Page 2 of Cyn

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“You’ll regret the drinking part,” Franklin said.

A little tension left Cyn’s shoulders at Franklin’s willingness to drop the subject and she let out a low laugh. “I always do, Franklin. I always do.”

Chapter One

Cyn flickedher wipers on again, clearing a few flakes of the icy January snow from her windshield. She loved almost everything that came with living in Cos Cob, the waterfront community located a little over an hour north of Boston where she and her friends resided. But she did not like it when the snow fell at the precise rate of being just enough to make it difficult to see through her windshield yet not enough that using the wipers had any impact other than to create streaks across the window. Thankfully, she was only a few minutes from home and would soon be out of the elements.

As she turned onto the coastal highway that would lead her to her home five miles up the way, her phone rang. Glancing at the screen on her dash, she smiled when she saw Nora’s name.

“Hello, darling,” Cyn said, after connecting the call.

“Are you home yet?” Nora asked without preamble. Cyn might have been gone for sixteen days, but there was no need for pleasantries—she and the rest of the club talked nearly every day.

“Five miles,” Cyn answered. Nora was the worrier of the group—well, that wasn’t exactly right. She was the caretaker of their lot, and she’d wanted to know when Cyn had landed, when she was on her way home, and when she actually arrived.

“Glad you missed the storm this morning,” Nora said, obviously deciding to keep Cyn company for the last leg of her journey. “I’m surprised Logan wasn’t backed up with delays.”

A nasty winter storm had blown into town the night before and blown right on out by ten that morning, leaving eighteen inches of snow in its wake.

“We landed on time, but it took a bit for a gate to open for us,” Cyn answered. “It’s good to be home.”

“Your visit was pleasant?”

Cyn smiled at Nora’s question. Raised in Jordan, Nora was the only daughter of a very prominent businessman who had dealings in about every precious commodity there was. Cyn knew for a fact that when Nora visited her family, it was, indeed, “pleasant.”

“We ate and drank too much. Daisy pretty much lap-danced her husband every night—they are trying to get pregnant, and she’s taken to encouraging his amorous activities to the extremes,” Cyn answered, referring to her older sister. “And Ash was convinced I’d made up all the sudoku and crossword puzzles because he was incapable of completing any of them,” she said about her brother.

“Did you?”

Cyn grinned in the dark of her car. “Maybe once or twice. He threw me to the wolves with Mum and Dad, so I had to get back at him somehow.”

“I take it they are still waiting with bated breath for you to settle down?”

“They are,” Cyn confirmed. “You’d think with Daisy married and getting ready to propagate the Steele line that they’d be happy with that. But, of course, they aren’t.”

“I would think Ash, as the heir, would be the one they’d harass.”

Cyn’s mind went to thoughts of her brother as she navigated the curvy road north. Occasionally, she caught glimpses of the Atlantic Ocean to her right, but the woods were thick in this part of the state and the vast stretch of water only peeked through in teasing intervals. As to her brother, Ash might be the heir to the family title and the only one to actually be able to carry on the name of Steele—according to the rules of primogeniture—but her parents had long ago given up on him. And with Daisy married, they had, with Ash’s encouragement, turned their sights on her—their youngest.

“Yes, well, we know how logical my parents are.” They weren’t. Not in the least. Alistair and Aurora Steele might be a marquess and marchioness, and might run a not-insignificant business empire, but at home, you’d think they’d stepped right out of a hippie commune. Which was another factor that made their apparent obsession with grandkids so weird. They’d always encouraged their three offspring to live their lives, stand on their own, and be their own people. Yada yada yada. Falling into the cliché role of desperate wannabe grandparents had thrown Cyn, Daisy, and Ash for a loop. Then again, maybe that had been her parents’ plan.

“All quiet here?” Cyn asked as she stopped at the stop sign at the intersection of Cos Cob’s Main Street and the state highway. To her left, Main Street stretched eight blocks before turning back into a rural road that wound its way west. But those eight blocks were lined with colonial style buildings, housing everything from restaurants and art galleries to the more practical merchants like a pharmacy, food co-op, and bookstore. While her chosen hometown was always charming, with a recent snowfall and Christmas lights still hanging, this time of year was especially delightful.

“Isn’t it always?” Nora answered.

Cyn eased forward through the intersection. The roads had been cleared from the earlier snowstorm, but during her first winter in the Northeast, she’d learned about that sneaky little bastard otherwise known as black ice. “You almost sound a little put out by that, Nora-luv. Everything all right?” Cyn replied as she continued north. Her house was the last house within the city limits and was another mile up the road.

Nora hesitated, then sighed. “Everything’s fine. I found a litter of abandoned puppies this morning and you know how I get about stuff like that.”

Cyn’s heart clenched. Nora attracted strays and helpless creatures like other people attracted mosquitos in the summer, and while Cyn had a hard time understanding how someone could dump a litter of puppies, let alone do it in the dead of winter, Nora would feel it ten times more. “Are they going to…?” She didn’t want to finish her sentence, but the chances of a helpless litter of puppies surviving unprotected in this weather wasn’t high.

“I have them in the warmer. They seem hardy and hopefully they’ll make it, but it’s too early to tell.” That was Nora in a nutshell—she had a bigger heart than the other three of them combined yet still had an innate ability to stay grounded and pragmatic.

“Well, I’ll come by to see them. Maybe Auntie Cyn will bring a toy or two.”

“There are nine of them. You better bring more than two. Devil and Six brought cozy fleece blankets and extra bottles, so you have some competition in thefavorite auntiecategory, too.”

“They beat me there on purpose, didn’t they?” As she spoke, she passed the turnoff to Six’s house and Cyn shot a glare in her direction for good measure.