Trisha Ashley - A Winter’s Tale - A festive winter read from the bestselling Queen of Christmas romance

I’ll let you know when I hear anything and hope to have a lovely new home for you to come back to when you return.

Love, Mum xxx

Who was I fooling? Lucy would be on the phone to me two minutes after she got the letter…which was why, I suppose, I was taking the cowardly way out and posting her the news.

I hoped, by the time she got hold of me, to have a new job and a new life lined up somewhere else. The applications lay on the table, ready to post except for stamps—and then I suddenly remembered it was the post office’s half-day and the clock was hurtling towards twelve.

Leaping up, I dragged on my jacket and flung open the door—then teetered perilously on the brink, gazing down into a pair of eyes of a truly celestial blue, but even colder than the caravan. Missing my footing entirely, I fell down the two metal steps into the surprised arms of an angry angel.

Maybe Anya was right after all, I thought, as he fielded me neatly—except that angels are presumably asexual, while this one was undoubtedly male, even if his short, ruffled hair was of corniest gold. He smelled heavenly too, and expensive. I think it was the same aftershave that Conor used, at about a million pounds a molecule, but it smelled so much better on my visitor.

He set me back on my feet, stared down at me in a puzzled sort of way, then said, ‘I’m looking for Sophy Winter—I was told she was staying here.’

‘She is—you’ve found her.’

‘ You’re Sophy Winter?’

‘Well, I was last time I checked in the mirror,’ I said tartly.

‘But you can’t be! You don’t look like—’ he began, then broke off to give me a comprehensive once-over, checking off my minus points on some mental list: dark hair—check; hazel eyes—check; unfashionably generous hourglass figure—check; supermarket jeans and jumble-sale jumper—check. Number of Winter attributes scored: nil.

‘Right…’ he said doubtfully, ‘then you must have been expecting me. I’m your cousin, Jack—Jack Lewis.’

‘But I haven’t got any cousins,’ I protested. I certainly didn’t recall any…and surely even my mother would have mentioned them if I had.

‘I’m a very distant cousin and since I didn’t go to live at Winter’s End until shortly after you and your mother had left, you wouldn’t remember me. But I’m sure you’ve heard of me?’

‘No I haven’t,’ I began—and then the full import of what he had just said sank in, shaking me to the core. I exclaimed incredulously, ‘What do you mean, you lived at Winter’s End?’

I’d always imagined Winter’s End and Grandfather and the twin aunts and the little dogs and everything just going on for ever, like a scene securely enclosed in a snowglobe. Even if I could never get back into that closed world again, at least I had been able to take it out and give it a shake occasionally…But now it seemed that this stranger had almost immediately taken my place there!

He misread my amazement as suspicious disbelief and flushed crossly. ‘If you must know, my mother was your grandfather’s cousin and we lived in New Zealand. She died when I was five, and when my father remarried I was sent back home.’

‘Oh,’ I said uncertainly, because despite his hair not having the true red-gold Winter tint he did have a look of my mother, now I came to consider it—or how she would have looked in a rage, if she’d ever had one. While ‘feckless’ and ‘stoned’ would have been the two words that summed my mother up best, she was good-natured to the point where it was a serious handicap in life. ‘But why are you here? And why did you think I would be expecting you?’

I must have sounded as genuinely bewildered as I felt for the anger in his eyes slowly thawed and was replaced by something like speculation. ‘You mean you don’t know anything about me? And you haven’t heard the news yet?’

‘No! And what news?’

‘That William Winter is dead, for a start,’ he said bluntly.

‘Grandfather’s dead ?’ Things seemed to blur dizzily around me and I sank down onto the top step of the caravan.

‘Dead for months. And while I, as the last male descendant of the Winters, get the title, I don’t suppose you will be surprised to learn that he left Winter’s End and everything else to you .’

My vision cleared and I looked up to see that he was eyeing me narrowly.

‘W-Winter’s End? Me? You’re mad or…or there’s some mistake!’ I stammered. ‘He’s only seen me once since we left, and he didn’t seem to like me any more then than he did when I was a little girl!’

‘ Once? ’ It must have been obvious that I was telling the truth, for his expression slowly altered to a rueful smile of singular and quite dazzling charm, exuding such warmth that, despite my state of numb shock, I found myself returning it.

‘Sorry, I seem to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. I’ve made all the wrong assumptions! What on earth must you think of me? Look, let’s start again, shall we?’ He took my hands and pulled me to my feet. ‘Sophy, I’m delighted to meet you at last!’

Then, enfolding me in his arms, he kissed me on each cheek before taking my hands again and stepping back to look at me with what appeared to be genuine admiration.

But do not think I was entirely inactive during this embrace—no, I was actively inert and acquiescent. I hadn’t had my hands on such a gorgeous man within living memory, even one with a dodgy temper who had just told me things I didn’t want to hear— and some I couldn’t believe.

You try dating in a small village, while juggling a low-paid and exhausting job and turning your hobby into a little business on the side, all under the critical and jealous eyes of your daughter. None of my potential suitors had made it past first base. If I actually managed to find a babysitter and got out of the house with a man, you could bet your bottom dollar Lucy would be running a high fever or throwing out interesting symptoms before I reached the end of the street.

And I hadn’t had much more luck since she went off to university. All the men in my age bracket seemed to be looking for skinny young blondes. That, or they had a serious impediment they forgot to mention, like a wife.

So now, enfolded in softest cashmere and anaesthetised by Amouage Gold Pour Homme, if I had any conscious thought at all it was along the lines of, Yes! Bring it on!

Ten minutes later we were sitting in my icebox of a caravan drinking coffee and talking like old friends.

‘So you see,’ Jack was explaining, ‘we didn’t even know old William had found you until the will was read. He’d tried and failed to discover where you and your mother were in the past, of course. Then when your mother…’ he searched for a tactful phrase, ‘when your mother was brought home, he tried again to trace you—but on the wrong side of the Atlantic, since we assumed you would have been in America with her. After that we thought he’d given up, until we discovered he’d secretly left you Winter’s End and,’ he shrugged and smiled charmingly, ‘we thought you must have finally got in touch with him and managed to persuade him into leaving you everything.’

‘No, he traced me through an advert for cushions I put in a magazine, and a few months ago he simply turned up out of the blue. And although it was lovely to know he’d never stopped trying to find me, I don’t know why he bothered, because he spent most of the time lecturing me about where I’d gone wrong in life and which decisions I could have made better. He’d hired a private eye to dig into my past, so he even knew things I’d forgotten. He didn’t look much different from how I remembered him, either…except he seemed frailer and his hair was white, of course.’