LITMIR.BIZ

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She’d even covered for the two of them that amazing night they’d spent together in a secluded cove on the beach. Could she and his father be conspiring?

      Damn straight, he thought with a shudder. Maybe he was finally about to get his wish and see Abby again. Or maybe he was about to land in a whole mess of trouble. He wondered if, with Abby involved, he’d actually be able to tell the difference.

      An hour later with the inn’s dismal financial figures still in his head, Trace climbed on his bike and took a drive to see the property. He was hoping he’d find something—anything—to convince him to let the loan stand. He needed arguments he could take to the board and his father with total confidence.

      Winding along the coastal road, he breathed in the salty air and relaxed as the sun beat down on his shoulders. It was late spring, but there was still the scent of lilacs on the breeze as he rounded the curve by the Finch property. Widow Marjorie Finch, who’d been bent and wizened when he was a boy, loved her lilacs. They’d been allowed to grow and spread until they formed a hedge all along the road. When honeysuckle had grown up in the bushes, she’d attacked it as if it were an alien invader. Her loving attention had paid off. The bushes were heavy with fragrant, delicate blossoms.

      To his right, along the narrow strip of land that ran along the beach, ospreys were building their nests back in the same bare branches where they’d built them for years. To his amusement, one intrepid osprey was constructing an elaborate configuration of branches, bits of string and even a strand of yellow police tape on a post at the end of someone’s dock. The owner was going to be ticked as hell to discover that his dock would be off-limits for the rest of summer while the birds of prey took up residence.

      Eventually he reached the turnoff to the inn, converted from what had once been a sprawling Victorian home on a pinnacle of land overlooking the bay. The last time he’d been here, the place had been badly in need of paint, its boards weathered by the sea air and harsh winter winds. The Adirondack chairs and rockers on the porch had been in an equally sad state of disrepair. The once perfectly manicured lawn had gone mostly to crabgrass, the gardens to weeds. The Pattersons hadn’t put a dime into the place for years, and the neglect had shown.

      Now, though, there was plenty of evidence that Jess had been hard at work remodeling the inn. The exterior was a soft white that seemed to reflect a hint of blue from the nearby water. Shutters were a bold red. The grass wasn’t as lush as it had once been, but it was green and well-trimmed. The azaleas and lilacs were in bloom, and one overgrown purple rhododendron spilled its huge blooms over a porch railing at the back of the house. The inn’s sign had been freshly painted and hung from brass hooks on a new pole at the edge of the driveway. It looked to him as if the place was ready to make a comeback.

      Jess’s payment record, however, told a different story. Since taking out the loan a year earlier, she already had a history of late payments, had missed several altogether. She’d spent every penny of her small-business loan, and no opening date for the inn had been set. Her cash flow was nonexistent. She’d already had a couple of formal warnings from the bank. Ever since the credit disaster in the mortgage industry, banks were getting jittery about loans that looked as if they were going bad. On paper, it appeared the bank had no choice except to issue a foreclosure notice. Trace cringed at the prospect.

      Even as he sat on his bike in the driveway, the door opened and Jess stepped outside. She caught sight of him and frowned.

      “What are you doing here, Trace?” she asked.

      Scowl in place, she crossed the lawn, hands on hips, her feet shoved into a pair of rubberized, all-weather clogs from one of the big outdoor apparel companies. Her jeans and T-shirt were splattered with paint—white, plus something close to Williamsburg blue, if he remembered his color palette correctly.

      When she was standing practically toe-to-toe with him, her defiant gaze locked with his, she reminded him of another O’Brien with a fiery Irish temper.

      “Well?” she challenged.

      “Just looking things over.”

      “For your father, no doubt.”

      “For the bank,” Trace corrected.

      “I thought you’d left town years ago, that you wanted no part of the bank.”

      “I don’t. I’m just filling in for a few months.”

      “Long enough to make my life hell?”

      He grinned at that. “Maybe longer.” He made a sweeping gesture toward the house and grounds. “You’ve been busy.”

      “It’s taken a lot of work. I’ve done most of it myself to save money,” she said, her chin lifted with pride and a hint of belligerence.

      “Might have made more sense to hire people and get it done sooner, so you could open.”

      “I didn’t see it that way.”

      “Obviously not.”

      “Do you want to take a look around inside?” she asked, her expression hopeful, her tone filled with enthusiasm. “Maybe once you’ve seen how great it looks, you’ll be able to go back and tell your father to be patient.”

      “It’s not that simple, Jess. I know he’s warned you that you’re getting too far behind. The bank looks at the bottom line, not at whether or not you’re doing a good job with a paintbrush.”

      “When did you turn into a hard-ass, by-the-numbers guy like your dad? You weren’t that way when you were seeing my sister.” She gave him a considering look. “Or were you? Is that why the two of you split up?”

      Trace stiffened. “You really don’t want to go there,” he warned. “Abby has nothing to do with this.”

      “Doesn’t she? For all I know, you’re absolutely thrilled by the prospect of payback for whatever she did to you. She was the one who broke it off, wasn’t she?”

      The comment was not only intrusive, it was insulting. “Dammit, Jess, you don’t know a thing about what happened back then and you sure as hell don’t know anything about me if you think I’d use you to get even with your sister.”

      “Really?” she said, her expression innocent. “She’s coming back, you know. She’ll be here tomorrow.”

      Trace tried not to let his immediate and unsteady reaction to the news show. “Tell her I said hey,” he said mildly. He started his bike. “See you around, Jess.”

      Her show of defiance faltered. “What are you going to tell your father, Trace?”

      “I have no idea,” he said candidly. He looked into her eyes. “But I will promise you this, it won’t have anything at all to do with Abby.”

      She nodded slowly. “I’ll take you at your word about that.”

      As he rode off toward town, though, he couldn’t help wondering if she should. When it came to his conflicted feelings for Abby O’Brien, his word might not be entirely trustworthy.

       2

      “Where are we going, Mommy? Tell us again,” Caitlyn commanded.

      “When are we gonna get there?” Carrie whined. “We’ve been driving and driving forever. I wanna go home.”

      “It’s barely been a half hour since we left the airport,” Abby told Carrie, her patience already frayed by the long security line at the airport in New York and the even more tedious wait at the car-rental counter in Baltimore. The flight itself, less than an hour from LaGuardia to BWI in Baltimore, had gone smoothly. The girls had been excited to be on a plane, but now they were tired and cranky and completely uninterested in the scenery as they drove south toward Chesapeake Shores. They might have been pacified by a stop for ice cream or some other treat, but Abby was determined not to reward them for bad behavior just to get a few minutes of peace.

      “Why don’t you try to take a little

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