Lakeside Cottage Read Online Free PDF

summoned a smile. “I shouldn’t have said that. I should remind you that the kindness of strangers is a rare and wonderful thing.”
    “A rare and wonderful and humiliating thing,” he said.
    “Help me load these groceries, smart aleck. Let’s see if we can get to the lake before the Popsicles melt.”

Three
    K ate’s Jeep Cherokee had seen better days, but it was the perfect vehicle for the lake, rugged enough to take on the unpaved roads and byways that wound through the mountains and rain forests of the Olympic Peninsula. Bandit greeted them as though they’d been gone a year, sneezing and slapping the seat with his tail.
    “Now to the lake,” Kate said brightly. “We’ve got the house all to ourselves, how about that?”
    Aaron buckled his seat belt in desultory fashion, barely reacting to Bandit’s sloppy kisses, and she realized she’d said the wrong thing.
    “It’s going to be a great summer,” she assured him.
    “Right,” he replied without enthusiasm.
    She could hear the apprehension in his voice. Though she wouldn’t say so aloud, she felt as apprehensive as Aaron.
    He regarded her with disconcerting insight. “They fired you because of me, didn’t they?”
    “No, I got fired because Sylvia is an inflexible stick of a woman who never appreciated real talent anyway.Deadlines and the bottom line, that’s all she cares about.” Kate made herself stop. No point venting to Aaron; he already knew she was angry. The fact that Kate had been let go by Sylvia Latham, the managing editor, stung particularly. Like Kate, Sylvia was a single mother. Unlike Kate, she was a perfect single mother with two perfect kids, and because of this, she assumed everyone else could and should juggle career and family with the same finesse she did.
    Kate ducked her head, hiding her expression. Aaron was clued in to much more than people expected of him. He knew as well as any other boy that one of the most basic realities of modern life was that a single mom missed work to take care of her kid. Why didn’t Sylvia get it? Because she had a perfect nanny to look after her perfect children. Until this past year, Aaron’s grandmother and sometimes his aunt watched him when he missed school. Now that they’d moved away, Kate tried to juggle everything on her own. And she’d failed. Miserably and unequivocally.
    “I have to call the bank, figure out what’s the matter with my debit card,” she said, taking out her cell phone. “We don’t get reception at the lake.”
    “Boooring,” Aaron proclaimed and slumped down in his seat.
    “I’m with you, bud.” She dialed the number on the back of her card. After listening to all the options— “because our menu has recently changed,” cooed the voice recording—she had to press an absurd combination of numbers only to learn that the bank, on East Coast time, was already closed. She leaned her head against the headrest and took a deep, cleansing breath. “It’s nothing,” she assured Aaron. “I’ll sort it out later.”
    “I need to call Georgie next,” she said apologetically.
    All five grandkids—Phil and Barbara’s four, plus Aaron—called her mother Georgie and sometimes even Georgie Girl.
    “Don’t talk long,” Aaron said. “Please.”
    Kate punched in the unfamiliar new number and waited for it to connect. A male voice answered.
    “This is Clinton Dow.” Georgie’s new husband always answered with courteous formality.
    “And this is Katherine Elise Livingston,” she said, teasing a little.
    “Kate.” His voice smoothed out with a smile she could hear. “How are you?”
    “Excellent. We’re in Port Angeles, just about to head to the lake.”
    “Sounds like a big adventure,” he said as jovially as could be. You’d never know that only last spring, he was urging her mother to sell the summer place. It was a white elephant, he’d declared, a big empty tax liability that had outlived its use to the family. With that one pronouncement,