LITMIR.BIZ

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CHRISTINE FLYNN

      admits to being interested in just about everything, which is why she considers herself fortunate to have turned her interest in writing into a career. She feels that a writer gets to explore it all and, to her, exploring relationships—especially the intense, bittersweet or even lighthearted relationships between men and women—is fascinating.

      This book is dedicated to every

       woman who kept a diary in high school…

      with the hope that she knows where it is.

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter One

      Having fantasies about a man wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Fantasies were normal. Fantasies were healthy. Writing them down wasn’t terribly bright, Kelsey Schaeffer conceded to herself, trying not to panic at what she was overhearing. Especially in detail. But she’d never dreamed that the subject of those wild imaginings would ever be anywhere near where she’d hidden her old diary. She’d had no idea that Sam MacInnes had even returned to Maple Mountain. She’d barely been back twelve hours herself.

      “You going to flip those cakes, honey?”

      Kelsey’s mother bustled into the kitchen of her busy little diner, one eye on the spatula Kelsey held, the other on her order pad. With her silvering-blond hair in its usual braided bun, her pretty features softening with age and a white bib apron tied around her ample waist, Dora Schaeffer looked much as she always had to Kelsey. Friendly. Efficient. Enduring. Like a rock that could weather any storm or challenge and remain unchanged. The only difference about her since Kelsey’s visit home last year was the white cast that ran from elbow to palm on her left arm. She had fallen from a ladder while adjusting the bunting she’d hung out front for the Fourth of July parade next Sunday.

      The red, white and blue bunting now lay bundled on the storage room floor. Dauntless and headstrong to her core, her mom had pulled down the sections she’d hung rather than have them hang crooked before she’d walked down the street to the doctor’s office to get her arm set. There were no half-measures with Dora Schaeffer. Something was either done perfectly, or it wasn’t done at all.

      Jerked from her alarm by her mom’s reminder, Kelsey hurriedly flipped the two orders of buttermilk pancakes turning golden on the griddle. With most of her attention on the conversation taking place on the other side of the service window, she stacked a third order onto a plate, added a side of sausage and eggs and slid the plate onto the window’s long ledge.

      Amos Calder and Charlie Moorehouse, two of the community’s inherently stubborn senior citizens, sat with their elbows on the lacquered pine counter, coffee mugs in hand, waiting for their breakfast. According to what she’d just overheard of their laconic conversation, Sam’s sister had bought the old Baker place and Sam was refurbishing it for her and her boys. What had her mentally hyperventilating was Amos’s comment about Sam tearing out the upstairs bedroom walls.

      Her old diary was up there. The one she’d kept in high school. It was behind a wall in the back bedroom. Her name was in glitter on the cover. Sam’s name was all over the inside.

      Until a minute ago, she had nearly forgotten the thing even existed. Now, her only thought was that she would die if Sam found it.

      She couldn’t remember exactly what she’d written. At that moment, all she recalled was that he had been a college senior the summer she’d turned sixteen and that he’d worked on his uncle’s farm. Big, buff, and totally out of her league, he had awakened her heart, her dreams and inspired a host of wild fantasies, the bulk of which she’d duly recorded, then ultimately hidden in the wall of the very house he was now tearing apart because her mom would have killed her had she found something so explicit in her bedroom.

      Her then-best friend, Michelle Baker, in whose room she had hurriedly hidden her rather risqué writings after she’d discovered that her original hiding place in the old grist mill wasn’t safe, hadn’t had a clue what was in that diary. Since she kept a diary herself, Michelle had understood, however, how important it was for a girl to protect her private thoughts and assured her that no one would ever know the little book was there. As it was, Kelsey had never intended

Скачать книгу