Wish Upon a Star
The perfect gift isn’t always under the tree…Single mum Cally’s life is all about her little girl Stella. She’s resigned to the fact that the only romance she’s going to get is from the rom-coms she watches, and with her busy job and her daughter, she doesn’t have time to even think about love.But life gets very tough when Stella gets sick. Balancing her job as a recipe writer and looking after Stella is all consuming, so when Cally meets handsome baker Jago the last thing she wants to do is fall in love, especially when she’s been badly burned by a Prince Charming from her past.Can laid-back, charming Jago unlock Cally’s frozen heart and help her find true love and magic under the mistletoe?Come home for Christmas with this gorgeous read, perfect for fans of Katie Fforde and Jill Mansell.
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TRISHA ASHLEY
Wish Upon A Star
This book is dedicated to all my wonderful readers – my stars to steer by.
Table of Contents
Prologue: 2001, The Return of the Native
Chapter 7: The Cult of Perfection
Chapter 19: Gone, but Not Forgotten
Chapter 20: The Proof of the Pudding
Chapter 21: Is There Honey Still for Tea?
Chapter 22: Princess Possibilities
Chapter 27: Nearer, My God, to Thee
Chapter 31: Cooking Up a Storm
Chapter 39: To Infinity and Beyond
Recipes, Wish Upon a Star, Trisha Ashley
Read on for an exclusive extract of Trisha’s next novel Every Woman for Herself
It was early evening in the village of Sticklepond and the bar of the Falling Star was almost empty, apart from a couple of locals who’d dropped in on their way home from work, and the shoe salesman in the corner who had booked a room for the night and was now studying racing form in the paper as if his life depended on it.
As Florrie Snowball slapped a hot, limp, microwaved sausage roll and a pint of Middlemoss Brown Ale in front of Pete Ormerod, who farmed up by the edge of the Winter’s End estate, she said, ‘I hear there’s an Almond moved back into the village.’
‘That’s right,’ he agreed, poking the middle of the sausage roll with the end of a gnarled finger as if unsure what might pop out. ‘News gets around fast.’
‘Someone saw her – there’s no mistaking an Almond, and anyway, we’ve seen Martha come and go over the years, right up till her mother died, haven’t we? Not that she didn’t keep herself to herself, just like her parents did.’
‘They had cause enough, didn’t they?’
‘I’m not one to think the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children, poor innocent mites, and only us old ones remember the whole story now,’ Florrie snapped. ‘And anyway, Martha’s parents were no more than cousins, so it wasn’t really anything to do with them.’
‘They still felt the shame, though,’ Pete Ormerod said heavily, ‘and went off to Australia with the rest of the family, even if they were back within the year.’
‘Well, you did all right out of it, didn’t you?’ she pointed out tartly. ‘Buying Badger’s Bolt farm gave you twice as much land and they were in such a hurry to get away, I bet you paid less than it was worth.’
‘It was enough to buy them a sheep holding in Australia and that’s what they wanted – though the sheep were what Jacob couldn’t abide. But there was never a better cattle man than Jacob Almond and I was more than glad to give him his old job and cottage back.’
‘I always thought the whole clan of them upping sticks and emigrating was a bit of an over-reaction myself,’ Florrie said. ‘Came of them being Strange Baptists from that chapel that was over in Ormskirk, I expect. The young ones these days’d think nothing of what happened – they see worse on the soaps every night. So now Martha’s back living in the very same cottage she grew up in, it’s surely time to forgive and forget.’
‘Not exactly the same cottage,’ Pete said through a mouthful of sausage roll, ‘the last people who had it built a big garden room at the back with a bedroom over it and tarted the place up no end.’
‘Well, you should know, you were the one who sold it off to them in the first place. And it’s just as well it’s been done up, because it was no more than a hovel before, and after being married to that London doctor Martha must be used to something different – and come to think of it, she’s not an Almond now, she’s Martha Weston.’
‘She’ll always be an Almond as far as some of us are concerned, there’s no getting away from it,’ Pete said, shaking his head, and seeing he was set in that conviction she said no more, though she did severely admonish him for having the bad manners to talk with his mouth full, before leaving him to the rest of his sausage roll and pint.
It had been sheer serendipity that the house where she was born should have come up for sale just as Martha Weston had started her search for a new home. Now, unpacking books in the almost unrecognisable cottage, she neither knew nor cared whether the locals were talking about her or not – she was just glad to be back where she felt she belonged.
