Free The Queen of New Beginnings by Erica James Page B

things.
    “How does it feel?” he said.
    She stopped what she was doing. “How does what feel?”
    “Being back in this house, where you grew up?”
    “You have no idea.”
    • • •
    From the window of the room he’d claimed as his den, Clayton watched the small red car drive away. Well, he thought. That’s that, then.
    He retraced his steps to the kitchen. Lunch. He needed something to eat. A sandwich. A nice cheese and pickle sandwich. He opened the bread bin and found a solitary crust.

CHAPTER TEN
    It wasn’t often that an author came into the studio, not unless a bonus author interview was being added to the CDs and cassettes, but James Montgomery always came into the studio for the first day of recording, he said he liked to be a part of the process.
    Alice had a real fondness for his spirited protagonist, a twelve-year-old girl called Mattie Munroe. To all intents and purposes, Mattie was a perfectly normal girl who lived in a perfectly normal house with a perfectly normal mother and father and two perfectly normal older brothers. She wasn’t a posh, clever child like Hermione from Harry Potter, nor was she one of those angsty troubled types coping with a dysfunctional family, playground bullies or teenage gangsters. But as with most children, she had a secret world into which she disappeared. Her secret world just happened to be a bit different from the usual level of make-believe children created for themselves. Hers was real, for a start. Whenever she opened a magic umbrella in her bedroom she and the family pet—an African grey parrot called Eric—would be transferred to faraway lands where they would be caught up in all manner of hair-raising adventures. During these adventures, Eric had to act as Mattie’s interpreter for the many strange languages they encountered, but on their return to her bedroom—the umbrella neatly furled and put away in the wardrobe—Eric reverted to his usual level of who’s-a-pretty-boy? communication. Just occasionally, though, he let slip a word or two regarding their escapades, ensuring that both the reader and Mattie knew that what took place was real and not a figment of Mattie’s imagination.
    As a child Alice would have loved James’s books; she would have read and re-read them. She enjoyed them as an adult, too. But then she was biased. She would love anything James wrote. He once told her that Mattie was based on a girl he had a crush on when he was a young boy. “It was the freckles that did it,” he’d confided. “They made her look so charmingly kooky. I’ve never forgotten her.” As a child Alice had had plenty of freckles but she had never dreamed that anyone might find them charming, least of all a boy who would one day grow into a man as divine as James. Looking through the glass to where James was sitting with Josie, she regretted having grown out of those freckles. Was it possible nowadays to have them painted on with the aid of cosmetic surgery?
    It was probably seriously uncool to have a crush on someone at her age, but Alice couldn’t help herself. Nor was she alone in her adoration. Josie always came over all of a dither whenever James came to the studio, and she was way, way older than Alice. More than a decade older, practically menopausal and at an age when she should be thinking about grandchildren, never mind making disgraceful eyes at James. It wasn’t just the females at the studio who batted their eyelashes at him. In his own words, Chris, the sound engineer, considered him as majorly droolworthy. Only when James came into the studio did Chris wear his best Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt with indecently tight white jeans and diamond stud earrings. Any other day and it was skanky khaki from head to toe and boring silver hoops through his ears.
    This morning James was indeed looking majorly droolworthy. His trademark lopsided fringe of dark-brown hair was flopping sexily across his wide intelligent forehead and brushing his sapphire-blue