Lilian Darcy - The One Who Changed Everything

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Isn’t love worth the family fallout?Daisy Cherry hasn’t seen rugged landscaper Tucker Reid in ten years. Not since the wedding between him and her younger sister had been called off! Now she’s hired a landscaper to fix the grounds of her parents’ Adirondack resort, Spruce Bay. It’s Tucker – he’s the best man for the job.When her family find out, Daisy is in a whole world of trouble!But none of them know that the instant, wild, intense attraction between Daisy and Tucker has bubbled into a secret affair. That would cause explosions!

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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—”

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