Flowers on Main. Sherryl Woods

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СКАЧАТЬ After all, he was the one who’d been left behind. She might be an O’Brien, with all that implied in this town, but she’d left. She was no longer one of them.

      Then, again, how could she allow what had happened so long ago to keep her from finding peace for herself? Over the past three weeks she’d increasingly come to believe that she belonged right here. She hadn’t figured out what she wanted to do with herself, much less any of the details, but when she thought of staying, she felt a kind of serenity that had eluded her for some time now.

      “I want to come home for good. I want to live in Chesapeake Shores,” she said aloud, while the waiting seagulls regarded her solemnly, hoping for more scraps. The words sounded right, convincing. Surprising.

      Like her sister Abby and her brothers, Bree had been only too eager to leave behind the town that had absorbed so much of her father’s time, then skyrocketed his career as an architect, developer and urban planner in a way that had taken him away from them. Now, it seemed, she was ready to come home. The decision, barely made, felt right.

      Except for its impact on Jake. If she decided to stay, first she had to find some way to coexist with the man whose heart she’d broken. Unfortunately, based on today’s reception, it seemed unlikely he’d make that easy for her.

      “Maybe it shouldn’t be easy,” she murmured as the seagulls watched her quizzically and a couple of weekday tourists regarded her curiously.

      She smiled wryly. She must present quite a sight, with no makeup, the sea breeze whipping strands of her hair out of the clasp meant to hold it atop her head and talking to herself. If she were a character in one of her own plays, there would be quite a story behind this scene.

      In fact, there was quite a story behind it. What she couldn’t quite predict for the real-life version was whether it would turn out to have a happy ending or wind up a tragedy.

      The crab-cake sandwich was sitting heavily in Jake’s stomach. One beer had turned into two before he’d cut himself off and returned to work. He planned to lock himself in his office at the nursery and spend the afternoon catching up on paperwork. As much as he hated that side of the landscaping business, at least it required concentration, which meant his mind wouldn’t be wandering to thoughts of Bree the way it had all during lunch, despite Will and Mack’s best attempts to talk about anything and everything else.

      They’d exhausted Orioles baseball, the upcoming football season with the Ravens, politics and even the usually lively recitation of Mack’s dating exploits. The latter, unfortunately, had cut a little too close to the unspoken topic of Bree, so Jake had cited a busy afternoon schedule and cut the meal short.

      En route to his desk, he kicked his trash can across the office, then threw a stack of seed catalogs on the floor. It was when a chair hit the wall that his sister came flying into the room.

      “What on earth has gotten into you?” Connie demanded, ducking behind the door when an empty soda can came flying in her direction.

      “If you have an ounce of sense, you’ll get the hell out of here,” Jake growled, turning his back on her to stare out the window at rows of shrubs and trees currently being examined by an elderly couple at the behest of one of his best salesmen. He recognized the Whitcombs. He’d been working for them since his days of cutting grass as a teenager. They’d been asking lately about crepe myrtles to fill in their landscaping. The trees that flowered in late summer came in an increasing range of colors now. Molly Whitcomb had her heart set on a dark purple one, while Walter liked the more traditional pink. Jake wondered idly who was winning the battle.

      He heard his office door click shut and turned around expecting to find himself alone, but his sister was calmly sitting on the chair opposite his desk, her expression patient.

      “So, you don’t have an ounce of sense?” he asked, amused despite his sour mood.

      “That’s what I hear,” she said. “I certainly don’t run from trouble, the way you apparently do.”

      Jake bristled. “What the hell does that mean?”

      “You and Bree—just about face-to-face at Sally’s, and you turn around and take off. Sound familiar?”

      He scowled at her. “How did you hear about that?”

      She rolled her eyes. “Oh, please, did you honestly think that news wouldn’t be all over town within five minutes? That’s the joy of cell phones, little brother. The local grapevine works at lightning speed these days.”

      “More’s the pity.”

      “So, do you want to talk about it?”

      “No.”

      She shrugged. “What else is new? You haven’t wanted to talk about Bree for six years. Now, personally, I think you’d get her out of your system a whole lot faster if you’d rant and rave and tell the universe exactly what you think about her.”

      “Bree is out of my system,” he insisted. And what he thought of her wasn’t fit for saying aloud. “I broke up with her, remember?”

      Connie gave him a sympathetic look, the kind that made him want to break things.

      “You may have said the words, Jake, but she broke your heart long before that. Don’t even try to deny it. I was here. I saw what it did to you when she left for Chicago. And something tells me there was a whole lot more to the story than you’ve ever admitted.”

      “I do not want to discuss this,” he reminded her fiercely. “I mean it, Connie. The subject of Bree is off-limits. If you bring up her name again, I’ll fire you.”

      “No, you won’t,” she said serenely. “But I’ll drop it for now. Or at least I will after you’ve answered one question for me. What are you going to do if she’s back here to stay?”

      “Bree’s a hotshot playwright in Chicago. She’s not staying, so it’s not going to be an issue.” Please God, let me be right about that.

      “I’m just asking, what if—”

      Jake cut her off. “Drop it, Connie. I mean it.”

      She sighed. “Consider it dropped, for now anyway. Are you coming for dinner tonight?”

      Ever since her divorce five years ago, he usually had dinner with Connie and his seventeen-year-old niece two or three times a week. A good deal for him, Jake acknowledged, because his sister’s cooking was a whole lot better than his. So was their company most of the time. It seemed best to steer clear tonight, though, with the whole conversation about Bree still a little too fresh. If Connie could pester the daylights out of him, his niece was worse. Jenny Louise thought his love life “sucked,” and considered it her own personal mission to point that out to him on a regular basis. If she’d caught wind of the incident at Sally’s, he’d never hear the end of it.

      “No,” he told Connie flatly.

      “I’m fixing your favorite—meat loaf and mashed potatoes and fresh green beans.”

      Jake almost regretted turning her down. Not only was the meal his all-time favorite, but nobody made it better than his sister. She used their mom’s old meat-loaf recipe, complete with mushroom gravy. Unfortunately, he knew in this instance, it also came with a scoop of sisterly advice and a side СКАЧАТЬ