I’m In No Mood For Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

the future he felt the urge to reconnect with his father—perhaps inhis late forties when it was time to slow down—there would be time.
    All that changed the day he put his mother in the ground.
    He’d been in Alabama, deep into research, when he received the call that she was dead. Earlier that afternoon, while trimming her clematis, she’d taken a fall off a step stool. No fracture or cuts or scrapes. Just a bruise on her leg. That night, she died alone in her bed when an embolus traveled from her leg to her heart. She’d been fifty-four.
    He hadn’t been there. Hadn’t even known she’d fallen. For the first time in his life he felt truly alone. For years he’d roamed the world, thinking himself free of strings. His mother’s death had truly cut him free, and for the first time he knew what it was like to be untethered. He also knew he’d been fooling himself. He hadn’t traveled the world without strings. They’d been there. The whole time. Keeping his life stable. Until now.
    He had one living relative. Just one. A father he hardly knew. Hell, they didn’t know each other. It was no one’s fault, just the way things were. But maybe it was time they changed that. Time to spend a few days reconnecting with the old man. He didn’t think it would take long. He wasn’t looking for a Hallmark moment. Just something easy and free of the strain that existed between them.
    He got out of the Land Cruiser and made his way across the thick green lawn to the flower garden rich with explosive color. Sebastian thought about the diamond stud in his pocket. He thought about giving it to Mrs. Wingate to return to Clare. He’d have to explain where he found it, and the thought brought a smile to his lips.
    “Hello, Mrs. Wingate,” he greeted the older woman as he approached. Growing up, he’d hated Joyce Wingate. He’d blamed her for his sporadic and unfulfilled relationship with his father. He had gotten over it about the same time he’d quit blaming Clare. Not that he harbored any love toward Joyce. He didn’t have feelings one way or the other. Until that morning, he hadn’t had any thoughts one way or the other about Clare either. Now he did, and they weren’t nice thoughts.
    “Hello, Sebastian,” she said, and placed a red rose in a basket hanging from her bent arm. Several ruby and emerald rings slid on her bony fingers. She wore a pair of cream-colored pants, a lavender blouse, and a huge straw hat. Joyce had always been extremely thin. The kind of thin that came from being in control of everything in her life. Her sharp features dominated her large face, and her wide mouth was usually pinched with disapproval. At least it had been whenever he was around, and he had to wonder if it was her acerbic personalityor her domineering ways that had always kept Mr. Wingate firmly planted on the East Coast.
    Probably both.
    Joyce had never been an attractive woman, not even when she was younger. But if someone shoved a gun in Sebastian’s ear and forced him to say something kind, he could say her eyes were an interesting shade of light blue. Like the irises growing at the edge in her garden. Like her daughter’s. The harsh features of the mother were smaller and much more feminine in the face of her daughter. Clare’s full lips softened the lines of her mouth, and she’d inherited a smaller nose, but the eyes were the same.
    “Your father tells me you plan to leave him soon,” she said. “It’s a shame you can’t be persuaded to stay longer.”
    Sebastian looked from the rose in Joyce’s basket up into her face. Into eyes that had shot blue flames at him as a kid. A huge bumblebee bumped along on a slight breeze, and Joyce waved it away. The only thing he saw in her eyes today was polite inquiry.
    “I’m trying to talk him into staying at least through the coming week,” his father said as he pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his pants and wiped beads of sweat from his brow. Leo Vaughan was