Bonnie and Stan

by Anna Stuart

Genres: General Fiction; Sagas; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

After 50 years together Stan still adores his wife... so why is he dating again?

Bonnie and Stan are soulmates. They met during the Swinging Sixties, to the soundtrack of The Beatles and the Merseybeat scene. Now they've grown up and grown old together, had children and grandchildren. They are finally building their dream home, when disaster strikes.

Stan is running out of time, and can't bear the thought of leaving Bonnie alone. Alongside his teenage granddaughter Greya, he forms a plan to find Bonnie a new love of her life. And she must never find out...

Bonnie & Stan is a poignant, surprising love story set during the Swinging Sixties and the present day. Ultimately feel-good and full of emotion, Bonnie & Stan will make your heart sing.

Read by Peter Kenny and Victoria Fox

(p) Orion Publishing Group 2019

Release date: February 21, 2019

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

Stan stepped out of the hospital doors with the scrap of paper clutched so hard between his fingers it was starting to disintegrate against his sweaty skin. He forced himself to loosen his grip. Let the wind take the wretched thing – the words wouldn’t change, however high they rose into the stark spring sky.

The lingering March chill stung his eyes, making them water. He rubbed them and glanced to his left. A concrete path led along the front of the hospital to a fenced-off area, optimistically called a ‘Garden’. He could just make out the jaunty blue sign, fixed onto a plastic trellis threaded with shivering rose plants, inviting him to ‘come in and relax’. Fat chance! Bonnie was waiting for him through there, pacing up and down, telling herself over and over that it was going to be good news and he would have to be the one to savage her gorgeous optimism with the sharp cut of his piece of paper.

‘I’m so sorry, Bonnie,’ Stan whispered.

He looked out across the car park to the sprawl of Liverpool beyond. He didn’t come to the city much, but he was strangely glad of it today. It seemed right to get the news that his life was ending here, in the city where he’d first met Bonnie and it had felt as if it was truly starting. He glanced to the garden again and forced himself to move towards it.

Bonnie had not been happy to be sent out, he knew that. He wasn’t even sure why he’d done it. He’d intended her to be with him to see the consultant, but when Dr Mirabi had asked, ‘And will your wife be coming in with you?’ he’d panicked and said that maybe it was best if she waited outside. She’d objected, of course, but his illness – possible illness, as it had still been back then – had given him a strange, calm certainty and he’d insisted.

‘You can wait in the garden if you like,’ Dr Mirabi had said to her kindly, and Stan had been glad the doctor was there to share the force of Bonnie’s glare.

It had been the right decision, though. He wouldn’t have wanted Bonnie in that blank room, wouldn’t have been able to keep calm in the face of her distress. At least this way he could compose himself a little before he broke it to her.

Stan took three more steps towards the garden. A young woman was sitting on a bench ahead of him, wrapped so tightly in a blanket that only her head was visible. Her face, however, was turned up to the thin sun and her eyes were shut in quiet bliss. Stan guessed she hadn’t felt fresh air for some time, and his eyes slid to the tired-looking older lady at the girl’s side. Her mother, it had to be. She was angled towards the girl and watching her with the sort of terrified love that she must have felt since the day she was put in her arms as a newborn. He offered her a smile and she returned it.

‘Spring’s coming,’ she said.

‘I hope so.’

Her eyes pulled back to her daughter and Stan moved on. A sudden wind whipped across the car park, sending a Styrofoam cup scuttling across the pathway like a scared creature and tugging again at the letter in his hand. Once again, he considered letting it go, just sending it up into the clouds and forgetting about it, but Stan wasn’t a man to turn his back on trouble. Forty years as a plumber and builder had taught him that ignoring even the smallest niggle only gave it licence to grow. Issues had to be faced head-on to stand a chance of being dealt with properly. More’s the pity.

‘It’s liver cancer, I’m afraid,’ Dr Mirabi had said as Stan sat there, mute and alone. ‘Stage four.’

‘Stage four?’ Stan had asked blankly, and the doctor had stalled.

‘Would you like to fetch your wife back in before we go through all this?’

‘No! That is, no thank you. I can manage.’

‘You’re very calm.’

A little bit of Stan had been proud at that. Proud! How stupid was he? Look at me, facing the news of my own mortality with a nice stiff upper lip. Idiot! This wasn’t the 1920s. He was allowed to rage and scream and even cry if he wanted – not that he did.

‘Should I not be calm?’ he’d asked instead.

‘Oh no, no. That is, yes. Absolutely. It’s the best way.’

The best way for what? Stan wondered now. He turned his eyes back to the city, letting them drift through the Liverpool bustle, over the Mersey and to the fields of the Wirral beyond. Home. In his mind’s eye he could see the stakes he and Bonnie had planted in the ground two weeks ago, marking out the footprint of their dream house.

It had taken them years to get planning permission. Their twins had been bolshy teenagers when they’d bought up the land on the edge of the village, and now they were approaching middle age. But Bonnie had refused to give up and at last they’d done it. Regulations had changed, she’d said, though he suspected it was more that her name as an award-winning local architect had finally swayed the council.

It didn’t matter. That piece of paper, with permission to build their dream home, had been so very welcome. They’d drunk champagne the day it had arrived – proper stuff they’d been saving from his seventieth – and Bonnie had posted her designs all over Facebook with words as bubbly as their drinks. Dream house on the cards at last! So excited!! Now Stan and I can enjoy our twilight years in style!!! She wasn’t normally one for exclamation marks, his Bonnie, but that day they’d burst from her. And now his stupid slip of paper was going to crush them all into flat little full stops.

He pushed on towards the garden, stepping sideways to let a man on a mobility scooter move past. A tiny terrier sat in the basket at the front wagging its tail and the man’s eyes were fixed upon his pet as he took it for a walk in the only way he was now able. What condition did he have, Stan wondered, and instantly hated the fact that he was now in a world in which everyone had something wrong with them.

He shoved his hands into his pockets as the man sailed round the corner of the hospital, accompanied by the dim whine of an electric engine and a small yap from the dog. Stan had been aware he’d lost weight recently, of course he had, but he’d just been quietly pleased with himself for not getting thickset. Fool. A bit of podge would have been far preferable to what was actually going on in his gut.

His fingers closed around his car keys. He drew them out slowly and looked into the face of Terry, the tiny troll key ring Bonnie had bought him years ago because his screwed-up face had reminded her of Stan on a bad morning. He wasn’t sure when he’d started talking to Terry. On the whole, he was as grumpy as he looked but the chap was a good listener and right now that was exactly what Stan needed.

‘If I hadn’t bothered going to the doctor, Terry, I wouldn’t be here now, would I? That would be better, wouldn’t it?’

Terry shook his little head in the wind.

‘You’re right,’ Stan groaned. ‘I needed to know. At least this way I get to cherish my last, my last …’

The words did dangerous, bubbly things in Stan’s throat and he swallowed madly. This couldn’t be happening. He had things to do, so many things. There was a list. Bonnie had written it and pinned it to the fridge, as she had all the way through their marriage. In the old days it had featured jobs like ‘paint over the damp patch’ and ‘find cheap sofa’ and ‘try not to kill your dad – you know he means well’. Later it had been ‘buy Lisa ballet shoes’ or ‘find Rachael a new piano teacher’ or ‘take the girls to the theatre – they need some sort of culture’.

Now, alongside ‘build dream house’ were a thousand other treats. ‘It’s all fun from here,’ Bonnie had scrawled at the bottom but nowhere on the list did it say ‘fight off terminal disease’. Then again, that wasn’t possible anyway, was it? Stan glanced back to the hospital. The young woman had got up from the bench now and was shuffling towards the doors into Oncology, her mother hovering after. Presumably she’d got cancer too, poor lass. Could Dr Mirabi treat hers? He did hope so.

‘Have you got any questions?’ the doctor had asked Stan.

‘Can I be cured?’

Dr Mirabi had dressed the answer up in several ‘so sorries’ and various ‘there are things we can do to ease matters’, but in essence it had boiled down to one word: ‘No.’ Stan’s illness – an illness he had not known he had until thirty minutes ago – was terminal. Dr Mirabi had been reluctant to give specifics but had eventually conceded that it was unlikely to be more than twelve months, and that had been more than specific enough for Stan.

Barring a miracle, this time next year he would be gone. His life was now finite, not in a ‘we’ll all die one day’ way, or even in a ‘we best enjoy our last years’ way, but with the months and days and even hours nailed to the wall to be used with the utmost care.

Stan was close enough to the garden now to see the start of tiny buds on the thin roses. They were getting ready to burst into life, whereas he …

‘Goodness, Stan,’ he heard Terry admonishing. ‘Get a grip. You’re hardly the first and you certainly won’t be the last. What makes your life so very special?’

There was, of course, only one answer to that: Bonnie. It had always been Bonnie. He’d known from the very first moment he’d seen her, right here in the heart of Liverpool, in a club bursting with music and chatter and exuberant, excitable hope, that he’d been put on this earth to be there for her, and now it seemed that was coming to an end.

‘No!’ he said out loud. ‘No way. I’m not leaving her alone.’

The roses shook and he heard a little gasp in the garden and then footsteps coming towards him.

‘Stan?’

And then there she was, Bonnie, stood beneath the trellis looking even more beautiful than the first day he’d seen her. She laughed at him when he told her how gorgeous she was, pointing into the mirror and scoffing at whatever imperfections she saw there, but for him their fifty-four shared years were written like a poem into the lines of her face, making it even more special with every day.

‘Bonnie,’ he stuttered.

‘Stan, you chump. What on earth are you doing lurking out here?’

He almost smiled. Then he forced himself to draw in a deep breath, stepped up to her and held out the paper bearing his life sentence. She looked down at it and then back to his face and, to his shame, he felt tears well up as she opened her arms and he stepped into them.

‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped out. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Bonnie. I’ve let you down.’

‘Never.’ She pulled him fiercely against her, crushing herself into the folds of his coat so it was almost as if they were both wearing it. ‘You have never once let me down, Stanley Walker, and you aren’t letting me down now. We’ll fight this. We’ll fight it together, and one way or another we’ll win.’

Stan drew in a deep breath and let his tears soak into her white-blonde hair, and when he looked up he could see clearly again. He remembered the love in the eyes of the mother on the bench as her daughter had drawn the sun into her skin, and the joy in the scooter-man’s face as he’d watched his dog wag its tail at the world, and he smiled. The roses were budding and Liverpool was as bright in the spring sunshine as it had been back when he’d first met his wife. And she was right, she must be right because they were Bonnie and Stan and they had to stay that way.

Bonnie Jessop closed the door of her tiny attic room and flung her book-bag into the corner. She was home, thank heavens, or at least what passed for home these days. She’d spent her first term in Liverpool living in university halls but had found them cold and unfriendly and after Christmas she’d snatched at the chance to move in with Susie-Ann, the one girl who’d been truly welcoming.

Bonnie loved it in the rough and tumble of Susie-Ann’s house, and the Cobden family’s warm welcome was a blissful contrast to the snotty reception she’d had from the other students on her architecture course, who treated her with suspicion and disdain because she was the only girl. It was stupid. There were plenty of girls in art and design and interior decoration, but the minute you wanted to draw houses rather than cushions or pretty pictures everything seemed to change.

‘I’ll show them,’ Bonnie muttered, retrieving her book-bag and looking for something to wipe off the muck from where a gaggle of art students had ‘accidentally’ knocked it into a puddle. They’d been girls, all of them; surely they should be on her side? But Bonnie had learned quickly enough that the girls were often the worst. All except Susie-Ann, of course. Susie-Ann was different.

Her friend and new housemate had a broad Scouse accent, eye-catchingly short skirts and an irreverent attitude, and she stuck out even more than Bonnie around campus. It appeared that she was the white sheep of a contentedly black flock – her three older brothers spent their days moving goods off the back of the city’s lorries faster than the police could keep up. As a result they had an endless supply of up-to-date clothes and, most importantly to Bonnie, records hot off the American ships down the docks.

‘Hey there! Bonnie? You up here?’ There was a clatter of high-heeled shoes on the stairs and Susie-Ann burst into the room, her long dark hair in big rollers and a green face pack slathered over her pretty face. ‘You are here! Thought I heard you.’ Susie-Ann took in the sight of Bonnie’s muddy bag and stuck her hands on her miniskirted hips. ‘Those bastards been at your books again? It’s too bad, Bon, really it is. I’ll let our kids loose on them, shall I? They can be dead scary when they want, so they can.’

Bonnie didn’t doubt it. Setting the three Cobden boys on Bonnie’s tormentors would certainly do the trick, but her Aunt Nancy had brought her up to stand on her own two feet and she wasn’t about to stop doing that just because she was miles away from her sleepy Cheshire village.

‘It’s fine, really. I just dropped it.’

Susie-Ann raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow but then shrugged.

‘Have it your own way. Who cares any road – it’s the Jac tonight!’

She grabbed Bonnie’s arm, squealing, and Bonnie couldn’t help but squeal with her. She’d loved music ever since she was tiny and the famous Jacaranda club had the best bands in town. Her earliest – and only – memories of her long-gone parents were of them dancing. They’d been solid, hard-working people, her father an accountant and her mother a maths teacher, and Bonnie remembered her young life as a largely serious business, save in the evenings when they’d let Charlie Parker and Ella Fitzgerald creep up through the needle of the gramophone and spark them into life.

Bonnie remembered waking to the sound of jazz and creeping down to sneak a peek at her parents dancing in each other’s arms just like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. She’d got Aunt Nancy to play their favourite records endlessly after their deaths, as if it might make them dance on in her memory, and she still treasured those songs now.

As she’d got older, though, she’d moved on from jazz, discovering Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and the heart-melting glory that was Elvis, and her Aunt Nancy had insisted that Liverpool was the place Bonnie had to be. There were musicians doing amazing things there, she’d assured Bonnie, and Bonnie had only been at the university for a week or two when a group of local lads called the Beatles had exploded into the big time with ‘Love Me Do’.

Bonnie had longed for friends to go to the buzzing clubs with, but the girls in her hall had spent all their time in the library and the boys on her course had taken delight in excluding her. Many was the night she’d lurked outside the entrances to the Jacaranda and the Cavern, longing for the courage to go in alone, but it wasn’t until Susie-Ann had swept her under her wing that she’d ever had the chance. But now, tonight, Bonnie was actually going to a gig at the Jacaranda and not just going there, but going there on a blind date with the lead singer of tonight’s band, the Best Boys.

‘Spike,’ Bonnie said out loud, hugging her bag tight, not even noticing the mud as she tried to imagine what on earth it would be like to be that close to a real musician.

He sounded so young and cool and glamorous, a world away from the staid Tonys and Nigels who’d asked her out back home, and she was in equal measures thrilled and terrified about the night ahead.

‘Don’t get too hung up on the wretched boy,’ Susie-Ann said, pulling her from her reverie, ‘or you’ll make him even more big-headed than he is now. But come on – we’ve got to get ready.’

She grabbed the bag from Bonnie and flung it aside, edging her towards the door.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Front room. Iron’s on.’

‘What?’

But Susie-Ann was tugging her down the stairs, and if she didn’t want to tumble down all three flights she had little choice but to acquiesce. They burst into the front room to find the rest of the Cobden family gathered around the little TV set the boys had procured from who-knows-where two weeks ago. The three boys, John, Mark and Kevin, were lounging on the lime-green settee, another new acquisition that sat incongruously in the otherwise beige room. Mr Cobden was in his saggy old armchair, wreathed in smoke, and Mrs Cobden was stood at the ironing board behind him.

‘Mam!’ Susie-Ann said indignantly. ‘Get off – that’s for Bonnie’s hair.’

‘What?!’ Bonnie and Mrs Cobden demanded at the same time, but Susie-Ann just hustled Bonnie forward, sweeping her mother out of the way.

‘It needs to be straight,’ she announced, bending Bonnie over so that her shoulder-length hair was spread out on the board.

‘Straight?’ Bonnie gasped, trying to put a hand to the careful waves she always styled into her blonde hair.

‘Yep. You look very sweet and all, queen, but it’s just not the in thing any more. You ever see Jean Shrimpton with a wave?’

Bonnie shook her head – or as much as she could with her hair pinned to the board.

‘Good. Now, stay still and let me sort you out.’

Susie-Ann lifted the iron like a weapon. The boys all looked curiously over and even Mr Cobden waved smoke away to watch.

‘Susie, no!’ Mrs Cobden gasped as her daughter brought the iron down and ran it smoothly over Bonnie’s blonde hair.

There was a soft crackle and out of the corner of her eye Bonnie saw strands rising on the static as her friend lifted the iron again but her wavy hair, miraculously, was straight. Everyone stared.

‘Well I never,’ Mrs Cobden said. ‘Will you look at that. It’s silky-smooth, lass.’

Bonnie tried to stand but Susie-Ann was already turning her to do the other side and all she could manage was a grateful smile to her host. When she’d first arrived at the Cobdens she’d feared that she’d never fit into their anarchic household, despite their warm welcome to a friend of Susie-Ann’s. She’d noticed Mr and Mrs Cobden peering at her over supper and thought that they were taking in her conventional clothes, middle-class manners and polished speech and wondering if Susie-Ann would end up like her.

She’d liked to think they hoped so, but feared it was actually an outcome they dreaded and had felt awkward around them until she’d found out that every one of the Cobdens loved music. From the moment they’d plugged in the gramophone and pulled out their collection of mostly bootleg singles, Bonnie had slotted right in. After just a few weeks, she felt far more comfortable around the rough-and-tumble family.

Not that she was exactly used to the quiet life, she reflected as Susie-Ann contorted her over the board to do the back of her hair, the boys still watching on. Her father’s younger sister, Nancy, had moved in to care for her when her parents had been killed, but at twenty-two she’d been barely more than a child herself and it had never been a conventional upbringing. Nancy was a tiny woman, barely five foot tall and with rather jumbled features, but she radiated an energy that drew people to her from far and wide and the house had always been full of fun.

She was an inventive cook at best, and apt to forget about eating altogether if she had friends round – which she often did – so Bonnie had learned to put meals together as quickly as she’d learned to mix the perfect vodka martini. Having left the Wrens to care for Bonnie, Nancy had a work ethic every bit as strong as her nose for a party, and had been fiercely adamant that Bonnie do well at school and push herself in life. It was she who had championed Bonnie’s right to study architecture and helped her secure the place at Liverpool.

Bonnie knew Nancy had been disappointed when she’d finally admitted at Christmas that she wasn’t enjoying university life but, being an arch-fixer, she’d soon found the solution. The Cobdens had been delighted to have the extra money for their attic room and if Bonnie had to sometimes share it with cratefuls of unusual goods, it was a small price to pay. The studying was still hard but at least at the end of a day of lectures she could escape and breathe again.

‘Perfect!’ Susie-Ann announced now, finally letting her stand up. ‘Isn’t it perfect, Mam?’

‘Perfect,’ Mrs Cobden agreed dutifully, before adding, ‘Can I iron the kecks now?’

‘Do what you want,’ Susie-Ann laughed. ‘Bonnie and I have got make-up to be getting on with. Come on, Bon.’

And with that she swept Bonnie back up the stairs, pausing only to retrieve a large make-up case from her own room. Bonnie felt as if she were at the centre of a small whirlwind. With her stomach already churning with nerves, she gave herself up to Susie-Ann’s ministrations.

‘Tell me about Spike,’ she said as her friend pushed her down at the little desk beneath the window, sweeping her books to one side to make room.

‘I’ve told you a million times! He’s tall and dark and his hair is all quiffed up, just like Elvis. He’s a plumber down the docks by day, but by night – which is more important, let’s face it – he’s a singer. He’s got a voice like melted chocolate and deep brown eyes and the tightest little arse in Liverpool.’

‘Susie-Ann!’

‘What? It’s important.’ Susie-Ann was fixing big heated rollers around the bottom of Bonnie’s hair and bent down in front of her to add, ‘Don’t let Sticks hear me say that, though. He’s a right jealous one, Lord love him.’

Sticks was the drummer in Spike’s band and Susie-Ann’s boyfriend of almost two years. Bonnie hadn’t actually met him yet but she’d heard him throwing stones at her friend’s window just below her own and then climbing up the drainpipe to join her. She’d heard other noises too but had buried her head beneath her pillow and tried not to listen.

Aunt Nancy had been frighteningly forthright about sex.

‘They’ll all want to do it with you,’ she’d told Bonnie shortly before she’d first left for Liverpool. ‘Boys that age are panting for sex with practically anyone and especially a pretty girl like you, so you’ll need to stand up for yourself.’

‘To stop them?’ Bonnie had asked, terrified.

‘If you want to.’ Nancy had laughed and taken her hands. ‘But if you fancy it, then why not? It’s rather fun, honestly, as long as you’re careful and you only do it if you want to. OK?’

‘OK,’ Bonnie had squeaked, not convinced she’d ever want to.

One or two of the lads down the youth club had let their hands wander when they’d kissed her, but she’d found it more ticklish than sexy. Maybe with Spike it would be different, though. Maybe with Spike she’d feel the tingles that everyone seemed to feel in the films.

‘Do you do it?’ she’d dared to ask Nancy.

‘Me?’ For a moment Bonnie had thought she’d gone too far, but Nancy was almost impossible to offend. ‘Course I do, sometimes – if I want to.’

‘But who with? I’ve never seen a man stay the night.’

At that, though, Nancy had just winked and said, ‘It doesn’t have to be with a man, sweetheart,’ and Bonnie’s head had spun with the sudden realisation of just how much she had to learn about the world.

In the event, though, the boys at university hadn’t seemed to want to do anything but sneer at her, and so she’d been able to avoid the thorny issue of sex all term. Susie-Ann’s world, however, felt like a very much more grown-up place and she was already worried what her gorgeous date might expect of her.

‘Is Spike very cool?’ she asked Susie-Ann as the other girl layered mascara onto her eyelashes with careful concentration.

‘Spike? Don’t make me laugh! He’s just a kid from down the road and don’t you forget that, whatever act he tries to pull on you. He can be bit of a knob if you’re not on to him quick, but he’s a handsome one all right. And a dead good singer. He’s going to be famous – as famous as bloody Paul. They all are.’

‘Paul McCartney?’ Bonnie breathed, though she already knew the answer.

She’d quizzed Susie-Ann endlessly about the Best Boys and knew full well that it was their avowed intent to be the next big Merseybeat band, and she felt her stomach fizzing with joy that she was soon going to meet them.

‘I’ve had my new dress hanging up all day,’ she said, indicating the alcove below the dormer window.

She’d bought it last week with Aunt Nancy’s Christmas money. It had cost more than she’d ever usually spend but Nancy’s new friend Astrid, an Amazonian Swedish woman with a huge laugh and a doting way of looking at Nancy that made Bonnie’s head spin, had added to the pot and with Spike to impress, she’d decided to splash out. It was red and white gingham – just like Brigitte Bardot, or so Susie-Ann said – and it was short, a good inch above the knee. It had a pleated skirt and a bow at the neck and she felt both playground-small and backstreet-grown-up in it. It was quite the most risqué thing she’d ever worn, but she was going to be with the band so she had to fit in, right?

‘Head up, Sweet Bonnie,’ she could imagine Nancy saying in her crisp voice. ‘Wear it like you mean it!’

Automatically she stuck her head up and Susie-Ann squeaked in protest as the super-pale lipstick she was applying smudged with the movement.

‘Hold still, idiot, or we’ll never get you beautiful in time.’ She pulled back and then grinned. ‘What am I banging on about? You’d be beautiful in a bloody coal sack, Bonnie Jessop. Spike is going to do his nut when he sees you.’

‘Really?’

‘You better believe it, queen. Right, dress on and you can have a look at yourself.’

She whipped out the rollers and then stood back to pass Bonnie her dress. Bonnie stepped into it and let her friend zip it up at the back. The nerves were fizzing stronger than a sherbet dib-dab in her stomach and she hardly dared look in the mirror as Susie-Ann held it up. When she finally did open her eyes, she stared in astonishment. Was that really her?

Her fringe was flat against her forehead and the ends of her now straight hair were curled out instead of under. Her super-dark eyes and pale lips made her look like a negative of the girl she’d been before and she stared and stared, wondering how on earth she’d find the nerve to inhabit this glamorous creature.

‘Beautiful,’ Susie-Ann pronounced. ‘You look like something off the cover of Cosmopolitan. Spike will die for you!’

She beamed proudly and Bonnie drew in a deep breath and nodded.

Wear it like you mean it! Nancy’s voice said in her head again, and she was determined to do just that.

‘Bonnie! Charmed to meet you.’

Spike took her hand and planted an extravagant kiss on it before raking his fingers through his dark quiff.

‘You too,’ Bonnie managed.

Spike was every bit as cool as Susie-Ann had described. He was wearing a dark suit with a tight cut that showed his toned legs and a high-collared shirt that framed his handsome face. He was tall but not so tall she had to strain to look up to him, and muscled without being too showy about it. And his eyes! His eyes were the deepest chocolate brown, and Bonnie was sure she could melt right into them. She felt heat radiate out from the spot his lips had touched and put her hand to her burning cheek as he drew her into the Jacaranda coffee house. She’d stood outside so often that it was unbelievable to finally be heading inside, and it was every bit as fantastic as she’d imagined.

The Jacaranda was a tiny little place with a c. . .