New Beginnings
When loved ones leave you, it’s time to change your life. A poignant and uplifting new novel about love and loss, for fans of Nora Roberts.Recently widowed March Cantrell must deal with her beloved husband's death while trying to escape the constant interference from her well meaning grown-up children.All her children that is, apart from Molly. March discovers that the new man she's dating, Spider Olsen, is 23 years older than her daughter - and believes the relationship is doomed to failure. However, any attempt to talk to Molly only drives them further apart. Meanwhile, March's sons are fighting for control of the family business.In order to heal the growing rifts between them all, the family decides to spend Christmas at their mountain home in Lake Tahoe. Whilst skiing one day, March finds herself stranded with a young man called Rio and is surprised to discover that she is attracted to him.A few weeks after the holidays, March returns to the mountains. One lonely night, whilst dining alone, March is joined by Rio. What starts as a one-night stand becomes something much more.Her children think March has lost her mind. However, somewhere in this tangled chaos, in the betrayal and competition and the innocence of new love, is the answer for all the Cantrells.
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JILL BARNETT
New Beginnings
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 © Jill Barnett 2008
Jill Barnett 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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Source ISBN: 9781847560254
Ebook Edition © 2008 ISBN: 9780007335039 Version: 2018-06-19
DEDICATION
March is not us, nor are her experiences ours. This story is fiction. But we know her world, because we have traveled down the same kind of unfamiliar, muddied roads, because we had to overcome the past to find a future, because of this and so much more, New Beginnings is for Jane, Meryl, Cathy, JJ, Deb, and me.
What is this really like? Never mind the conventions and the decisions we’ve all made together. What is it really like?
Mike Nichols, Inside the Actor’s Studio
Table of Contents
San Francisco is a mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.
Rudyard Kipling
March Randolph Cantrell was named for the time of year she came into the world, and had lived all of her life in a golden state. The Golden State exists deep in the bones and blood of those born there, and makes them different, natural to the land with all its mysteries and quirks. Native Californians are immanent beings who can recognize instinctively the color and stillness of earthquake weather, and are never divided by that invisible latitude/attitude that separates Northern from Southern; they understand the human geography of one whose first breath of air was in a land of gold rushes, gold hillsides and golden bridges.
A native can stand on the sandy spot where the biggest and deepest blue ocean in the world touches land and know there are more hungry sharks behind them than in front of them.
Birthright gives them ownership in the fables of California, those Disneyesque stories of El Dorado and Father Junipero Serra, who once sowed a magical trail of mustard seeds as he walked the length of the land, on leather sandals coated with brown soil in which almost anything could grow.
Come every spring, Father Serra’s yellow mustard seeds sprout up from the ground on rolling hillsides, around fresh asphalt—in spite of concrete and wood frames—as bright a gold in color as one could imagine, and there to remind those who care to notice of the way things once were.
The month of March is a time of lions and lambs, and, in California, the time of the four-leafed mustard blooms that some claim are luckier than clover, and certainly more resilient. No matter what the weather: freak snow and ice, brush fires, crackling drought or Pineapple-Express-rains that drive homes down crumbling hillsides, despite all that Mother Nature can cast down from the heavens, every year the mustard always grows back.
For March Randolph Cantrell, California native was just one of many things that defined her: woman, daughter, artist, wife, mother, friend, businesswoman, now grandmother, a title that sounded too decrepit for a baby boomer who still wore string-bikini underwear and listened to rock music.
Growing up on the West Coast in the 1950’s, March and her sister May were known as those Randolph girls with the strange springtime names. Back in Connecticut, where the Randolph family had deep roots, names like March and May were simple tradition, appropriate as Birch and Rebecca, and not uncommon to girls with a great aunt named Hester, who had pointed out during one family holiday, “California is a fine place to live if you happen to be an orange.”
