A Winter Flame Read Online Free PDF Page B

exciting to spend it
on though. All her money went into the bank and sat there twiddling its thumbs.
    She had scribbled quite a few alterations on Aunt Evelyn’s plan for the park as well. The wedding chapel had been changed to a second gift shop and café, for a start. Food,
that’s where the money was – not in silly whimsical chapels that would probably bring in one booking a year and be a total waste of a building. The reindeer enclosure had been changed
into a coffee shop and picnic area. Livestock only ran up vets’ bills although it did, she supposed, make some commercial sense to have the ponies, if they were to be working and earning
their hay or straw or whatever they ate pulling hired carriages and were not just stuck in a field pooing. She even wondered if there was any mileage in the idea of selling snow-pony poo to
gardeners (it was just a thought). She had also claimed one of the log cabins near the restaurant as an ice-cream parlour. If she could get Violet on board that would be fantastic. Not just because
she made the best ice cream in the world, but because she would have an ally firmly in her camp in case Mr Glass turned out to be a right old tosser with no business acumen at all. Any friendly
weight on her side would help in levering him out. She would be meeting him tomorrow anyway. And all the many questions she had about him were at last going to be answered. Or so she thought.

Chapter 6
    Sitting in Mr Mead’s office, Eve rolled
his
name around in her mouth. The spelling, she had learned, was
Jacques Glace,
not Jack Glass
.
She imagined
a number of personalities which that name would suit. A fifty-something French fop with frilly cuffs, a giant quiff and a blue rinse. Carrying a toy poodle. Or a very young, arrogant, nerdy-student
type with a big coat and a Masters in philosophy, a long Dr Who scarf wound around his neck. Eve still couldn’t work out how Jacques Glace had managed to jointly inherit a very valuable chunk
of land from her aunt. She considered the possibility that Aunt Evelyn had acquired a young, slim, six-packed Jacques Glace as a gigolo, and the land was his payment for ‘services
rendered’. She dismissed that immediately as being totally daft and so out of character for Aunt Evelyn it couldn’t be taken seriously for a second. Then again, everything she had
learned about her aunt recently was out of her character – did she really know old Evelyn that well? The disclosures of the past couple of weeks had made her wonder. The sweet, quiet Aunt
Evelyn who lived surrounded by very old sepia-coloured memories and had a penchant for Mr Kipling cakes was not the woman she recognized from all the recent revelations. It was how Lois Lane must
have felt when she discovered who Clark Kent really was.
    Eve had thought of nothing else but plans for the park since she had visited White Christmas. But she wanted to run it her way and not have to make joint decisions. Maybe – she hoped
– he’d be willing to act as a silent partner and let her get on with it. With two cooks, the winter broth was more than likely to get spoiled. Anyway, Mr Glace would soon realize that
he couldn’t be as imaginative or good at organizing as she was; and when he saw that he would recede into the shadows and go and buy a boat to live on and ring up every year to check on the
profits. She could live with that arrangement, she supposed.
    Eve looked out of the window at a very rainy, bitter October day as they waited for the arrival of Jacques Glace. The Christmas lights were already up, strung across the central Barnsley street.
If the start of Christmas became any earlier, Britain was going to end up being like Aunt Evelyn’s house and not bother taking its decorations down. The shops had been filling up with
Christmassy things since early September, forcing everyone to start feeling the pressure. Eve could have quite happily taken a flight to somewhere hot and sunny as soon as she