Echoes of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

having second thoughts.’
    For a moment, Anna said nothing. She’d been wondering the same thing herself for the past week, ever since Ruth Croft had announced that Felix was coming home. On the one hand, if she did
see him and he didn’t want to know, she might die all over again; on the other, if she didn’t see him, and his time away had been filled with yearnings for her and a desire to start
over . . .
    ‘A lot. I want to see him a lot.’
    ‘Right,’ Shannon said, licking the last remnants of sugar from her fingers. ‘So for once, do what you want. You’re eighteen, for God’s sake – you can do what
the hell you like.’
    ‘It’s not as simple as that.’
    ‘Oh Anna, those are the very words you said to me way back when everything blew up in your face, remember? And I told you then that things are as simple or as difficult as you choose to
make them. Fancy another coffee?’
    ‘I’ll get them,’ Anna said hastily, as Shannon backed her wheelchair away from the table.
    ‘Don’t you dare,’ Shannon replied amicably. ‘I can manage. Just sit there and make a plan.’
    Not for the first time, Anna reflected on the irony of their friendship. There was Shannon, who following a horrendous accident when she was thirteen, spent most of her waking hours in a
wheelchair, and who was about the most feisty, go-getty girl she’d ever known, never letting her disability stop her from doing whatever she wanted. She was a great keyboard player, and a
leading light of the county wheelchair basketball team. And here was she, Anna Eliot, with everything going for her and the chance to put her whole life back on track, and she didn’t have the
guts to tell her father that, even if he had to go to Sussex, she didn’t have to follow him.
    The trouble was, irritating though he was, she loved her dad, and she knew that underneath all his blustering and pomposity, he still missed her mum dreadfully. Alice Eliot had been his rock;
his nickname for her had been Pebble, because he said she was too dainty and too beautiful to be a rock. Alice had always been there to pick up the pieces when Walter messed up, always took his
side and made excuses for some of his more outrageous behaviour, and one of the last things that she had said to Anna before she died had been, ‘Look after everyone, darling. Especially your
daddy. You’re my sensible girl – I know I can rely on you.’
    She’d failed her mum once already. She’d been the cause of all her father’s recent problems. She didn’t dare upset him again. And yet . . .
    Her thoughts were interrupted by her mobile phone vibrating in her pocket.
    ‘Hi Mallory, what’s up?’
    ‘You’ll never guess, it’s so amazing, I could die from happiness.’
    ‘Why? What is it?’ Anna laughed.
    ‘I’ve got a job!’
    If Mallory had said that she was about to fly to the moon, Anna couldn’t have been more surprised. Work was normally something she expected others to do for her.
    ‘It’s so cool,’ she babbled. ‘I’m going to work in the tearoom at Uppercross Farm. It was my idea and Charlie sorted it with his mum and guess what?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘They say I can live with them all summer till I go back to school. I can have the spare bedroom as my own. And they’re going to let me try out recipes for the café and
everything. Isn’t that just the best thing?’
    ‘Yes, I guess,’ Anna replied hesitantly, trying to suppress the surge of jealousy. ‘But have you asked Dad?’
    ‘Not yet, and I shan’t ask him, I shall tell him,’ Mallory replied decisively. ‘He can’t complain; it’s his fault we’re in this mess. And besides,
it’ll look good on my CV for when I go to catering college. Anyway, got to go; Charlie’s waiting. Laters!’
    For a moment, Anna sat open-mouthed, staring at her phone. While she couldn’t for one moment imagine her sister sticking at a job day in, day out, and knew that her latest idea of going to
catering college