Summer in the City: The perfect feel-good summer romance Read online

  Dedication

  For all the people who give so much to look after others

  SUMMER IN THE CITY

  Emma Jackson

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Central Park is a world of activity all year, but never more so than in the summertime. There are people everywhere: going to the zoo, jogging, doing tai chi, eating ice-creams, visiting one of the outdoor theatres, relaxing on the grass, kissing on the grass, boating, kissing while boating… Why do people get so horny in the summer?

  I’d been counting on it being a great place to get some inspiration. I was fed up with staring at the four walls of my sweatbox of an apartment, going out of my tiny mind because of the editorial letter my publisher sent me that morning, attached to a very brief cover email:

  Noelle

  Hope you’re well. Please find attached my edit letter.

  Yours, Patti

  It hadn’t boded well from the off. Patti was usually way chattier than that.

  I had been expecting a brutal critique though. I wasn’t happy with the book when I sent it off to her two weeks ago. And there’s a difference between knowing it’s rough around the edges and needs development – which is how it always feels – and feeling in my gut that something was missing.

  I’d dived straight into the letter because I don’t believe in delaying inevitable pain; best to get it over with. It was five pages long. Not too bad but…I’d scrolled down and saw what the headings were. Everything. Every integral component of a novel needed drastic work. Particularly the conclusion of the love story.

  So, here I was, sitting on a bench opposite the Alice in Wonderland statue staring at all the passers-by trying to smile rather than squint as the sun laser-beamed off its bronze surface while they took their photos. I had my latest sparkly notebook in front of me, ready for the epiphany to fix everything and…nothing. Just nothing.

  Honestly, it was like I’d never written a book before. It was driving me crazy.

  ‘Christ on a cracker.’ I jumped as my phone pinged, interrupting my reverie.

  Daisy: Are you going to be here soon? I’m

  soooo bored. Dad and Uncle Joe are talking

  about how wrong CSI is. Again.

  Shoot. My little sister Daisy. I checked the time. I was supposed to leave ten minutes ago to meet my family at the parking-lot-cum-outdoor-theatre where my twin brothers, Alfie and Teddy, were performing the final show of the semester for their college theatre class. They were going to be the main players in a gender flipped version of A Streetcar Named Desire – Stella and Blanche respectively – and I was looking forward to it. They were both great actors. They ought to be since they’d started their careers in kindergarten impersonating each other, driving us and their teachers mad.

  I scooped my belongings into my tote and left the park, trying to jog along the sidewalk to catch the subway across town. My progress was hampered both by the fact I’d not fastened my sandal tightly enough and by all of the people milling around in the heat like confused cattle. The train was typically hellish in the heat too, but it was running on time and I didn’t have far to go thankfully.

  The entire ride I watched all the couples, wondering what their deal was. How did they get together? Why did it work?

  I mean, I understood the basics of human biology – it was something like eighty per cent the right pheromones to suit their genetic code, but I couldn’t write a satisfying finale to my series with the heroine choosing her partner because she’d noticed he smelt right.

  Could I?

  How I was supposed to replicate that kind of relationship in my book when my own love life had sputtered to a halt. The last serious relationship I’d had (and I use the word “serious” in its loosest form), was a year ago. Since then I’d been trawling the depths of internet dating and not got past a second date with anyone.

  ‘Noelle,’ my mom called over the top of people’s heads as soon as she spotted me through the wire mesh, just outside the entrance to the parking lot. She waved her arm violently, knocking my eldest brother Tim – I have a lot of brothers – in the head. Her voice was accustomed to being pitched above the din of over half a dozen kids squabbling at home, so it carried like a football announcer across to me. ‘Over here, honey. I left your ticket on the door.’

  “The door” was a grumpy-looking teenager with a book of raffle tickets at the barrier. The place wasn’t exactly sold out.

  My family took up the entire back row on one side of the bleachers, which had been brought in. Mom, Dad, Tim and his girlfriend Delia, Sam – another brother – Daisy, my brother-in-law Quinn who must’ve been roped in because my eldest sister Lucy was staying at home with the baby, my aunt and uncle and my parents’ neighbour. It was a full house. Wherever we went, we went in force. It was like mobilising an army for every extracurricular activity.

  ‘Here she is finally,’ Uncle Joe cried. ‘Better late than never as always, eh Noelle?’

  ‘Better never than late when it comes to you, Uncle Joe,’ I quipped in response and flicked the brim of his baseball cap as I did the awkward side shuffle past them all to the space they’d left me between Daisy and Tim. I heard him laughing as I sat down.

  ‘We’ve just been staring at concrete anyhow,’ Daisy told me under her breath, referring to the asphalt stage with its bare-boned props of broken wooden crates and bald tyres. She wasn’t great at sitting down at the best of times. Daisy was always most comfortable when she was active but being parked here in the sunshine was especially painful for her.

  ‘Where’s your sun hat?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, don’t start fussing.’ She tutted. ‘I left it in my kit bag, is all.’

  ‘She can use some of yours, can’t she?’ Tim commented, trying to rearrange his shoulder around my, admittedly, rather large white hat. I made no apologies. When you’re red-headed, you don’t sit out in the sun for two hours without protection unless you want to end up with skin the colour and texture of a red M&M.

  ‘Sure, I’ll share.’ I put my arm along the back of her, so the brim of my hat covered her. She rolled her eyes but leaned into my shoulder for a cuddle.

  ‘What have you been up to anyway, Noelle?’ Tim asked. ‘You look all in. Everything going okay with the book?’

  ‘Sure. Living the dream as always. Must just be the heat. So hard to sleep when it’s this hot.’ I plastered a grin on my face and fanned myself with the programme. My parents – my whole family really, now most of us were adults – worried about my career. I’d given up being a midwife four years ago to write full time when my first two novels sold well, and I was offered the six-book contract.

  If I ever gave them any indication that things were not peachy, wonderful and amazing, they instantly started checking up on me, trying to find out if my m
edical insurance had lapsed and reassuring me that there was always a bed for me at home. I was so lucky to have them all – but also, having a minimum of nine immediate family members trying to look after me because they were worried I was going to starve, alone in my apartment, for the sake of my art, didn’t bolster my confidence. I wished they had a little more faith in me and my chosen career. Particularly when my faith in myself was wobbly.

  My series was all about this private detective who travelled around solving mysteries in cosy, small-town communities – and, of course, there was a love interest, who’d been dangling in one of those yummy will-they-won’t-they relationships. Only now, at the end of the series, I had to say whether they would, or they wouldn’t… As well as come up with a satisfying mystery that was not completely separate from the character development.

  I’d managed to write myself into a romantic subplot corner and I had no clue how to get out of it.

  My heroine, Charmaine, was capable and self-sufficient, smart and able to make friends (and a few enemies) everywhere she went. Kit – her love interest – had been there, helping out, basically being endlessly competent and making heart eyes at her because she was amazing. What possible reason could there be for her to give in and settle down with him when she was so cynical about love after her parents’ bitter divorce? I’d written her strong and independent and I’d be damned if I was going to change that, so…I was stuck.

  My cell phone pinged in my bag and my sister nudged me. ‘Someone’s messaged you.’

  ‘Yeah, I got it.’ I pulled it out and saw a text message from my friend Kaylee.

  When I sent out the SOS to my core team of writing buddies, Kaylee immediately told me not to worry about trying to plan the changes yet. That I should just let my editor’s comments percolate in my brain for a day and go out with her this evening for drinks. It was amazing how often a writer’s solution to something involved alcohol, cake, caffeine or all three. But I knew that it was sensible advice (the space, rather than the drinking). I’d said the same thing to other writers myself more than once. It was June 14th and my editor was due on vacation in three weeks. Ideally, I needed to get the revised manuscript to her by then, so she could read it while she was supposed to be relaxing.

  Three weeks was such a short amount of time for such a massive overhaul. I had to use every minute I could spare, and I knew Kaylee’d understand that…

  ‘Well, aren’t you gonna answer it?’ Daisy nudged me again. Teenagers are so twitchy about technology. She was thirteen and had only just been allowed social media, but when she wasn’t running around a track or hitting softballs, she was fielding hundreds of notifications on her cell.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Oh, I get it.’ She nodded knowingly. ‘Who are you ghosting? Did you go on a date with a creep and now you have to shake him off?’

  Mom’s head swivelled in my direction like a hawk sighting a mouse at a hundred yards, her blue eyes wide. ‘Do I need to speak to your father? He can send someone around if you’re being harassed.’

  ‘No.’ I leaned forward to look down the row, knowing Dad would already be listening in, picking up the tone of Mom’s voice. ‘No. I’m not being harassed, no police presence required,’ I told him and his raised eyebrows.

  ‘Why have you turned your ringer off now if you’re not trying to ignore someone?’ Daisy asked after watching me switch my cell to silent and put it away again.

  ‘We’re about to watch a play; that’s just good theatre etiquette.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, what did the guy do this time, Noelle?’ Tim chipped in, with a teasing grin. ‘Order your dinner for you? Put the jelly on before the peanut butter? Which interview question did he fail?’

  ‘I wish I’d never told you about that.’ I scowled at him. After the first couple of months of internet dating, I’d devised a list of questions I needed guys to answer before I even agreed to going on a date with them. Pretty obvious stuff. What was the point of meeting up if I knew our politics were completely incompatible or they never wanted kids, or they thought that writing wasn’t a real job? Made sense to me but Tim had taken every opportunity to wind me up about being picky and high maintenance, ever since.

  What was worse, the list of questions didn’t even help. Sure, I went on fewer dates, but they were equally pointless because the men I did meet up with had either lied their socks off, been strategically dishonest or I had zero chemistry with them.

  I was sick of it. And sick of being the butt of my family’s dating jokes. Lucy had found her soulmate, Quinn, in high school; Tim and Delia had been together since college and for some (sexist) reason, my brothers’ love lives were never of much interest; and Daisy was too young, so I got the full brunt of it. They even had labels for the types of men I apparently went for, with equally disastrous results. Was it a Type A failure or a Type B?

  Mom shook her head a little and relaxed again, now she was convinced there was no threat to one of her children to worry about. ‘I don’t understand online dating. Whatever happened to just letting fate take a hand? What’s the rush?’

  I made a vague sound. In principle I agreed with Mom. I knew I wasn’t old. I knew that even if I didn’t meet someone for another decade it needn’t mean my hopes of starting a family of my own were scuppered. Mom had fallen pregnant with Daisy when she was thirty-seven and I’d delivered many a baby to healthy, happy new mothers in their forties.

  But.

  My record for meeting good people through a dating app was so dire, I’d chosen to delete them all. My prospects of finding that needle-in-a-haystack person the old-fashioned way was even harder. I hadn’t been on a date in months.

  ‘You know what you should try,’ Tim announced, no doubt about to lay some classic mansplaining on me. I loved him but as the eldest brother he had this way of thinking he knew best, even though Lucy and I were older than him. ‘Blind dating.’

  ‘I know a guy. Is he allowed to bring his guide dog?’ Uncle Joe joked, always eager to wind someone up. He meant no harm, it was just his way, but I was feeling too crabby from my bad editing news, and bad dating memories, and the heat, so I didn’t even bother to retort. Choosing to put this show on in a parking lot was a nice, gritty touch but my God it was baking hot. I’d arrived at around 5.30pm and now I had to be about seventy years older.

  ‘All right, Joe, enough. Noelle will find her guy soon enough,’ Mom said. ‘Now, sweetheart, have you got Brigid’s christening in your diary?’

  ‘Of course. August 18th.’ I’d had it in the diary since she was two weeks old. I was going to be godmother, but I appreciated that Mom’s change of subject was to help me out.

  ‘And you’re coming to my softball jamboree next Sunday?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘And the week after that we’re having a barbecue. To celebrate the end of school,’ Mom added.

  I nodded, suppressing a sigh. I wanted to do all those things with them. But there were so many things to go to and do when it came to my family. It was like an exponential growth of obligation. As soon as I attended one event, I got invited to three more. Every moment I wasn’t doing something to fix my book made me panic. And if dating was a mess that I was just going to have to leave to serendipity, then my writing career was all I had. I couldn’t lose my grip on that.

  Maybe it was a good idea to meet up for drinks with Kaylee. If I ever made it out of this car park and I hadn’t been fried into a walking piece of bacon, some alcohol and a sense of perspective were definitely in order.

  ‘Leaving so soon, Sir Stephen?’

  I looked up from shutting down my laptop to see my new boss, Georgina, staring straight at me from the doorway to her office. She arched one fine black eyebrow at me in a way I’d grown used to over the first fortnight of my secondment to the New York office.

  Georgina often communicated with her eyebrows. Dependent on the accompanying expression, the movement of her left eyebrow could mean anything along a sl
iding scale from ‘I’m not here to listen to your BS’ to ‘this could be entertaining’. The small curl at the corner of her mouth as she lifted her ever-present coffee cup up for a sip made me gamble that she was feeling more playful than peevish.

  I gave her an easy smile as I continued packing up, closing and sliding my laptop into its case. ‘Duty calls I’m afraid.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Her heels clicked across the lacquered floor with ominous precision as she approached – she was in no hurry, presumably because she could tell I was. She leaned her hip against my desk and put her Starbucks down so close to me, it meant she had to lean forward and the collar of her dark blue blouse gaped open. My eyes remained glued to her face. ‘And what due-ty could possibly outweigh your responsibilities here?’ She did an exaggerated impression of my English accent.

  ‘Embarking on a quest, fulfilling my destiny, possibly wooing a fair maiden or two. The usual for us Knights of the Realm.’ It wasn’t a stellar attempt at a witty comeback but the best I could come up with when my boss was encroaching on my personal space and I wanted to leave the office at a reasonable hour for once.

  Since I arrived in the US, I’d worked twelve-hour days – at a minimum – including weekends. It’s not unusual in trading, and that applied doubly when taking over a senior broker’s accounts while they went on extended paternity leave for the summer. I expected it and would continue to put in every hour required, but today I had to locate a man I’d not seen since I was three years old. In other words, my father. In more accurate words, a stranger. But I could hardly tell my new boss that.

  ‘I can just picture you astride a mare.’ Georgina bit her lip and her brown eyes danced over my face.

  The visual image – which I think was the opposite of what she was trying to conjure up – made me want to laugh. Swallowing over it, I plucked her empty cup from my desk and wheeled my chair away to pop it in one of the recycling bins at the end of the bank of workstations.

  My new boss wanted to screw with me. Of that I was sure…I just didn’t know the precise nature of the screwing she intended. An actual, genuine physical encounter – or the metaphorical kind that would see me in trouble with HR if I acted on any of her flirtatious behaviour.