Lakeside Cottage by Susan Wiggs

Author:Susan Wiggs [Wiggs, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: MIRA
Published: 2005-11-04T20:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

“Go ahead and say I told you so,” Kate offered Mable Claire Newman as they sat over coffee at the First Street Haven Café.

“Refresh my memory. What did I tell you?”

“I’m seeing someone. He was your idea. The guy who is staying at the Schroeder place.”

Mable Claire beamed at her. “Good for you, Kate. He seems like a perfectly nice fellow. Not to mention he’s a hunk.”

“I noticed that right away.” Kate couldn’t suppress a smile. She had all the classic symptoms of pure infatuation. The light-headed moments of disorientation. The pounding heart and quickened breathing at the mere thought of him. The constant sense of hovering between laughter and tears. The heightened sensitivity to anything and everything, from the smell of coffee to the warmth of the sun on her skin. There was no denying it. Kate was in the staring-out-the-window, smiling-at-nothing stage of this relationship.

“So keep talking,” Mable Claire said. “Old widowed lady like me, I need all the romance I can get.”

“I don’t really know how to explain this. Our first date was dinner at C’est Si Bon. After that, we started spending most evenings together, sometimes with the kids, sometimes by ourselves. There’s this rhythm that we’ve started and it’s…I don’t know. Special.” Kate speared a piece of watermelon from the fruit plate she’d ordered. Another symptom—wild swings of appetite from voracious to nonexistent. “Isn’t that awful? Here I am, calling myself a writer and I can’t even find the words for—”

“Oh, stop,” Mable Claire said. “Of course you can’t. But the good news is, every person who’s ever been in love or even dreamed of it knows exactly what you’re talking about.”

“I’m not—” Kate nearly choked on her watermelon.

“You are, too. You’re moving in that direction, anyway. Let yourself, Kate. You deserve to fall in love.”

The words struck to the heart of Kate’s uncertainty. You deserve to fall in love. Did she? Why had she never allowed it to happen?

“There’s a huge gap between dating for the summer and falling in love.”

“So what? Let your heart go and see what happens.”

“That would be fine if I had only myself to think about, but there’s Aaron. He’s absolutely crazy about JD, and it will crush him when we go our separate ways.”

“Not when. If.”

Kate felt a welling of tears, yet another symptom of this bittersweet affliction. She wept at the drop of a hat. At the sound of a heart-tugging song on the radio or the sight of an old married couple holding hands in church. For Kate, falling in love was like being terminally ill. Painful to go through, with a predictably bad outcome.

“He’s not going to stay with us,” Kate said. “Why would he?”

“Oh, let me think. You’re a warm, wonderful, beautiful young woman with an adorable son. Whatever could a man see in you?” Mable Claire buttered a marionberry scone. “You’re already planning to let him go before you’ve explored all the possibilities.”

“I’m trying to be practical and keep Aaron from getting his hopes up,” Kate insisted.

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.