LITMIR.BIZ

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      To Aileen and Adrian Galang,

       Happy wedding! Happy life! Love, The Third Photographer

      MARIE FERRARELLA

      earned a master’s degree in Shakespearean comedy and, perhaps as a result, her writing is distinguished by humor and natural dialogue. This RITA Award-winning author has one goal: to entertain, to make people laugh and feel good. She has written over 100 books for Silhouette, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide and have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Japanese and Korean.

      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

      Epilogue

      Chapter One

      With a sigh, April Yearling moved the desk fan closer to her. It was stuffy in the archaic post office, but she couldn’t turn the fan on high because it would send the tonnage of envelopes, leaflets and whatnot around her flying off in an unauthorized, frantic dance.

      One week back in Hades and she remembered why she’d left.

      She mopped her damp forehead with the back of her wrist and instantly regretted it. The area hidden beneath the haphazardly wrapped bandage on her wrist stung, reminding her that there was a consequence for moving too fast, even in a place like Hades.

      Biting her lower lip, April continued to sort the mail. She glanced at her watch, swearing that time was altered here in the backstretch of Alaska, moving at a snail’s pace that was completely unacceptable to normal human beings.

      At least, it was unacceptable to her.

      Gran had proudly pointed out that there were people who had moved here from the lower forty-nine. Why a place like Hades, numbering about five hundred on its town roster, would attract anyone to come and settle here was completely beyond April.

      Glancing at the scribbled name, she tossed the envelope into its proper pigeonhole.

      She moved the fan a tad closer and longed for air-conditioned rooms. It was unseasonably warm for the middle of spring. April couldn’t remember a spring ever being so hot and muggy. But this old building wasn’t wired for air-conditioning. She supposed she should be happy that it was even wired for electricity, otherwise she’d be relying on candles and the now dormant fireplace in the corner.

      A fragment of a memory flashed through her mind. She and her brother and sister gathered around a fireplace, listening to the wind howl outside and the fire crackle as Gran read a ghost story. She remembered waiting to be frightened, but she never was.

      Maybe that was her problem, April mused, flipping the last envelope into its cubbyhole. She was too fearless. Nothing frightened her. Except maybe the specter of falling in love.

      Small chance of that ever happening, she told herself confidently. She was too smart.

      Bending to retrieve more mail out of the sagging pouch Jeb Kellogg had just flown in and dropped off, April smiled. She was a city kid through and through. It had taken her exactly five minutes in Seattle, her first port of call after graduating high school, to discover that about herself, although she’d secretly thought it for years before her great escape.

      There had been this exhilaration that had telegraphed itself through her the moment she’d stepped off the plane and looked around Seattle. She knew then that her soul belonged in a city—the bigger, the better.

      April glanced at the next envelope and deposited it where it belonged. Her soul certainly belonged to something bigger than a town comprised of two rows of buildings that faced each other like participants in an old-fashioned square dance.

      When she’d left, she’d been positive that nothing would ever bring her back here, here amid the snow and the scenery that went on forever without so much as a soul to disturb it, the loneliness so thick you couldn’t cut through it. But of course, her family was here—Gran and Max and June—so there’d been short visits throughout the years. And then she’d received the letter from June saying that Gran, their tiny but invincible tower of strength who had never been ill a day in her life, was sick. Angina, the doctor, Shayne Kerrigan, had said. So she had come back.

      It was as simple as that. She owed Gran everything. She and Max and June, they all did. Everything. If Gran hadn’t taken them in when their mother had left them in every way but physically, becoming a vacant, broken shell of a woman, April wasn’t sure what she would have done. As the oldest by eleven months, she would have had to do something and she had tried. Tried to care for her brother and sister and her mother. But eleven had been a very young age to suddenly become an adult and she hadn’t been quite able to manage it.

      Until then, she had believed herself up to the challenge. She’d felt she’d grown up rather quickly even before her father had walked out on them and their mother had gone to pieces. Living in a rural town in Alaska was no picnic, no matter what the travel brochures said to the contrary about the frozen state. Alaska, she thought, tossing a fashion magazine onto Edith Plunkett’s stack of mail, was an uncompromising mistress who demanded a great deal from everyone who inhabited her terrain.

      And right now, she was stuck here. April thrust a postcard into Jean-Luc LeBlanc’s pigeonhole. As much as she longed to leave, she felt too worried and too guilty to return to the life she’d placed on hold.

      Postmistress. April shook her head. Never in a million years would she have ever seen herself in this position. Gran had even made her take the oath, hand on the Bible and everything. Gran had said it wasn’t official otherwise, which meant she couldn’t handle the mail when it came through. Gran had taken her position here, both with the government and with the community, very seriously. So April had taken the oath to placate Gran rather than just whisk her away the way she’d wanted to.

      April sighed, picking up another envelope. She fervently wished that Max or June had had the time to take over for Gran. But career-wise, neither of them had her flexibility.

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