Jessica Steele – The Girl from Honeysuckle Farm / One Dance with the Cowboy: The Girl from Honeysuckle Farm / One Dance with the Cowboy (страница 1)
From the rolling hills of the English countryside to the majesty of the Rocky Mountains…
THE GIRL FROM HONEYSUCKLE FARM
by Jessica Steele
Jessica Steele’s classic love stories whisk you
into a world of pure romantic excitement!
A perfect English gentleman will sweep you
off your feet in this beautiful country setting
with the scent of honeysuckle in the air…
ONE DANCE WITH THE COWBOY
by Donna Alward
Young Canadian author Donna Alward
brings you an irresistibly rugged cowboy
and a warmly emotional story
that will tug on your heartstrings…
The Girl From Honey Suckle Farm
By
Jessica Steele
One Dance With The Cowboy
By
Donna Alward
The Girl From Honey Suckle Farm
By
Jessica Steele
Jessica Steele lives in the county of Worcestershire, with her super husband, Peter, and their gorgeous Stafford-shire bull terrier, Florence. Any spare time is spent enjoying her three main hobbies: reading espionage novels, gardening (she has a great love of flowers), and playing golf. Any time left over is celebrated with her fourth hobby: shopping. Jessica has a sister and two brothers, and they all, with their spouses, often go on golfing holidays together. Having travelled to various places on the globe, researching backgrounds for her stories, there are many countries that she would like to revisit. Her most recent trip abroad was to Portugal, where she stayed in a lovely hotel, close to her all-time favourite golf course. Jessica had no idea of being a writer until one day Peter suggested she write a book. So she did. She has now written over eighty novels.
CHAPTER ONE
PHINN tried hard to look on the bright side—but could not find one. There was not so much as a glimmer of a hint of a silver lining to the dark cloud hanging over her.
She stared absently out of the window of her flat above the stables, barely noticing that Geraldine Walton, the new owner of the riding school, while somehow managing to look elegant even in jeans and a tee shirt, was already busy organising the day’s activities.
Phinn had been up early herself, and had already been down to check on her elderly mare Ruby. Phinn swallowed down a hard lump in her throat and came away from the window, recalling the conversation she’d had with Kit Peverill yesterday. Kit was Ruby’s vet, and he had been as kind as he could be. But, however kind he had been, he could not minimise the harshness that had to be faced when he told her that fragile Ruby would not see the year out.
Phinn was quite well aware that Ruby had quite a few health problems, but even so she had been very shaken. It was already the end of April. But, however shaken she had been, her response had been sharp when he had suggested that she might want to consider allowing him to put Ruby down.
‘No!’ she had said straight away, the idea not needing to be considered. Then, as she’d got herself more collected, ‘She’s not in great pain, is she? I mean, I know you give her a painkilling injection occasionally, but…’
‘Her medication is keeping her relatively painfree,’ Kit had informed her. And Phinn had not needed to hear any more. She had thanked him for his visit and had stayed with Ruby for some while, reflecting how Ruby had been her best friend since her father had rescued the mare from being ill treated thirteen years ago, and had brought her home.
But, while they had plenty of space at Honeysuckle Farm in which to keep a horse, there had been no way they could afford to keep one as a pet.
Her mother, already the breadwinner in the family, had hit the roof. But equally there had been no way that Ewart Hawkins was going to let the emaciated mare go back to the people he had rescued her from. And since he had threatened—and had meant it—to have them prosecuted if they tried to get her back, her owners had moved on without her.
‘Please, Mummy,’ Phinn remembered pleading, and her mother had looked into her pleading blue eyes, so like her own, and had drawn a long sigh.
‘You’ll have to feed and water her,
And Ewart, the battle over, had given his wife a delighted kiss, and Phinn had exchanged happy grins with her father.
She had been ten years old then, and life had been wonderful. She had been born on the farm to the best parents in the world. Her childhood, given the occasional volcanic explosions from her mother when Ewart had been particularly outrageous about something, had been little short of idyllic. Any major rows between her parents, she’d later realised had, in the main, been kept from her.
Her father had adored her from the word go. Because of some sort of complication at her birth, her mother had had to stay in bed, and it had been left to Ewart to look after the newborn. They had lived in one of the farm cottages then, only moving to the big farmhouse when Grandfather and then Grandmother Hawkins had died. Phinn’s father had bonded with his baby daughter immediately, and, entirely uninterested in farming, he had spent hour after hour with his little girl. It had been he who, advised by his wife, Hester, that the child had to be registered with the authorities within forty-two days of her birth, had gone along to the register office with strict instructions to name her Elizabeth Maud—Maud after Hester’s mother.
He had never liked his mother-in-law, and had returned home to have to explain himself to his wife.
‘You’ve called her—
‘Calm down, my love,’ he had attempted to soothe, and had gone on to explain that with a plain name like Hawkins, he had thought the baby had better have a pretty name to go in front.
‘Delphinium!’
‘I’m not having my beautiful daughter called plain Lizzie Hawkins,’ he’d answered, further explaining, ‘To be a bit different I’ve named her Delphinnium, with an extra “n” in the middle.’ And, to charm his still not mollified wife, ‘I’m rather hoping little Phinn will have your gorgeous delphinium-blue eyes. Did you know,’ he went on, ‘that your beautiful eyes go all dark purple, like the Black Knight delphinium, when you’re all emotional?’
‘Ewart Hawkins,’ she had threatened, refusing to be charmed.
‘And I brought you a cabbage,’ he’d said winningly.
The fact that he had brought it, not bought it, had told her that he had nipped over some farmer’s hedge and helped himself.
‘Ewart Hawkins!’ she’d said again, but he had the smile he had wanted.
Hester Rainsworth, as she had been prior to her marriage, had been brought up most conventionally in a workaholic family. Impractical dreamer, talented pianist, sometime poet and would-be mechanical engineer Ewart Hawkins could not have been more of an opposite. They had fallen in love—and for some years had been blissfully happy.
Given a few ups and downs, it had been happiness all round in Phinn’s childhood. Grandfather Hawkins had been the tenant of the farm, and on his death the tenancy had passed to her father. The farm had then been her father’s responsibility, but after one year of appalling freak weather, when they had spent more than they had earned, Hester had declared that, with money tight, Ewart could be farmer and house-husband too, while she went out and found a job and brought some money in.
Unlike his hard-working practical father, Ewart had had little interest in arable farming, and had seen absolutely no point in labouring night and day only to see his crops flattened by storms. Besides, there’d been other things he’d preferred to do. Teach his daughter to sketch, to fish, to play the piano and to swim just for starters. There was a pool down at Broadlands, the estate that owned both Honeysuckle Farm and the neighbouring Yew Tree Farm. They hadn’t been supposed to swim in the pool, but in return for her father going up to the Hall occasionally, and playing the grand piano for music-lover Mr Caldicott, old Mr Caldicott had turned a blind eye.
So it was in the shallows there that her father had taught her to dive and to swim. If they hadn’t taken swimwear it had been quite all right with him if she swam in her underwear—and should his wife be home when they returned, he’d borne her wrath with fortitude.
There was a trout stream too, belonging to the Broadlands estate, and they hadn’t been supposed to fish there either. But her father had called that a load of nonsense, so fish they had. Though, for all Phinn had learned to cast a fine line, she could never kill a fish and her fish had always been put back. Afterwards they might stop at the Cat and Drum, where her father would sit her outside with a lemonade while he went inside to pass time with his friends. Sometimes he would bring his pint outside. He would let her have a sip of his beer and, although she thought it tasted horrible, she had pretended to like it.
Phinn gave a shaky sigh as she thought of her dreamer father. It had been he and not her mother who had decorated her Easter bonnet for the village parade. How proud she had been of that hat—complete with a robin that he had very artistically made.