Lilian Darcy - The One Who Changed Everything

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…?

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 DARCYhas 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.