Pastures New
Take one sleepy Suffolk villageAdd a young widowThrow in a local vamp and a harassed mumStir it up with a sexy, secretive doctorAnd watch feuds grow, tempers fray and love blossom…Amy Nicholson never expected to leave London for the Suffolk countryside. But she also never expected to be a 33-year-old widow, left alone with a young son. Fleeing her memories, she swaps her heels for wellies and embarks on a new rural life.The big-hearted community of Nevermorewell welcome them with open arms. There's old Harry, offering pearls of advice (fuelled by whisky from his hip flask), Saffron, juggling motherhood with business (whilst searching for her lost libido), and Caroline, the scheming local vamp, who tramples over lives as easily as the allotments backing onto Amy's cottage.But just when Amy thinks she's finally leaving the past behind, Ben Martin crashes into her life. Sexy and enigmatic, Ben is haunted by his own secrets. Will love blossom on the allotments? Or will it be once bitten, twice shy?
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JULIA WILLIAMS
Pastures New
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
A Paperback Original 2007
Copyright © Julia Williams 2007
Julia Williams 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: 9781847563613
Ebook Edition © September 2008 ISBN: 9780007278954 Version: 2018-05-23
For Joseph Henry Moffatt and John Douglas (Roger) Williams, for sharing their wisdom
Contents
Title Page Copyright DedicationPart One: Forever AutumnChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NinePart Two: Lighten UpChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenPart Three: Here Comes The Summer SunChapter NineteenChapter TwentyChapter Twenty-OneChapter Twenty-TwoChapter Twenty-ThreeChapter Twenty-FourChapter Twenty-FiveChapter Twenty-SixChapter Twenty-SevenPart Four: Fix YouChapter Twenty-EightChapter Twenty-NineChapter ThirtyChapter Thirty-OneChapter Thirty-TwoChapter Thirty-ThreeChapter Thirty-FourChapter Thirty-FiveChapter Thirty-SixAcknowledgementsAbout the Author About the Publisher
Forever Autumn
In the allotment:Harvest the crops, dig over the soil, and prepare the ground for winter.
State of the heart:Barren, cold, dead.
‘There’s a fire on the anti-clockwise section of the M25, just before the junction with the M1, and the traffic’s backingup to junction 26, so do avoid that if you can …’
Hopefully that will have cleared by the time I get back, thought Amy, as Sally Traffic made way for a debate about gun crime. She’d always hated driving on the motorway, and never more so than now, when she had to do it alone.
Oh Jamie, I miss you so much …
The thought came unbidden and unprompted, and she blinked back the sudden tears.
This would never do.
Pull yourself together, girl, Amy admonished herself sternly, straightening her slight shoulders and gripping the steering wheel tighter. If she really was going to make this move, she had to be strong. She had to. Hold on to that thought …
At least it was a gloriously sunny day, and the soft undulating Essex countryside was looking its best. Field after field of sun-drenched corn. Thanks to the rotten summer, the harvest was late, but here and there bales of hay indicated that it was finally underway. And the smell of burning stubble was a reminder that summer really was drawing in. Constable country, Amy thought to herself. She wouldn’t be surprised to find a haywain round the next corner.
The journey from North London had taken much longer than she had envisaged, but eventually Amy found herself driving over the little humpbacked bridge that, according to her map, marked the boundary between the Essex and Suffolk sides of the pretty market town of Nevermorewell. A feeling of excitement grew in her as she pulled the car into the picturesque high street, dwarfed by a large Norman church, and flanked on either side by tiny quaint shops with mock Tudor cladding. It was perfect. Just what she was looking for.
Amy pulled into a parking place – amazingly there were several empty ones. So different from Barnet, where she would have been driving around fruitlessly for hours before finding a spot miles away from home. That had to be a good omen.
She took a deep breath and stared at herself in the rear-view mirror. She teased out her fair curls so they didn’t look quite so tangled, and put on a bit of lippy – bright red to boost her confidence. She rarely wore makeup – Jamie had always said her light natural complexion didn’t need any, and now she didn’t see the point. But lippy was good. Lippy was part of the mask she needed to face each day. The mask she needed right now to persuade Josh of the wisdom of this move. It didn’t help that she was so racked with guilt about it, that she wasn’t one hundred per cent convinced herself.
