Hearts Cursed by Leisl Leighton

Author:Leisl Leighton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leisl Leighton

Chapter

Thirteen

She was coming. Today. In fact, she’d be here with Tamuel’s family later this morning.

It was like a buzz under his skin, the knowledge, the certainty. He’d known it this morning before he’d even seen Korinna, who’d greeted him with the news.

She was so close now. And with her came the future. His future.

Or was it his past?

One was all tangled up in the other – for without a past, how could you have a true future?

For the first time in his life, he wished he didn’t have hundreds of Christmas tree hunters coming today. He wished he had the day free, set aside just for her. For her arrival. For the momentous something he knew she brought with her.

He glanced around. The car park was almost full. Daphne and Charlie were already in their summer-friendly Mrs Claus and elf costumes and were busy confirming the e-tickets for each booking.

There was a queue lined up around the shop-shed, where Harry and Gideon were stationed along with Korinna, ready to greet hungry and thirsty travellers with a cold drink and whiskey cake before they headed off to hunt down and cut their trees. Tamuel was acting as traffic officer in the car park – also in an elf costume.

The nine o’clock session of Christmas tree hunters was about to begin. He couldn’t ask them to go now and disappoint all these people. Part of his plan was about the Christmas spirit, about spreading and sharing the joy. Their being here was part of who he was and why he did what he did. He needed Ilia to see that. To feel it. To understand what sharing herself in the way he needed her to would do for them; for the world.

But not only that, deep in his bones, he knew that once he drank of her blood, things would be righted for them in a way they never had before.

He had to show her, to make her see. And this was the only way he knew how.

Daphne glanced his way, her brow rising in question. He waved and smiled in acknowledgement, then headed to get changed into his costume, nerves fluttering in his stomach.

She and the boys had been worried at first that Korinna and Tamuel were lying. That they were some kind of gold-digging couple come to benefit from his prosperity. But nobody who looked at him and Korinna could deny the familial connection.

Korinna had smoothed things over with the story that her mother, his high school sweetheart, had never told Trip she was pregnant because she didn’t want to hold him back from his plans of travelling the world once they finished school – which cleverly explained how, at his age, he could have a daughter in her late twenties. Only after her mother’s recent death had Korinna discovered his identity and tracked him down.

It helped too that both she and Tamuel were so kind and helpful – with wealth of their own given how they dressed and the helpful additions they’d made to the farm and its Christmas decorations.

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