Winter Magic on Railway Lane (The Railway Lane #4)

Chapter 1

1

Libby Jacobs had always declared that the best part of being a flight attendant was the freedom and adventure that travelling the world brought her. The worst part was the occasional rude passenger.

But at least those passengers would never be rude to her ever again. Because she had just completed her last ever flight for the airline.

Libby angrily slammed the car into fourth gear as she headed out of Aldwych town and onto the narrow country lane towards her home village of Cranfield.

In the inky darkness before the dawn of an October morning, she could barely see any distance ahead, despite the car headlamps being on. Being in the middle of the English countryside, there were no streetlamps along the country lanes. Luckily, she knew this journey like the back of her hand. She had lived in Cranfield all of her life and knew every corner and crossing on the ten-mile journey ahead.

Which was a good thing, because she was barely concentrating on the road at all, such was her despair.

She groaned once more and shook her head, mainly at her lack of self-control. Ten years in the job and she still couldn’t control the rebel that she had been throughout her teenage years.

It wasn’t her fault that the budget airline she worked for had decided to branch out into long-haul travel. Nor was it her fault that the company’s expansion had been a complete and utter disaster.

However, it was her fault that she had already received two written warnings for being rude to difficult customers in the first-class section of the cabin that she had looked after. That meant that when the airline had announced the previous day that they were stopping the long-haul route with immediate effect, as well as a wave of redundancies, Libby was first in line to be out of a job.

The panic on the loss of her job was huge. Her monthly wages really helped to keep paying the bills on the little cottage on Railway Lane where she lived with her dad.

But, despite that, a tiny part of her was actually glad to be finally stopping the exhausting cycle of jet lag and disturbed sleeping patterns. The fact was that she was tired. Tired of spending so long away from home in order to support her dad. Tired of enduring a job which she no longer enjoyed. Tired of the overnight stopovers in bland hotels which were barely distinguishable from one city to the next, desperate to be back in Cranfield instead.

This craving to go home would have astounded the much younger Libby, who had yearned for nothing else but to escape and run far away from her home village.

Growing up, she had had a turbulent relationship with her father. Philip Jacobs had been the headmaster of the local infants school and liked everything regimented and in order, both at work and at home. He had never hurt her and Libby knew that her father loved her, even though they never said such things to each other.

However, Libby had inherited both her mother’s pale blonde hair as well as her nature. Her mother had been a free spirit who couldn’t stay within the constraints of normal limits either and drifted from job to job without a care in the world, preferring to be at home in the kitchen or the garden.

Love had seemingly overcome her parents’ different approaches to life. Her mother was the peacemaker, always soothing over yet another argument when Libby had been late home after playing too long in the fields or had ignored her father’s request to tidy her messy bedroom.

To escape what felt like his constant disapproval, Libby had rebelled against him every step of the way. Despite being bright, she had never taken her studies seriously and had often not turned up at all to most classes. To her father’s obvious disappointment, she had left school with hardly any qualifications and no ambition either, except to flee her stifling home life.

After a few years of trying out every job she could find in the area, the discovery that she could escape to the skies as a flight attendant had been too much of a lure to resist and Libby had signed up for training.

Of course, the reality was that there wasn’t an awful lot of glamour to being a flight attendant. The hours were long and hard, with the majority of time spent on her feet, especially when covering the long-haul flights in the past couple of years. She had been paid to go to some of the most amazing destinations in the world, but it wasn’t a holiday. Most of the time, she would arrive at the hotel booked for the flight crew, go to sleep and then head back on the next flight in the morning. It was a hard job and she had grown weary of it as the years had passed. Now in her early thirties, the despondency felt even worse.

She glanced at herself briefly in the mirror, despite the darkness inside the car. She could still make out her blue eyes lined with mascara and her make-up immaculate even many hours after she had applied it. Her long pale blonde hair was scraped back into a perfect bun.

Libby Jacobs , she silently told herself, you’re a long way from being a rebel now .

But some things had survived from her turbulent childhood and acting on impulse was one of them. Her quick temper and sarcastic way had ensured that she had just completed her very last flight. And with two written warnings, any other airline was unlikely to take her on either.

Libby sighed heavily as she turned a sharp corner down the dark country lane.

She had felt so differently about the job at first. She had attended the interview with the airline and it had gone so well that she could still feel the broad smile on her face as she had driven home that day ten years ago. She would finally have enough money to move out of home for good. She would be free of her father’s disappointed looks. She couldn’t wait.

But it had swiftly turned into a bittersweet day after being offered her dream job. Her mother had been unwell for a couple of years and the test results her parents had received that day had been the worst news possible. Her mother’s health had quickly deteriorated and she passed away only a couple of months later.

Libby and her dad had struggled on through their grief, trying to come to terms with the massive loss in their lives. Any arguments had been swiftly replaced with a stunned silence whenever Libby was home from her flight attendant training course.

They had managed to get through the funeral, to say their last goodbyes and Libby began to tentatively plan to pick up the pieces of her life and move out a short while later when she began to fly around the world with her new job.

However, the terrible series of events seemed set to continue when her father had a massive stroke one morning soon after the funeral. Whilst Philip had thankfully survived, the stroke had taken its toll on his physical and mental well-being. He had to give up work as he had lost some use in his right arm and right leg. Heartbroken from both the loss of his beloved wife and the abrupt halt from his life of teaching, he spiralled into a deep depression.

He effectively shut down to the outside world, rarely leaving the house. He became a self-imposed prisoner of his own home, cutting himself off from their friends and neighbours. A decade had passed and nothing had changed for the better for Philip. Apart from his daily walk to pick up the newspaper, it was a world mostly devoid of human contact too, apart from his daughter and church on a Sunday morning. She had gently encouraged him to try to find new hobbies outside of the house to no avail.

Libby had always blamed herself for her father’s stroke. It was all her fault, of course. If only she had behaved better growing up and not put so much stress and strain on him. If only she had taken better care of him, as she had promised her mum during those last wretched weeks. Now he was trapped inside his own insular world and Libby was trapped there as well.

As the main breadwinner for the household, there was no way she could have left him. She had briefly contemplated giving up her new job to look after her dad but the money had been too good an opportunity to pass up. But whilst Philip had recovered enough to be able to take care of himself, she felt too guilty to move out and so, ten years later, she was still there, at the age of thirty-one. But without a job to support them both, what on earth was she going to do now?

Her friends all thought that she had this amazing life, dating pilots and travelling the world. But the truth was that most of the time she was away, she was lonely. Really lonely. Perhaps now she could find a job closer to home and be with the people she loved more often.

For a brief moment, she wondered about whether losing her job might just give her the push to turn her hobby into something more permanent.

Growing up, her favourite time of the week was when she and her mum had made different flavours of chocolate truffles in their tiny kitchen at home. The smell of cocoa still invoked the warmth and love that her mother had given her.

After her mother had passed away, Libby had stopped making chocolate for a long time. Then, on a stopover in Switzerland a couple of years ago, on a whim she had booked herself in for a chocolate making course. From there, her curiosity had grown into a full-blown obsession.

She didn’t want to upset her dad as it had been his wife’s favourite hobby. So when he was at church on a Sunday morning, for one morning of the week she would make all sorts of chocolates and truffles. For those couple of hours, she would forget about all of her worries and just focus on the fabulous flavours that she could concoct. However, she always ensured that everything was cleared away by the time her dad returned, with no trace of what had occurred for him to suspect. Only the alluring, sweet aroma of cocoa hung in the air afterwards.

Eventually, she had been brave enough to show her friends what she had been making. And after much positive feedback, Libby had even sold quite a few boxes of her handmade truffles from a small stand in Platform 1 – the coffee shop in the village owned by her friends Ryan and Katy.

But Libby had a dream. And that was to make chocolate from bean to bar so that she could control every step of the process and ensure it tasted just right. On a flight to Venezuela, she had taken time to source a local cocoa bean farmer. She had even bought a small bag of cocoa beans and had taken time to roast the beans herself when she had got home. It had been such a success that she had ordered a couple of larger bags for future use.

The trouble was that the kitchen in the tiny cottage in Railway Lane was miniscule and there was no way that she could up production to any degree without her dad finding out. She had even changed the name on the packets that she sold in Platform 1 on the off chance that he happened to come across them. She couldn’t upset him any more. He had already been through so much.

But despite the secrecy, chocolate brought her joy. It felt as if it was the only thing that she did solely for her own pleasure. The only selfish thing she could call her own when nothing else made her feel whole, not even the endless stream of first dates she went on each month.

As if on cue, her phone lit up in the darkness. She could just read the beginning of a flirty message from one of the pilots she had met on her outbound journey. She would press delete as soon as she parked up the car, having already spotted his wedding ring whilst they had been chatting.

She rolled her eyes in the darkness. Men! She had dated many but none had compared to Ethan Connolly. Upon thinking of him, as usual she was instantly irritated at her lack of self-control. Surely she should be over him by now?

She had grown up with Ethan and his elder brother Ryan, who both lived at Cranfield station with their family. But she had always been closest to Ethan, who had become her best friend throughout their childhood. Together they had rebelled, bunking off school when they should have been studying or messing about in the classroom whenever they did decide to attend.

But as her teenage years had progressed, Libby had become aware of something else, wanting something more from him. When Ethan had asked her to the prom, she had thought all her secret dreams were about to come true. But Ethan had been a completely different person that night, cold and uncaring towards her. She had totally misread the situation and had quickly realised that he didn’t care for her at all. So the evening had ended in disaster with Libby not speaking to him.

Then her mother had grown ill and Libby didn’t have the time or energy to question what had gone wrong in their friendship. So they had slowly drifted apart when she had never needed Ethan more. She remembered him giving her a hug at her mother’s funeral. But, after that, he had left Cranfield to work abroad, rarely coming home to visit his family.

Whenever she did bump into him, eager to protect her still vulnerable heart, she treated him with cool indifference and sarcasm. And apart from one catastrophic lapse in judgement a couple of years later, they still barely conversed with each other.

Libby shook her head. She couldn’t think about Ethan now. She had to concentrate on working out how she was going to pay the bills when her redundancy money ran out.

Annoyed at herself for giving in to the old familiar feelings he always seemed to invoke in her, she put her foot down and the Mini Cooper quickly accelerated. However, she took the next corner too fast and almost ended up in the ditch at the side of the road. With a squeal of tires, she slammed on the brakes and took a deep breath to steady herself.

As she sat there, a gust of wind blew some nearby fallen leaves across her windscreen. Autumn had arrived and the air was noticeably cooler.

With a shiver, she put the car into first gear and then drove more slowly as she neared Cranfield. Once more, she wondered how on earth she was going to tell her dad that she had lost her job. What was she going to say? How could she allay his fears and worries about money when her own were already almost overwhelming?

As she passed the sign for Cranfield, she saw that the tiny hamlet was still in darkness. But on the far horizon, beyond the green rolling hills, the first glimmer of daylight was beginning to appear as dawn began to break.

All the houses were in darkness. Except one, she realised, slowly drawing the car to a halt. The old infants school, long since closed, sat at the very end of Railway Lane where she lived in one of the cottages with her dad.

When her father had lost his job, the school had been shut down and the children moved to a bigger school in the next village. The schoolhouse had remained empty for the past decade until it had been bought and renovated a couple of years ago. Even then it had stayed empty. But as Libby looked through her windscreen once more, she knew that she wasn’t mistaken. There was most definitely a light on inside. It looked like a torch flicking around, its beam showing through the glass windowpanes.

Suddenly, all her frustrations boiled over. The school, so beloved to her dad, was precious, with its memories of happier times, long since gone, when life was simple and complete, before the pressures of growing up had come upon her. How dare someone decide to break in, no doubt to steal whatever was left inside!

Ever impetuous, Libby grabbed the first thing she could think of from her carry-on bag as a weapon – a square marble pastry board she had bought from a cook shop in Washington DC on her stopover the day before. Although she had been intending to use it to practise tempering chocolate, it was certainly nice and heavy, she thought, weighing it in her hands.

And then, carrying the marble board and still in a fury, she got out of the car and raced up the short path to the front door of the schoolhouse.

Noticing it was ajar, she stepped into the entrance hall, fumbling for a light switch. But before she could adjust to the darkness, she found herself blinded by a light shining straight into her face!

Libby reacted instinctively, lifting her arm up high and bringing down the marble board onto the intruder’s head with as much force and pent-up anger as she could muster.

In the darkness, she felt the person slump to the floor and heard him swear.

Then she heard a familiar voice drawl, ‘Always a pleasure to see you too, Libby.’

The torch on the man’s mobile suddenly lit up his face and Libby found that she was staring into the eyes of Ethan Connolly.