by JoAnn Ross
Lose yourself in the magic, charm and romance of Christmas in the Pacific Northwest as imagined in JoAnn Ross’s heartwarming Honeymoon Harbor series.
Growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, Jolene Wells is forever indebted to the mother who encouraged her to fly—all the way to sunny LA and a world away from Honeymoon Harbor. Although Jolene vowed never to look back, returning home isn’t even a question when her mom faces a cancer scare. Which means running into Aiden Mannion all over town, the first boy she ever loved—and lost—and whom she can barely look in the eye.
Aiden’s black-sheep reputation may have diminished when he joined the marines, but everything he’s endured since has left him haunted. Back in Honeymoon Harbor to heal, he’s talked into the interim role of police chief, and the irony isn’t lost on the locals, least of all Aiden. But seeing Jolene after all these years is the unexpected breath of fresh air he’s been missing. He’s never forgotten her through all his tours, but he’s not sure anymore that he’s the man she deserves.
Despite the secret they left between them all those years ago, snow is starting to fall on their picturesque little town, making anything seem possible...maybe even a second chance at first love.
Praise for JoAnn Ross’s Herons Landing
“The connection between a deeply conflicted man slowly coming to terms with loss and a woman who understands him adds strength and intensity to a perceptive story that is more than the average friends-into-lovers romance. Vivid, detailed descriptions, real-life issues that resonate... Verdict: An excellent start to a promising community series with a stunning Olympic Coast setting.”
—Library Journal
“Perennial favorite Ross delivers the emotionally intense first book in her small town contemporary romance series, Honeymoon Harbor... Ross has always been known for her ability to create truly memorable characters whose stories resonate sharply. This amazing book is touched by pain and grief, but also love and hope. A wonderful novel!”
—RT Book Reviews
“A widower gets a second chance at love with his wife’s best friend in this...sweet first book in Ross’s Honeymoon Harbor series... Fans of cozy small-town romances will be willing to read further in the series.”
—Publishers Weekly
More select praise for JoAnn Ross
“Ross’s Shelter Bay series spotlights her talent for blending vibrant characters, congenial small-town settings, and pressing social issues in a heartwarming contemporary romance.”
—Booklist
“Beautifully descriptive and gently paced, this heartwarmer captures coastal small town flavor perfectly.”
—Library Journal on Seaglass Winter
“It isn’t often readers find characters they’re willing to spend a weekend with. However, that’s exactly what Ross accomplishes...enveloping the reader in the lives of two endearing, albeit flawed, characters.”
—RT Book Reviews on The Homecoming
Also available from JoAnn Ross
Honeymoon Harbor
ONCE UPON A WEDDING (novella)
HERONS LANDING
HOME TO HONEYMOON HARBOR (novella)
JOANN ROSS
Snowfall on Lighthouse Lane
As always, to Jay, who never stopped believing.
Contents
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
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
JOLENE’S QUICK AND EASY CHEESY CORN-AND-BACON SIDE DISH
EXCERPT FROM SUMMER ON MIRROR LAKE BY JOANN ROSS
CHAPTER ONE
October
Washington State coast
LIFE, AS AIDEN MANNION knew firsthand, could be dangerous. Anything could happen. You could be hit by a taxi while sightseeing in Times Square. Run headfirst into a tree while skiing down a diamond run pretending you were Bode Miller. Or you could be a cop who got up one morning, headed off to work on the joint police/Department of Homeland Security detail you’d been assigned to and, out of the blue, end up in the ER getting a slug dug out of your thigh while your partner was being wheeled off to the morgue.
He watched the fishing boats chug along beneath a gray quilted sky from the deck of his family’s vacation house. Out on the horizon a storm was brewing, bringing to mind all the ships that had sunk into the sea off this wild, rugged Washington coast. Including ancestors from the Harper side of his family.
He took a long drink of coffee. It was black and thick and sweet. It was his thirtieth day waking up without a hangover. “Which has to be an improvement, right?”
“Too bad no one’s around to give you your one-month chip.” The dry response had him realizing he’d spoken out loud. It also made him laugh for the first time in a very long while.
“You always were a smart-ass.”
“Takes one to know one, dude,” his former partner shot back with that flash of grin that was the last thing Aiden remembered seeing before all hell broke loose. When Bodhi Warfield’s ghost had first appeared on the ferry headed to Honeymoon Harbor, Aiden had thought he was a hallucination. That was weird because, after attending Bodhi’s funeral—with all the pomp and ceremony that occurred when a police department lost one of their own—he’d purposefully waited until he’d gotten here to the coast house to start drinking. Having witnessed too many drunk driving deaths during his LAPD patrol days, no way was he going to risk causing another.
But after drinking himself to oblivion for the first several weeks and, waking up with a hangover the size of Mount Olympus, he’d come to the conclusion that being a drunk was getting boring. So, he’d just stopped. Cold turkey. The same way he’d quit the cops. But Bodhi had continued to hang around.
“Don’t ghosts get cold?” Aiden asked.
Bodhi glanced down his California beach-tanned chest at the Hawaiian-print board shorts he was wearing instead of the leather biker dude duds he’d been wearing when killed. “Surfers are too chill to get cold,” he said.
They’d been an odd couple. The laid-back surfer—who’d changed his name from Broderick to that of Patrick’s Swayze’s surfer bank robber character from Point Break, then had joined the cops mostly to piss off his liberal psychologist professor parents—and the Marine turned vice cop who still carried an edge from his bad boy days. But that difference had made them a great team. Like Starsky and Hutch. Men in Black’s Agents J and K. Lethal Weapon’s Murtaugh and Riggs, and Miami Vice’s Crocket and Tubbs, who even Bodhi had reluctantly admitted would win on the chill factor.
“But hey,” his partner would say, whenever the topic would come up, “they were just actors playing roles. We’re the real deal, Mannion.”
And they had been. Until they weren’t.
“Someone’s coming,” Bodhi said.
Apparently death gave you preternatural senses, because it was another few seconds before Aiden heard the car rumbling across the bridge over the creek fed by glacier waters that would soon be icing up for the winter.
The house had been built on the cliff where the mighty Pacific—ill named, Aiden always thought, since there was nothing peaceful about it—constantly warred with the land. The towering sea stacks offshore, many with trees still growing atop from when they’d been part of the mainland, were proof that wind and water would always eventually win.
Built for a whaling captain nearly a hundred years ago, the house was two stories with a widow’s walk around the top. Seth Harper, who’d taken over his family’s construction company (which had originally built the house) and was engaged to Aiden’s sister, Brianna, was the only person, other than his immediate family, who knew what had gone down the night Bodhi had lost his life. The night Aiden had lost his way.
The driveway was long and lined with towering, shaggy Douglas fir trees. He walked around to the front of the wraparound deck and watched the familiar SUV come into view.
“It’s your dad,” his partner said, without even bothering to look up.
“Seems to be.” He knew his parents worried, but he’d reminded them that he was no longer that wild-ass boy who’d gone off to war. All he needed was a little time to adjust. Something he could do better on his own. During their twice-a-week check-in phone calls, he hadn’t shared the fact that he wasn’t exactly alone.
“He’s bringing change.”
“And you know that how? What, is my life written down on some big Life and Times of Aiden Mannion board somewhere?”
Aiden had been raised Catholic, but life had turned him a hard-core agnostic. Had it not been for his former partner’s ghost showing up, he would’ve gone full-out atheist, but maybe there was something to the life after death thing, after all.
Unfortunately, every time he tried to pry some details about the afterlife from Bodhi, he’d get only a shrug and the response that it wasn’t his place to tell, but not to worry, it wasn’t boringly pastoral and the music was a helluva lot cooler than just harp players.
That was encouraging. Not that Aiden was in any hurry to find out for himself. He’d assured his mom that yeah, he might have issues, but she didn’t have to worry about him being suicidal. Part of him wondered if his imagination had recreated his partner to help him overcome the gut-wrenching guilt that in the beginning had hung over him like a cold, wet shroud. If that was the case, it seemed to be working, so he wasn’t going to dig too deeply into the question.
He watched his father park the SUV and climb out with a cooler that Aiden knew was filled with meals his mom had cooked. She’d sent John Mannion out with a similar cooler last week. And every week since Aiden had arrived back in Washington.
“You don’t have to keep coming all the way out here,” he greeted his dad. “The freezer has enough food for any army.”
“You know your mother. She believes in the food pyramid. Which is why she sneaks green stuff into her dishes. I also picked up a pizza at Luca’s.”
“Loaded?”
“Is there any other kind?” John carried the cooler past Aiden and Bodhi and into the kitchen. “If you moved back to town, you could have all the pizza you wanted. And Luca won’t make you put vegetables on it.”
“I’m happy where I am.”
Sure, he was drifting, okay, maybe stalled, but what was wrong with that? Wasn’t a guy entitled? He had, after all, been shot. Maybe not that badly, but it should give him a pass.
“I went to Mom’s birthday party. And that wedding,” he pointed out.
“Four months ago. And you only went to the wedding because your sister guilted you into it because her fiancé’s, who used to be your best friend, mother had come back from Yellowstone Park to officiate.”
It had been hard enough to sober up enough to drag himself out to the family Christmas tree farm just out of Honeymoon Harbor for his mother’s birthday celebration, but at least that had been just family who—except for his grandfather, who seemed to have lost his conversational filter—had treated him with kid gloves.
Then Brianna had taken him out to the barn, supposedly to show him all that had been done to fix it up for summer theater companies while he’d been away, and to tell him how she and Seth Harper were trying to decide whether to have their next year’s summer wedding here in the barn or in the garden of her bed-and-breakfast, Herons Landing.
“And speaking of weddings,” she’d mentioned offhandedly, “Seth’s mom is going to officiate Kylee and Mai’s ceremony tomorrow.”
“You mentioned that, too.”
“You should come.”
“Why? Kylee was yours and Zoe’s friend. I barely knew her. And I’ve never even met Mai.”
“In the first place, you can’t hide away like a hermit forever. In the second place, you should go because you’ve been ignoring my fiancé, who used to be your best friend, and it’s not like an hour or so of socializing with a few old friends is going to kill you. And third—” she ticked the reasons off on fingers tipped in a turquoise polish that reminded him of the Caribbean “—we’re all worried about you, Aiden. Including Seth. And me.”
“You’re playing the Catholic guilt card,” he’d grumbled.
She grinned, looking not the least bit guilty. “It’s my superpower.”
And so, unable to say no, he’d caved. And while it had admittedly been good to talk with Seth, it still weirded him out thinking about his best friend and his sister having sex. Unfortunately, Brianna hadn’t warned him that Jolene Wells would also be there. That was probably because his sister had no way of knowing about his and Jolene’s past.
“You sure have a lot of secrets for a guy who always came off so uncomplicated,” Bodhi said. Aiden glanced over at his father, who, after putting the pizza in the center of the table, had begun loading up the refrigerator. Fortunately, he didn’t appear to hear a thing. That meant Aiden’s ghost, hallucination, or imagination, was a private one.
Aiden followed his dad to the kitchen and got out some paper plates and napkins. “It hasn’t been that long,” he belatedly responded to his dad’s comment.
“Four months.”
Four months, one week and five days, he thought. There had admittedly been those lost weeks when he’d first arrived.
“I need your help,” his dad said as he popped the top on two bottles of beer.
“I’m not drinking.”
“Good for you. This is a nonalcoholic winter ale your brother made.”
“Because nothing says I’m an alcoholic like drinking a nonalcoholic beer.”
“Or it could say, I’m a smart guy who wants to keep my wits about me while the morons around me are getting plastered,” John Mannion suggested in that deceptively mild tone that somehow possessed as much power as Aiden’s former drill instructor’s shouts. “Why don’t you withhold judgment until you taste it?”
Shrugging, Aiden took the bottle, tipped it to his lips and swallowed. But not before rolling it around in his mouth. He may not be an expert, but he’d drunk enough beer over his lifetime to recognize good stuff when he tasted it.
“This is really great.” Good enough if you gave it to a guy without a label, he might not realize it was alcohol free.
“Can you imagine Quinn doing anything that wasn’t?”
No. Quinn Mannion always been the quintessential perfect eldest child. A real-life Eagle Scout with the badges to prove it, along with being head altar boy at St. Peter the Fisherman’s Church, had made him a hard act to follow. Which was why Aiden hadn’t even tried, instead going for a gold medal in rebellion.
Quinn had been making big bucks as a corporate lawyer
in Seattle when he’d up and quit, come home to Honeymoon Harbor and started a brewery and pub, following in the footsteps of their ancestor Finn Mannion, who’d been forced to shutter the Mannion family pub during Prohibition. The beer was as perfect as everything else Quinn did. It was dark, with an honest-to-God beer flavor that carried a hint of seasonal spices.
“He makes a summer version, too,” John said. “It’s got a citrusy taste that’s great for cookouts. It got a lot of buzz locally, so he’s going regional with it next summer. This is the first season, but I suspect it’s going to do as well as his Captain Jack Sparrow.”
That beer had won a bunch of awards, Aiden knew. It had also made it down to LA, where it was strictly a draft beer, because, according to Quinn, most distributors and bars kept kegs cold all the time, allowing for a consistent flavor advantage. The kegs also protected the beer from light. And proving that Quinn hadn’t exactly given up capitalism when he’d walked away from his big bucks lawyer gig, he’d told Aiden that kegs had bars buying and selling a lot more than in bottles.
“Damn, I miss beer.” Bodhi heaved a huge sigh and shook his sun-bleached hair “And pizza. It’s a bummer having to live vicariously through you, since you’ve never exactly been Mr. Party Guy, but the past few months have been brutal.”
“You could leave,” Aiden shot back. Then cringed, when his dad, who’d been dishing up slices of pizza glanced up. Damn.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he backtracked. “I meant you didn’t have to hang around to keep me company just because Mom’s worried about me.”
“Parents worry. It comes with the job. But this is a busy time, getting ready for the Christmas tree-selling season, so I’m only staying long enough to eat a slice of pizza and offer you a proposition.”
“Okay.”
While his mother could be a velvet steamroller you could see coming from a mile away, his dad had stealth ninja skills that had you agreeing to something before you knew what had hit you. Like that judge who’d been tempted to throw up his hands and send Aiden to juvie. But without attempting to use the power of his office, which John Mannion had far too much integrity to ever try, he’d deftly worked out a deal where, so long as Aiden stayed out of trouble for the last two months of high school, he could enlist in the Marines when he turned eighteen and have his juvenile crime spree record expunged.
