Back to McGuffey's by Liz Flaherty

Author:Liz Flaherty [Liz Flaherty]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Family Life, Contemporary, Fiction, RNS, Romance
ISBN: 9781460341346
Google: kW50AwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 23146868
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

AS BIG AS Mrs. Hylton-Wise’s house was, it was still very much a home. The country decor included work by New England artists—Kate stood in front of an original Will Moses painting above the fireplace for a full ten minutes—but framed photographs were everywhere. The furniture was high quality, carefully chosen and comfortable. Kate was pretty sure nothing had come from garage sales.

In one of the bedrooms, a large stained-glass window—both out of place and strikingly beautiful—faced the lush mountainside. It was the only room without an exit to the second-floor balcony that crossed the back of the house. It looked odd from the outside, but the beauty of the window made up for the disproportion.

Kate inventoried two of the upstairs bedrooms, including that one, before going down to the kitchen to start dinner for Ben and herself. Assembling salad at the prep table, she reflected that she could easily get spoiled working in the kitchens here and at Kingdom Comer. The one in the back of A Day at a Time would be the size of the closet in the room she was using in Bright Sky.

She daydreamed while she cooked. She tried not to do that, but Ben’s almost daily presence in her life made that particular abstention increasingly difficult. What would it be like to be married to him and live somewhere like this, with ski slopes almost right outside the back door and bike and hiking trails everywhere she looked? There was room for a half-dozen kids along with their attendant puppies and kittens.

A cluster of photographs, all in pewter-colored frames, hung above the table where she worked. She recognized Mrs. Hylton-Wise in many of them. The two teenagers in the photos must be her children. The girl was a lawyer now, the boy the CEO of the family business, whatever that was—their mother didn’t talk about them much.

The handsome man with Paul McCartney hair and impatient eyes was undoubtedly her late husband. Kate could almost see him looking at his watch, wanting to be away from the taking of family snapshots. Her father used to do that, too, simply because he hated having his picture taken. Her mother used to tell him he’d look better in photographs if he’d stop rolling his eyes.

But it was the little blonde girl in some of the photos that grabbed Kate’s attention, made her reach to take one of them from the wall so she could see it better. The picture had been taken out back, with Wish Mountain as a glorious backdrop. The child hugged the leg of Mrs. H-W’s white pants while the woman’s hand caressed the wild halo of curls on the little girl’s head.

She was beautiful, the child was. Tiny and fairy-like. And without a doubt she had Down syndrome.

“Look at this,” she said an hour later, dragging Ben into the kitchen and handing him the picture.

He looked at it for a long time, his other hand holding hers, and she stood still beside him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.