The Summerhouse Read online

  Critical acclaim for the

  marvelous romances of

  JUDE DEVERAUX

  THE SUMMERHOUSE

  “Deveraux uses the time-travel motif that was so popular in A Knight in Shining Armor, successfully updating it with a female buddy twist that will make fans smile.”

  —Booklist

  “Entertaining summer reading.”

  —The Port St. Lucie News (FL)

  “[A] wonderful, heartwarming tale of friendship and love.”

  —America Online Romance Fiction Forum

  “A wonderfully wistful contemporary tale. . . . With New York Times bestselling author Jude Deveraux, one thing that’s guaranteed is a happy ending.”

  —Barnesandnoble.com

  “Thought-provoking, entertaining, and downright delightful.”

  —Amazon.com

  TEMPTATION

  “Deveraux[’s] lively pace and happy endings . . . will keep readers turning pages.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An exciting historical romance that centers on the early twentieth century women’s rights movement. . . . Filled with excitement, action, and insight . . . .A nonstop thriller.”

  —Harriet Klausner, Barnesandnoble.com

  “[A] satisfying story.”

  —Booklist

  HIGH TIDE

  A Romantic Times Top Pick

  “High Tide is packed full of warmth, humor, sensual tension, and exciting adventure. What more could you ask of a book?”

  —Romantic Times

  “Fast-paced, suspenseful . . . . [A] sassy love story.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Exciting. . . . Fans of romantic suspense will gain much pleasure.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “[A] fast-paced escapade . . . mysterious and sultry.”

  —BookPage

  “Jude Deveraux not only keeps you guessing but mixes crime and human morality with humor in the most unexpected moments. . . . Real-life characters, tension-building suspense, intense passion, and [a] dynamic climax make this a fantastic read.”

  —Rendezvous

  THE BLESSING

  “Plenty of romance, fun, and adventure . . . fans won’t be disappointed.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “[A] fun and entertaining love story . . . a wonderful read. . . . A must for Deveraux fans.”

  —The Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA)

  “The Blessing is another bestseller by one of the all-time greats.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “A heartwarming story.”

  —Kerrville Daily Times (TX)

  AN ANGEL FOR EMILY

  “All sorts of clever turns and surprises. Definitely a keeper. . . . Wow!”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  LEGEND

  “First-rate reading. . . . Only Jude Deveraux could mix romance with tongue-in-cheek humor and have it all come out so perfectly right.”

  —Rendezvous

  THE HEIRESS

  “Deveraux’s novels are always eagerly awaited by her fans, and The Heiress lives up to her usual standards.”

  —The Pilot (Southern Pines, NC)

  Thank you for purchasing this Pocket Books eBook.

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  Contents

  Part One

  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

  Part Two

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Epilogue

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The Mulberry Tree excerpt

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  I’d like to thank Dr. Donna Twist for her expert

  help with writing about the treatment of an injury

  like Roger’s. We walked and talked and had many

  laughs together. Thank you.

  Part One

  One

  Leslie Headrick looked out her kitchen window at the old summerhouse in the back. Now, in early fall, the vines and twisted stems of the old roses nearly covered the building, but in the winter you could see the glassed-in porch well. You could see the peeling paint and the cracked glass in the little round window above the front door. One of the side doors was hanging on one hinge, and Alan said it was a danger to anyone who walked past the place. In fact, Alan said that the whole structure was a danger and should be torn down.

  At that thought, Leslie turned away from the window and looked back at her beautiful, perfect kitchen. Just last year Alan had gutted her old kitchen and put in this one. “It’s the best that money can buy,” he’d said about the maple cabinets and the solid-surface countertops. And Leslie was sure that it was the best, but she missed her ratty old Welsh dresser and the little breakfast nook in the corner. “That table and those chairs look like something kids made in a shop class,” Alan had said, and Leslie had agreed—but their perspective of what was beautiful differed.

  As always, Leslie had given in to her husband and let him put in this showplace of a kitchen, and now she felt that she was ruining a piece of art when she baked cookies and messed up the perfect surfaces that scratched so easily.

  She poured herself another cup of tea from the pot, strong, black English tea, loose tea, no wimpy tea bags for her, then turned back to again look out at the summerhouse. This was a day for reflecting because in three more days she was going to be forty years old—and she was going to celebrate her birthday with two women she hadn’t seen or heard from in nineteen years.

  Behind her, in the hallway, her two suitcases were packed and waiting. She was taking a lot of clothing because she didn’t know what the other two women were going to be wearing, and Ellie’s letter had been vague. “For a famous writer, she doesn’t say much,” Alan had said in an unpleasant tone of voice. He had been quite annoyed to find out that his wife was friends with a best-selling author.

  “But I didn’t know that Ellie was Alexandria Farrell,” Leslie had said, looking at the letter in wonder. “The last time I saw Ellie she wanted to be an artist. She was—”

  But Alan wasn’t listening. “You could have asked her to speak at the Masons,” he was saying. “Just last year, one of my clients said that his wife was a devotee of Jordan Neale.” Everyone in America knew that Jordan Neale was the lead character that Ellie, under the pen name of Alexandria Farrell, had created. Jordan Neale was someone women wanted to imitate and men wanted to . . . Well, the series of romantic mysteries had done very well. Leslie had read all of them, having no idea that the writer was the cute young woman she’d met so long ago.

  So now, in the quiet of the early mor
ning, before Alan and the kids came downstairs, Leslie was thinking about what had happened to her in the last nineteen years. Not much, she thought. She’d married the boy next door, literally, and they’d had two children, Joe and Rebecca, now fourteen and fifteen years old. They weren’t babies any longer, she thought, sipping her tea and still staring out the window at the summerhouse.

  Maybe it was the letter and the invitation from Ellie, a woman she hadn’t seen in so very many years, that was making Leslie think about the past so hard. But, as Ellie had written, their one and only meeting had had an impact on Ellie’s life and she wanted to see both Leslie and Madison again.

  Yes, Leslie thought, that meeting had had an impact on her life too. Since that afternoon nineteen years ago, she’d often thought of Ellie and Madison. And now she was going to fly all the way from Columbus, Ohio, to a tiny town in Maine to spend a long weekend with the other two women.

  But what was it about the summerhouse that was holding her attention this morning? She’d been so restless that she hadn’t been able to sleep much last night, so, at four A.M., she’d got out of bed, dressed, then tiptoed downstairs to put together the ingredients for apple pancakes. Not that anyone would eat any of them, she thought with a sigh. Rebecca would be horrified at the calories, Joe would come down with only seconds to spare before he made the school bus, and Alan would only want cereal, something highfiber, low-calorie, low-cholesterol, low . . . Well, low-flavor, Leslie thought. Attempts at gourmet cooking were wasted on her family.

  With another sigh, Leslie picked up a warm pancake, folded it, and ate it with pleasure. Last week when she’d received Ellie’s letter, she wished she’d received it six months earlier so she would have had time to get rid of the extra fifteen pounds she was carrying. Everyone at the Garden Club said they envied Leslie her figure and how she’d been able to keep it all these years, but Leslie knew better. Nineteen years ago she’d been a dancer and she’d had a body that was supple, muscular, and hard. Now, she thought, she was soft, not fat really, but her muscles were soft. She hadn’t thrown her leg up on a ballet bar in years.

  Overhead she could hear Rebecca’s quick step. She’d be the first one down, the first one to ask why her mother had made something that was guaranteed to clog all their arteries with one bite. Leslie sighed. Rebecca was so very much like her father.

  Joe was more like his mother, and if Leslie could get him away from his friends long enough, they could sit and talk and “smell the roses,” as she used to tell him. “Like your wallpaper,” he’d said when he was just nine years old. It had taken Leslie a moment to figure out what he was talking about, then she’d smiled warmly. In the summerhouse. She’d put up wallpaper with roses on it in the summerhouse.

  Now she remembered looking at her son on that long ago day and seeing his freckled face as they sat across from each other in the old inglenook at one side of the sunny kitchen. Joe had been such an easygoing child, sleeping through the night when he was just weeks old, so unlike Rebecca, who seemed to cause chaos and confusion wherever she was. Leslie wasn’t sure if Rebecca had yet slept through a night of her life. Even now, when she was fifteen, she thought nothing of barging into her parents’ bedroom at three A.M. to announce that she’d heard a “funny noise” on the roof. Leslie would tell her to go back to bed and get some sleep, but Alan took “funny noises” seriously. The neighbors were used to seeing Alan and his daughter outside with flashlights.

  Leslie looked back at the summerhouse. She could still see some of the pink paint on it. Fifteen years later and remnants of the paint were still there.

  Smiling, she remembered Alan’s expression when she’d bought the paint. “I can understand if you want to paint the place pink, but, sweetheart, you’ve bought five different shades of pink. Didn’t those men at the store help you?”

  Alan was a great believer in men taking care of women, whether it was at home or in a paint store.

  At that time Leslie had been five months pregnant with Rebecca and she was already showing. She didn’t know it then, but Rebecca was going to be early in everything, from letting her mother know she was there to . . . well, letting the world know she was there.

  Laughing, Leslie had told Alan that she planned to paint the summerhouse using all five shades of pink. Now, fifteen and a half years later, she could still remember the look on his face. Leslie’s mother had said that Alan didn’t have a creative bone in his body, and, over the years, Leslie had found out that that was true. But, back then, when they were both so young and so happy to be on their own, the colors she wanted to paint the falling down old summerhouse had been cause for laughter.

  It had been Leslie who’d persuaded Alan to buy the big Victorian house that was in an old, unfashionable neighborhood. Alan had wanted something new, something that was white on the outside and white on the inside. But Leslie couldn’t stand any of the houses that Alan had liked: perfectly square boxes set inside a bigger perfectly square box. “But that’s what I like about them,” Alan had said, not understanding her complaint.

  It was Leslie’s mother who had given her the strength to stand up to her new husband. “The house belongs to the woman,” her mother had said. “It’s where you spend most of your time and it’s where you raise your children. It’s worth a fight.” In her family, her mother had been the fighter. Leslie was like her father and liked to let things find their own solutions.

  Later Leslie said that it was having Rebecca’s fierce spirit inside her that had given her the courage. She played her trump card: “Alan, dear, we are buying the house with money my father left to me.” Alan didn’t say anything, but the look on his face made her never, ever again say anything like that.

  But then she’d never before or since wanted anything as much as she’d wanted that big, rambling old house that needed so very much work. Since her father had been a building contractor, she knew what needed to be done and how to go about getting it done.

  “That has to go,” Alan had said when he’d seen the old summerhouse, hidden under fifty-year-old trees, nearly obscured by wisteria vines.

  “But that’s the most beautiful part of the house,” Leslie had said.

  Alan had opened his mouth to say something, but Rebecca had chosen that moment to give her first kick, and the argument about the fate of the summerhouse was never completed. Later, whenever Alan had said anything about the house, Leslie had said, “Trust me,” so he’d left it to her. After all, Alan had just started selling insurance and he was ambitious, very, very ambitious. He worked from early to late. He joined clubs and attended meetings. He was quite happy when he found out that the most fashionable church in town was within walking distance of the horrible old house that Leslie had persuaded him to purchase.

  And it was at church that he found out that people were pleased with him for having the foresight to buy “the old Belville place” and restore it. “Sound invest, that,” some old man said as he clapped Alan on the shoulder. “It’s unusual that a man as young as you would have that much wisdom.” Later the man bought a big policy from Alan. After that, Alan took as much interest in the house as Leslie did. And when Leslie had her hands full with two babies under the age of three, Alan took over supervising the restoration of the house.

  At first there had been fights. “It isn’t a museum!” Leslie had said in exasperation. “It’s a home and it should look like one. Joe’s going to ruin that expensive table with his trucks. And Rebecca will draw on that silk wallpaper.”

  “Then you’ll just have to keep them under control,” Alan had snapped.

  And Leslie had backed down, as she always did at a confrontation. Like her father, she’d rather retreat than fight. Which is why her mother had ruled her childhood home and Alan ruled their home. So Alan had filled the wonderful old house with too many antiques that no one could sit on or even touch. There were three rooms in the house that were kept tightly closed all year, only being opened for cleaning and for Alan’s huge Christmas part
y for all his clients.

  The kitchen had been the final holdout, but last year Alan had had his way on that room too.

  Leslie finished her tea, rinsed out her cup, then looked back at the summerhouse. That was to have been hers. It was to have been her retreat from the world, a place where she could keep up with her dancing, or curl up and read on rainy afternoons.

  Now, looking at the building, she smiled. Before she had children, a woman thought of what she wanted to do on rainy afternoons, but afterward, her hours filled with “must” instead of “want.” She must do the laundry, must get the groceries, must pull Rebecca back from the heater.

  Somehow, Leslie had lost the summerhouse. Somehow, it had gone from being hers to being “theirs.” She knew exactly when it had started. She had been eight months pregnant and so big she’d had to walk with her hand under her belly to support Rebecca’s constant kicks and punches.

  They’d just torn out the living room in the house and there was a leak in the roof. Alan had invited his brother and three college friends over for beer and football but it was raining that day, so there was nowhere for them to sit and watch the game on TV. When Alan had suggested that he set the TV up in the summerhouse for “this one afternoon,” she’d been too grateful for the peace and quiet to protest. She’d been dreading a house full of men and smoke and the smell of beer, so she was glad when he said he’d take the men elsewhere.

  On the next weekend, Alan had taken two clients into the summerhouse to discuss new life policies. It made sense, as the living room was still torn up. “We need a place to sit and talk,” he’d said, looking at Leslie as though it were her fault that the roofing materials still hadn’t arrived.

  Two weeks after that, Rebecca was born, and for the next year, Leslie hadn’t been able to take a breath. Rebecca was insatiable in her demands for attention from her tired mother. It was three months before Leslie could get herself together enough to get her squalling baby out of her pajamas. By the time Rebecca started walking at ten months, Leslie was pregnant again.