“How did you find out?” She thought she’d made it absolutely clear to their folks that her broken engagement was something she’d wanted to announce to her sisters herself…maybe next June, when the shock had worn off.
Unfortunately Max and Colleen D’Angelo weren’t great at keeping quiet. They thought families should stick together in times of crisis. Her sisters had learned the lesson well. Until now, Jo had always found that com forting.
“Nothing stays secret in this family for long,” Ashley responded, stating the obvious. “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t say something yourself. You should have called us the minute you caught James cheating.”
“Why?” Jo grumbled. “So you could come up here and personally rip his heart out?” The image gave her a certain amount of bloodthirsty satisfaction, which she found deeply troubling. She liked to think of herself as kindhearted.
“That or some other part of his anatomy,” Ashley said.
“That’s precisely the reason I didn’t call,” Jo explained, shaking off the chill that had run down her spine at her sister’s words. Ashley was perfectly capable of making good on such a threat. She had the protective-big-sister thing down pat. “I handled it in my own way. Besides, I didn’t want all this sympathy, and I definitely don’t want to run away. The humiliation of discovering James in bed with another woman was bad enough. I won’t let him chase me off. My life is here in Boston. I’m not budging because of that scumbag.”
In fact, this whole mess had reminded her of just how determined she was to make a life for herself in Boston. It had brought back way too many memories of an other man she’d loved, another man who had cheated on her and forever ruined the love she’d once felt for Rose Cottage, her grandmother’s home in Virginia. Even now, fresh as this was, she was having a hard time deciding which betrayal had been more devastating.
Worse, even though they’d never known about that earlier disaster, Jo had anticipated exactly how her sisters would react to this one. Though she sometimes thought of herself as the odd man out—the only one whose name wasn’t somehow tied to Gone With the Wind, her Southern mother’s favorite book—she’d known they would rally around her and insist that she come to Virginia, where they could fuss over her. The scene of that heartbreaking first betrayal was the last place on earth she wanted to be—not that her sisters had any way of knowing that. She’d kept her own counsel back then and dealt with the anguish in private. Only her beloved grandmother had known the details, and she’d honored Jo’s wishes never to discuss what had happened.
“You may as well give in and do this gracefully,” Maggie chimed in on another extension, dismissing Jo’s protests.
“Yes,” Melanie added. “Don’t make us come up to Boston to get you.”
Jo’s chuckle turned into a sob. It was too late to regret her part in insisting that each of her sisters go to Rose Cottage after their lives had fallen apart. How could she explain that it was different for her without divulging the secret she’d kept from them all these years? Then the fussing would really begin in earnest.
“I can’t,” she whispered. It was one thing for Ashley, Maggie and Melanie to make new lives for themselves in Virginia, but Rose Cottage was where Jo’s heart had been broken the first time. How could she go there to heal now, when there were so many ghosts from the past to be faced in that place? Visiting for a day or two had been difficult enough. Staying any longer, risking a chance encounter with the man she’d once loved so deeply, would be torment.
“I’d like to know why not,” Ashley demanded. “If you can’t take the time off work, quit.”
“Work’s not the issue,” Jo said miserably, though it didn’t surprise her that it was the first thing her big sister had thought of. Even now, with her workaholic tendencies held in check by her new husband, Ashley was still driven.
“Then what is?” Ashley asked.
“I’m better off here,” Jo said, knowing it was a weak response but unwilling to admit the truth. None of them knew how crazy in love she’d been during that last summer she’d spent at Rose Cottage. They’d all been busy with summer jobs back in Boston that year. She’d spent the entire summer alone with her grandmother…and with Pete.
She’d been so sure Pete Catlett was the one. She’d believed him when he said he loved her, believed it enough to make love with him, believed it well enough when he’d promised to be waiting when she returned the following year.
But even before the last of the autumn leaves had fallen, her grandmother had casually mentioned that Pete had gotten married. A few months later, there had been mention of a baby, too. A boy.
She and her grandmother had both maintained the pretense that Cornelia Lindsey was doing little more than passing along local gossip about an acquaintance, but Jo had heard the compassion underlying the words, the awareness that what she was telling Jo would devastate her.
Jo had felt utterly betrayed, especially because the young man she’d loved and trusted hadn’t even had the courage to tell her himself. Not that that would have made the pain any easier to bear, but it would have reassured her that she hadn’t misjudged him entirely, that she had mattered to him, at least for a time.
It had taken her years to find the courage to risk her heart again, and just look what had happened, the same damn thing…or something that felt a whole lot like it.
No, Virginia was definitely not the place for her. She needed to stay right here in Boston and bury herself in work. She liked her job as a landscape designer. She had her friends, even if none of them were as close as the sisters who were insisting she come to Rose Cottage so they could hover over her.
“I can’t come to Virginia,” she said again, her tone flat and, she hoped, unequivocal.
Melanie heaved an exaggerated sigh. “I guess that means we leave in the morning, right, Ash and Maggie?”
“I can be ready by 5:00 a.m.,” Ashley said. “How about the rest of you?”
“Absolutely,” Melanie responded.
“Guys!” Jo protested with what she knew was wasted breath. They weren’t going to be satisfied until they’d seen her for themselves, babied her for a few days or weeks. It was the curse of being the youngest that they thought she needed extra care at a time like this.
“You can stop us,” Ashley reminded her. “All you have to do is agree to come quietly. Settle in for the winter, Jo. It’ll be peaceful and quiet. We won’t bug you un less you want us to.”
“That’s a joke. You’re already bugging me,” Jo pointed out.
“Yes, but with the best intentions,” Melanie said cheerfully.
“Let me see what I can work out,” Jo said finally. “Maybe I’ll come for the weekend so you can see that I’m not a complete basket case. James isn’t worth falling apart over.”
She figured she could hide the truth about her aversion to Rose Cottage for a couple of days, then scamper straight back to Boston. In fact, two days seemed safe enough, however she looked at it. After all, she hadn’t run into Pete on any of her previous brief visits. She’d been very careful not to spend too much time in public.
Though her reluctance to go places had clearly aroused her sisters’ suspicions, they’d never called her on it with more than the most cursory questions. Any hesitation she showed now, they would blame on her broken heart. They’d never guess it had anything at all to do with a long-ago relationship that had ended badly and a panicky fear that she would encounter Pete Catlett again.
Not that her self-imposed isolation had worked all that well when it came to her own feelings. She’d been aware of Pete every second of every visit. Just driving to Rose Cottage, she’d seen his name on construction jobs all over in the small waterfront towns of White Stone and Irvington. Knowing that he had built a reputation for himself doing what he loved had only stirred mixed emotions. She wished she were a big enough person to be happy for him, but a part of her had seen that success as further evidence of betrayal. She was the one who’d encoura
ged him to fight for his dream, de spite his mother’s insistence that he attend college instead. Now he’d achieved that dream with some other woman by his side.
“A weekend won’t cut it,” Melanie said firmly. “We made Ashley come for three weeks. If Ms. Workaholic could do that, you ought to be able to commit for at least a month, minimum.”
“Right,” Ashley agreed. “Besides, you work for a landscape company. How much work do you do in winter, anyway? And if you get the itch to design something, I’ll bet Mike can put you to work. He has more landscaping jobs than he can handle these days.”
“You worked all of this out before you called, didn’t you?” Jo said, increasingly resigned to her fate. “You even have Mike in on it. Does he know you’re now hiring employees for him, Ashley?”
“Of course,” Ashley said. “I never go into a courtroom or into an argument with you unprepared. Be sides, this was Mike’s idea, right, Melanie?”
“Absolutely,” Melanie said, speaking for her husband. “He really is swamped, Jo. You’d be doing him—and me—a favor. I’d like to see a whole lot more of my husband than I do. Come on, Jo, say yes.”
Jo sighed.
“Call us when you’re a couple of hours away,” Maggie said, obviously convinced that they’d won. “We’ll get a fire going and some dinner on the table. Rose Cottage is a wonderful place for you to be. It certainly did the trick for the rest of us. I can’t think of anything cozier than sitting in front of a fire and letting all your cares drift away while the snow falls outside.”
“It snows in Boston,” she reminded them, making one last halfhearted attempt to put them off. “I hate snow.”
“You do not,” Melanie protested. “Besides, it’s common there. It’s so rare here that it’s magical. Just wait. Maybe you’ll follow tradition and meet the man of your dreams here, too.”
“Whatever,” Jo said, seeing little sense in trying to shake their faith in the cottage’s magical properties when it came to romance.
In her current mood, however, she couldn’t imagine that there was enough magic on earth, much less at Rose Cottage, to make her feel one bit better, not about snow, and definitely not about love.
The irony, of course, was that she was the first of the D’Angelo sisters to find the right man at Rose Cottage. She wondered what they’d think of the tradition if they knew how badly that had ended.
1
As if to prove her sisters’ point, snow had started falling an hour after Jo’s arrival at Rose Cottage. She stared out the window as the big, wet flakes landed on the ground. With some effort, she bit back an hysterical sob.
“What?” Ashley asked, coming up to slide a comforting arm around her shoulders.
Jo turned to her big sister, her eyes stinging with tears. “Do you guys have to be right about everything?” she asked in frustration.
Ashley grinned. “Pretty much. Why?”
“The snow’s started right on cue. Surely you don’t actually control the weather.”
Hearing that, Melanie and Maggie rushed over to join them.
“It’s going to be beautiful,” Melanie promised, stepping up beside her and circling an arm around Jo’s waist. “You’ll see. By morning it will be like a winter wonderland out there.”
“And I’ll be trapped in here all by myself,” Jo grumbled, awash in an unbecoming and uncommon sea of self-pity. “I’ll have nothing to do but think.” She shuddered at the prospect. Her thoughts were not all that happy these days. She didn’t want to be alone with them.
“We’ll rescue you,” Ashley promised.
“I’ll bring Jessie by and the two of you can go sledding,” Melanie suggested, referring to her energetic stepdaughter. “That’ll put some color in your cheeks.”
“It’s cold out there.”
“Please,” Melanie commented. “Compared to Boston, this is practically tropical. Besides, you used to love sledding.”
“When I was eight,” Jo muttered.
“Okay, if that doesn’t appeal to you, we can all sit here in front of the fire and drink hot chocolate and eat s’mores,” Ashley said, her tone soothing, as if she sensed that Jo was about to come unglued on them. “Or Maggie can bake. The whole house will fill up with all these wonderful scents, just the way it did at home when Mom made us cookies on snowy days.”
Jo knew they would all be on her doorstep first thing in the morning tomorrow and every day after, unless she put a stop to it right this second. If she ate as many cookies as Maggie was likely to bake, she’d be a blimp by spring.
“Okay, enough,” she said firmly. “Don’t listen to all my grumbling. You can’t turn your lives upside down for me. I appreciate your concern, but I’ll be fine. If my thoughts start getting too dark and dreary, I can always go for a walk.”
“Of course you can. And there are a few things around this place that need to be taken care of,” Ashley said briskly. “Since I was the last one here, I’ll make a list of the stuff I never got to do. In fact, I’ll make a couple of calls first thing tomorrow and try to line up the right people to come by. You’ll just have to be here when they show up.”
“I can’t afford to spend a fortune on repairs,” Jo reminded her. “Until Mike needs me for something, I’m on an unpaid leave of absence. My boss was generous in agreeing to keep the job open for me.”
“Generous, my ass,” Ashley retorted. “You’re the most talented person he has.”
Jo grinned at her. “Thanks, big sister, but you’re not only biased, you don’t know a thing about landscape de sign.”
“But Mike does,” Melanie chimed in. “And he says you’re good. Don’t worry about money, Jo. You’ll have all the work you want while you’re here. You just have to speak up whenever you’re ready.”
“And in the meantime, don’t worry about the repair bills,” Ashley said. “We’ve pooled money to get this place fixed up. Melanie got the rooms painted and worked on the garden, Maggie made improvements in the kitchen.” She shrugged. “I didn’t do much, since Josh was teaching me to relax, so I’ve chipped in for the work that still needs to be done. All the bills will come to me. You’ll just need to supervise.”
Jo regarded them with bemusement. “Why waste any more money on this place? You all have your own homes now, and Mom hasn’t been here since Grandmother died except to see you. Why spend a fortune to fix up Rose Cottage?”
“It’s not a fortune. We’ve all agreed Rose Cottage needs to stay in the family, which means it’s sensible to keep it in good repair,” Ashley said. “And it’s yours for as long as you want it.”
“Thanks,” Jo said, her voice choked. Until she’d actually gotten here, she hadn’t realized how much she missed her big sisters. Right this second, it didn’t even matter that they were gathered around her in Rose Cottage, the site of her first painful love affair. “You guys are the best.” She sniffed and brushed away a traitorous tear.
“Don’t start bawling now,” Maggie scolded, handing her a tissue. “Or we’ll have to stick around till you’re finished and we’ll wind up being snowed in. Much as you love us right this second, I doubt you’re up for a slumber party.”
Jo forced a misty-eyed smile. “True.” The last thing she wanted was to give her sisters too much time to cross-examine her. “Go, while you can. And call me when you get home, so I won’t worry that you’ve skidded off the road and landed in a ditch.”
Relieved by their acquiescence, she stood in the doorway watching until they were out of sight, then sighed heavily. The ground was almost covered with snow already, and there was no sign that it was stopping. It was a little like a winter wonderland, she admitted as she stared toward the Chesapeake Bay.
Once, when she’d been starry-eyed and in love, she had thought this would be the place she’d spend the rest of her life. Now it felt more like a beautiful prison.
At least she could leave it when it got to be too much, she reminded herself. If she managed to plaster a cheery smile on her face eac
h time she saw her sisters, eventually they’d relent and let her go home. Until then, she’d lay low and pretend that she’d never even heard of Pete Catlett, much less loved him enough to let him break her heart.
Pete’s answering service relayed the message that there were some loose and rotting boards on the porch at Rose Cottage, along with a plea that he get to them first thing in the morning if at all possible. The service hadn’t said who’d called, though his guess was Ashley.
Damn, he thought, his mind immediately going back seven years to the summer when Rose Cottage had been like a second home to him. Maybe even more like the first real home he’d known. Mrs. Lindsey had had a soothing temperament, especially compared to his mother’s quick flashes of irritation.
And, of course, there had been Jo with her huge blue eyes, scattering of freckles dusted across a pert nose and a mouth that had tempted him from the first time he’d seen those lush lips curve into a shy smile.
They had shared so many hopes and dreams that summer. He’d been so sure that in a few years they’d find a way to be together forever. He’d made a lot of promises that he’d had every intention of keeping.
Then he’d made one stupid, idiotic mistake in the first weeks after Jo had gone back to Boston, and his life had been sent in another direction entirely.
He’d wanted to blame Kelsey Prescott for getting pregnant, but the one thing he’d vowed to do the moment his father abandoned him and his mom was to be responsible. He’d sworn he would never walk out on a child of his, not even if he wasn’t in love with the child’s mother. He’d find some way to make it work. In his head, if not his heart, he’d accepted that he was every bit as responsible for that baby’s creation as Kelsey was.
And he’d tried doing the right thing. Lord knows, he’d tried. But Kelsey had felt trapped and angry from the very beginning. She couldn’t seem to let go of her bitterness the way Pete had tried valiantly to do. Nothing Pete had done could make up for the fact that she’d had to give up her dream of moving away to someplace more exciting than the rural area where they’d both grown up.
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