The One Who Changed Everything

In this first Cherry Sisters title, Lilian Darcy shows just how tricky mixing family and romance can be!

Daisy Cherry hasn’t seen rugged landscaper Tucker Reid for ten years. Not since the wedding between him and her sister had been called off, just before the big day!

Now she’s hired a landscaper to fix the grounds of her parents’ Adirondack resort, Spruce Bay. Yes, it’s Tucker—he’s the best man for the job. Surely that’s okay after all this time?

Er…no. Her parents go mad. Her big sister disapproves. And her younger sister, Tucker’s ex, doesn’t know—yet. And none of them know that the instant, wild, intense attraction between Daisy and Tucker has bubbled into a secret affair. That would be explosive. Dynamite. But when it’s this good with Tucker, isn’t it worth the family fallout…?

She heard his frustration. “It’s not like that.”

“Then tell me what it is. Here I am, sneaking you home in the middle of the night. Are you going to climb through your bedroom window? Take off your shoes so you can creep inside? Is your dad going to be standing there with a shotgun pointed at me?”

“Tucker, it’s not like that.”

“Isn’t it? Isn’t it because of what happened ten years ago?”

Okay, maybe that was part of it. Tucker had already broken up with one Cherry sister. Would it end up being two? She didn’t want to put her family through another mess. She didn’t want them thinking it was Tucker’s fault.

“I want to ease them into it…and I need time.”

“Then we’ll ease into this…” He sighed deeply and she felt his hunger. “But for now, get out of this truck before I make a grab for you and never let you go.”

Dear Reader,

As I’m sure you know, it takes months—sometimes more than a year—to bring a book from the idea stage to the finished product on the shelves, so you won’t be surprised to learn that I’m writing this letter in March, while you’re probably reading it six months later. This week, I learned that the third book in my McKinley Medics trilogy from Harlequin Special Edition had reached the finals in the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award. It’s my fifth time as a finalist, and it’s just as much of a thrill as the first. I’m especially pleased because A Marriage Worth Fighting For was my favorite of the McKinley Medics books, and that’s the one the RITA® Award judges liked best, too. It doesn’t always happen that way!

A few years ago, if you didn’t happen to buy. A Marriage Worth Fighting For when it first came out, you would have missed your chance. Now, thanks to ebooks, it’s easy to catch up on earlier titles by your favorite authors, as well as their latest releases. Since we all have different favorites, in authors and series and individual books, the diversity of choice is a winner for all of us.

Meanwhile, over there in September, you’re about to read this first book in my new Cherry Sisters trilogy, while back here in March I’m still writing the second book, with the third book just a cloud of ideas and scenes floating in my head. It’s too soon to say which of these three will be my favorite, but one thing I do know, whichever one it is, not all readers will agree!

All the best, and happy reading,

Lilian Darcy

The One who Changed Everything

Lilian Darcy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

LILIAN DARCY has written nearly eighty books for Mills & Boon. Happily married with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at PO Box 532, Jamison PO, Macquarie ACT 2614, Australia, or email her at lilian@liliandarcy.com.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter One

Mary Jane was laughing. You could hear it thirty yards away, through a closed door and a screen of bushes, and it was a glorious sound on a mild mid-October Monday beside a mountain lake.

Daisy Cherry came up the steps and out of the delicious fresh air into the resort office and found her sister with shaking shoulders and tears running down her cheeks, a heap of old photo albums in a litter around her, along with piles of shipping boxes, too. “Hey, what’s so funny?”

Mary Jane rocked back on her heels, flattened a hand over her heart and gasped for breath. “Dad’s mustache, Mom’s wedding hat. Their clothes. Her swimsuit. I’m sorry, it’s not that funny. I don’t know why I’m—”

“No, it’s great,” Daisy cut in with conviction.

As the eldest of the three Cherry sisters at age thirty-four, Mary Jane was too serious and too responsible too much of the time. Right now, her medium brown hair stuck out in a messy halo all over her head, she had dust marks on her cream-colored top and she looked like someone who’d been working harder than she should, for longer than she could remember.

Daisy and Mary Jane had already had a few tense moments with each other since Daisy had come back east to live just a couple of weeks ago, and in all honesty, Daisy didn’t think that she was to blame. It was really good to see Mary Jane lose control, lighten up a little, and Daisy found herself grinning at the sight of it.

Unfortunately, the laughter and lost control didn’t last.

“I don’t have time for this.” Mary Jane took a determined hold of herself, stood up, wiped the tears from her eyes with a crumpled tissue and fussed around getting the albums back in a pile, which she dumped into a cardboard box.

“Where did you find them?”

“Here in the office, under a pile of files. Lord only knows what they were doing here.”

“Are you packed?” Daisy asked.

“You mean this?” Mary Jane waved her hand at the boxes, some filled, some still empty. “These are going to South Carolina to the new condo with Mom and Dad.”

“I meant for your trip, not Mom and Dad’s move.”

“In that case, I was packed a week ago.” Mary Jane looked a little tense suddenly.

She was leaving tomorrow. She loved to travel, and when Spruce Bay Resort closed each year for most of November and April, during the quietest seasons in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, she always went away. Someplace exotic, or someplace indulgent. Never the same destination twice. Taking full advantage of the fact that she was single, even though Daisy strongly suspected that in her secret heart Mary Jane didn’t actually want to be single at all.

This unwanted condition was down to Alex Stewart, horrible man. Water under the bridge, four years on. Nobody talked about it anymore, but Mary Jane had wasted a lot of time—years of her life—on a relationship that had gone nowhere and it had taken its toll on her heart and her outlook.

Mary Jane and I are so different, Daisy had thought to herself more than once. Mary Jane’s love for Alex had been a steadfast flame that refused to die even when it needed to. Whereas Daisy had blown hot and cold. Came on strong, then pulled right back. Sent clear signals, then turned them off like a faucet.

I jumped in too fast. I never looked below the surface. It was my fault as much as Michael’s.

Was it a fair accusation to make about herself? She still tied herself in knots asking that question. It was a big reason why she was here, instead of in California, and Mary Jane had accused her—quite gently and sympathetically, which almost made it worse—of coming back for the wrong reasons.

“I don’t want you as a business partner at Spruce Bay just because you’re running away from something that turned sour in your personal life.”

This year, because of the renovation and their parents’ retirement from the business, Spruce Bay had closed a month early, missing out on the fall-foliage season, and Mary Jane would be spending most of October, including her thirty-fifth birthday on the eighteenth of the month, on safari in the heart of Africa.

She hadn’t wanted to go initially. “I’ll have to skip my usual trip this year, with the remodel. It just can’t be helped.” She was definitely too responsible about things like this. Daisy and Mom and Dad—and Lee, from a distance, in Colorado—had all insisted that of course she should go, as usual, since she loved her travels so much. Eventually and reluctantly, Mary Jane had booked her tour package.

“If you’re worried I can’t handle things here for three weeks, don’t be,” Daisy assured her quickly now, because her sister had really started to look stressed. “Hey, if I can create the dessert recipes and oversee their preparation every night for a two-hundred-seat five-star San Francisco restaurant, I can oversee a construction crew. I’ve brainstormed a heap of ideas for the restaurant remodel, I’m so excited about it, and I have menu ideas to match.”

“Listen, I don’t doubt that, okay?”

“But you doubt the reasons I’m here.”

“Sometimes you dive in too fast, Daisy. You told me that happened with Michael. I don’t want it happening with Spruce Bay.” She gestured toward the open window, where blue sky blazed behind a silhouette of pine needles whose fragrance Daisy could smell from here. She could hear the pine needles, too—the light soughing they made in the breeze. The peace and familiarity of this place hurt her heart, it was so beautiful.

“It won’t happen, Mary Jane,” she answered, quietly sure of herself, suddenly. “Spruce Bay is different. Spruce Bay is home.”

Mary Jane looked at her curiously. “Is that how you feel? Even after ten years away?”

“It is. More than I expected. It hit me just now. I love it here.”

“Well, okay, then.”

A new peace settled between them.

“And as for the landscaping,” Daisy continued after a moment, “it makes much more sense to have the structural work for that done when Spruce Bay is already closed for the interior work, rather than waiting until spring. Obviously the actual planting will have to wait, but that’s only a small part of what needs doing.”

“True,” Mary Jane conceded. “We’re behind on the planning for all that. The decisions and plans on the interiors took more time than I expected, especially the cabins, and Mom and Dad have been stalling. They think the grounds are fine as they are.”

“They’re not.”

“I know. But maybe it’s too late and we’ll have to leave it till spring after all.”

“No, we won’t, because I called Reid Landscaping yesterday, and I’ve set up a meeting for tomorrow. I’m hoping that if we can make our decisions and plans quickly, work can get started—”

Mary Jane stood up, looking horrified, and didn’t wait to hear when it was that Daisy hoped work would start. “You what?”

“Set up a meeting. Tomorrow at ten.”

“With Reid Landscaping.” It wasn’t a question. More of a thud. Like the dropping of a shoe. All the more obvious because just a few seconds ago they’d had a strong moment of closeness.

“They’re the best in the area,” Daisy pointed out briskly. “And we’ve known—”

“Tucker Reid’s company?”

“Yes.”

The simmering stress behind Mary Jane’s recent bout of laughter burst through the facade and came out as anger. “You cannot be so clueless, Daisy! Tucker Reid!”

“Wait a second...”

“Tucker. Reid!” You could have cut the fake patience in Mary Jane’s tone with a knife.

Oh, for crying out loud! It wasn’t as if Daisy wasn’t getting this. Of course she got it!

“It was ten years ago, Mary Jane,” she said, gentleness not quite winning out over frustration. Here was her older sister sniping at her again. “It was a broken engagement, not an acrimonious divorce, and it was mutual. Lee and Tucker announced their decision together, remember. Not to mention that Lee is two thousand miles away in Colorado.”

Lee, the middle Cherry sister, the meat in the sandwich between responsible, energetically organized Mary Jane and not-nearly-as-blonde-as-she-looked baby sister Daisy.

“Do you honestly not have any idea?” Mary Jane cut in. She was angry. Needlessly angry, Daisy thought. “Do you honestly not know why Lee and Tucker canceled their wedding?”

“I was there, wasn’t I? Because they realized it wasn’t right, and weren’t dumb enough to take such a step when they weren’t one hundred percent sure. Because Lee wasn’t ready. And Tucker wasn’t, either. They were pretty young. I think it was a very wise decision.”

“She was twenty-three, he was twenty-four. Not that young. We were all so incredibly happy when they got engaged. Do you honestly think that breaking it was her choice?”

“Lee is incredibly happy with her life now.”

“Now. Yes. But it took a while. It took a long while. Years.” Mary Jane said that last word as if she knew all about things taking years. Alex Stewart again.

“And you’re saying that’s all because of Tucker Reid?”

“He dumped her! They might have pretended that it was mutual, but it wasn’t. It was down to two things.” Mary Jane checked the first one off on her fingers. “Because of the accident, and because—” But even though the second finger came up, she stopped abruptly, closed her mouth, and the second reason didn’t get spoken.

Daisy’s attention had caught on the first reason, however. “The accident? Really? You think it was down to that? Because Lee had some scarring?”

“In large part, yes.” But she sounded hesitant and awkward.

“You think Tucker is as superficial as that?” Daisy was shocked about it, for some reason. Disappointed. It had never occurred to her to question the motives of Lee’s ex in such a way. She’d taken the whole canceled wedding at face value. They’d both had second thoughts. They’d sensibly called it off. It happened.

She’d been twenty-one years old at the time, and excitedly absorbed in her own life. She remembered giving her first impression of Tucker in a drawled aside to her mother. “Well, he certainly seems like the strong silent type...”

She hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but it hadn’t been a statement of dislike, either. She’d shared the family’s happiness about the upcoming wedding and had thought of Tucker as someone who’d be great for Lee, but not for herself—definitely not her type.

“Do Mom and Dad think this, too?” she asked her sister.

“Mom and Dad think it even more,” Mary Jane retorted with spirit. “But that’s because they never saw—” She stopped suddenly, and her face was shuttered.

“No one has ever said this!”

“They’ve said so plenty to me. You haven’t been here. And when you are here, usually Lee is here, too, so we don’t talk about it.”

“Plus it was ten years ago,” Daisy reminded her.

“There’s that,” Mary Jane conceded. She’d calmed down a little. The angry pink in her cheeks began to fade. The violent eddies of emotion filling the room began to settle. Daisy wondered just how much Alex Stewart had to do with all this, how much Mary Jane was still regretting the fruitless years she’d spent waiting for him to get serious, make the full commitment, and then he never had.

After a moment she said, treading carefully, “Is there something else going on, Mary Jane? You seem—”

Wrong thing to say. “Oh, because it couldn’t possibly be you, could it? Or Tucker himself, for that matter. It has to be me.”

“Well, no, okay, but if there is something, if there’s ever anything, I want you to know that you can talk to me, that’s all.”

She reached out her hand and touched Mary Jane’s arm, and at least her sister didn’t throw her off. The atmosphere between them eased a little, once more. They were sisters, after all. There was a strong bond, even when they disagreed.

“Look, you’re going to Africa,” Daisy continued. “It’s going to be amazing.”

“Y-yes. Oh, it is!”

“I’m sure you still have a ton of stuff to do to get ready. I do understand what you’re saying. I’m...a little shocked, actually.”

“Shocked?”

“About Tucker.”

Mary Jane muttered something that was impossible to hear.

“You said there were two reasons...”

“Yeah, well, no, not really. No.”

“You said—”

“Look, that’s not important.” There was a stubborn set to Mary Jane’s mouth now that told Daisy she could spend all day trying to coax more out of her sister and still get next to nothing.

“Let me talk to Lee,” she offered, letting the was-there-or-was-there-not-a-second-reason thing go. “And I’ll talk to Tucker himself. If there really does seem to be a good reason not to go ahead, our meeting tomorrow is just the initial consult so that he can put together an estimate if we ask him to. We’re not committed yet. And if some of his personal choices and attitudes aren’t quite what they should be, does that matter? I mean, it’s...yeah, disappointing...”

Mary Jane huffed out an impatient breath as if she could have come up with a different word.

“But he’ll be doing our landscaping, and that’s all,” Daisy continued. “It’s a business arrangement. It’s not like he’ll be part of the family, the way we once wanted. It’s not as if we need to love everything about him.”

“Lee—”

“Lee is way stronger than you think. She’s—” A lot happier about being single than you are, sis.

Daisy managed not to say it out loud, while Mary Jane retorted, “Lee was way more upset than you think about the canceled wedding.”

“But since none of this actually involves Lee because she has a whole life that she loves, ski instructing and mountain guiding in Colorado, that she’s not planning to change anytime soon—”

“Oh, I give up,” Mary Jane muttered and stalked into the front office, closing the door very firmly behind her just in case Daisy was in any doubt that the conversation was over.

“You know what?” Daisy said out loud to the empty room. “I give up, too!”

* * *

That statement wasn’t quite true, however. She hadn’t given up at all. Why else would she have found herself forty minutes later, wearing a fresh outfit, climbing out of her car in the parking lot at the front of Reid Landscaping’s building? She’d tried to call Lee to talk about all this, but Lee’s phone was switched off, so she’d left a message.

She didn’t have an appointment with Tucker. That was tomorrow. But if there was any chance of hosing down Mary Jane’s overreaction before she flew off to Africa tomorrow, then why not go after it. You had to put the right energy into a problem if you wanted results. Daisy put energy into everything she did.

The headquarters of Reid Landscaping was an impressive advertisement for the company’s abilities. She hadn’t seen it before. Ten years earlier, the landscaping business had been only an ambitious plan simmering in Tucker’s head that he hadn’t spoken of very much, even to Lee. Since then, and having lived in California until so recently, Daisy had never happened down this quiet street on the edge of the woods during vacation visits home.

She’d never bumped into Tucker himself, either, and she knew nothing about his life now. He could be married with two or three children, or seriously attached. He could be divorced, for that matter, or wedded to his career, or maybe a player with no plans ever to settle down.

The building itself was a gorgeous, purpose-built structure in modern log cabin style, with richly varnished golden wood and huge double-glazed, south-facing windows that would catch the sun at all the right times. On the upper level, there seemed to be a private apartment with a balcony orientated to face summer sunsets. A round wooden table and two chairs invited the idea of cool drinks on warm, lazy evenings, while now, in fall, there were wooden tubs planted with chrysanthemums in gold and bronze and deep red.

But it was the exterior landscaping that really showed itself off. Even though the fall foliage had passed its peak of color, everything still looked beautiful. There were plantings that would offer color according to the changes of the season, a long boardwalk-style entrance ramp zigzagging from the parking lot to the front door, garden features in stone and wood and acid-rusted metal that provided structure to the greenery...

There was much more that Daisy didn’t have time to take in right now, but she would definitely want a closer look when it came to planning the detail on the relandscaping of the Spruce Bay grounds.

She went up the entrance ramp and entered the building, hearing a bell jangling to announce her arrival. “I’m hoping I might be able to see...uh...Mr. Reid for a few minutes. Is he around?” she asked the woman at the main desk. “I’m Daisy Cherry, from Spruce Bay Resort.”

“Oh, right, yes, we’ve spoken. Spruce Bay, that’s along the lake between Mission Point and Back Bay? Gorgeous setting. By the way, I’m Jackie. I’m the office manager.”

“That’s the place. Nice to meet you, Jackie. Something’s come up, you see, and I’m hoping for five minutes now, to set us up for the longer meeting.”

“Let me check for you.”

“Would you? Thanks so much.” Daisy sat down in a sleekly comfortable leather chair while Jackie made some finger movements over something on the desktop, apparently sending a text message via cell phone to her boss, which meant that Daisy was left not knowing whether Tucker was actually on site or not.

And that was frustrating because she really, really wanted to see him right now, since she really, really didn’t want her sister to wing off to Africa in the wrong mood. At times, you could almost suspect that Mary Jane was actively dreading the trip.

Daisy sat, and kept sitting.

Had Tucker checked his phone yet?

Had Lee?

Jackie went on with her work, and Daisy looked around. On the wall to her right there was a whole gallery of photos, beautifully enlarged and mounted. Before-and-after shots of Reid Landscaping projects, candid pictures of the team at work. Here was Tucker himself, perfectly dressed in a dark suit, hair cut short, beard like Orlando Bloom’s, accepting an award for a big landscaping project. The award plaque was right here on the wall, also.

And here he was again in another photo, very differently dressed, leaning on a shovel and grinning at the camera. This time he was clean-shaven, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his legs bare and tanned in faded green shorts. He had a couple of staff members standing on either side—a young man with knobby knees and a tall, pretty, fair-skinned brunette with a belt cinching the top of her cargo pants against her very slender waist. It was the closest thing Daisy could find to a personal photo.

Tucker looked the same as he did ten years ago, and yet not. His frame had filled out with more muscle. He had more laugh lines around his eyes, especially when wearing that satisfied, outdoorsy grin.

His presence dominated the whole photo and he looked more confident than he had been the last time they’d met. He gave off a sense of energy and presence, the way a man did when those big plans in his head from years ago have become a reality better than he’d ever dreamed.

And, oh, that grin! Strong and content and full of life.