Free The Barn on Half Moon Hill by Milly Johnson

Cottage, a tumbledown animal sanctuary, for the summer. Her job is to help with the admin, but the truth is she is here for something much closer to her
heart . . .
    Geraldine runs the Wildflower Cottage sanctuary. She escaped from her past to find happiness here, but now her place of refuge is about to come under threat. Can she keep her
history at bay and her future safe?
    Back home, Viv’s mother Stel thinks she might have found a man who will treat her right for once. Ian is kind, considerate and clearly head over heels for her. That’s
what she has wanted all along, isn’t it . . .?
    Escape to Wildflower Cottage this summer for love, laughter and friendship . . .

Chapter 1
    A person could have been forgiven for thinking that by driving to the hamlet of Ironmist, they were crossing the boundaries of time as well as county divisions. Viv Blackbird
half expected to see King Arthur and the knights of his Round Table in her rear-view mirror when she had passed the grey stone castle on the crest of the hill. The castle was the seat of the
Leighton family, she knew. They owned most of the land around here and had done since before the Big Bang. The area from the hilltop down to the hamlet below had once been called
High-on-the-Mist
, though the name had long since been contracted to Ironmist, or so the internet told her. Viv was headed for the bottom of the dell where the Wildflower Cottage Sanctuary
for Animals was situated. As the road turned sharply away from the castle and began to dip, she could see how the old name had suited it perfectly. A low mist had settled in the bowl of the valley.
It was as if the ground were made of smoke. It looked both beautiful and weird; but then weird was good sometimes.
    A black horse was trotting along the road. Its rider was a woman who was wearing her long hair loose and it was as black as the horse’s mane. Viv dabbed her foot on the brake, even though
she was hardly speeding anyway, and swung out to the other side of the road. The woman didn’t even acknowledge the consideration. In fact, if anything, she gave Viv a look that said
what
is your car doing on the road?
Viv hoped she wasn’t representative of the welcome she was going to receive. She’d never lived in a place as small as this but knew they had the
reputation of being cliquish. She also hoped there weren’t any horses in the sanctuary. She didn’t like the unpredictable massive things and couldn’t understand how anyone would
want to climb up onto their backs and give them free licence to throw you off and then trample all over you.
    Viv turned down what she presumed was the main street through Ironmist, passing a pretty row of cottages, a barber on one side of the road, a pub on the other called The Lady of the Lake. A
woman was washing her front step with a bucket of water and a scrubbing brush. An A frame stood outside the Ironmist Stores and Post Office holding a handwritten sign which read:
MR WAYNE HAS
HAD HIS OP AND HE’S FINE
. Viv smiled. That notice gave her better hope that she was about to join a friendly community.
    Jesus
. She slammed on her brakes as a dog wandered into the road. A huge beast of a thing. It was larger than the dog that had played the title role in the TV adaptation of
The
Hound of the Baskervilles
. A tall, squarely-built young man approached the car, holding up his hands apologetically. Viv lowered her window as he indicated that he wanted to speak to her.
    â€˜I am so sorry,’ he said. ‘My fault. I let go of his lead. Are you all right? You’re shaking like a jelly.’
    Viv looked at her hands clamped onto the steering wheel and noticed that her little finger was vibrating.
    â€˜I’m okay, thank you,’ she replied, though she didn’t entirely feel it. Thank goodness she hadn’t been going any faster.
    The man stroked the big dog’s head. ‘He’s called Pilot,’ he said.