The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge

by Stewart, Mariah

  “I’m only answering because I want you to know what a dickweed I think you are.”

  He sighed heavily as if exasperated. “Dickwad.”

  “What?”

  “I think the word you want is dickwad.”

  Funny, but that professorial tone that she used to think made him sound intellectual suddenly seemed obnoxious.

  “Whatever,” she snapped.

  “Sophie—”

  “Can it. We are so done.”

  She hung up.

  She blew the red light at the corner and felt a momentary touch of relief when she realized there were no cars coming from the opposite direction and no police officers to flag her down. Since starting at the DA’s office seven years ago, she’d been careful not to do anything that might cause her embarrassment when she had to face the cops in court. Getting stopped for running a red light would be one of those things … especially at that moment when she knew her mascara was running and her face was a blotchy mess from crying. Hardly the professional image she’d worked so hard to create.

  The street in front of her condo was slick with the cold rain that had been falling since early afternoon, and she was lucky to find a parking spot close to her door. She hopped out and dodged puddles. Water splashed up on her legs and her skirt anyway, but she barely noticed.

  The red message light was flashing on her phone, but she ignored it. She dropped her briefcase near the door and kicked her shoes halfway across the room. Then she went straight into the bathroom, turned on the shower, peeled off her clothes, and tossed them back into her bedroom, where they landed on the floor.

  “Bastard!” She stepped into the steam and cursed softly under her breath as the hot water stung her back, stood under the steady stream until her skin began to pucker.

  Reluctantly, she got out, dried off, and pulled on her oldest sweats—gray fleece washed so thin the fabric was almost see-through in places—and an oversized navy tee. She went into the spare bedroom, where she stored things she either had no immediate use for or didn’t have time to deal with, and found a large box that had delivered a down comforter back in November. She’d been filling the box with clothes she planned on taking to a thrift shop, clothes which she now dumped unceremoniously onto the floor.

  She dragged the box into her bedroom and tossed in all of Christopher’s belongings that he’d left at her place. She opened her closet and tossed in his robe along with a few extra shirts, then added clothes from the dresser drawer she’d been happy to empty to make room for his jeans, underwear, and a few sweaters. She spied a book that rested on the table next to his side of the bed—a political thriller—and tossed it in. It landed spine out, the pages splayed atop his jeans. She hesitated, fighting the urge to smooth the creases and close the book, but she resisted after reminding herself that she’d been the one to recommend it to him.

  She was tempted to remove a few key pages so he’d never know who the bad guy was and how he’d set up the hero, but even her wrath wouldn’t permit her to deface a book.

  “You’re lucky I have a conscience,” she muttered.

  She tossed in a pair of sneakers she found under the bed, then returned to the bathroom for his toothbrush, shaving stuff, and the body wash he preferred over hers. Her apartment stripped of everything that was his, she pushed the box into the back hall, then dragged it down one flight of steps. She opened the back door and shoved the box out, positioning it so that it sat directly in front of the trash cans.

  Sophie trotted back up the steps, phone in hand, texting as she climbed:

  Your stuff is in a box behind my building. The trash men come at nine.

  She hit send just as she arrived at her door.

  She’d hoped that the purging of her apartment would make her feel a little better, but she still had that huge lump in her throat and that gnawing pain in the pit of her stomach. She considered calling a friend, thinking that maybe some sympathy would make her feel better, but she stopped midway through dialing the number. She couldn’t face the actual telling of what happened, couldn’t bring herself to speak the words. It hurt too damned bad.

  I caught Chris with someone …

  She frowned. She’d been so focused on him that she’d ignored his partner. Now she found herself wondering who that someone might have been. Was it someone she knew?

  She tried to recall the voice she’d heard coming from the backseat—had it been familiar?—but in her shock, she hadn’t paid close enough attention. Though she gave it her best effort, she couldn’t make the voice play back in her head.

  The phone rang again, and Christopher’s voice filled the apartment for the fourth time. This time she sat and listened. This was the man who only two nights ago had declared his undying love for her. The man she thought she was in love with. The man she might even have built a life with.

  She listened to his words of apology—at one point she even thought he might be shedding a few tears—and his sworn oath that “she” meant nothing to him. That it hadn’t been planned, that it had just happened.

  “The way your car ‘just happened’ to be parked in the darkest, most remote part of the garage?”

  She rolled her eyes in disgust and left the room before he finished his message. She had reports to write explaining that day’s debacle in the courtroom. Her heart might be burning and her insides in an uproar, but there was still work to be done.

  It had been a long, rough night, and the morning found Sophie feeling almost as angry and hurt as she had the night before. She awoke with a massive headache, killer circles under her eyes, and a grumbling stomach. She scrambled an egg and forced herself to eat it, then popped a few Advils.

  “This is no day to spare the concealer,” she murmured as she applied her makeup in front of the bathroom mirror.

  She put on a red cashmere sweater under her gray suit, and while ordinarily red heels would have been frowned upon in her ultraconservative office, today she felt they were a necessity. She brushed her black hair from her forehead and popped gold discs into her ears. She might feel like crap, but she was determined to look like a million dollars.

  There was something about looking good that always made her feel better. And she did. Right up until the minute that she walked into the conference room for an early morning meeting and saw the smirk on the face of one of her co-workers.

  The smirk was like a shot to Sophie’s gut.

  Anita Hayes. I should have known.

  Sophie glanced away as if she hadn’t noticed, and she kept her gaze on the memo she’d been handed even when Christopher entered the room and Anita moved over to give him a place to stand next to her. Sophie continued to act the professional, listening attentively though an ocean’s roar of pain filled her head and she could feel Chris’s eyes on her the entire time. Finally—mercifully—the meeting ended, and though she wanted nothing more than to bolt from the room, she walked leisurely to her office and closed the door, pretending not to notice the looks of sympathy from several others as she passed. But once the door was closed behind her, Sophie leaned back against it, squeezed her eyes tightly shut, and wished that the roof would fall on her head.

  It took less than two minutes for her desk phone to buzz. She debated the possibility of ignoring it, but it could have been someone important. Like her boss.

  “Soph, it’s Gwen.” Sophie’s best friend in the office apparently hadn’t been blind to what was going on. “What the hell?”

  “I’ll tell you at lunch.”

  “It’s my day in district court,” Gwen reminded her. “I won’t be here. Tell me now.”

  “Christopher and Anita were …” Sophie sighed. “I caught them together in the backseat of his car. In the parking garage.”

  “In the parking garage? Chris and Anita Hayes?” Gwen all but gasped. “Is he nuts? She’s the office skank.”

  “Apparently he didn’t get that memo.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to pre
tend I don’t know either one of them. What else can I do?”

  “You’ve got more balls than I do. If George did that to me, I’d be off and running for some nice quiet corner where I could nurse my broken heart and suck my thumb in peace. Right after I sent him screaming into the night with a fork in his eye.”

  “Running away doesn’t solve anything, and while I do love the image of Chris with something sharp painfully protruding from his face, I’ve prosecuted enough domestic violence cases to know I don’t want to go where they send you.”

  “There is that,” Gwen agreed. “But either way—running or incarcerated—at least you wouldn’t have to look at him or her every day.”

  Gwen had a point, Sophie considered, one that was driven home when she left the confines of her office around eleven and saw Christopher go into the library, followed within seconds by Anita, who closed the door behind her.

  Yeah, Gwen definitely had a point.

  “Of course you can come for a visit. Stay as long as you want.” Sophie’s brother, Jesse, had sounded pleased when she called to ask if the following week would be convenient for her to visit. “We never get to spend time together since I moved.” Jesse paused. “But is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine.” Sophie swallowed hard. “Well, except that Christopher and I did break up.”

  “I thought the two of you were getting serious.”

  “Apparently that was only one of us.”

  “What happened?” Jesse asked.

  “I don’t feel like going into it right now, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, but if you ever feel like talking …”

  “I know. Thanks, Jess. I’ll see you on Saturday.”

  “Can’t wait, kiddo.”

  Jesse was three years older than Sophie, and he was now making his home in St. Dennis, Maryland, a small town on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. He’d gone there to join their grandfather’s law firm and had found the love of his life. Jesse and his Brooke would be married in a few months, and Sophie thought their love story had “happily ever after” written all over it. She couldn’t be more pleased for her brother—he’d always been a good guy and if anyone deserved to be happy, it was Jesse. She smiled, recalling how he’d always taken his role as big brother very seriously. On the phone, she downplayed the situation with Chris because she could imagine Jesse’s reaction and she didn’t want to deal with any more drama this week. She just wanted to put Christopher out of sight. With any luck, out of mind would eventually follow.

  When Sophie asked Joe, the district attorney, for the week’s vacation she’d been floating, he’d readily agreed. That she had no trials on the docket for the next several weeks made it easy for him to say yes. Somehow she made it to the end of the week without breaking down in the office or losing it in court. If anyone in the office—including Chris and Anita—thought she was running away, well, let them. It might very well have been the truth.

  On the other hand, Sophie decided she’d rather think of this trip as running to than running from. After all, who wouldn’t love a week away in an idyllic little Bay town with nothing to do but relax, visit with a favorite relative, and eat glorious food? If at the same time a broken heart began to mend, so much the better.

  Chapter 2

  Jason Bowers sat in his pickup outside the chain-link fence that surrounded the vacant lot, engine idling, a container of steaming coffee in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other. Through the lenses he could see across the open space to the bare trees at the back of the property and clear on down to the river that ambled along till it met up with the Chesapeake a few miles to the west. He’d taken to making this a regular stop on his way to work every day since he first saw the “For Sale” sign posted on the gate back in November. The single acre was so overgrown with weeds that the Realtor had been forced to hire someone to come in to cut them down and clean up the lot so that prospective buyers could get a decent look at the grounds. The someone the Realtor hired had been Jason, and for him, it had been love at first sight.

  For the past two months, he’d found himself drawn back over and over, not yet tired of imagining the way his nursery would look when he finally got it up and running. He’d blacktop the area from the road down to the trees so he could store his heavy equipment—the Bobcat, backhoes and riding mowers, his dump truck, and the extra pickup—and still have room for the piles of mulch and soil he’d need for his landscaping business. Not to mention parking places. He was planning on needing lots of parking because he was already envisioning lots of customers.

  Jason wanted it all so much he could taste it.

  Eighteen months ago, he’d sold his Florida landscaping business. It had been a tough decision: he and his late brother, Eric, had started building it before Jason had even graduated from high school. Eric had put up half the money that had gone into making Bowers for Landscape a success, and Jason felt obligated to return that money to his brother’s widow, Brooke, after Eric was killed in Iraq. That obligation had brought him to St. Dennis with no intention of staying, but the opportunity to spend some time with his nephew, Logan—Eric’s only child—had kept him around longer than he’d planned. The longer Jason stayed, the harder it was to think about leaving.

  For one thing, Logan was the image of his father, and that alone tugged at Jason’s heart. The fact that Logan was Jason’s only living relative made it even more difficult to move on. Once he’d made the decision to stay in St. Dennis, Jason knew he was doing the right thing. Family connections had opened prominent doors—Brooke’s brother, Clay, was married to the daughter of the owner of the town’s most popular inn, and Brooke was marrying the grandson of St. Dennis’s most prominent resident—but Jason knew it was his hard work that kept his phone ringing.

  When he first arrived in St. Dennis, Jason had struggled to establish himself in a town where everyone seemed to belong but him. Thanks to a few influential people, like the Sinclairs and Jesse’s grandfather, Curtis Enright, Jason was slowly building up his business. But in order to prosper, he needed to expand. And in order to expand, he needed more equipment, along with property on which he could park it all, and he’d need to branch into retail sales of garden supplies. The long-neglected field on River Road was exactly what he’d been looking for. After a week’s worth of haggling with the owner, his offer had been accepted, and settlement was now only a week away.

  He could hardly believe his good fortune, but he had the owner’s signature on the agreement of sale and had an appointment tomorrow to look at some equipment that was being sold by a retiring landscaper from a neighboring town. There were times—such as right now—when he felt like pinching himself.

  Jason took one last sip of coffee before returning the cup to the holder, replaced the lens caps on his binoculars, and tucked them back into their case. He made a U-turn and eased past the old cyclone fence that separated his property from the one next door, where a square stone building stood. Boarded up and covered with vines, it looked every bit as neglected as the lot he was buying, but once cleaned up and renovated, it would make a sweet little shop for the retail business he’d open as soon as he got the nursery going. He’d already had his Realtor contact the owner to see if they could work out a deal, but the owner wasn’t interested in selling right then. Jason would just have to bide his time, maybe have the Realtor try again in the spring.

  Of course, he’d have to hire someone to run the shop because he’d always been an outside guy, but he was a smart enough businessman to recognize a void in the marketplace when he saw it, and Jason planned on being the person to fill it. The closest big-box store that carried garden supplies was sixteen miles from St. Dennis and carried plants that were grown who-knew-where across the country in factory-sized, warehouse-style greenhouses. Jason’s perennials would be field grown right there in St. Dennis.

  Jason sighed. He’d had all that and more in Florida, and it had killed him to sell it, but it had to be done. That
was all behind him now, and there was nothing to be gained by looking back. He told himself that things had all worked out for the best, and there were times when he really believed that. Except for the fact of Eric dying, he wouldn’t change much about his life these days.

  Jason wondered what Eric would have thought about living in St. Dennis.

  It was a nice enough place, with pretty streets, a lot of old houses, and fabulous views of the Chesapeake Bay. St. Dennis was a town that was fat with history. There were homes several centuries old and families that had lived there almost as long. And all things considered, here was better than most places. Here he could be a part of Logan’s life, and he knew he had Jesse to thank for that as much as Brooke. Even though Jesse would soon be Logan’s stepfather, he never seemed to resent the place that Jason played in the child’s life. In fact, it had been Jesse’s idea that Jason share coaching duties of Logan’s basketball and softball teams, and he never failed to let Jason know when there were school plays and concerts. All in all, St. Dennis was a pretty good place to have landed, especially when he considered the fact that he didn’t have any real ties to anywhere else.

  That was okay, too. For the most part, he kept himself too busy to think about it. Most days he worked from dawn to dusk building up his clientele. Time off was mostly devoted to Logan or joining a few of the guys he’d made friends with—Jesse, Clay, and Cameron O’Connor, the local contractor—for a beer or two. He’d had a few dates since moving here, but he hadn’t met anyone who’d interested him enough to spend much time with and he’d never been one for casual dating. Small talk always seemed like a waste of time to him. He knew some people were pretty good at it, but he wasn’t one of them. If he occasionally felt pangs of loneliness, well, everyone got lonely from time to time, right? As far as he could see, one-night stands in a small town like St. Dennis could only lead to trouble. If the right woman came along, one that turned his heart as well as his head, he wouldn’t walk away. That just hadn’t happened yet, and Jason wasn’t one to use up valuable time worrying about something he couldn’t control.