LITMIR.BIZ

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following behind with Edward, crunching over snow and gravel. Uncle Edward had always been a big favourite with Max. Maybe he’d be able to get through to him.

      I figured I was due a Christmas miracle.

      ‘We held off decorating the tree until you got here,’ Saskia went on, as we approached the steps. ‘Isabelle and Therese have been inventing Christmas cocktails in the drawing room this afternoon. They claim they got them from an old book from the good old days, but they look bloody lethal. Feel free to turn them down. Oh, and Ellie’s been making mince pies, and Dad’s cooking something spectacular for Christmas Eve dinner. So basically, all the fun starts now you’re here!’

      I paused, just for a second, at the threshold to Rosewood House. I couldn’t shake the feeling that once I stepped through that doorway, and the heavy wooden door closed behind me, I’d be trapped. Caught in a world that would pull every last secret from my heart, and leave me a different person.

      Which was crazy, of course. I knew I shouldn’t have stayed up re-reading Biding Time the night before.

      ‘Hurry up!’ Edward called from behind us. ‘We’re turning into snowmen out here, aren’t we Max?’

      I took a breath and stepped inside, then stopped again, almost immediately.

      The hallway was impressive, I was sure. The empty tree huge and imposing. But right then, I didn’t notice any of that.

      I could only see one thing. One person.

      There, at the top of the wide, curving staircase, stood Aiden Waites. I might not have seen the man in fourteen years – at which point he was barely eighteen, and only just scraping into the ‘man’ category in the first place – but I’d have known him anywhere. Even if his photo hadn’t been plastered on tube adverts beside the cover of whatever his latest book was for the last three years.

      His dark hair curled a little longer than in his author photo, covering the tips of his ears and almost falling into those bright blue eyes. He looked not just older than I remembered, but more worldly too. Which I suppose made sense.

      When I’d met him, he’d been a virgin. When I’d left him two weeks later, he really, really wasn’t. And given his aptitude for it, I couldn’t imagine he’d given up sex for very long after our fortnight together.

      ‘Freya.’ He smiled, moving down the stairs without pointing out that I was staring, which was unexpectedly polite of him. Especially given the way he was glowering at me. ‘It’s good to see you again.’ The words didn’t match his expression.

      ‘You too.’ The words came out too fast, a reflex lie. ‘I didn’t know you were going to be here.’ A follow-up shot of honesty to explain my staring. And the way my heart was hammering against my ribcage. What the hell was he doing here at Rosewood?

      ‘Seriously, Mum. Can we come in now? It’s freezing.’ Max’s voice shocked me into movement, and I took a few quick steps into the hall, towards Aiden, to let the others in behind me.

      Saskia, I realised belatedly, was looking between us with far too much interest. Edward, thank God, didn’t seem to have noticed anything.

      ‘I forgot you two had met,’ he said, grinning. ‘Your mum and Aiden went to the same university up in Lancaster, Max.’

      ‘Three years apart,’ I added quickly.

      ‘I asked her to take him under her wing, but by the time she finally found time to answer my email he’d already been there a full term,’ Edward went on, and I realised that given all the ways I’d embarrassed him over the years, he was very capable of using this whole Christmas break to show me up in front of my son and Saskia’s family. With Aiden there, he wouldn’t even have to try that hard.

      Had Aiden told him? As far as I knew, he never had, honouring my request that we keep our fling a secret. But if Aiden was here, that might have changed…

      No, really, what the hell was he doing here? I needed to get an answer to that pretty damn quick.

      ‘But since we were both stuck in town over that Christmas, we caught up eventually,’ Aiden said, his gaze never breaking away from mine. His eyes blazed with a deeply buried fury, simmering under his smile. I wondered if the others could see it. ‘We kept each other company – watching Christmas movies when we weren’t working, that sort of thing.’ He’d been avoiding going home to a stepfather who hated him, and I’d been stuck working an internship that I hoped would make my career, but didn’t. With everyone else I knew gone home for the holidays, it felt like we were the only two people on campus, just for those two weeks. Alone in our snow-covered world. I shivered, remembering it.

      ‘Until her boyfriend came back, anyway,’ Aiden said, and broke the spell of my memory. ‘Then she forgot all about me, and left me to pine alone for what might have been…’

      I forced myself to roll my eyes. ‘I see fame hasn’t beaten that sense of the overdramatic out of you, then?’ A tight, uncomfortable feeling swelled up inside me. He wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t telling the whole truth either. And if anyone asked too many questions…

      I’d never told Edward that I’d seduced his best friend. That we’d had a brief, but intense, fling that Christmas – or that I’d avoided him until I’d graduated and moved away the next summer. He didn’t even know that Darren and I had broken up that December, or that we’d only made up in the January when he proposed.

      As far as Edward knew, Aiden and I had kept each other company watching The Muppet Christmas Carol and eating turkey pasties on Christmas Day.

      Which was only a tiny fragment of the real story.

      ‘I make things up for a living,’ Aiden pointed out. ‘Being overdramatic is kind of compulsory. Besides, I didn’t say it was a bad thing. It let me know what to expect from the big bad world.’

      Had he ever told anyone what really happened that Christmas? I studied his face – his burning, knowing eyes, his sharp smile, but I couldn’t read anything into them. The Aiden I’d known, however briefly, was fourteen years away. This was a new man altogether.

      At least, that was what I was telling myself.

      ‘And what about deepest Cheshire?’ I asked, keen to bring the conversation back to the present. The past was too hard to deal with. ‘What should we expect from Rosewood?’

      ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be the one to answer that,’ Aiden said. ‘I’ve only been here six months.’ Six months? What could have happened to drag him away from his illustrious career as the face of British crime fiction in London for so long? Usually, he was on the telly every few weeks, or pictured at the premiere of one of his film adaptions, or escorting some model or pop star to some hot new restaurant. But, now that I thought about it, the tube posters were all I’d seen of him since the summer.

      Not that I’d been looking. Obviously.

      Okay, maybe a bit. Aiden was a popular figure, and someone I’d once known. Of course I’d followed his career over the years – but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how it would have brought him to Rosewood for six months.

      ‘An outsider’s perspective, then,’ Saskia put in. ‘You probably see the place more clearly than the rest of us, anyway.’

      Aiden looked from her to me. ‘Okay, then. How about this. Rosewood is a place of stories, of merriment and of celebration.’ Well, that didn’t sound too bad. I could live with that.

      Then he caught my gaze. ‘And secrets, of course. Always secrets.’

      Our secret. I knew then that he hadn’t told a soul until he came here. Because that had been the deal. No person in the world but the two of us knew what had passed between us that Christmas. But now, I had a feeling the secret was out.

      And seeing him again, I knew that despite the years, those two weeks we’d spent together had never left me. From the way he was looking at me, Aiden hadn’t forgotten

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