Holiday Affair Read Online Free PDF

circuit around the base campsite. There was no way he’d chance taking them on a real trek across the Outback. He knew better.
    As Reid should have expected, though, the privileged foursome had reacted to his decision with about as much maturity as they did everything else—meaning, none at all. Even now, the sounds of Binky and Booster haranguing Shane drifted across the campsite’s grounds, stirring the cooling air with ugly obscenities and an even uglier aura of I-want-that entitlement.
    Frowning, Reid turned his attention to Nicole and Alexis. Their tent, well lighted by a pair of solar-powered lanterns and decorated with the tribal rugs they’d helped barter for in Marakesh, stood a few meters away with its flaps open.
    Inside, his daughters perched cross-legged on hi-tech sleeping bags, heads bowed over their homeschooling textbooks. Nicole hugged her stuffed dingo. Nearby, their nanny/tutor, Amanda, flopped on another bedroll with a jar of Marmite and a pack of crackers by her side, a battered paperback clutched in her hands. Knowing Amanda, it was probably a travel memoir.
    She was obsessed with them. She was also obsessed with trying every local delicacy they encountered in their journeys. She’d eagerly sampled fermented herring in Sweden, jibachi senbei —crunchy wasp crackers—in Japan, and Ugli fruit straight from the tree in Jamaica. Amanda loved to travel, which only made her an even more ideal companion for Alexis and Nicole.
    Reid had hired Amanda on an old friend’s recommendation, when she still was a fresh-faced graduate of Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. In the two years since, he hadn’t had cause to regret his decision. Although Amanda was only twenty-four now, she was responsible, smart, resourceful, and irreplaceable.
    Not as irreplaceable as his daughters. But important.
    Remembering the way Alexis had boosted that old Jeep earlier today, Reid smiled. That girl had a lot of her mother in her, starting with her red hair, freckles, and tall, gangly figure—and ending with her utter imperviousness to rules or traditions. In a few years, Alexis would be drawing boys like butterflies to sugarcane. She was just that pretty—and that unique.
    Inevitably, he knew, there would be crushes and flirting, first dates and curfews, breakups and heartache. Reid only hoped he’d have the wisdom to cope with it all. Failing that, he figured if any unruly boys came to call on his daughter, he’d bench-press them until they agreed to behave.
    And Nicole…She really worried him. Or she would have if Reid were the worrying kind. Mostly, he took things as they came. But Nicole might change that. She had a natural gift for charming people—from nomadic sheepherders in Lhasa to salty-tongued net fishermen in Norway. Everyone who met her liked her.
    Her charisma was as inexplicable as it was undeniable. Like father, like daughter, his ex-wife would have said. At least Gabby might have said that, had she dragged herself away from her academic research career long enough to pay attention to something (or someone) that couldn’t be put under a microscope.
    Gabby Foster-Sullivan was never short on theories, Reid knew, whether the topic under discussion was the potential genetic inheritability of charisma or the proper way to eat injera with wat. At first, Reid had loved that about her. He’d loved her verve, her long legs, and her agile mind with equal enthusiasm. When they’d met near a research site just outside Kazakhstan, Gabby had theorized that their similarly nomadic approaches to life would make them perfect for one another. Reid had agreed.
    When they’d married and then had Alexis and Nicole, Gabby had theorized that there’d be nothing more satisfying than combining parenthood, marriage, and itinerant botanical research. Reid had agreed with that too. But later, when he and Gabby had found themselves pulled in two different directions—on two separate continents—his (now ex-) wife had come up