To Have and to Hold
Page 33
Nevertheless, a part of Josie will always miss the danger, the excitement, the roller-coaster ride she experienced with Joe.
Luckily, the same cannot be said for Alice. Alice rarely thinks of Joe these days. He gave her the house in Highfield as part of the divorce settlement, and that was it. She didn’t want anything to do with the apartment in New York or the house in London.
And Joe was delighted he got off so lightly. He’d heard all the stories about colleagues who had been forced to part with half of everything they owned. Even his divorce lawyer was amazed, as was Alice’s, who begged her to take the house in London, told her repeatedly that she deserved more, but Alice wouldn’t hear any of it.
Alice once had a dream of a house in the country, a house with wisteria growing over the front and climbing roses tumbling over the back. She had a dream of acres of land filled with children running and jumping and animals playing.
The wisteria is growing slowly but surely. The roses are climbing and tumbling happily and heartily, and Snoop and Dharma have been joined by a Labrador called Floozy, Calvin the cat, and five chickens named Maisie, Corny, Mealy, Grainy, and Rice.
As for the children, we’d have to ask Harry about that, but Alice is blooming just as steadily as her garden these days, the sparkle in her eye brighter than it has ever been, her hair as luscious and thick as it has ever been, and don’t they always say that’s one of the signs?
Take a closer look at her stomach. Is it our imagination, or is it ever so slightly more curved than we are used to seeing it? It could of course be happiness that is causing her to eat more, but then again, she does seem to stroke her stomach rather more often than she ever has before.
But as I said earlier, that’s a story for another day.
Also by Jane Green
Straight Talking Mr. Maybe Jemima J Bookends Babyville
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD. Copyright © 2004 by Jane Green.
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To Have and To Hold was originally published as Spellbound in the United Kingdom by The Penguin Group.
The publishers gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint extracts from the following: “Let’s Get It On,” Words and Music by Ed Townsend and Marvin Gaye © 1969, Jobete Music Co. Inc./Stone Diamond Music Corp/Cherritown Music Pub. Co. Inc., USA. Reproduced by permission of Jobete Music Co. Inc./EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H 0QY. “This Be the Verse,” from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by Philip Larkin. Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Green, Jane, 1968–
Spellbound / Jane Green.
p. cm.
1. Married women—Fiction. 2. Connecticut—Fiction. 3. Adultery—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6057.R3443S67 2004
823'.914—dc22
2003055888
eISBN: 978-0-7679-1228-0
v3.0