SWEETHEART COTTAGE
(A Cranberry Bay Book #1)
by
MINDY HARDWICK
Copyright 2015 by Mindy Hardwick
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations used in articles or reviews.
Sweetheart Cottage is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, actual events, places, incidents or organizations is coincidental.
Cover Design by MK McClintock
Edited by Bev Katz Rosenbaum and Clare Wood
Formatted by Self-Publishing Services LLC. (www.self-publishing-service.com)
Eagle Bay Press
Lake Stevens, Washington
For those who take the bet and risk the chance to love
Table of 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
Acknowledgements
This story’s setting never would have been written without the inspiration of the north Oregon coast towns of Wheeler and Nehalem. Thank you for sharing your beautiful towns with me.
It takes a team to bring a book to publication and SWEETHEART COTTAGE is without exception. Thank you to the fabulous developmental editing of Bev Katz Rosenbaum and copyeditor, Clare Wood. Danica Winters and her team at SPS brought this story to readers faster and more efficiently than I ever dreamed possible.
As always, the Seattle RWA Chapter is invaluable to my growth as a writer and encourages me to take new risks and explore new options.
Thank you to my very best writer pal, Rhay Christou, whose emails and calls talk me off the ledge on a regular basis. Thank you to Mimi Fox at Mimi’s A Shabby Chic Country Boutique for giving me the final push to start the ball rolling on this series. And, thank you to Dave Swords, whose mail I collected during a cold January which made me stay home with my butt in the chair and get this story written.
And especially thank you to my sweet contemporary readers who with their support and belief in my romantic storytelling encouraged me to start a new series.
Chapter One
A gust of wind threatened to shove Rylee’s car off the Oregon highway and down the steep cliff to the forest below. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and sang loudly with her favorite country-and-western singer, trying to drown out her increasing fears about the trip to Cranberry Bay.
Rylee slowed to peer at a small blue sign that pointed to a rest stop tucked into the backside of the mountain. She checked the rearview mirror. Her black-white-and-tan mutt, Raisin, stood on a threadbare towel in the backseat. He whined and pressed his nose to the glass. Rylee turned on her left blinker and slowed to exit.
“We’ll get out of this storm,” she said to the dog, more to reassure herself than Raisin. Rylee frowned at the small GPS attached to the dashboard. It hadn’t picked up a signal to Cranberry Bay for miles, and she hoped it wasn’t broken. She hadn’t been back to the small town in ten years, not since she left Bryan. Rylee bit her lower lip and pushed away the thoughts of leaving her childhood sweetheart the morning after he proposed. She tried to focus on driving down the dark and rainy mountain road, where nothing looked the same as she remembered.
A small headache pounding between her eyes, Rylee followed the signs to the rest stop, pulling off the freeway onto a long ramp. She stopped in front of a brown, wood-shingled building. Picnic tables and a path curved down a hill toward a rushing stream. Towering evergreen trees surrounded the open green space. Signs pointed toward men’s and women’s restrooms. There wasn’t another car in the parking lot, but a light glowed from a middle window in the building.
“Okay, bud,” Rylee said. “It’s going to be wet.” She smiled at her faithful companion, who had ridden with her on the hundred-mile trip from Vegas. She didn’t doubt Raisin understood rainstorms. She’d found him huddled against a Dumpster in the back alley outside her condo. It hadn’t taken much to coax him inside; the leftover bite of her turkey sandwich was enough. Raisin became her only confidante as she packed up and sold everything off. Rylee’s stomach twisted as she thought about the text she received from her partner and former best friend. Ericka had eloped with Rylee’s fiancé and wanted out of their shared business immediately. Rylee was left with nothing but maxed out credit cards and rent on an expensive storefront. Only the letter she received from her grandmother’s lawyer had given her any hope.
Rylee opened the car door, and the wind rushed through her short cardigan, thin lace shirt and cropped pants. She blasted the car heater to take away the mountain chill. None of the black pumps, skirts, and thin blouses inside her old, beat-up suitcase would be any warmer. But it didn’t matter. She planned a quick sale of her grandmother’s place. Once she convinced her gambling father to leave Vegas, something she knew he’d do as soon as he realized she was leaving him, she’d be on her way to San Diego to restart her life.
Rylee shivered and pulled her black cardigan tighter. Rain dripped against the side of her face as she stepped out of the car. A gust of wind blew strands of her hair against her mouth, and she pushed them aside and opened the backdoor. Rylee clipped on a leash and guided Raisin out of the car. The wind tossed Raisin’s ears as he shook-off of the last five hours of travel. The trees above her head swayed, and Rylee quickly stepped away. A large branch could easily damage her car or hurt her.
Rylee hurried to the warmly lit building. She stepped under the covered porch. A coffee pot sat on a ledge beside a basket of napkins. A couple of dollar bills were stuffed inside a yellow coffee cup plastered with a black smiley face. A small handwritten sign said: “Donations Accepted.”
“Cup of coffee, my dear?” A round-faced woman with deep-set blue eyes peered back at her from the other side of an open glass window. A basket of sewing yarns, threads, and measuring tapes was perched by her feet, and an old pair of jeans rested across her lap.
“Yes, please.” Rylee reached in her pocket and pulled out a crumpled dollar bill. She dropped it in the donation cup and poured a thick stream of rich black coffee into a Styrofoam cup.
“Stormy evening.” The woman pushed a plate of white-frosted oatmeal cookies toward Rylee.
Rylee shook her head at the cookies. “No, thank you.” She barely had the dollar donation for the coffee. She didn’t need cookies too.
“Go on,” the woman’s soothing voice wrapped around Rylee like a hug. “The chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies are my homemade special."
A deep ache dove through Rylee’s chest. Grandma always made cookies for her when she arrived in Cranberry Bay for her summer childhood visits. Peanut-butter, chocolate-chip, and oatmeal cookies waited for her inside a colorful, old-fashioned tin that once belonged to Rylee’s Great-Grandma. Rylee made a mental note to find her grandmother’s tins. She planned to tuck a few things into her car before everything was marked to sell in the estate sale.
“Thank you.” Rylee took a cookie from the tray and bit into it. The sweetness filled her mouth. It tasted exactly like her grandmother’s recipe.
“I’m Beth Dawson. I run the coffee pr
ogram at the rest stop for Cranberry Bay Community Youth. All the donations go toward helping youth attend a local summer camp where they can learn to swim, fish, and enjoy hiking.”
“That’s nice,” Rylee muttered, not wanting to give away her own connections with Cranberry Bay. She was there only to sell her grandmother’s house, and then she’d be on her way. Well-meaning strangers only threatened her family’s longtime rule of not revealing her father’s gambling secret. It was a secret they had kept since her father left town in his twenties, headed to a career as a minor league baseball player. The baseball career never materialized, and her father drifted into a twenty-year addiction with gambling. Years later, still unable to tell the town the truth about their famed hometown hero, Rylee had been driven out of Cranberry Bay and away from Bryan by her father’s secret. She didn’t need a reminder written on her calendar to remember to keep to herself during this trip.
“Do you have a pen?” Beth asked. “I’ll write down the name of the camp. We accept donations all year-round. We’re always looking for businesses to sponsor the kids.”
Rylee fiddled in her purse for a pen. Once she got to San Diego and secured her job, she’d send a check to cover at least three kids. Giving back was a part of her business plan and something she made sure to include on her yearly goal chart. After all, Cranberry Bay was a town she always enjoyed visiting as a child.
Beth quickly wrote down the name of the camp and a website. “Here you go.” Hope filled Beth’s eyes. “Please. It’s really important to these kids that they have a chance. If there is a business that is looking for a place to donate, we’d love to talk to them. We also love for people to volunteer. That’s just as important as the money donation. Maybe if you have time…”
Abruptly, Rylee took the pen from Beth. The blue-and-green company emblem plastered to the side of it taunted her with everything she had lost. “I’ll keep the camp in mind for a donation.”
Tucking the piece of paper in her purse, Rylee walked over to the trash can, where she promptly dumped the pen and all reminders of her former life. Impatiently, she tugged on Raisin’s leash and strode back to her car with the dog trotting behind her.
Quickly, she loaded Raisin into the backseat. Rylee slipped into the driver’s seat and fiddled with the GPS buttons on her dashboard. The screen remained blank. Rylee frowned and pulled out of the parking lot. It couldn’t be that much farther to Cranberry Bay. There should be signs pointing her in the right direction. Rylee breathed in and out. She hoped to arrive to Cranberry Bay before dark.
Rain pounded on the roof and a large semi-truck passed in the other lane. Water sprayed over her windshield as she slowed to avoid hydroplaning into the truck’s lane. Rylee peered through the windshield and searched for a road sign telling her she needed to turn off the highway to reach Cranberry Bay. She didn’t remember much about the trip when Grandma and Grandpa used to pick her up at the Portland airport. After Mom died, Dad always made sure to send her to Cranberry Bay for the entire summer. Both of them pretended they didn’t know Dad would spend the summer in the casinos. She loved those childhood summer days when daylight stretched far into the evening. By the time she was nineteen, she and her childhood sweetheart, Bryan, had declared their love for each other. Even now, her insides warmed as she remembered how he made her feel—loved, cherished, and protected. The night he proposed, she believed everything would finally work out. She would find a way for Dad to get help for his addiction. He could return to Cranberry Bay and enjoy his life again. But the next morning, everything had crashed when the Vegas police called. She left immediately, knowing she could never leave her father alone in Vegas, and he couldn’t return to Cranberry Bay until he was the hometown hero they all remembered and loved. But ten years later, her father was still gambling, Bryan had married someone else, both her grandparents were dead, and she had just lost the only thing she had left in the world—her career.
A blast of wind blew across the highway, and Rylee swerved to avoid missing a small branch. Raisin let out a sharp bark and paced back and forth on the backseat. A small tire light on the dash flashed, and the car bumped with a flat. Rylee cursed and steered toward a small gravel pullout. In the summer, motor homes and slow-moving cars stopped to allow streams of cars pass. Now there was no one on the gravel road. Rylee drove alongside a small trailhead and parked.
Twenty-four hours before she left Vegas, Rylee had traded in her gorgeous black Lexus for an old, four-door car with the large dent on the left side. The dealer told her the used car needed new tires. She had a budget for how long she could make her meager savings account last. New car tires were not in the budget.
Rylee reached over to the passenger seat and fumbled inside her brown leather purse. She’d simply call her emergency roadside assistance number for help. Rylee unzipped her purse and pulled out her phone, only to see the small message in the window: “No service.” That explained the GPS problem.
Hold it together, she told herself as panic rose in her chest. She could handle the situation. The enclave of trees must be blocking the reception. She would simply walk back to the rest stop and ask Beth for help. It had to be less than a mile back down the road. She could walk a mile. On her treadmill, she walked at least three miles a day. Of course, it wasn’t in the middle of a windstorm, and she always wore her expensive sports shoes during her workouts, not her flimsy open-toed black sandals. But those were just details.
Rylee peered outside the window. She longed for the small blue emergency bag Grandma and Grandpa tucked into the backseat of their car. As a child, Rylee loved to explore the blue bag and check for the white candles, matches, flashlight, extra batteries, flares, granola bars, water jug, and the thick maroon blanket. One summer, she created an entire spreadsheet of the items in the blue bag and gave it to her grandparents. They tucked the paper inside the front pocket for safekeeping.
She pressed her nose to the window. If she walked against the traffic on the left side of the road, she could do it. “Come on, bud,” Rylee said to Raisin. “We’re going for a little walk.”
Rylee stepped out of the car as headlights rounded the bend and splayed into her eyes. She lifted her hand to shield her vision from the glaring lights. A tree branch cracked behind her and landed somewhere close by with a thud. She didn’t need her list of goals to tell her she had to get out of here. Fast.
The small truck slowed, and Rylee’s heart pounded. The only person who expected her was her grandparents’ lawyer, and her appointment was on Monday morning. There wasn’t a person in Vegas who cared where she was, and, except for Beth Dawson, she hadn’t talked to anyone in days. By the time someone realized she was missing, it’d be too late for anyone to find her.
Rylee scurried into the passenger seat and locked the doors. “Now would be a good time for you to bark,” Rylee said, turning around and looking at Raisin. Of course, he wasn’t barking, unlike the last five days where she’d done her best to keep him from barking at slamming doors and suitcases being lugged up and down stairs in the hotels.
The blue sports pickup maneuvered in front of her car. A colorful sticker, plastered on the back bumper, said: “Doug Mays for Cranberry Bay Mayor.” A tall, broad-shouldered man stepped out of the truck. He wore jeans and heavy brown hiking boots and strode purposefully toward Rylee’s car. Rain cascaded off his thick hooded black jacket. He tapped briefly on her window. “Everything okay?” he mouthed. “It’s a nasty storm out here.”
“I have a flat.”
The man raised an eyebrow and shook his head.
He couldn’t hear her. She’d have to take her chances and roll down the window. Thanking the age of her car, Rylee turned the old-fashioned window crank and yelled above the wind, “My left front tire is flat.”
“I’ll take a look. Do you have a spare?”
“In the trunk. I can help you…” She knew how to change a tire. She didn’t need this man to rescue her.
“I got it,” the man hollered. �
�It’s nasty out here. I’m already soaked. Stay there.”
Rylee nodded. It was pouring rain, and she wasn’t exactly dressed for changing a tire. Raisin paced on the backseat, and Rylee reached into his treat bag on the front seat. She held the small dog biscuit out to Raisin, and he gobbled it from her hand.
A sharp tap on the car window jerked Rylee’s attention away from Raisin. The man’s hood had fallen off, and his blond hair was wet. Rylee swallowed hard. Her eyes passed over his high forehead and the freckles that danced across his cheekbones. A flicker of recognition crossed his face at the same time as her heart fluttered. Bryan gazed back at her with all the kindness and compassion she once remembered.
Slowly, Rylee stepped out of the car as Raisin gave a sharp bark in the backseat. “It’s okay, boy,” Rylee said to Raisin. She pressed her hands against the back of the car and leaned against it, trying to steady herself. The wet car soaked the back of her bare legs, but she barely felt it. Rain fell off her head and danced onto the gravel below her feet.
“Bryan,” Rylee whispered. Her insides quivered from something that reached into her far deeper than the cold rain and wind. She didn’t dare look at his hand to see the gold wedding band that claimed him as belonging to someone else. She tried to steady herself. She’d known it was a possibility to run into Bryan; Cranberry Bay wasn’t that big. But nothing could have prepared her heart for the moment when it actually happened.
Bryan’s eyes swept over her face, down her soaking wet cardigan, and to her red painted toenails peeking from the tips of her sandals. “Rylee?” A shadow flashed across his face. “I thought it was you…but I didn’t…” Suddenly he cleared his throat. “Pop the trunk, and I’ll get that spare on for you.”
Rylee nodded and slipped into the driver’s seat. She leaned down and lifted the trunk latch. Her hands shook as the old feelings for Bryan rushed through her.
Sweetheart Cottage (Cranberry Bay #1) Page 1
