know that? So badly.’

‘I want you, too,’ she gasped in wonderment, and laced her fingers into his thick dark hair.

His hand moved to the pert curve of her bottom, cupping each silk-covered buttock with a groan, and he was just about to slide the slithery material up, so that he could touch her legs and beyond, when the brief and rapid sound of footsteps heralded a third person’s arrival and the room was thrown into bright light.

Bedazzled, they sprang apart—just in time to see the Head of Science standing by the light switch, with a whole gaggle of giggling fifth-formers just behind him.

‘Good evening, Cutler,’ he said stonily. ‘Perhaps you and Miss Powers would like to come to my office. I think that a little talk is probably long overdue. Don’t you?’

Clemmie looked up into Aleck’s face. For a split second their eyes connected, and in his she could read the unmistakable message of self-disgust and outraged recrimination.

And she knew then why mothers always warned their daughters about being too easy. Because Clemmie would have done anything to be able to remove that look of seething contempt from Aleck Cutler’s beautiful eyes.

## CHAPTER TWO

’MOM, Mom—Mom! Is this really, really our new home?’

Clemmie laughed and looked up from the packing case she was hunting through. Where was the wretched kettle? She smiled into the excited face of her ten-year-old daughter. ‘Yes, Justine,’ she smiled. ‘It really, really is!’

‘And did I come here when I was very little?’ Justine sat back on her heels and looked up at her mother.

‘Yes, you did. You wouldn’t remember. It was where Grandma used to live—’

‘With Grandad Dan?’

‘That’s right.’ Clemmie lifted the bright blue kettle out of the packing case with a look of triumph. ‘There—found it! Why don’t you go and get your sister and bring her down, and then we’ll all have a break?’

‘Is there any cake?’

‘Ginger cake, if you’re very good!’

‘Whoopee!’ shrieked Justine, and scooted off to find Louella.

Clemmie looked around her at the empty room, still trying to take everything in, wondering why her life never seemed to chug along comfortably like everyone else’s. Not that she was complaining. Not now. Not with this lovely house to call her own. A home at last, after a long time searching.

Clemmie sighed, remembering the man who had brought her and her mother so much happiness. Dear Dan. Because he’d been her stepfather she had not expected him to love her. But he had loved her, loved her as much as if he had been her own father. And yet...

When he died, she had somehow expected him to leave the house to one of his blood relatives, not to her. There had been a nephew somewhere, an elderly aunt somewhere else. And it wasn’t as though she’d seen a lot of him. Her visits from the States had tended to be when she could afford them, which hadn’t been very often. And after her mother had died she hadn’t had the heart to come back to Ashfield at all.

Clemmie’s mother had died six years previously, and—judging by his letters—Dan had never seemed to get over that. Yet when they’d rung Clemmie in America, to tell her that Dan himself was seriously ill, she had damned the expense, jumped on a flight and come straight over. He had died that same day, gratified that the woman he had looked on as a daughter should have been there to hold his hand while he slipped away...

Clemmie had flown back to the States—to her two beloved daughters and the realisation that she could no longer live in the small American town where her life had broken down so dramatically. Something was going to have to change...

Dan’s legacy had come like a bolt out of the blue, and a welcome one. The house and enough capital to live on for a little while. A life-saver. A new beginning. A new life in England.

Clemmie’s divorce had left her even more broke than she’d been before, scrubbing around to make ends meet in a country where suddenly, without her American husband, she was a foreigner. A foreigner, moreover, with foxy dark eyes and a curvy body. The kind of woman universally feared by other, not-so-happily-married women...

So she had packed the three of them up, lock, stock and barrel, and moved them back to Ashfield. Back to the town where she had spent two fractured years before going off to college, her whole view of the place coloured by her ill-advised passion for Aleck Cutler. What a gullible little fool she had been!

Part of her had wondered about coming back at all, but it had only been a small part. Women in her position had little choice about where they lived. She was happy, and grateful for Dan’s legacy, and strangely drawn to Ashfield. In spite of her youthful mistakes, it was the only place where she felt some affinity with the past. And with such an uncertain future lying ahead of her, Clemmie needed to hang onto that feeling right now.

Clemmie boiled the kettle and made tea, then cut slices of dark, sticky gingerbread and laid them out in a pattern on the plate. The frantic thump, thump, thump of feet on stairs heralded the arrival of her two daughters, and as Clemmie carried the tray into the sitting room she gave them a slow smile of contentment.

They looked as fresh as daisies, she thought proudly, and not as though they’d stepped off a transatlantic flight just hours earlier. They were, quite simply, the lights of her life.

For, no matter what else she achieved in her life, she had done this—and mostly on her own, too. Produced two beautiful, intelligent and charming little girls—though she conceded that she might be a little biased! Now she had to raise them to be happy. Nothing else really mattered.

‘Mummy, I’ve chosen my bedroom!’ sighed Justine. ‘It’s really cool!’

‘Why does she always get to choose first?’ complained Louella, scowling.

‘Because I’m ten and you’re only eight!’ crowed Justine.

‘But it’s not fair!’

Clemmie bit back the temptation to inform her younger daughter that life often wasn’t fair—she didn’t want to turn her into a cynic at such a tender age! ‘Don’t you like your bedroom, Louella?’ she asked softly. ‘It’s the one that I used to have when I lived here. It isn’t the biggest, but it has the best view in the house, in my opinion.’

‘It’s neat,’ nodded Louella, so that her waist-length brown plaits jiggled up and down. ‘I can see right over the wall to that big garden at the back—the one with the swimming pool. And there was a girl there, playing on a swing.’

‘Was there?’ asked Clemmie absently, pouring out the tea.

‘I waved at her—and she waved back!’

‘That’s nice, darling.’

‘So would she be our nearest neighbour?’

‘Yes, she would.’ Clemmie handed over a thick slice of cake and watched while Louella took a bite. ‘It’s good that someone’s living there at last—it was empty for years and years.’ And then fragments of a long-ago conversation swam up to the surface of Clemmie’s memory, and Aleck Cutler’s perfect eighteen-year-old face imprinted itself there.

She shook her head, trying to get rid of it, wondering why the recollection still had the power to shake her. Because there could be nothing more pathetic than a woman of twenty-nine carrying a torch for a man who was married to someone else.

And Aleck had married Alison.

‘It’s not really like moving somewhere completely new, is it, Mom?’ observed Justine slowly. ‘Since I guess you must still know lots of people here?’

Clemmie shook her head. She still wore her thick, red-brown hair long, but most days, like today, she didn’t have time to do any more with it than drag it back into a ponytail. ‘Not really, honey,’ she said softly. ‘I left when I was eighteen, so I kind of lost touch. Friendships don’t thrive unless you invest time in them, and I never really had the time. I went away to college and then—’

‘Then you met Dad?’ asked Louella brightly.

‘That’s right,’ agreed Clemmie steadily, and kept her face poker-straight. It was difficult, she had decided, to be a mature and generous human being where her ex-husband was concerned, but she was trying. Oh, Lord, how she was trying! She understood that it was in a child’s nature to love its parents absolutely, as Justine and Louella loved their father. But Bill had let the girls down so many times over the years, whittling away at that love every time he did so, that Clemmie had to force herself to say anything positive about him.

‘And once I went to the States to live with your dad, then I didn’t get to visit very often at all.’

‘So you don’t know very much about Ashfield, Mom?’ asked Justine thoughtfully.

‘I know where the church and the shops and the schools are—but that’s about it! I’m relying on you two to find out where all the excitement is—think you could do that for me?’

‘You bet!’ grinned Justine.

The three of them sat on the floor, drinking their tea and eating cake. Clemmie was reluctantly thinking about unpacking another case when there came the sound of a girl’s voice, calling, ‘Hello?’

Justine and Louella looked at one another excitedly before springing to their feet and running into the hall.

‘Our first visitor!’ smiled Clemmie, as she followed them out, and then her mouth dried as she stared at the young girl who was standing on their doorstep.

She looked about ten, the same age as Justine, but she was tall for her age, with pale hair which fell neatly to her shoulders and pale, creamy skin. But it was her eyes which made Clemmie’s mouth fall open in an unconsciously shocked reaction.

Greeny-blue mesmeric eyes, fringed with thick dark lashes. There could not be another pair of eyes in the world which were that beautiful. Clemmie swallowed. This was Aleck Cutler’s daughter, she realised, with a certainty which astonished her almost as much as her own heart-racing reaction.

‘Hello,’ said Clemmie, hoping that her voice didn’t betray her shock. ‘Are you our new neighbour?’

‘I am,’ answered the girl politely, in a remarkably grown-up voice. ‘I live in the house at the back. I’m Stella Cutler.’

So she had been right! Clemmie felt her nails, concealed in the back pockets of her jeans, dig hard through the denim into the soft flesh of her buttocks, while the world threatened to sway intolerably before righting itself once more. Aleck’s daughter! Here!

‘I’m Clemmie Maxwell. I used to be Clemmie Powers. And this is my daughter, Justine.’ Clemmie swallowed as she indicated both her daughters. ‘And her sister Louella. Say hi, girls!’

‘Hi!’the two chorused shyly.

‘We were just having a tea break, Stella,’ continued Clemmie, trying to behave as she would normally behave if a young neighbour came to call. ‘Can you stay for a while and join us? Or do you have to get back?’

‘Oh, I can stay,’ said Stella quickly.

‘Shouldn’t you check with your parents first?’ Clemmie forced herself to ask.

Stella shook her blonde head, her face curiously lacking in emotion. ‘No, that’s okay. I was home alone—so there’s no one there to ask. But I’d love some tea,’ she added winningly.

‘Well, then, tea it is!’ Clemmie led the way into the sitting room and wondered if she had suffered some kind of emotional block all those years ago. Why on earth was she feeling so disorientated just because Aleck’s daughter had come to visit? He was a guy she had had a mad crush on and they had shared a kiss twelve years ago! Nothing more than that. So why was she making such a big deal out of it?

‘Our mom makes fantastic cake! You should see what she does for our birthdays! She makes rainbow frosting that tastes like heaven!’ Louella was confiding to Stella, her freckly face so like Clemmie’s as she babbled away excitedly.

‘Are you American?’ asked Stella curiously.

Justine shook her head. ‘Our dad was—is,’ she corrected herself hurriedly. ‘But he still lives in America, with his new girlfriend and their baby, and we live here now! But that’s where we grew up, and that’s why we’ve got accents. Do you suppose we’ll get teased by the other kids?’

Stella shook her head. ‘No way! All the girls will be jealous! If you speak with an American accent everyone thinks you’re a movie-star over here!’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘No, I’m not!’

Clemmie left them chattering while she went to refill the kettle, but before it had begun to boil she heard footsteps on the stairs and Justine shouting, ‘We’re taking Stella upstairs to show her round. Is that okay, Mom?’

‘Okay, that’s fine!’ Which would give her time to tackle some of these boxes...

Clemmie began to unpack the cases which were stacked haphazardly all over the kitchen floor, humming to herself as she did so. She had been torn—wanting to bring every single stick of furniture with her, mainly so that the girls would feel safe and surrounded by the familiar, but there had also been a side to her which had wanted to throw everything away. To start anew—without any objects which would remind her of Bill and the marriage she had struggled so long to sustain.

In the end she had just brought their favourite things—the good set of china which had been a wedding present, the rocking chair which Bill had carved for her in the early, happy days, and some small Shaker knick-knacks she had collected over the years. Amazing, she thought, as she pulled a jug out of the case and carefully peeled away the protective paper from it. You could spend ten years of your life in another country, and come back with very little to show for it.

Just two gorgeous daughters and a fierce determination to steer clear of men! Men were nothing but trouble and heartbreak. Men chewed you up and spat you out.

Even so, it seemed a rather cruel irony that Clemmie was now faced with the prospect of having to confront Aleck and Alison Cutler over the garden wall!

Still, she told herself briskly, as she placed a vase on the window-ledge. She had survived isolation and desertion and infidelity in a foreign country—she was damned sure that she could endure seeing her schoolgirl crush and the woman he had courted and married!

The morning seemed to fly by, so that Clemmie was able to accomplish plenty. She spent much of it wiping down the walls and the paintwork. She might think about giving each room a lick of paint once the girls had gone back to school.

Having Stella certainly helped keep them out of Clemmie’s hair, and she seemed like a very self-contained child. She had organised Justine and Louella into tidying up their giant doll’s house, and when Clemmie had stuck her head round the door a couple of minutes ago it had been to see three heads bent over it in industrious play!

At one-fifteen Clemmie washed her hands, put the kettle on, and was just thinking about getting some lunch for them all when there was a loud and peremptory knocking on the front door.

She stole a quick glance at herself in the mirror and grimaced at her jeans and old yellow tee-shirt, wishing that she’d made a bit more effort. She wasn’t best dressed to impress any of her new neighbours! Her dusty hair could do with a wash, and her face was completely bare of make-up, which only drew attention to the freckles which spattered her nose and cheeks and which were the bane of her life.

She pulled the front door open and the welcoming smile froze on. her lips as she realised the identity of the man who stood so tall and so broodingly on her doorstep. Clemmie stared up at Aleck Cutler.

Twelve years was a long time in anyone’s life—particularly the years between eighteen and thirty, when adolescents became adults—but all Clemmie could think about was how the essential characteristics of the man remained unaltered.

He was even taller, yes, and he had filled out, that was for sure. The snake-hipped teenage Aleck had been transformed into a big, strong man with hard, firm flesh and shoulders so wide you felt you could have rested the world there. Just a few silver strands ran through the abundant thickness of his dark hair, but the eyes were as remarkable and as mesmerising and as vibrant as they had been all those years ago, and Clemmie felt her face suddenly grow heated...

‘A-Aleck!’ she stammered. ‘Aleck Cutler!’

He stared at her, but made no greeting in response. Just clipped out coldly, ‘So it’s true. You’re back.’

If his eyes hadn’t been spitting unfriendly fire, Clemmie might have smiled. As it was, the hostile vibrations she was getting from him made her stiffen her shoulders defensively. ‘Obviously,’ she responded, her own voice chilly.

‘Have you got my daughter here?’

‘Y-you mean—Stella?’ she managed, stung and confused by his combative air.

‘Since I only have one daughter—yes, I do mean Stella,’ he told her with icy emphasis.

Clemmie could tolerate all kinds of things, but rudeness was not one of them. Years of being insulted within a failing marriage had reinforced her determination never to let a man treat her that way again. She stared at him. So he could wipe that disdainful look off his face right now!

‘Yes, she’s here!’ she snapped back. ‘And how was I supposed to know that you only have one daughter? Telepathy isn’t one of my particular talents!’

He looked at her properly then, the green-blue eyes taking their time as they slowly surveyed her from head to toes, and Clemmie was left feeling as though they had stripped her bare.

‘No,’ he said carefully. ‘As I recall you had many talents, Clemmie, but telepathy wasn’t one of them.’

‘Just what are you implying?’ she demanded, furious at that critical look on his face, and even more furious at the unconscious quickening of her heart when she realised that he did remember her name.

He gave a disparaging smile. ‘Oh, you surely don’t need me to spell it out for you, do you?’

‘Oh, I do,’ she mocked sweetly. ‘I can’t stand innuendo! So if you’ve got something to say, Aleck, why don’t you just go right ahead and say it?’

He raised his dark brows so that they slanted in arrogant surprise. ‘You mean relate the simple fact that if we hadn’t been discovered, then we probably would have ended up making love—with you straddled over one of the classroom desks, your panties down by your ankles?’

All the heat drained from Clemmie’s face—she was so shocked and horrified by his crude portrayal of what had actually happened. What a way to put it! ‘How can you say something like that?’ she whispered, in a hollow voice. ‘How can you?’

He shrugged, apparently not bothered by her white face, nor her trembling mouth. ‘How can I not? It’s what happened, isn’t it, Clemmie? Or would you prefer to define the episode as true love? Maybe that’s how you usually justify your behaviour to yourself—I don’t know.’

He managed to make the word ‘love’ drip with such venomous sarcasm that Clemmie stared at him in horror. ‘But it was just a kiss!’ she protested.

‘Really?’ His eyes narrowed alarmingly. ‘Is that what it was? Some kiss! Do you normally let men who kiss you for the first time touch your breasts like that, Clemmie?’

She wanted to hit him. Because at least hitting him would detract from the way her body responded when he said ‘touch your breasts’. How could he? How could he? Her fingers itched to claw at him in some frighteningly primitive way, but to do that would be to compound his opinion of her as some emotional loose cannon.

‘Why are we discussing something which happened twelve years ago?’ she demanded, swallowing back her lust and her anger and attempting to transform them into dignity.

‘I thought that was what you wanted,’ he observed. ‘You were the one who persisted with the subject, weren’t you? After all, I came over simply to fetch my daughter—’

‘Then I’ll go and find her,’ said Clemmie tonelessly.

‘Before you do, Clemmie...’ He lifted his fingers and, annoyingly, Clemmie found herself halting in her tracks. ‘Didn’t it occur to you that I might be worried? Didn’t you consider ringing me to say that Stella was here?’

‘Of course I did!’ she defended. ‘And Stella told me that it was okay! She told me that she was home alone—’

‘She was not alone!’ he shot back repressively. ‘I was working in my study, and she was probably bored and saw you arrive. She’s ten years old, for God’s sake—didn’t it occur to you to check with me first?’

The trouble was that he was right. She should have checked, should have got Stella to ring her father, or should have done so herself. She hoped that he would have done the same if her girls had turned up unexpectedly at his house. And she wondered if she would have been so reluctant to ring if the father in question had been anyone other than Aleck Cutler...

He threw her a look that was distinctly insulting. ‘Though maybe you decided that it would suit you to have her stay so long.’ His eyes glinted. ‘Was that it?’

‘And why would I do that?’ she queried steadily, her heart pounding away in her head as she began to realise just what he was getting at.

‘Maybe you were hoping that I would come looking for her and...’

‘And what?’ she goaded, needing to hear him say the unbelievable.

‘And maybe you wanted to finish off what we started all those years ago?’

Clemmie came closer to hitting someone than she had ever done in her life, but she fought the feeling as if she was fighting for her life. She was not about to start brawling like a fishwife! She managed a tight, supercilious smile. ‘I don’t think so, Aleck. I grew out of teenage fumblings a long time ago. Besides, even if I was still turned on by heavy petting—I’ve always made it a rule not to fool around with married men.’

His eyebrows disappeared into the thick, dark hair as he feigned surprise. ‘Really? Then you must