Judith Bowen - Charlotte Moore

GREETINGS FROM

PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND

Dear Lydia and Zoey,

I found him!

Tall, dark and handsome—yes, I suppose so, in a tough sort of way—but where’s the boy I remember? This Liam Connery is nothing like my sister’s friend at Dunwoody High, the one I fell in love with.

Plus, there’s something mysterious about him that just…sets me on edge. He didn’t know I existed back then, and I’d say he doesn’t really know I exist now, even though I’m staying in the same house with him and his mother, who is a sweetheart.

Just goes to show—you can’t trust memory. How are you both doing? Find your “first love” yet?

Love,

Charlotte

P.S. See you New Year’s Eve!

Dear Reader,

Most women wonder what happened to that first love, the first boy they had a crush on, the one who made them ask what love was all about.

My “first love,” the boy I first noticed in second grade and who was my “first date” in seventh grade and with whom I went to the prom at graduation, is happily married—to someone else!—and driving a taxi in a large Canadian city, last I heard. I haven’t seen him since our tenth high school reunion, over twenty years ago, although we come from the same hometown and as in all small towns, “there ain’t much to see, but what you hear sure makes up for it!”

Zoey, Charlotte and Lydia have all been on a quest to look up their “first loves” in my GIRLFRIENDS miniseries. In this story, Charlotte goes to Prince Edward Island on business and just happens to find Liam Connery, the lean, intense boy she’d lost her young, untried heart to at eleven. Of course, they’d never spoken back then, but that doesn’t mean she hadn’t suffered all the agonies of true love.

Charlotte gets a shock. Liam isn’t anything like she remembers. But she soon finds that the man he is today holds an entirely different kind of appeal….

I hope you enjoy Charlotte’s story.

Warmest regards,

Judith Bowen

P.S. I love to hear from readers. Please let me know what you think of GIRLFRIENDS. Write to me at: P.O. Box 2333, Point Roberts, WA 98281-2333, or visit me at my Web site at www.judithbowen.com.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Delia McCrae,

longtime friend

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 EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

HARDWOODS, MOSTLY MAPLES, blazed on the hillsides, elbowing aside, if only for a few weeks, the darker tones of gnarly cedar, abundant spruce, towering white pine. At the turn of the road, poplar or birch gleamed—rags of flat gold, tatters of amber, set against the brilliance of the blue October sky.

Wood smoke from kitchen fires hung in the trees, in the dips and gullies. Every hour at least, before turning onto the highway that afternoon, Charlotte had to slow for a farmer drawing a cart loaded with firewood or turnips, sometimes late potatoes, behind his tractor.

This was the best time of year, still weeks away from the winds of winter blowing down from Labrador. It still offered picnicking weather on a good day and, a bonus, the peace and expectant quiet of a tourist area between seasons—the summer travelers, families seeking sun, sea and lobster suppers, had all gone home now, and the color “peepers,” the buses full of second-honeymooners and seniors up from Boston and New York or down from central Canada to gaze at all this autumnal glory, were only just beginning to arrive.

Charlotte loved everything about the Maritimes. She was a city girl through and through, but she always felt completely at home on her annual trips east to the Gaspe, to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, attending village auctions, winkling out estate sales, sometimes just plain exploring back roads and country lanes, as she’d done this time. She never tired of the scenery, but right now, fall colors and pastoral landscapes were far from her mind.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Liam. Liam Connery.

The first boy she’d ever had a crush on. She’d been in grade five at Snowden Elementary, and he’d been a friend of her sister’s, in grade eleven, at A.E. Dunwoody High in Toronto. He’d never even known Charlotte existed, of course, but that hadn’t stopped her young heart from going pitter-patter whenever he showed up at their house with Laurel and her gang, and happened to glance her way.

What a laugh. She hadn’t thought of him in years and years, just assumed he’d gone on and followed his dreams, as everyone tried to do after high school. As she had done. He’d talked of flying, so maybe he was Captain Connery now, piloting 747s for Air Canada, a handsome, sexy first officer married to a beautiful, sexy flight attendant.

Last spring, she’d started thinking about him again—and now, six months later, he was still on her mind. The idea of looking up first loves had arisen at last April’s reunion of the summer staff of Jasper Park Lodge. Her curiosity had been aroused by the challenge—what had happened to Liam Connery?

She’d said as much to Zoey Phillips and Lydia Lane, her best friends, whom she’d first met working at the lodge when they were all eighteen. The summer they met, they’d traveled east together in Lydia’s beat-up Toyota minivan and become partners for a few years in the now-defunct Call-a-Girl Company, the little odd-job and catering business they’d formed to earn money for college.

The three of them were still best friends. Both Zoey and Lydia were in Toronto now, but Zoey intended to head to British Columbia soon to attend a friend’s wedding—and, Charlotte suspected, to look for her first love in the wilds of the Cariboo-Chilcotin. Sure, Zoey had scoffed at the initial suggestion, but Charlotte knew her friend was as intrigued as she and Lydia had been. Zoey was the pragmatist of the group. Lydia was the world’s biggest romantic; maybe she was doing a little scouting of her own back home. Wouldn’t it be fun to find out, when she got back, that her two friends had done the same thing, looked up their first loves? Charlotte smiled at the thought. They could compare stories when they got together at New Years.

A definite doggy snore rose from the back seat of her ten-year-old Suburban and Charlotte glanced over her shoulder at Maggie, her sister’s Labrador retriever, snoozing on the back seat. Maggie. That was another piece of good fortune, the kind of luck she couldn’t help thinking was fate.

Naturally, when she’d decided to try and track down Liam Connery, she’d asked her sister. Pay dirt. Laurel, who’d always been the archetype of the annoying, superior, bossy big sister, had lit right up and told her that, yes, she knew exactly where Liam Connery was and just leave it to her, she’d make arrangements for Charlotte to meet him.

That had seemed a little…weird. Laurel had never been terribly helpful before, preoccupied as she was with her new second husband and the horses and dogs she raised at their farm north of Toronto. But Charlotte got a phone call from Laurel two weeks later, telling her that everything was arranged, she could take Maggie, one of Laurel’s three Labs, to Prince Edward Island to be bred at a retriever kennel owned by none other than the elusive Liam Connery. Charlotte’s immediate reaction had been hey, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!

Everything had turned out perfectly. Of course, Charlotte was making the trip, anyway, not only to replenish the antiques, folk art and other stock for her one-woman decorative arts supply business, which served a small clientele in the design and decor trade, but to carry out a very special estate appraisal on Prince Edward Island. Now, thanks to her sister, she also had an excellent excuse to meet her first love again, face-to-face—she had a dog to deliver to his kennel. He raised and trained retrievers and hunting dogs, it turned out. So much for being a pilot.