Carolina Home

by Virginia Kantra

  “VIRGINIA KANTRA DELIVERS.”

  —Jayne Ann Krentz, New York Times

  bestselling author

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF

  VIRGINIA KANTRA

  “Virginia Kantra is one of my favorite authors.”

  —Teresa Medeiros, New York Times

  bestselling author

  “A really good read.”

  —Karen Robards, New York Times

  bestselling author

  “A sensitive writer with a warm sense of humor, a fine sense of sexual tension, and an unerring sense of place.”

  —BookPage

  “You are going to LOVE this book! I highly, highly recommend it.”

  —Suzanne Brockmann, New York Times bestselling author

  “Rich and sensual.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Entertainment at its finest.”

  —RT Book Reviews (4 ½ stars)

  “Virginia Kantra has given us another gem.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Epic and wonderfully intimate.”

  —Dear Author

  “Fiction that is smart, engaging, and original.”

  —Bitch Media

  “Smart, sexy, and sophisticated—another winner from Virginia Kantra.”

  —Lori Foster, New York Times bestselling author

  “With lush writing, vivid descriptions, and smoldering sensuality, Kantra skillfully invites the reader…into the hearts and minds of her characters.”

  —Romance Novel TV (5 stars)

  “You will hate to put it down until you have read the last page.”

  —Night Owl Reviews (Top Pick)

  “Moving, heartbreaking, and beautiful.”

  —Errant Dreams Reviews (5 stars)

  Berkley Sensation titles by Virginia Kantra

  HOME BEFORE MIDNIGHT

  CLOSE UP

  CAROLINA HOME

  The Children of the Sea Novels

  SEA WITCH

  SEA FEVER

  SEA LORD

  IMMORTAL SEA

  FORGOTTEN SEA

  Anthologies

  SHIFTER

  (with Angela Knight, Lora Leigh, and Alyssa Day)

  OVER THE MOON

  (with Angela Knight, MaryJanice Davidson, and Sunny)

  BURNING UP

  (with Angela Knight, Nalini Singh, and Meljean Brook)

  Carolina Home

  VIRGINIA KANTRA

  BERKLEY SENSATION, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  CAROLINA HOME

  A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / July 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Virginia Kantra.

  Excerpt from Carolina Girl by Virginia Kantra copyright © 2013 by Virginia Kantra.

  Cover art by Tony Mauro.

  Cover design by Rita Frangie.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58693-8

  BERKLEY SENSATION®

  Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY SENSATION® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  To Michael.

  You are my home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Dare Island exists nowhere and everywhere along the North Carolina coast. You can find pieces of it, as I did, from Manteo to Hatteras, Ocracoke to Swan Quarter, in Emerald Isle, Topsail Beach, Fort Fisher, and Southport. To the many residents who shared their love of the Outer Banks and inner islands with me, thank you.

  Like an island, a book requires a community to bring it to life. Special thanks to Francis Castiller, M.D., and Angela R. Narron for their expertise and patience with my questions; to Robin Rue and Beth Miller of Writers House for their wonderful suggestions; to Cindy Hwang (Best Editor Ever) and Leis Pederson at Berkley for their hard work and constant support; to Rita Frangie and Tony Mauro for another fabulous cover; and to Carolyn Martin and Mike Ritchey, who read every word and critiqued every scene. Sometimes twice.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Carolina Girl

  One

  MATT FLETCHER DIDN’T go looking for trouble. Most times, it just found him.

  His life was changing around him, slipping away like the sand of the Carolina coastline, and there wasn’t a damn thing he or God or the Army Corps of Engineers could do about it. But a day working on the water gave him something to hold on to. Sweat and salt cured everything in time.

  The smell of fish and fuel, mud and marsh grass thickened the air as he turned the Sea Lady II toward home. The September heat pressed down, flattening the inlet like glass. The twin engines chugged. Water churned, attracting a flock of greedy gulls that cried and hovered in his wake.

  He navigated the fifty-three-foot Lady past bobbing boats and narrow slips, heading for the wharf and weathered shack that served as office for his tiny charter fleet. With Joshua back in school and unable to cre
w, Matt had been forced to leave the original Sea Lady in dock and bring his father, Tom, along as mate. It hurt leaving a boat behind, losing business this late in the season.

  But his passengers, doctors from Raleigh, wanted the kind of amenities the Lady II could provide. They hadn’t balked at the full-day offshore rate, and they’d pay to have their catch cleaned, too, three big yellowfin, two dozen dorado, a cooler full of steely-faced wahoo.

  A good day all around.

  Satisfied, Matt revved the diesels, swinging the Lady II around in a tight arc. Fishermen learned to accept what the sea gave and the sea took away. A captain pitted his boat and equipment, his experience and skill, against the whims of the ocean, the season, the weather. Sometimes you did everything you could do and still came home empty-handed.

  Which was why Matt was grateful for good days. Like today.

  He backed into the slip. Fezzik, his rough-coated shepherd-Lab mix, lurched from the shadow of the cabin and barked. A pelican launched from the wharf, settling expectantly in the water.

  Matt’s father secured the lines. At six-two and sixty-four, Tom Fletcher resembled one of the pilings that lined the wharf, gray, tall, and spare. He wore a United States Marine Corps baseball cap, the red bill faded with sun and age.

  “I was a Navy corpsman,” one of the doctors offered as he jumped onto the dock.

  “Nothing against the Navy.” Tom grinned as he handed up the man’s backpack, jacket, cooler. “The Marines need bus drivers.”

  A brief pause before the offended doctor decided to laugh.

  Matt rubbed his jaw, feeling the scrape of a day’s stubble, hiding his own smile. It was customary to tip the mate on a charter fishing boat. But twenty-five years as a career sergeant major hadn’t taught the old man the value of keeping his mouth shut. Dad wouldn’t get a tip from that ex-Navy man.

  Along the waterfront, gawkers had gathered to compare the day’s take from the different boats, couples strolling hand in hand, excited family groups with sunburns and ice cream. Tourists. Matt didn’t mind them. Okay, they crowded the roads and the stores until it seemed a man couldn’t talk with his neighbors until after Labor Day. But the tourist tide in summer kept the island economy afloat the rest of the year.

  He scanned the small crowd, trying to pick the potential customers from the merely curious.

  His gaze snagged. Caught.

  A young woman stood at the end of his dock, her long blond hair bundled into some kind of ponytail, a V of pink skin at her throat, a flutter of skirt at her knee. Nice legs. Too young. And as tall, cool, and appealing as an ice-cold longneck.

  For a moment his mouth went dry.

  Matt shook his head, amused by his reaction. He wasn’t about to break his long dry spell with a pretty young thing dressed like a model in a J. Crew catalogue.

  No harm in looking, though. He studied her from the bridge. She wasn’t a native. He’d have recognized her. Or the average tourist on vacation. She looked more put together somehow, like a real estate agent or his ex-wife’s lawyer or somebody attached to one of the doctors. A daughter, maybe, or a trophy wife, although Matt didn’t spot any big chunks of jewelry on her. No ring.

  His father opened the fish box in the stern and began tossing up the catch. Fish flew in a rainbow arc, blue, gold, glittering silver, all their angry energy transformed by death to pale, stiff beauty.

  But the girl wasn’t watching the show. Her deep brown eyes fixed on his father. Her chin lifted. Her soft mouth firmed.

  Matt recognized the determination in her gaze and felt a tightening in his gut, tension gathering at the back of his neck like a storm blowing in.

  Trouble.

  ALLISON CARTER DIDN’T believe in hanging around waiting for her ship to come in. She was more likely to rush out and book passage to…well, anywhere. She had a trust fund. More importantly, and recently, she had a job. But here she was, standing under the weathered FLETCHER’S QUAY sign, watching as a big white boat slid through a thicket of masts and fishing rods to tie up at the dock.

  It backed without a bump into the slip. A large black dog of indeterminate breed—she really didn’t know much about dogs—stood in the stern. Sea Lady II, Allison read. At least she was in the right place.

  In more ways than one, she hoped.

  She’d fallen in love with the island at first sight, rising like a whale’s back from the sea as she approached on the ferry. She loved its jumbled mix of old and new, weathered cottages side by side with bright tourist shops, gnarled oaks adjoining sunny summer gardens. She liked the mix of people, too, sturdy native islanders and enthusiastic transplants.

  She wanted to be one of them, to put down roots here.

  Of course her parents had other ideas.

  This wasn’t the first time, as her mother frequently pointed out, that she’d changed direction or location in hope of finding herself. Surely she could do her soul-searching closer to home? Especially as she was all they had left.

  “I’ve lost one child already,” Marilyn Carter had said with practiced pathos after Allison had been there a week. “I can’t bear to lose you, too.”

  “You haven’t lost me, Mom.” Allison had kept her tone determinedly cheerful. “You know where I am. You have my phone number on speed dial.”

  “Not that you ever answer.”

  Familiar guilt pounded in Allison’s temples. “I told you I can’t take calls during class.”

  “You can’t take time to talk to your mother? I didn’t complain when you spent all summer away from me building houses for the poor. Or when you turned down spring break in Paris to teach English on some reservation. But I thought when you finished that Peace Corps nonsense—”

  “Teach for America,” Allison corrected for the hundredth time.

  Marilyn was too well-bred to sniff, but her tiny pause spoke volumes. “Whatever. You’re not in college anymore, Allison. You had two years to get all that out of your system. I thought when you left Mississippi you’d come home where you belong. To Philadelphia. It’s not like you need to work.”

  “I like to teach.” She’d learned that much about herself. “I need to keep busy.”

  “You could keep busy here.”

  Running her mother’s errands, serving on her mother’s committees, a dull satellite in her mother’s glittering social orbit.

  No more.

  “I’m lucky to have been offered a job at all,” Allison had said. “With the recent budget cuts—”

  “But you’re so far away!”

  Allison didn’t tell her mother that the distance had been part of the offer’s appeal. “Actually, Dare Island is ten hours closer,” she had pointed out patiently. “Half the distance. In a better school district. Higher pay. Smaller class sizes.”

  Same damn heat.

  Water slapped the pier. A bead of sweat ran between Allison’s breasts to soak into her bra.

  She shifted her weight in her ballet flats, wishing she could peel off her tissue-thin sweater and shove it into her purse. But she didn’t. It was too easy for her to be mistaken for one of her students, dismissed because of her age. If she wanted to be taken seriously, she had to present a professional appearance.

  Especially when she was meeting with a parent.

  Not, she thought, one of the four men standing on the dock arguing over who took home the tuna. Men like her father, with gym-toned waists and salon-cut hair and a subtle air of entitlement.

  She squinted into the sun sinking toward Pamlico Sound. Maybe the one on the bridge?

  Her gaze skated over him. From a purely female, personal perspective, he was certainly worth looking at. Hard muscle packed into a faded T-shirt and jeans. Sweat-dampened hair jammed under a baseball cap. A lean, watchful face with a hint of pirate stubble.

  Her breath escaped. Instant melt. Instant tingle. This one definitely didn’t look like any high school father she’d ever seen.

  She dragged her gaze away. She would not let a momentary appreci
ation for the, ah, scenery get in the way of doing her job. She had other fish—ha ha—to fry.

  An older man was tossing fish into a large plastic garbage can. Now he looked the way she imagined a boat captain should look. Like Ahab in Moby Dick, all “compacted aged robustness.” Minus the scar and the peg leg, of course.

  She lifted her chin. “Mr. Fletcher?”

  He spared her a quick glance from faded blue eyes before hauling the garbage can over to a long metal table under the shade of a wooden roof. “Yep.”

  She followed him. So did a dozen gulls, hopping, hovering, swooping, lighting on the roof and in the water.

  “I’m Miss Carter.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the squawking birds. “Joshua’s Language Arts teacher. I have to tell you how much I’m looking forward to working with your son.”

  Captain Ahab Fletcher flipped the dead fish out on the table, smooth as a blackjack dealer in Vegas. Out came a knife. Cut, cut, cut, down the row of heads. Cut, cut, cut, along the spines and bellies. “No, you don’t.”

  Allison straightened to her full five feet, ten inches. She’d shoveled mud from flood-ravaged homes in Louisiana, provided child care in a domestic violence shelter in South Dakota. She had motivated, coaxed, and bullied 127 underachieving students in the Mississippi Delta into scoring at a Basic or Proficient level on the English II graduation exit exam. She could not be deterred by a little thing like dead fish or a bad attitude.

  “Actually, I make it a point to talk to all my students’ parents at the beginning of the school year.”

  “Then you want his dad.” He winked at her before calling over her shoulder. “Matt! Josh’s teacher is here to see you.”