The Accidental Family Read Online Free PDF Page A

still going strong, something that Sophie would have found heartening if she didn’t believe in the law of averages. Surely the chances of there being two happy whirlwind romances blooming into two successful long-term relationships in the same Cornish town seemed rather remote. But even if Carmen had dibs on the fairy-tale ending coming true, it didn’t stop Sophie from liking her enormously. It wasn’t only the quality of Carmen’s jam that led her back to the Ye Olde Tea Shoppe so regularly. It was that she could really talk to Carmen and Carmen could certainly talk back. Carmen had stepped into the void that leaving Cal in London had left in Sophie’s life, and Sophie found her forthright friendliness a port in the storm as she settled into a new town.
    “He’s gonna what?” Carmen asked her, her thickly mascaraed eyes widening as Sophie whispered her fears over the lace-doilied counter as Louis and the girls sat at the table only a few feet away. “Never! What, here?”
    “I think so,” Sophie said. “Although to be fair I’m not one hundred percent sure. It’s just that Izzy said he had a big question to ask me and that he’d spent a lot of money on something really special.”
    “Right, well, I love that child, but isn’t she the one who made a mouse out of cheese and kept it in a matchbox under the bed until it grew actual fur?” Carmen asked. “I’m not especially sure you should base your assumptions on what she has to say, bless her. What about Bella? Bella’s the one who normally knows what’s going on from here to Land’s End. That girl loves information.”
    “Bella tried to cover it up, going on about hats and stuff. Bella was definitely trying to keep something a secret—it has to be a proposal, it fits the facts, and it wouldn’t be the first time—”
    “Wouldn’t it?” Carmen’s eyes widened. “Don’t say you’ve turned him down before?”
    “Not exactly,” Sophie said, experiencing a rather wonderful flashback of exactly what had happened after Louis had proposed the first time. “ Anyway, that’s not important at the moment. What’s important is— what am I going to do? ”
    Sophie glanced back at Louis, who was letting Izzy dress him with a hat she’d fashioned out of paper napkins and some secret bubble gum. It was a good thing he wasn’t fussy about his hair, Sophie thought fondly.
    “Say yes, you idiot,” Carmen told her in hushed tones. “That feller’s pure class, love. If I didn’t love my James, I would, let me tell you.”
    “Would you?” Sophie watched Louis, trying to see him through fresh eyes. To her he was the most beautiful creature who had ever walked the earth in the form of a man, but it always interested her to know how other women saw him.
    “Look at him,” Carmen all but growled. “He’s sex on legs, that one.”
    “Sex on …? Oh, never mind. The point is, any moment now he’s going to ask me to marry him and I’m going to have to say no, Carmen. I’m going to have to turn him down.”
    “Excuse me? Turn him down? But why?” Carmen fired the questions at her in quick succession, each one gilded with incredulity.
    “Because this is too much, too soon, too fast …,” Sophie said, faltering. “We’ve only been together six months. And it’s not much longer than that since his wife died and he came back to look after his estranged children and found me as their guardian. How’s it going to look to the outside world? It will look like Louis is getting himself a free nanny with added sex benefits. Everything is so perfect now, we’re so happy. I’m so happy, and if we’re that happy, then why change anything? Why not just stay as we are …?”
    “Forever?” Carmen asked her. “Well, I can think of a few reasons,one of them being that if you keep doing it on his sofa you’re going to slip a disk, and the other possibly more pertinent one is that if he makes you happy, and you love him, then you are supposed to marry