In this first Cherry Sisters title, Lilian Darcy shows just how tricky mixing family and romance can be!

Daisy Cherry hasn’t seen rugged landscaper Tucker Reid for ten years. Not since the wedding between him and her sister had been called off, just before the big day!

Now she’s hired a landscaper to fix the grounds of her parents’ Adirondack resort, Spruce Bay. Yes, it’s Tucker—he’s the best man for the job. Surely that’s okay after all this time?

Er…no. Her parents go mad. Her big sister disapproves. And her younger sister, Tucker’s ex, doesn’t know—yet. And none of them know that the instant, wild, intense attraction between Daisy and Tucker has bubbled into a secret affair. That would be explosive. Dynamite. But when it’s this good with Tucker, isn’t it worth the family fallout…?

“What time will your curfew be?”

She heard his frustration. “It’s not like that.”

“Then tell me what it is. Here I am, sneaking you home in the middle of the night. Are you going to climb through your bedroom window? Take off your shoes so you can creep inside? Is your dad going to be standing there with a shotgun pointed at me?”

“Tucker, it’s not like that.”

“Isn’t it? Isn’t it because of what happened ten years ago?”

Okay, maybe that was part of it. Tucker had already broken up with one Cherry sister. Would it end up being two? She didn’t want to put her family through another mess. She didn’t want them thinking it was Tucker’s fault.

“I want to ease them into it…and I need time.”

“Then we’ll ease into this…” He sighed deeply and she felt his hunger. “But for now, get out of this truck before I make a grab for you and never let you go.”

Dear Reader,

As I’m sure you know, it takes months—sometimes more than a year—to bring a book from the idea stage to the finished product on the shelves, so you won’t be surprised to learn that I’m writing this letter in March, while you’re probably reading it six months later. This week, I learned that the third book in my McKinley Medics trilogy from Harlequin Special Edition had reached the finals in the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award. It’s my fifth time as a finalist, and it’s just as much of a thrill as the first. I’m especially pleased because A Marriage Worth Fighting For was my favorite of the McKinley Medics books, and that’s the one the RITA® Award judges liked best, too. It doesn’t always happen that way!

A few years ago, if you didn’t happen to buy. A Marriage Worth Fighting For when it first came out, you would have missed your chance. Now, thanks to ebooks, it’s easy to catch up on earlier titles by your favorite authors, as well as their latest releases. Since we all have different favorites, in authors and series and individual books, the diversity of choice is a winner for all of us.

Meanwhile, over there in September, you’re about to read this first book in my new Cherry Sisters trilogy, while back here in March I’m still writing the second book, with the third book just a cloud of ideas and scenes floating in my head. It’s too soon to say which of these three will be my favorite, but one thing I do know, whichever one it is, not all readers will agree!

All the best, and happy reading,

Lilian Darcy

The One who Changed Everything

Lilian Darcy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

LILIAN DARCY has written nearly eighty books for Mills & Boon. Happily married with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at PO Box 532, Jamison PO, Macquarie ACT 2614, Australia, or email her at lilian@liliandarcy.com.

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Contents

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 One

Mary Jane was laughing. You could hear it thirty yards away, through a closed door and a screen of bushes, and it was a glorious sound on a mild mid-October Monday beside a mountain lake.

Daisy Cherry came up the steps and out of the delicious fresh air into the resort office and found her sister with shaking shoulders and tears running down her cheeks, a heap of old photo albums in a litter around her, along with piles of shipping boxes, too. “Hey, what’s so funny?”

Mary Jane rocked back on her heels, flattened a hand over her heart and gasped for breath. “Dad’s mustache, Mom’s wedding hat. Their clothes. Her swimsuit. I’m sorry, it’s not that funny. I don’t know why I’m—”

“No, it’s great,” Daisy cut in with conviction.

As the eldest of the three Cherry sisters at age thirty-four, Mary Jane was too serious and too responsible too much of the time. Right now, her medium brown hair stuck out in a messy halo all over her head, she had dust marks on her cream-colored top and she looked like someone who’d been working harder than she should, for longer than she could remember.

Daisy and Mary Jane had already had a few tense moments with each other since Daisy had come back east to live just a couple of weeks ago, and in all honesty, Daisy didn’t think that she was to blame. It was really good to see Mary Jane lose control, lighten up a little, and Daisy found herself grinning at the sight of it.

Unfortunately, the laughter and lost control didn’t last.

“I don’t have time for this.” Mary Jane took a determined hold of herself, stood up, wiped the tears from her eyes with a crumpled tissue and fussed around getting the albums back in a pile, which she dumped into a cardboard box.

“Where did you find them?”

“Here in the office, under a pile of files. Lord only knows what they were doing here.”

“Are you packed?” Daisy asked.

“You mean this?” Mary Jane waved her hand at the boxes, some filled, some still empty. “These are going to South Carolina to the new condo with Mom and Dad.”

“I meant for your trip, not Mom and Dad’s move.”

“In that case, I was packed a week ago.” Mary Jane looked a little tense suddenly.

She was leaving tomorrow. She loved to travel, and when Spruce Bay Resort closed each year for most of November and April, during the quietest seasons in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, she always went away. Someplace exotic, or someplace indulgent. Never the same destination twice. Taking full advantage of the fact that she was single, even though Daisy strongly suspected that in her secret heart Mary Jane didn’t actually want to be single at all.

This unwanted condition was down to Alex Stewart, horrible man. Water under the bridge, four years on. Nobody talked about it anymore, but Mary Jane had wasted a lot of time—years of her life—on a relationship that had gone nowhere and it had taken its toll on her heart and her outlook.

Mary Jane and I are so different, Daisy had thought to herself more than once. Mary Jane’s love for Alex had been a steadfast flame that refused to die even when it needed to. Whereas Daisy had blown hot and cold. Came on strong, then pulled right back. Sent clear signals, then turned them off like a faucet.

I jumped in too fast. I never looked below the surface. It was my fault as much as Michael’s.

Was it a fair accusation to make about herself? She still tied herself in knots asking that question. It was a big reason why she was here, instead of in California, and Mary Jane had accused her—quite gently and sympathetically, which almost made it worse—of coming back for the wrong reasons.

“I don’t want you as a business partner at Spruce Bay just because you’re running away from something that turned sour in your personal life.”

This year, because of the renovation and their parents’ retirement from the business, Spruce Bay had closed a month early, missing out on the fall-foliage season, and Mary Jane would be spending most of October, including her thirty-fifth birthday on the eighteenth of the month, on safari in the heart of Africa.

She hadn’t wanted to go initially. “I’ll have to skip my usual trip this year, with the remodel. It just can’t be helped.” She was definitely too responsible about things like this. Daisy and Mom and Dad—and Lee, from a distance, in Colorado—had all insisted that of course she should go, as usual, since she loved her travels so much. Eventually and reluctantly, Mary Jane had booked her tour package.

“If you’re worried I can’t handle things here for three weeks, don’t be,” Daisy assured her quickly now, because her sister had really started to look stressed. “Hey, if I can create the dessert recipes and oversee their preparation every night for a two-hundred-seat five-star San Francisco restaurant, I can oversee a construction crew. I’ve brainstormed a heap of ideas for the restaurant remodel, I’m so excited about it, and I have menu ideas to match.”

“Listen, I don’t doubt that, okay?”

“But you doubt the reasons I’m here.”

“Sometimes you dive in too fast, Daisy. You told me that happened with Michael. I don’t want it happening with Spruce Bay.” She gestured toward the open window, where blue sky blazed behind a silhouette of pine needles whose fragrance Daisy could smell from here. She could hear the pine needles, too—the light soughing they made in the breeze. The peace and familiarity of this place hurt her heart, it was so beautiful.

“It won’t happen, Mary Jane,” she answered, quietly sure of herself, suddenly. “Spruce Bay is different. Spruce Bay is home.”

Mary Jane looked at her curiously. “Is that how you feel? Even after ten years away?”

“It is. More than I expected. It hit me just now. I love it here.”

“Well, okay, then.”

A new peace settled between them.

“And as for the landscaping,” Daisy continued after a moment, “it makes much more sense to have the structural work for that done when Spruce Bay is already closed for the interior work, rather than waiting until spring. Obviously the actual planting will have to wait, but that’s only a small part of what needs doing.”

“True,” Mary Jane conceded. “We’re behind on the planning for all that. The decisions and plans on the interiors took more time than I expected, especially the cabins, and Mom and Dad have been stalling. They think the grounds are fine as they are.”

“They’re not.”

“I know. But maybe it’s too late and we’ll have to leave it till spring after all.”

“No, we won’t, because I called Reid Landscaping yesterday, and I’ve set up a meeting for tomorrow. I’m hoping that if we can make our decisions and plans quickly, work can get started—”

Mary Jane stood up, looking horrified, and didn’t wait to hear when it was that Daisy hoped work would start. “You what?”

“Set up a meeting. Tomorrow at ten.”

“With Reid Landscaping.” It wasn’t a question. More of a thud. Like the dropping of a shoe. All the more obvious because just a few seconds ago they’d had a strong moment of closeness.

“They’re the best in the area,” Daisy pointed out briskly. “And we’ve known—”

“Tucker Reid’s company?”

“Yes.”

The simmering stress behind Mary Jane’s recent bout of laughter burst through the facade and came out as anger. “You cannot be so clueless, Daisy! Tucker Reid!”

“Wait a second...”

“Tucker. Reid!” You could have cut the fake patience in Mary Jane’s tone with a knife.

Oh, for crying out loud! It wasn’t as if Daisy wasn’t getting this. Of course she got it!

“It was ten years ago, Mary Jane,” she said, gentleness not quite winning out over frustration. Here was her older sister sniping at her again. “It was a broken engagement, not an acrimonious divorce, and it was mutual. Lee and Tucker announced their decision together, remember. Not to mention that Lee is two thousand miles away in Colorado.”

Lee, the middle Cherry sister, the meat in the sandwich between responsible, energetically organized Mary Jane and not-nearly-as-blonde-as-she-looked baby sister Daisy.

“Do you honestly not have any idea?” Mary Jane cut in. She was angry. Needlessly angry, Daisy thought. “Do you honestly not know why Lee and Tucker canceled their wedding?”

“I was there, wasn’t I? Because they realized it wasn’t right, and weren’t dumb enough to take such a step when they weren’t one hundred percent sure. Because Lee wasn’t ready. And Tucker wasn’t, either. They were pretty young. I think it was a very wise decision.”

“She was twenty-three, he was twenty-four. Not that young. We were all so incredibly happy when they got engaged. Do you honestly think that breaking it was her choice?”

“Lee is incredibly happy with her life now.”

“Now. Yes. But it took a while. It took a long while. Years.” Mary Jane said that last word as if she knew all about things taking years. Alex Stewart again.

“And you’re saying that’s all because of Tucker Reid?”

“He dumped her! They might have pretended that it was mutual, but it wasn’t. It was down to two things.” Mary Jane checked the first one off on her fingers. “Because of the accident, and because—” But even though the second finger came up, she stopped abruptly, closed her mouth, and the second reason didn’t get spoken.

Daisy’s attention had caught on the first reason, however. “The accident? Really? You think it was down to that? Because Lee had some scarring?”

“In large part, yes.” But she sounded hesitant and awkward.

“You think Tucker is as superficial as that?” Daisy was shocked about it, for some reason. Disappointed. It had never occurred to her to question the motives of Lee’s ex in such a way. She’d taken the whole canceled wedding at face value. They’d both had second thoughts. They’d sensibly called it off. It happened.

She’d been twenty-one years old at the time, and excitedly absorbed in her own life. She remembered giving her first impression of Tucker in a drawled aside to her mother. “Well, he certainly seems like the strong silent type...”

She hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but it hadn’t been a statement of dislike, either. She’d shared the family’s happiness about the upcoming wedding and had thought of Tucker as someone who’d be great for Lee, but not for herself—definitely not her type.

“Do Mom and Dad think this, too?” she asked her sister.

“Mom and Dad think it even more,” Mary Jane retorted with spirit. “But that’s because they never saw—” She stopped suddenly, and her face was shuttered.

“No one has ever said this!”

“They’ve said so plenty to me. You haven’t been here. And when you are here, usually Lee is here, too, so we don’t talk about it.”

“Plus it was ten years ago,” Daisy reminded her.

“There’s that,” Mary Jane conceded. She’d calmed down a little. The angry pink in her cheeks began to fade. The violent eddies of emotion filling the room began to settle. Daisy wondered just how much Alex Stewart had to do with all this, how much Mary Jane was still regretting the fruitless years she’d spent waiting for him to get serious, make the full commitment, and then he never had.

After a moment she said, treading carefully, “Is there something else going on, Mary Jane? You seem—”

Wrong thing to say. “Oh, because it couldn’t possibly be you, could it? Or Tucker himself, for that matter. It has to be me.”

“Well, no, okay, but if there is something, if there’s ever anything, I want you to know that you can talk to me, that’s all.”

She reached out her hand and touched Mary Jane’s arm, and at least her sister didn’t throw her off. The atmosphere between them eased a little, once more. They were sisters, after all. There was a strong bond, even when they disagreed.

“Look, you’re going to Africa,” Daisy continued. “It’s going to be amazing.”

“Y-yes. Oh, it is!”

“I’m sure you still have a ton of stuff to do to get ready. I do understand what you’re saying. I’m...a little shocked, actually.”

“Shocked?”

“About Tucker.”

Mary Jane muttered something that was impossible to hear.

“You said there were two reasons...”

“Yeah, well, no, not really. No.”

“You said—”

“Look, that’s not important.” There was a stubborn set to Mary Jane’s mouth now that told Daisy she could spend all day trying to coax more out of her sister and still get next to nothing.

“Let me talk to Lee,” she offered, letting the was-there-or-was-there-not-a-second-reason thing go. “And I’ll talk to Tucker himself. If there really does seem to be a good reason not to go ahead, our meeting tomorrow is just the initial consult so that he can put together an estimate if we ask him to. We’re not committed yet. And if some of his personal choices and attitudes aren’t quite what they should be, does that matter? I mean, it’s...yeah, disappointing...”

Mary Jane huffed out an impatient breath as if she could have come up with a different word.

“But he’ll be doing our landscaping, and that’s all,” Daisy continued. “It’s a business arrangement. It’s not like he’ll be part of the family, the way we once wanted. It’s not as if we need to love everything about him.”

“Lee—”

“Lee is way stronger than you think. She’s—” A lot happier about being single than you are, sis.

Daisy managed not to say it out loud, while Mary Jane retorted, “Lee was way more upset than you think about the canceled wedding.”

“But since none of this actually involves Lee because she has a whole life that she loves, ski instructing and mountain guiding in Colorado, that she’s not planning to change anytime soon—”

“Oh, I give up,” Mary Jane muttered and stalked into the front office, closing the door very firmly behind her just in case Daisy was in any doubt that the conversation was over.

“You know what?” Daisy said out loud to the empty room. “I give up, too!”

* * *

That statement wasn’t quite true, however. She hadn’t given up at all. Why else would she have found herself forty minutes later, wearing a fresh outfit, climbing out of her car in the parking lot at the front of Reid Landscaping’s building? She’d tried to call Lee to talk about all this, but Lee’s phone was switched off, so she’d left a message.

She didn’t have an appointment with Tucker. That was tomorrow. But if there was any chance of hosing down Mary Jane’s overreaction before she flew off to Africa tomorrow, then why not go after it. You had to put the right energy into a problem if you wanted results. Daisy put energy into everything she did.

The headquarters of Reid Landscaping was an impressive advertisement for the company’s abilities. She hadn’t seen it before. Ten years earlier, the landscaping business had been only an ambitious plan simmering in Tucker’s head that he hadn’t spoken of very much, even to Lee. Since then, and having lived in California until so recently, Daisy had never happened down this quiet street on the edge of the woods during vacation visits home.

She’d never bumped into Tucker himself, either, and she knew nothing about his life now. He could be married with two or three children, or seriously attached. He could be divorced, for that matter, or wedded to his career, or maybe a player with no plans ever to settle down.

The building itself was a gorgeous, purpose-built structure in modern log cabin style, with richly varnished golden wood and huge double-glazed, south-facing windows that would catch the sun at all the right times. On the upper level, there seemed to be a private apartment with a balcony orientated to face summer sunsets. A round wooden table and two chairs invited the idea of cool drinks on warm, lazy evenings, while now, in fall, there were wooden tubs planted with chrysanthemums in gold and bronze and deep red.

But it was the exterior landscaping that really showed itself off. Even though the fall foliage had passed its peak of color, everything still looked beautiful. There were plantings that would offer color according to the changes of the season, a long boardwalk-style entrance ramp zigzagging from the parking lot to the front door, garden features in stone and wood and acid-rusted metal that provided structure to the greenery...

There was much more that Daisy didn’t have time to take in right now, but she would definitely want a closer look when it came to planning the detail on the relandscaping of the Spruce Bay grounds.

She went up the entrance ramp and entered the building, hearing a bell jangling to announce her arrival. “I’m hoping I might be able to see...uh...Mr. Reid for a few minutes. Is he around?” she asked the woman at the main desk. “I’m Daisy Cherry, from Spruce Bay Resort.”

“Oh, right, yes, we’ve spoken. Spruce Bay, that’s along the lake between Mission Point and Back Bay? Gorgeous setting. By the way, I’m Jackie. I’m the office manager.”

“That’s the place. Nice to meet you, Jackie. Something’s come up, you see, and I’m hoping for five minutes now, to set us up for the longer meeting.”

“Let me check for you.”

“Would you? Thanks so much.” Daisy sat down in a sleekly comfortable leather chair while Jackie made some finger movements over something on the desktop, apparently sending a text message via cell phone to her boss, which meant that Daisy was left not knowing whether Tucker was actually on site or not.

And that was frustrating because she really, really wanted to see him right now, since she really, really didn’t want her sister to wing off to Africa in the wrong mood. At times, you could almost suspect that Mary Jane was actively dreading the trip.

Daisy sat, and kept sitting.

Had Tucker checked his phone yet?

Had Lee?

Jackie went on with her work, and Daisy looked around. On the wall to her right there was a whole gallery of photos, beautifully enlarged and mounted. Before-and-after shots of Reid Landscaping projects, candid pictures of the team at work. Here was Tucker himself, perfectly dressed in a dark suit, hair cut short, beard like Orlando Bloom’s, accepting an award for a big landscaping project. The award plaque was right here on the wall, also.

And here he was again in another photo, very differently dressed, leaning on a shovel and grinning at the camera. This time he was clean-shaven, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his legs bare and tanned in faded green shorts. He had a couple of staff members standing on either side—a young man with knobby knees and a tall, pretty, fair-skinned brunette with a belt cinching the top of her cargo pants against her very slender waist. It was the closest thing Daisy could find to a personal photo.

Tucker looked the same as he did ten years ago, and yet not. His frame had filled out with more muscle. He had more laugh lines around his eyes, especially when wearing that satisfied, outdoorsy grin.

His presence dominated the whole photo and he looked more confident than he had been the last time they’d met. He gave off a sense of energy and presence, the way a man did when those big plans in his head from years ago have become a reality better than he’d ever dreamed.

And, oh, that grin! Strong and content and full of life.

Daisy didn’t really recognize the grin, when she thought about it. He’d been tense during those few days she’d spent in his company around the time of the canceled wedding. Prickly and uncomfortable and too watchful sometimes. Strong and silent, as she’d said to Mom. He hadn’t grinned much. Had he smiled at all? She hadn’t really felt that she’d gotten to know him at all.

With nothing to do but wait, and with Mary Jane’s accusations from earlier this morning still fresh in her mind, she found herself thinking back in a way she hadn’t done in...oh...ever.

Chapter Two

Ten Years Earlier

Lee’s fiancé didn’t smile.

At all.

“Nice to finally meet you, Daisy,” he said, barely moving his lips. Standing beside him and beaming at both of them, Lee didn’t seem to notice.

Tucker Reid’s face was set like a rock, with a deeply grooved frown between his brows, blue eyes that Daisy couldn’t read and a closed, flat mouth. And it wasn’t so much that he looked angry or unhappy, he just looked totally determined to keep any expression at all from showing on his face, or let any of the wrong words escape his lips.

She registered the barrier he’d put in place as she shook his hand in greeting, so she let her own smile ebb and just nodded at him and quickly took her hand away from the large, strong grip. “Same back at you. It’s about time, isn’t it?” Even though the wedding was only five days from now, this was the first time they’d met.

Daisy had been in Paris for a year, and Lee and Tucker had only known each other for a few weeks when she’d flown off to France. They hadn’t even been dating at that point and were just friends. They’d both had summer jobs at a big-chain hotel, working long shifts to put some decent money in the bank.

Lee was a rather private person. Even though the rest of the Cherry family was close at hand, they hadn’t met Tucker, either, until he and Lee were practically engaged.

Mom, Dad and Mary Jane all adored him, apparently, and were incredibly happy and excited about the wedding.

“He was so wonderful about Lee’s accident,” Mom had been gushing at regular intervals during the twenty-four hours since Daisy’s arrival home, the same way she’d gushed in phone calls and emails while Daisy was in Paris. “He was there by her hospital bed for days on end. She said she couldn’t have gotten through the pain without him.” Burns hurt a lot, as Daisy knew from her own experience of minor ones in restaurant kitchens. “He never once made her feel it was her fault. He really talked her around on that, because she was beating herself up for being careless with that hot oil in the fryer.”

Daisy wasn’t sure yet how she was going to feel about Tucker Reid. He stood there while Lee went on talking for just a little too long about how great it was to have all three Cherry sisters together again, and how much had changed over the past year, and how happy she was about absolutely everything.

He gave a tiny nod occasionally, but that was about it, and Daisy decided it was time to extract herself from the whole situation. There was something about the way he was holding himself that wasn’t right, something about the look in his narrowed blue eyes, but she didn’t have time to think about that. She’d promised to show off her new French dessert-making skills tonight—no, of course she wasn’t too tired!—and there was a lot to do in the kitchen.

“Mom, I need to get started on the peach tart and the raspberry dacquoise,” she said. “Or I’ll crash from jet lag before I’m done.”

She undraped the gorgeously patterned and very Parisian fringed silk scarf from around her neck and shoulders and tossed out her hair, itching to get to work.

Mmm, it felt so good to be home, and yet to know herself a little changed from the person she had been the last time she was here. She’d learned so much about fashion and taste and grace and creativity in Paris. She’d spent hours browsing boutiques and galleries and food markets, people watching at pavement cafés, window-shopping, dreaming.

Even though dessert-making was her main creative outlet and her planned profession, she loved to draw, as well, and she’d filled a stack of sketch pads with rapid-fire impressions of Paris and its people. She hadn’t wasted a second of the trip.

She felt as if she was bursting with life, bursting with the love of it, its beauty and variety and vibrancy. Lee had the reputation in the Cherry family of being the most energetic of the three girls, but Daisy had decided this wasn’t true.

Lee might be incredibly athletic and outdoorsy, just as her fiancé was, but there were other kinds of energy. The energy of her own creativity sizzled inside Daisy, and right now she couldn’t wait to get started on those luscious desserts.

On her way to the kitchen, she glanced back at the bridal couple, still a little thrown by her first meeting with her future brother-in-law—by how little he’d given her, by the fact that she had so little to go on in finding out who he was. Lee was looking up at him and she wasn’t smiling and animated anymore. Tucker stood awkwardly, his head tilted in his fiancée’s direction, but his eyes were elsewhere, restless.

They landed on Daisy for a tiny moment and she felt too warm suddenly. What was that about? Why was he looking at her now, when he hadn’t met her eyes once during their greeting and awkward first conversation? What was wrong with the man?

Or is it something wrong with me?

Everyone was so happy about the wedding. It would be horrible if she didn’t get along with her sister’s husband!

Present Day

In the end, of course, Daisy’s feelings about Lee’s groom hadn’t mattered. The wedding had never taken place. Mom had nagged her a little about the “strong silent type” comment. “You’re not suggesting he’s not smart enough for her, are you?”

“No, of course not.”

“He’s cautious, that’s all. Sensible, and reserved. And responsible. He thinks before he speaks.”

“It’s fine, Mom.”

“When you get to know him...”

But she never had gotten to know him. Lee and Tucker had announced their decision to call off their wedding just a few days before the scheduled event, both of them looking a little wrung out and sad, but with some relief in the mix at the same time.

For a moment during the announcement, they’d held hands, but then they’d dropped the contact with two awkward movements that somehow hadn’t matched—a sign that the right connection wasn’t there, it seemed.

Less than a week later, Daisy had flown out to California, lured by the sudden chance of a three-month internship with an internationally known pastry chef. From then on, far too busy with her fifteen-hour days in a hectic professional kitchen, she’d taken the whole thing at face value whenever she thought back on it.

A mutual decision, announced while standing side by side.

The strong silent type wasn’t what Lee wanted, after all.

Now, after what Mary Jane had said this morning, Daisy wondered how much more there’d been to the situation that she hadn’t seen at the time.

It was an uncomfortable feeling, like a nagging itch in a place she couldn’t reach to scratch. Her phone began to ring. She grabbed it quickly and found it was Lee. “Sorry I missed you. What’s up?”

“You sound breathless,” Daisy said, relieved to hear her sister’s voice. It would be good to get this settled before she talked to Tucker himself.

“Just got back from a five-mile run,” Lee said.

“You didn’t have to call me back before you’ve even got your breathing back to normal.” Except that already it almost was. Lee was incredibly fit.

And although convenient, the timing of her call was a little awkward. “I’m good,” she said. “Now, shoot, Daze.”

Daisy picked her words carefully. “Look, I’m here at Reid Landscaping...”

“Oh. Wow. You mean Tucker’s company?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re thinking of contracting him for the work at Spruce Bay?”

“Yes, only Mary Jane...has doubts.”

“Because of me?” Lee had a habit of getting right to the point.

“That’s right,” she said again, aware that Jackie could overhear.

“That’s ridiculous!”

“Well, yes, I thought so, but I wanted to check with you.”

“And you’ve checked, and I’m good, so go ahead.”

Daisy laughed. “You are the most efficient conversationalist I know, Lee.”

“Only when I’m busting to get into the shower. Seriously, it seems like half a lifetime ago that he and I were planning a big wedding, and I am sooo not that kind of girl anymore. If I ever was. Mary Jane is projecting her own stuff.”

“Well, yeah, I did wonder about that.”

“I was hurt at the time. I mean, I was.”

“I don’t think I knew that...”

“You were hardly around. But now I know it’s the best thing that could have happened, us calling that wedding off. Are we done?”

“We’re done. Go take your shower.”

They ended the conversation seconds later, just as the phone vibrated on the Reid Landscaping office manager’s desk. Jackie checked it quickly and said, “Okay, you’re in luck, Ms. Cherry.”

“Please call me Daisy.”

“Daisy. Such a pretty name!”

“Thanks.”

“Tucker can see you now. He’ll be coming in from the display area in a moment or two.”

“Can I meet him out there?” Daisy jumped up. “I don’t want to create too much of an interruption.” She felt a little claustrophobic in here for some reason, and suddenly craved the open air with its October crispness and bite.

“Sure, go through the door here,” the office manager said. “You’ll see him coming across in a minute or two.” Once more, there was that flicker of curiosity in Jackie’s manner, and Daisy wondered what it meant.

Probably nothing. Curiosity was a natural response. She was feeling it, too. If she’d never gotten to know Tucker Reid ten years ago when he was about to marry her sister, what would she feel about him now?

Would he still be that granite-faced, uncomfortable presence she’d been able to call to memory so clearly a few minutes ago? Would he be someone that carefree Lee would still be happy to think of as a friend? Would he be the man Mary Jane thought he was—cold and superficial enough to dump his fiancée because she had some burn scarring on one side of her lower jaw and neck and shoulder?

Or was there another truth to the man that none of the Cherry sisters had understood?

* * *

The paving stones were a delaying tactic. Tucker knew it even as he placed another one in position, rocking it back and forth on its sand foundation to make sure it was steady.

It wasn’t.

Or level.

He didn’t have the spirit level with him to enable a final adjustment, so he was not just delaying his meeting with Daisy Cherry here, he was actively wasting his own time, because he would probably end up lifting all the pavers and laying them down again from scratch in order to get them right.

He sighed between his teeth, irritated at himself.

And then picked up another paving stone. There was something about physical labor that settled his head. He’d always been that way, through his father’s illness, through all the anger and mess, through the years he’d spent filling his dad’s shoes too young. When he had something on his mind, he worked through it, literally. Raking leaves in his parents’ yard at thirteen. Unloading deliveries at the garden center at twenty.

Or fiddling uselessly with pavers right now.

He didn’t like thinking back on his relationship with Lee, that was the problem. And he definitely didn’t like thinking about Daisy’s part in the whole thing.

No, that wasn’t fair.

As far as Daisy herself knew, she hadn’t been involved at all.

It was all me.

It had so nearly been a disaster—so very, very nearly—and he couldn’t give himself any credit for averting that disaster. He’d seen it coming, but he hadn’t been the one to act. He’d let Lee and fate do that. He’d been paralyzed by his intense need to do the right thing, without knowing what the right thing was.

There were reasons for the paralysis, but he found it hard to forgive himself for it all the same.

He sometimes still thought about getting in touch with Lee to see how she was doing. Thought about calling or emailing, but how did you do that? How did you revive something that had started as a friendship and should never have turned into anything else? How did you just ask someone out of the blue, “Hey...are you happy?”

You can ask Lee’s sister if Lee is happy. You can ask her today. She would know the answer to that.

But he wasn’t convinced that he would manage to frame the question. He could end up holding back and holding back until someone else took the matter into their own hands, the way he had held back ten years ago.

Yeah, he definitely hadn’t forgiven himself for that.

Ten years earlier

Something’s not right.

The thought was nagging and insistent, prodding at Tucker like someone trying to get his attention with the point of an umbrella. Hey, you! Notice me! Do something!

Everything’s not right.

“...and Mom is still questioning the fact that we’re only giving chocolate as wedding favors,” Lee was saying.

Tucker tried to listen, tried to feel that what his fiancée was saying was important. “I think it’s fine,” he said, and she nodded, but neither of them was really thinking about chocolate or wedding etiquette or any of that.

I’m thinking I don’t want to go ahead with this, and I’ve known it in my heart for a while, and today it’s making me sick. It’s like lead in my stomach. It’s gotten worse. Oh boy, has it gotten worse! How could this happen? Everyone in both families is so happy about the wedding, I shouldn’t be feeling this way.

Was that what Lee was thinking, too? Or was she just scared? Scared because she could see that he was thinking it?

His mind scattered onto six different tracks at once. Scared because she didn’t know what he was thinking, because he was fighting so hard not to let it show?

More than that, he was fighting so hard not to feel it. He honestly did not know if it was just prewedding jitters, the kind everyone had, or if it was a serious problem, and he didn’t dare to bare his soul to a listening ear in order to find out. Not to Lee, not to anyone.

Dad had “followed his heart” and left havoc in his wake for years, made his whole family miserable. Tucker thought that human hearts could talk a lot of disastrous nonsense, and had vowed many times that he would keep his where it belonged, under the firm control of his head.

Meanwhile, Daisy had disappeared into the kitchen.

Daisy, who’d knocked him off course the moment he’d set eyes on her from an upstairs bedroom window less than an hour ago. He’d never expected it. How the hell could you expect something like that?

He’d heard the car swinging in from the resort driveway to park beside the house, a little later than predicted. Mary Jane had been the one to go pick up Daisy from Albany airport. He’d heard voices—Lee and his future in-laws, Marshall and Denise, as they rushed outside to greet her.

He’d stepped over to the window. Daisy was climbing out of the car. Shafts of afternoon sun struck her blond hair and glinted on earrings and a gold bangle on a bare, lightly tanned wrist. She was wearing jeans, a white top and some kind of pointless but beautiful, vibrantly colorful summery scarf that got mixed up in her huge, warm hug with Lee.

She didn’t even seem to see Lee’s newly scarred skin, she was just so busy hugging her and exclaiming, wiping happy tears from her eyes, laughing. She hugged her parents, said something about the beautiful June day and the sun on the water.

“You’re later than we expected,” Denise Cherry said.

“My fault,” Daisy answered. “I want to bake for you tonight, so we stopped for ingredients.”

“You don’t have to bake for us! Not when you’re only just home!”

“I want to. Please! I really do!” She was already diving into the trunk of the car and bringing out shopping bags. “I’m going to do a raspberry dacquoise that’s so luscious we’ll have to row right around the lake to burn off the calories. And a peach tart, because French tarts are just so gorgeous to look at.”

“I don’t know where you get the energy, honey!”

Tucker didn’t know, either. All he knew was that it glowed from every pore of her skin and he was captivated by it. Lee was pretty energetic, too. She liked to hike and ski and climb and run, and he loved that about her—that she was active and fit, and not some girlie girl who wouldn’t set foot outdoors for fear of ruining a pedicure.

But Daisy’s energy was different, electric and beautiful, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

He felt as if he was spying, a voyeur, betraying Lee, betraying the whole Cherry family, betraying himself, and even his mother, who adored Lee. And he kept right on doing it, watching the outline and movement of Daisy’s body as she carried the shopping bags. She paused to take another look around her at the beloved, familiar sights of home, and let out a big sigh of contentment that he felt in his own body.

It couldn’t be happening.

Even if it was happening, it couldn’t mean anything, or be important in any way. It was just some stupid symptom of his prewedding nerves. He seriously didn’t believe in this kind of thing. He seriously didn’t want to believe in it, after Dad. And if it seemed to be happening anyway, then it was just a meaningless illusion. It wasn’t real.

And yet... He felt it again a little later, when they formally met, the moment they shook hands. The aura of creative energy and star-kissed good fortune that radiated from her like an inner light, the optimism and curiosity and zest for life. Her hair, her eyes, her bow of a mouth, the way she undraped that stupid, beautiful scarf, unconsciously running her hand over the silk as if its color gave off heat and her fingers were cold.

Wow.

Just wow.

There were three Cherry sisters in his life. He liked the eldest one a lot, even though she could be prickly at times and he couldn’t stand Alex, her boyfriend. He loved the middle one like a comrade-in-arms and he was going to marry her. He was. Everyone wanted it.

Sister number three was a revelation he hadn’t expected or wanted or—

Hadn’t wanted.

Really, really didn’t want.

He wanted to marry Lee.

He wanted to want to marry Lee.

“Should we get out of here?” she asked him suddenly, and he realized he was still staring into space, roughly in the direction of the kitchen door, even though it was a good forty-five seconds since Daisy had disappeared through it.

“Out of here?” he echoed stupidly.

“Away,” Lee said. “Right after dinner. Go to a bar, or something. Even better, skip dinner and go to a bar right now.”

“You know we can’t do that.” As a future Cherry son-in-law...as the first future Cherry son-in-law...he was well aware of family requirements five days before the wedding, and his sense of duty about it was strong. “Not even after dinner.”

“Is it wrong that I want to?” There was a huge amount of appeal in Lee’s voice, and he didn’t know how to answer her.

“We’re both on edge.” He touched her neck. It was a caress he’d used countless times before the accident and he wasn’t out of the habit of it yet, even though he knew she didn’t like it anymore. The burn scarring there and on her jaw and shoulder was fading now, but it was still too fresh for comfort and would never fully disappear, and they were both self-conscious about it, second-guessing their own motivations.

Was he only touching her neck to prove that he didn’t mind touching it? Did she only dislike it because she didn’t believe such a caress could possibly be sincere? She hated the scarring way more than he did.

Why had he started touching her neck in the first place? He liked her so much, they were such great friends, they had things in common, but that slightly crazy party night when friendship had spilled over into something physical...

To be honest, he wondered where they would be now if that night had never happened.

Maybe we would have stayed just friends, and I would have met Daisy instead...

No! Idiot!

When Lee had still been in the hospital after the accident, they’d both said to each other that this was what love was all about, going through the dark times together as well as the good times, and yet...

Something’s not right.

It wasn’t just wedding jitters.

And it wasn’t just Daisy.

Lee felt it, too, he was sure she did.

Almost sure.

But she wasn’t saying anything.

And he couldn’t say it for her because then she’d think...everyone would think...that he was doing it because of the accident, when really he thought the accident had done him a favor, reaffirming his bone-deep understanding of how serious marriage was, forcing a realization that they weren’t together for the right reasons. They cared about each other, but not in the right way.

I have to say it. If she won’t, I have to.

But what if he was wrong? What if this was just a temporary blip in the beat of his untrustworthy heart? What if the Reid and Cherry families were right to be so happy about the wedding? And what if Lee was devastated instead of relieved? Could he do that to her?

He couldn’t say it. Was there any way he could work out what both of them really felt without resorting to the finality of words? Maybe the best marriages were the ones that started out exactly the way he’d started out with Lee—as friends. After seeing what passion and wild impulse had done to his own family, he truly didn’t think that was the way to go.

So where did Daisy fit in?

She didn’t, his own ruthless honesty told him. He’d schooled himself not to believe in rosy scenarios, after Dad’s lymphoma diagnosis and his reaction to it. Life wasn’t sunny and effortless. Life wasn’t about going where the winds of emotion blew you. Life was struggle. Given a choice between believing in easy miracles and believing in solid work, Tucker chose the hard yards every time.

Daisy didn’t fit. Daisy was an illusion.

She was oblivious, and it was better that way.

“You’re right,” he told Lee. “After dinner. After we’ve put in as much time as anyone could expect. We do need to get out of here and get a couple of hours to ourselves.”

“Or I’m going to explode.”

“Me, too.”

“We need to talk, and—”

“Yes, work things out. Think. Out loud. To each other.” The words didn’t come easily. Frustrated by the difficulty of coherent speech, he grabbed her shoulders and squeezed her and felt the breath come out of her as if she’d been holding it for too long. She squeezed him back.

“Yes. Yes. We really do,” she said, and blinked back what could have been tears.

Shoot, he was giddy with relief!

Giddy, and thirsty, he realized. He’d been out of doors from six until two at the garden center, where he worked three days a week on top of his hours at the hotel. He’d repotted grafted plants, unloaded new stock and supplies, planned his own future landscaping business inside his head while his body lifted and carried and stacked and sorted. He’d grabbed a burger and a sugar-filled soda for lunch, but hadn’t had a real, thirst-quenching drink since before noon.

Thinking only of a long glass of clear, icy mountain water, he made for the kitchen, and there was Daisy stirring a pot that bubbled with sweet, fragrant syrup. He could smell it the moment he walked in.

And the moment he walked in, he was far too aware of her—of how pretty and exotic she seemed, so freshly arrived from France, with that indefinable nuance of Frenchness about her. She looked a little steamy at the hot stove, with pink in her cheeks and several tendrils of fine, golden-blond hair curling around her face in the humid warmth. She brushed one back behind her ear then looked up and caught sight of him.

They looked at each other.

He froze inside and looked away before either of them could even blink.

This was not important. This was not what was making him jittery about his future with Lee. The jitters had been building for weeks, when Daisy was just a name and a vague reference.

He’d seen her in family pictures as a cute toddler and then a gangly-limbed teen, and right up until their meeting ten minutes ago he’d still been thinking of her as a kid, as Lee’s kid sister.

Someone he might tease a little about boyfriends.

Someone with a boyfriend—a local guy she’d known since high school who’d been texting and calling and emailing her faithfully the whole year she was in France.

She didn’t have a boyfriend, he’d learned.

Not that this was important, either way.

But still, they’d looked at each other for that tiny moment before he’d flinched his gaze away.

“Thirsty,” he said, to explain his presence.

“Beer or soda?” she offered, smiling. “There’s both in the refrigerator.”

“Actually, water...”

“Bottled or tap?”

“Tap is fine. I’ll help myself.”

“Thanks. I can’t leave this glaze right now, or very bad things will happen to it.”

“No problem.” He ran the faucet, and cold mountain water gushed into his glass. And then he took it outside to drink it, because he didn’t trust himself to stay anywhere near her.

Chapter Three

Present Day

Out in the yard, Daisy saw Tucker in worn jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up his arms the same way—although it was not the same shirt—as they’d been in the photo on the wall inside.

He was shifting a large paving stone into place in an open-air alcove that formed one of Reid Landscaping’s displays. There were five of these alcoves, each designed to show what could be achieved with barbecue areas, ponds and fountains, raised garden beds and a dozen other features.

He straightened, stepped back to judge his work and was apparently satisfied. He paused for a moment to stretch his shoulders and check his phone, then turned to begin striding across the large yard, sliding the phone into his back pocket as he caught sight of her. She waved at him and came forward to meet him before he got too close to the building. She really didn’t want to end up back inside, with the possibility of their conversation being overheard.

Just in case Mary Jane was right about the kind of person he was—the nasty kind, like Mary Jane’s ex. After her long experience with Alex Stewart, maybe Mary Jane was a really good judge of scumbag men. Maybe there really was a good reason, even after all this time, not to contract Tucker’s company to relandscape the Spruce Bay grounds, and it was all bound up in Lee’s accident and Tucker’s response.

Daisy wondered again about the second reason, the one Mary Jane hadn’t spoken.

The one that had put a stubborn, shuttered look onto her face, as if the second reason was something she wouldn’t confess even under torture.

Tucker saw her and stopped to wait until she reached him, watching her with a steadiness that unnerved her, given how uncomfortable she was already feeling. Those memories of his unreadable presence ten years ago were fresher and more vivid than they should have been.

She hadn’t been too impressed with strong and silent back then, but she’d learned to appreciate it in the years since, and the Tucker Reid of today was even more impressive in the flesh than he’d been in the photos on the main office wall, hard and solid and strong, with the kind of maleness that only belongs to a man who works hard with his body in the open air.

Daisy knew she would be incredibly disappointed if she couldn’t manage to like him, if he was exactly what Mary Jane claimed him to be, or worse.

Superficial. Unkind. A womanizer. All of the above.

“Daisy,” he said when she was close enough. He gave her a brief smile, but it didn’t last. She started to hold out her hand, but he turned his palm up and showed the dirt and they both gave an awkward shrug and dropped the idea. “It’s been a while.”

“It has.”

“Jackie says you’d rather talk out here?”

“Oh, she—?”

“Sent a text about ten seconds ago. Weird how we do things now, isn’t it?” Most people would probably have smiled with that line, but he didn’t.

“Weird...” Daisy echoed. “Convenient.”

“Want to sit here?” he offered. “It’s a sun trap. Beautiful today. Better than inside.”

“That’s what I thought.” He wasn’t giving her much, she decided. Short phrases, an offhand observation about phones. Their exchange seemed familiar, a flashback to their brief acquaintance in the past.

She settled herself a little stiffly on the wide wooden bench seat he’d indicated. In a sheltered, sunny position it was warm to the touch even in October, and the splash of an ornamental fountain nearby brought a sense of natural tranquility that contrasted uncomfortably with the rather less peaceful feelings inside her.

Who were we back then, all of us? Mary Jane, and Lee, and Tucker, and me? What’s Mary Jane not telling me? Why am I feeling so tense about this, now that I’m here?

“What can I do for you today?” Tucker asked, sitting down beside her. He kept to his own body space, their hips a good two feet apart, with a safe stretch of smooth, sunny bench in between. Did they really need that?

“You mean because I’m actually supposed to be meeting you tomorrow at the resort?”

He shrugged and smiled. The smile was too tight. “I guess that’s what I’m asking.”

Suddenly, she realized that she didn’t know how to handle this. It had seemed easy on her way here, but maybe it wasn’t going to be.

Face-to-face, with Tucker understandably expecting her to take the initiative since this meeting was her idea, she felt her poise evaporate like spilled water on hot pavement. She couldn’t exactly accuse him of breaking up with her sister for nasty reasons ten years ago, and then ask him if he was still the same kind of man.

And yet she had to say something, or he wouldn’t know why she was here.

With no other option, in the end she just said it the best she could. “Mary Jane thinks it’s inappropriate for Spruce Bay Resort to hire Reid Landscaping for the work on our grounds because you were once engaged to our sister.”

“Ah,” he said.

Which gave her just about as much as he’d given her ten years ago—one handshake, a few words and a couple of looks that disappeared too fast.

She waited for more.

After a moment, it came, but it wasn’t much help. “And what do you think?” He shifted a little on the bench. Farther away, not closer. Still, the movement made her more aware of him, of just how strong and solid he was, of just how well those jeans fit his muscled legs. He was intimidating.

“I—I didn’t think it should be a problem. Which was why I set up the appointment without consulting her first.”

“You didn’t think it should be a problem. But now you do?” He’d narrowed his eyes against the bright light, but the glint of blue was still strong. She was very glad not to know exactly what he might be thinking.

“No, I—” she began, then stopped and started again. “Well, I just thought we should explore the idea. Mary Jane is pretty sensible...” She gathered herself and sat up straighter, determined to take a little more control of the conversation. “Seriously, though, on this occasion I think she’s wrong. I’ve also talked to Lee on the phone, and she says she’s fine about it. But still, I thought we should get it out in the open. You were engaged to Lee, and then the wedding got canceled. I want Reid Landscaping because I know you’re the best in the area, and I don’t see that having a personal connection so long ago is going to be an issue. I want to be able to reassure Mary Jane that you and I have talked about it and dealt with any concerns.”

He was silent for a moment, and she wondered if this meant he thought the same way as Mary Jane. Then he took a deep breath. “Tell me how Lee is,” he finally said. “She’s still in Colorado? Is she married? Kids?” He took another breath. “Is she happy?”

This was easy, thank goodness. “She’s still in Colorado. Yes, she’s really happy. I don’t think marriage and kids figure on her agenda.”

“No?” He slid her a sideways glance.

“That’s what she says. I’ve visited her there a couple times. From what I can see, she has everything set up just the way she wants, and she’s not pining for change.”

“That’s good,” he answered. “That’s really great.”

“Well, we all think so, yes.”

“Meaning it’s none of my business because I took myself out of her life at the wrong time?”

“That’s Mary Jane, not me,” she said quickly.

“Mary Jane thinks it was my fault, you mean, that the wedding got called off?”

“Apparently.”

“Mary Jane needs to find something better to do with her time than making judgments about something that happened so long ago,” Tucker growled, and it was so close to what Daisy had just been thinking that she almost groaned out loud.

“It won’t be a problem,” she said quickly. “She’s going to Africa tomorrow.”

“Africa?”

“She loves to travel. She’ll be gone for three weeks. I mean, I’m not sure how booked up your schedule is...”

“Pretty booked up.”

“Right.”

“I’ll see what I can squeeze in. You mean, if we could have the design and budget and timetable all locked in by the time she gets back, she’d realize everything had been worked out with no difficulties?”

“I’d been wondering if you might even have started on the actual work by then.”

Ah. No.

“Not possible, I’m afraid.” The look he gave her clearly said, Reid Landscaping is way more in demand than you realize, and she was embarrassed at being caught out in such a mistaken assumption. It seemed arrogant on her part, entitled, and she was quite horrified about how well he could get his meaning across without words.

She backpedaled politely, aware that this improvised meeting had not achieved very much. She’d been too impulsive in coming here, hadn’t thought it through. “In that case, if we’re lucky enough to have an estimate and plans by then, that would be great.”

“So I can leave you with Jackie, then?” He didn’t try to hide that he needed to end this meeting. In fact, he was so cool about it that she wondered if he wanted Spruce Bay’s business at all.

She stood, and said even more politely than before, “Of course, since you’re busy.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, then let out a sigh between his teeth. “I’m sorry, that sounded rude.”

“You are busy.”

“Jackie’s been with us since we started. She knows more than I do about prices and delivery times, and she has a great eye. I have an appointment I need to get to. Shouldn’t have sounded so impatient about it. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

He smiled, and she felt a rush of relief that the intimidating distance seemed to have shrunk to a much more manageable level. “You can have a browse around here,” he offered. He made a gesture of casual ownership that hinted at his sense of success. “Take a look through our gallery of past projects and gather some ideas, get Jackie to show you the brochures from our suppliers.”

“Sounds good. Please go to your appointment and leave me to it, and we’ll meet as planned at Spruce Bay tomorrow.”

“Looking forward to it.”

But he wasn’t. She could see it in the guarded expression that had appeared again on his face, and she didn’t know why it was there.

Ten years earlier

“We have to pick up the tuxes from the hire place,” Lee said to Tucker in their usual corner of their usual bar, “finalize the seating arrangements and write out the place cards, work out the checks we’re going to need to give to people on the day and write those out. We should probably call the hotel to confirm our reservations—”

“Lee,” Tucker cut in quietly. “Is this really why you wanted to get away and talk? To go through our to-do list for the millionth time? We can talk about this stuff anywhere.”

She got that frightened, doubtful look on her face. “But we weren’t talking just now, were we? We weren’t saying anything. I was...filling the silence.”

“There’s allowed to be silence, isn’t there?”

“Not when—” She stopped and took a breath, lifted her strong chin. She had the strongest face of the three Cherry girls, determined and full of courage. Tucker was so grateful that the burning oil hadn’t splashed more than an inch above her jawline to change those contoured planes. She began again. “Not when all I can think about when we’re silent is that I can almost feel you wanting to call this off.”

“Call it off,” he echoed blankly, as if he didn’t know.

“Yes. Cancel. End it. Tell me it’s been a mistake. I keep waiting for you to say it, and you don’t.”

“Because I didn’t want to hurt—” Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Her eyes narrowed and she went white. “That’s why? That’s why? I thought you might not be sure about what you were feeling. Wedding jitters. I’m having them, too, and the other stuff, the sense that we’re not connecting, and I haven’t known if it was temporary— But now you’re saying— You’re telling me you knew this wasn’t right, knew it for sure, but you were just going to go ahead with it anyhow?”

“Not for sure. I was— I kept—” But he couldn’t say it. He didn’t really know, himself, what he’d been going to do. He didn’t feel as if he understood anything right now. He kept thinking about his dad, and his own determination never to do anything even remotely similar to what he had done. You had to consider your family’s happiness, not just your own. You couldn’t let your emotions blow you every which way like leaves in the wind.

She said it for him. “You were going to marry me, because you didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Do you have any idea how insulting that is?”

It went downhill from there.

And then, eventually, after quite a long time, with a lot of silence, some tears, some words, it came partway back up. “It’s a relief,” Lee said quietly. “I’m relieved.”

But when they got back to the house she didn’t even wait for him to kill the engine before she jumped out of the car, gabbled something he couldn’t catch and disappeared inside. By the time he reached the porch, he could hear through the open front door her feet clattering up the stairs toward the privacy of her room.

He didn’t go inside.

He couldn’t. Not yet.

He needed some space. They’d decided not to say anything to anyone else until tomorrow. “Daisy only arrived six hours ago,” Lee had said. “I don’t want to hit everyone with this news until she’s settled in a little.”

“It’s not about Daisy, is it?” he’d answered, and the words had felt like a lie in his mouth.

Was it about Daisy?

Hell, he definitely wasn’t going inside right now, because Daisy would probably be there.

He sat on the porch steps instead, hunching over to rest his elbows on his spread knees and brooding in the dark. A slew of different emotions roiled inside him, as choppy and confusing as the waves on the lake when the weather was changing.

This whole thing felt like a change in the weather, a change in the season. That unsettling feeling at the end of summer when the leaves rattled down from the trees in a sudden wind, and the temperature dropped forty degrees in an hour, only to come back up into the seventies again the next day.

He didn’t run his life on these kinds of emotions. He didn’t blow hot and cold. There’d been no place for that kind of thing after the lymphoma had finally claimed his dad eight years ago, when Tucker was just sixteen. No place, and even less motivation.

He’d had to grow up fast, with no time to waste. He’d had to put his family first. He’d needed two part-time jobs to help his mom with money. He’d been the one to sit up with her late at night while they talked about how to keep Mattie in school and whether Carla was old enough for a serious boyfriend. He knew the value of caution, and of thinking things through. He knew the honor in it, even more.

“It’s meaningless, isn’t it?” he asked the universe, on a mutter. This sense of changed destiny, of an unlooked-for miracle, it was just nonsense.

What am I asking for? A damn sign, or something?

He heard footsteps behind him.

It was her, Daisy, and his crazy heart told him that this was the sign he’d been asking for.

He turned around too eagerly, already half on his feet on the lowest porch step.

And of course it wasn’t her.

It wasn’t even Lee. It was Mary Jane.

“Oh.” The energy slumped out of him. The slump was so obvious that Mary Jane couldn’t miss it.

“Everything okay?” she asked with a lightness he didn’t buy for a moment. She knew something was wrong. Maybe she’d seen Lee disappear upstairs and close the door of her room. There was no light coming from Lee’s window, he saw. She was in there in the dark. Daisy’s room was next to hers, and from there the light shone brightly, spilling down onto the porch roof.

“Everything’s fine,” he growled, almost too low for Mary Jane to hear. She said nothing, and he let her silence prod him into saying more, still on a reluctant mutter. “Lee and I have been talking. We’ve worked it out. It’s okay.”

“Good.” It was firm, almost aggressive. She hesitated for a moment, as if she might have said something more, then turned to head back inside. She’d been waiting all evening for Alex to call, and Tucker guessed that he still hadn’t. He would be full of apologies when he finally did, and would probably bring her flowers the next time he saw her, but Tucker still wasn’t impressed by his ex-future-sister-in-law’s boyfriend.

“Mary Jane, is that you down there?” Daisy’s voice came from her window.

She lifted the sliding screen and stuck her head out, her hair haloed by the lamp on the desk nearby. Tucker took the last step down off the porch, looked up at her and felt like Romeo to her Juliet.

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks, if you can believe that nonsense!

“Oh, Tucker, sorry,” she sang out breezily. “I thought it was Mary Jane.”

It was. Dragging his gaze from the upper window, he found that Mary Jane had heard her sister’s voice and had stopped on the porch. She was looking at him as if she’d read the whole Romeo-and-Juliet thing in his body language, clearer than Shakespeare’s words.

“She’s here,” he told Daisy, his voice catching roughly in his throat.

“Or if you don’t mind, Tucker, I left my hairbrush in her car. Could you grab it for me and toss it up? Is it locked, Mary Jane?” she called a little louder.

Mary Jane cleared her throat, and called back, “No, it’s open. I can get it for you.”

“But I bet Tucker can throw better than you.”

“I could bring it up to you, Daisy,” Mary Jane said tetchily, starting across the porch and down the steps. “Nobody has to throw it!”

“I got it,” Tucker said quickly. The car was parked only yards away. He found the hairbrush on the front dash and held it up for Daisy to see. “You really want me to...?”

“Sure, why not.” She reached out for it. He threw it neatly, and she caught it even more neatly, laughing.

He thought he would remember that moment for the rest of his life.

Present Day

And he did, damn it, he still remembered it.

Abandoning the crooked paving stones, he went out the side entrance to his car, parked in its designated space at the front of the private parking lot, while Daisy began to browse the display areas. He could see her as he sat in the vehicle waiting for the engine to warm, in her bright blue biker-style jacket and black pants. She walked slowly, pausing every time something caught her attention.

She stepped back to appreciate the effect of the morning sun on the splashing water of a fountain, stepped forward again to run her hand across a piece of blue-gray slate. She picked up a glazed black pot planted with miniature bamboo and set it on the slate as if testing the blend of colors, and then she put it carefully back exactly where she’d found it.

This was what had drawn him so strongly ten years ago—the intensity of her response to beauty, the creative energy that ran through her, the bright light she seemed to give off, when the darkness of his father’s illness and its aftermath had still been hanging over him.

The car engine was warm. He had no reason to still be sitting here. He had to take himself off before she noticed...except that her browsing made her oblivious, the way she’d been oblivious that very first day.

The one thing he could be proud of, possibly. He’d kept his cataclysmic thunderclap of feeling to himself.

Lee hadn’t guessed. Marshall and Denise had had no idea. They’d gotten it all wrong. Marshall had accosted him in the privacy of the resort office after all the phone calls had been made—canceling the reception, the photographer, the flowers, the guests.

“I cannot believe you’re doing this, Tucker. My incredibly brave, beautiful girl is pretending she wants it, too, but I’m not fooled. This is coming from you. Maybe she doesn’t even know that. Maybe she genuinely thinks this is a mutual decision, but I’ve seen you withdrawing over the past few weeks. You’ve frozen her out until she thinks it’s coming from her, as well. I know what a man looks like when he’s truly in love with the woman he’s going to marry. You haven’t looked that way, and if it’s because my girl is disfigured after the—”

“Marshall, she’s not—” He hadn’t been able to say it. Disfigured. He’d never said that in his head, never felt that way.

“You don’t want that word? It’s too blunt for you?” Marshall had used it as a punishment and an accusation. “You don’t like facing the truth about your own motivations?”

It hadn’t been a pleasant conversation, and Tucker had come dangerously close to saying Daisy’s name but he’d managed to stop himself, and if that meant that Marshall went on thinking that it was Lee’s accident at the heart of the problem, then this was collateral damage that he couldn’t avoid.

He didn’t want Daisy dragged into this. He didn’t want any additional hurt to Lee, or a mess worse than the mess they had already.

He would wait, he had decided. He would just lay low and do nothing, and in a few months when things had died down and when he had some perspective, he would take action, seek Daisy out, see if he still felt...and if she felt...and if there was any way they could possibly...

Hadn’t happened.

He drove out of the lot, remembering the shock he’d felt when he’d run into a very bubbly Daisy at a local convenience store just a few days after the canceled wedding. Hiding his pleasure behind dark sunglasses, he’d drawled, “You’re looking happy today.”

She’d told him, “Happy and really thrilled. I’m flying out to California tomorrow to start an internship with an amazing pastry chef. The opportunity came up so fast, I haven’t had time to breathe! Someone else canceled, and it turned out I was second on the list. I can’t believe it! Um...it’s good to see you, Tucker, but I have to run.”

And that was that.

Gone.

He’d never pursued it. Why would he trust in signs that pointed in two different directions at once, when he didn’t believe in signs in the first place? Why would he chase after something his head didn’t even want? Something that might only ever have been a symptom of the deeper problem between himself and Lee? Something nobody in either family would want? Something that fate had chosen to take out of his hands?

“Ten years later...” he muttered to himself as he drove.

Ten years later, incredibly, he’d felt exactly the same. Thunderclap. Across a crowded landscape display. Changing everything.

Magic.

Chemistry.

Whatever you wanted to call it.

It was just as strong, and he distrusted it just as much. He’d hidden it manfully during their brief meeting today, and he didn’t think she’d guessed. He hoped she hadn’t, because his beliefs and his morals were still the same, and this feeling about Daisy wasn’t something he believed in or wanted to pursue.

Not with his legacy of experience, and not with his current situation the way it was.

You see, there was a little thing called a marriage certificate, and call him old-fashioned, but, no matter what the circumstances, he didn’t think a man should go after one woman when he was already legally wed to someone else.

Chapter Four

“So I saw your half brother today,” Tucker’s mother, Nancy, told him that night.

She’d called him to see if he could come over and fix a leak in the U-bend pipe beneath the kitchen sink and change the lightbulb at the top of the stairs. At sixty-one years old, she was pretty good about most of that stuff.

He was proud of her, actually. She mowed her own lawn, changed all the lightbulbs she could reach, paid her bills on time. He’d in fact forbidden her to change the one at the top of the stairs, since it involved climbing onto a chair and leaning precariously into space.

With a trim, energetic figure and hair she’d allowed to remain its natural silvery gray, she could have married again if she’d wanted to, Tucker was certain, and yet to his knowledge she’d never come close. A couple times he’d almost asked her about it—“Did you love Dad that much?” Or maybe, “Did Dad scar you that badly?” But in the end he’d stayed silent.

“Oh, you did?” he said to her carefully now, about Jonah.

“He’s working at Third Central, the branch on the corner of Maple and Twenty-second Street, and I had checks to deposit,” Mom explained. “I don’t usually go to that branch, but I had a delivery down that way.” She had her own business as a florist now, having started in that field as a sales assistant after his dad became ill. “He’s looking so grown-up, I guess he’d be twenty-one by now.”

“About that, I think.”

“He didn’t recognize me.” She added, “Or if he did, he was pretending, the same way I was.”

There wasn’t much else to say. Jonah had been three years old at their dad’s funeral, a difficult imp of a kid who didn’t understand what was happening. Tucker’s mom had been horrified that Andrea would bring him. How could she do this? she’d said over and over. How could she do this?

She’d been devastated at Andrea’s presence, exhausted by the effort of dealing with it. Jonah crying and struggling in his mother’s arms had been the last straw on top of more previous last straws than Tucker could count.

His mom had found out about his dad’s affair three months after she’d learned about his cancer. Three months after that, she’d found out that the woman involved was eight months pregnant with Dad’s child.

But the order she’d found out about it wasn’t the order in which it had all happened. Dad had known he was ill months before he’d told his family, and he’d started the affair almost immediately “as a reaction.” The justification he’d used still made Tucker queasy with anger. I had to follow my guiding star. I had to go with how I felt. Me, not anyone else. I had to live life to the full, while I still had the chance.

That’s not how you react, Dad. Cancer is supposed to bring you closer to the people who love you, not send you off on a self-absorbed wild-goose chase for your lost youth.

Yeah.

What did you say about all that, eighteen years after Dad was gone?

“It’s not Jonah’s fault,” Mom said, as she’d said before, and it was true.

She’d talked a lot, at one time, about getting to know him. “He looks so much like you and Mattie when you were that age, Tucker.”

But it was impossible. There was still too much anger and mess, no possibility of any forgiveness between Andrea Lewers and his mom. His mom blamed Andrea for the affair because she couldn’t cope with blaming his dad. Andrea blamed his mom for shutting her out and dismissing her grief because somehow she’d loved his dad, too.

In the end, Tucker had steered his mother away from the idea of making any kind of connection with his half brother, and so they barely knew him. They knew him from a distance because Mom hadn’t been able to stop herself from keeping track of him.

“You didn’t go to that branch because you knew he was working there, did you?” Tucker accused gently.

She looked at him and sighed. “No, I didn’t. I’ve been so good about that these past couple years. No, it was a total coincidence. You’re right in what you’ve always said. Too much mess, and Jonah himself doesn’t need to be dumped in it.”

“I really think that’s the only way to go.” He felt a wash of relief on realizing that he didn’t have to argue the case.

“Speaking of mess, though...” his mom said.

“Yeah? Are we?”

She took a breath, a certain very mothery kind of breath. “Emma called a couple days ago, and we had a talk.”

“Oh, you did?” His wariness kicked in.

When his mom brought Emma into the conversation, the result was rarely a relaxing chat. Her manner turned plaintive, and she couldn’t hold herself back. “Tucker, I don’t think she wants this divorce, and I don’t understand why the two of you haven’t tried harder.”

He sighed. “Because that wasn’t the agreement. You know that.”

“You can rethink the agreement. I think that’s what she wants, at heart. For you to work at it and turn it into a real marriage, instead of just letting it go.”

“No, she doesn’t. She really doesn’t, Mom.”

She ignored him. “You could have such a great partnership. Everyone would be so happy about it. You’ve had a broken engagement, and now a marriage that isn’t what it could be. I’m not sure what it is that you want. I don’t understand why—”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“About the marriage, or about what Emma wants?”

“Both. It’s not like she and I haven’t talked about this.”

“She’s scared to say it. She needs it to come from you.”

“No, Mom. We’ve been married three years. If there was any possibility of it turning into the real thing, it would have happened by now. There’s no chemistry and there never has been.”

“Chemistry? You get on so well together...”

“Because we’ve given each other plenty of space. Because we’ve been clear about the whole arrangement.”

“Emma wants the arrangement to change,” she said firmly, then added as a signal that she wasn’t going to keep on about it. “Now, are you staying for coffee and a bite to eat? I have cake.”

“Sure, I have time. That would be nice.”

When he’d finished the coffee and cake that his mom had pressed on him and they’d talked about Carla and Mattie, and how well they were both doing in New York City, and how it would be nice if one or both of them moved back closer, as well as easy things like TV shows and the weather, he left with that familiar sense of having hosed down a potential emotional crisis.

Or two of them.

His marriage, and Jonah.

Although this wasn’t fair, because his mom had changed the subject pretty fast both times, and when it came to action rather than talk, she’d behaved as sensibly and decently about Dad’s affair and Tucker’s own unusual marriage as she possibly could.

And that was exactly the way he was going to behave about Daisy Cherry. Sensible and decent.

Maybe it was good that his mom had run into Jonah today. It gave Tucker a very necessary reminder of how much he hated complicated, emotionally messy entanglements. Giving in to an attraction to his ex-fiancée’s sister while his green-card marriage was still a legal reality was quite a bit more complicated and messy than he wanted.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

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