Chocolate Wishes
Featuring an EXCLUSIVE FREE SAMPLE of Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues by Trisha AshleyLife is sweet for chocolate maker Chloe Lyon…In the picture-perfect Lancashire village of Sticklepond, Confectioner Chloe dispenses inspirational sweet treats containing a prediction for each customer. If only her own life was as easy to forecast – perhaps Chloe could have foreseen being jilted at the altar…But when a new Vicar arrives in the village, the rumour mill goes into overdrive. Not only is Raffy Sinclair the charismatic ex-front man of rock band 'Mortal Ruin', he's also the Chloe's first love and the man who broke her heart.Try as she might, Chloe can't ignore this blast from her past. Could now be the time for her to make a wish – and dare to believe it can come true?A charming novel for chocoholics everywhere, perfect for fans of Katie Fforde, Jill Mansell and Carole Matthews.
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Chocolate Wishes
Trisha Ashley
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
AVON
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Trisha Ashley 2010
Trisha Ashley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9781847561145
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007365722 Version: 2018-06-20
I think it is time my wonderful agent had a dedication all to herself, so this one is for Judith Murdoch, with love and thanks.
Table of Contents
Chapter One There Must Be an Angel
Chapter Three Chocolate Wishes
Chapter Seven Brief Encounters
Chapter Nine Drawing the Lines
Chapter Eleven Birthday Wishes
Chapter Twelve Desperate Dates
Chapter Thirteen Ashes of Roses
Chapter Sixteen Dead as My Love
Chapter Seventeen Written on the Cards
Chapter Twenty-two Darker Past Midnight
Chapter Twenty-six High Maintenance
Chapter Twenty-seven Pure Criollo
Chapter Twenty-eight Home Alone
Chapter Thirty-one Party Animals
Chapter Thirty-two Delivering Angels
Chapter Thirty-three Candy-Coated
Chapter Thirty-four Melting Moments
Chapter Thirty-six Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Chapter Thirty-seven Gran Couva!
Excerpt from Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues
Chapter 1: Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues
When the normally innocuous radio station she always listened to while she was working suddenly started pumping out Mortal Ruin’s first big hit, ‘Dead as My Love’, Chloe Lyon was in the kitchen area of her small flat, carefully brushing a thick coating of richly scented dark criollo couverture chocolate into moulds, to make the last batch of hollow angels before Christmas.
That seemed pretty appropriate, because a hollow angel was what Raffy Sinclair had proved himself to be, but it meant that it was a couple of minutes before she had a hand free to reach across and snap down the off button. By then they’d moved on to Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’, so it was becoming obvious that the guest on Desert Island Discs (she’d missed the start) had much happier memories of 1992 than Chloe did. In fact, she’d take a bet on the next song being Whitney Houston and ‘I Will Always Love You’, and that really would finish her off.
But the music carried on playing in her head even after the radio was silenced and it was already too late to suppress the memories. The dark, viciously searing tide of anger and pain at Raffy’s betrayal was rushing in as sharply as if it had all happened yesterday and she was once again that love-struck nineteen-year-old, thinking she’d found a kind of magic more potent than any of her grandfather’s chants, charms and incantations.
She’d loved that Clapton song, though Raffy’d teased her that it was mawkish. But then, as well as being keen on Nirvana, he’d had a worrying penchant for Megadeath and older bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath, all of which influenced the lyrics he wrote for his own band, Mortal Ruin. This obsession with the dark side was part of the reason why she’d never mentioned her grandfather to him – he might have been too interested had he known about her connection with Gregory Warlock.
But actually, there had simply not been enough time to explore their family and backgrounds, since they’d met and fallen in love at the start of her first university term and those few weeks spent intently engrossed in each other encompassed the whole span of their relationship.
