by Grace Palmer
No Wedding Like Nantucket
A Sweet Island Inn Novel (Book Three)
Grace Palmer
Copyright © 2020 by Grace Palmer
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
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Also by Grace Palmer
No Wedding Like Nantucket
I. One Year Later
1. Mae
2. Eliza
3. Brent
4. Sara
5. Holly
6. Sara
7. Brent
8. Eliza
9. Mae
II. A Guest Arrives
10. Holly
11. Mae
12. Sara
13. Holly
14. Eliza
15. Holly
16. Brent
17. Mae
18. Sara
19. Mae
III. What the Heart Wants
20. Oliver
21. Brent
22. Eliza
23. Mae
IV. The Big Day
24. Holly
25. Sara
26. Mae
27. Eliza
28. Sara
29. Brent
30. Eliza
31. Mae
Coming Soon!
A Note from the Author
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Also by Grace Palmer
Sweet Island Inn Series
No Home Like Nantucket (Book 1)
No Beach Like Nantucket (Book 2)
No Wedding Like Nantucket (Book 3)
No Love Like Nantucket (Book 4)
No Wedding Like Nantucket
The wedding of the year versus the storm of the century. Who will win?
Things are finally looking up for the Benson family.
After a year of tough choices and big leaps of faith, it seems like love, success, and happiness are right in their grasp.
But with a wedding on the horizon and a successful new restaurant growing faster than anyone ever expected, everyone certainly has their hands full.
In fact, it’s starting to cause problems.
Little cracks are appearing in the surface.
And the historic storm brewing offshore might turn those cracks into craters.
Can the Bensons and their loved ones band together in time to make this summer their best yet?
Or will jealousy and uncertainty spoil the big day?
Find out in NO WEDDING LIKE NANTUCKET.
Welcome back to another summer at Nantucket’s Sweet Island Inn! It’s the happiest time of the year, so sit down, stay awhile, and fall in love in this heartwarming, inspirational women’s fiction beach read from author Grace Palmer.
Part I
One Year Later
1
Mae
A beautiful Sunday morning in June.
Seven days until Eliza’s wedding.
These days, Mae Benson sometimes—not very often, but sometimes—slept in.
It was only on days when there were no guests at the Sweet Island Inn and no pressing chores to do. Only on days when she didn’t have plans to meet a friend for brunch or volunteer at the pet shelter or the soup kitchen. Or if she’d stayed up late drinking a glass or two of wine on the front porch the night before.
So, not very often. But sometimes. And that alone was a world of difference from what she’d done for the first sixty-two years of her life.
As she entered year number sixty-three, a lot of things were different. Mae was now the permanent co-owner and co-operator of the Sweet Island Inn, a beloved bed and breakfast on the beautiful island of Nantucket just off the coast of Cape Cod. She was a grandmother three times over. And she was beginning a new relationship.
“Beginning” was a heck of a word, though. As was “relationship.” And “boyfriend,” and “date,” and “love,” and all the myriad things that went along with falling for someone new at such an unexpected stage in her life. Just a few years ago, Mae would have thought that all those things had long since disappeared in the rear-view mirror. Oh, how wrong she had been!
Life came in circles, as it turned out. Seasons. And this was a beautiful springtime in her world, the kind where all the flower buds were just pushing their way up out of the topsoil. Things in Mae’s universe were tender, blooming, and determined to reach the sunlight.
Speaking of sunlight, the rays coming through the blinds in the inn’s master bedroom were letting her know that she had slept in plenty long enough. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes as she sat up and looked to her left. Her boyfriend, partner in crime, and fellow co-owner of the Sweet Island Inn, famed Irish novelist Dominic O’Kelley, was fast asleep next to her. Even unconscious, he looked the same as he always did—dapper, intelligent, reserved, with a soft smile playing across his lips.
She decided to be kind and let him sleep in for a little while longer. He’d been up late last night writing the first pages of his new novel. Staying as quiet as she could, Mae slipped out of the bedroom.
There were no guests at the inn today, nor would there be any for the rest of the week. It was closed for a special occasion: the wedding of Mae’s oldest daughter, Eliza. Seven days from now, her firstborn would be standing on the altar, across from a man who had stolen her heart when she’d thought it was irretrievably broken. Just the thought of that moment made Mae smile.
With no guests requiring her attention, there was only herself and Dominic to take care of. Downstairs in the kitchen, she put on a kettle to heat water for the French press and found a yogurt in the fridge to quell the hunger in her belly. Though it was all well and good that there were no guests, Mae did miss having them. She loved how far people traveled to stay under her roof and explore the island she called home. She considered it a privilege to be able to host them. It was a responsibility she took quite seriously—“her life’s calling,” she said whenever anyone asked. After all, Nantucket was beautiful. Paradise on earth. In her humble opinion, everyone ought to see it at some point in their lifetime.
When the kettle began to squeal, Mae poured it over the coffee grounds and set a timer to let the coffee steep. She looked around, twiddling her thumbs. It was so oddly silent with no one here. No squeaks from the floorboards upstairs, no children running underfoot. The only thing that moved were the leaves of a rosebush outside the kitchen window, stirred by the early June breeze.
It still made her head spin to think about how fast this inn had become home. Two years ago, she had been living a different life. Then she’d lost her husband, Henry, to a tragic boating accident. In the wake of his death, Mae had taken up her sister-in-law’s offer to manage the Sweet Island Inn in her absence. Mae had made the transition here from the house on Howard Street, the one she’d raised her family in, the one that Henry had built with his bare hands. That was an abrupt change. But it felt like the inn was her home from the second her bags first hit the ground. Funny how that worked—how home could travel with a person, change shape and size and smell, but still feel much the same every time you walked in the door.
Dominic joked sometimes that she was like a hermit crab. She’d shed one home—albeit not quit
e by choice—and picked up another. The old home felt somehow foreign to her now, despite how many of her memories and how much of her DNA was bound up in its walls. So foreign, in fact, that she’d recently begun the process of selling it. That thought—getting rid of the house on Howard Street—would once have seemed laughable.
But it wasn’t. Not anymore. The Sweet Island Inn was home now. The house on Howard Street was merely a building she once had loved.
Everything she loved now was here with her. This inn, its spirit, its guests, her boyfriend, the island of Nantucket as a whole.
“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty!” she chirped brightly as the boyfriend in question made his way sleepily downstairs. Dominic was wearing a muted gray cardigan and olive green slacks with house slippers on his feet. Mae loved teasing him about the slippers. “Such an old man affectation,” she’d say.
“As befits an old man,” was his inevitable grinning reply.
He crossed from the bottom of the stairs to the kitchen, then let his fingers tap dance gently across the back of Mae’s hand where it rested on the kitchen countertop. “What mischief are we getting into today?”
“Mischief? You’ve got the wrong girl for that,” Mae answered. “I’m far too old for mischief.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, darling. Mischief is merely a state of mind.”
“The state of your mind, maybe. My mind is in a state of hunger right now. Yogurt isn’t quite going to do it today.”
“Well then, you’re in luck, Mae, my dear. Sit back, sip your coffee, and prepare to be amazed.” He cracked his knuckles and his neck, still grinning all the while.
“Uh-oh,” she tutted. “Don’t tell me you’re going to cook.”
“Not only am I going to cook,” he said, walking over to the refrigerator and rummaging around, “I’m going to cook you the world-famous Dominic O’Kelley Toast Extraordinaire.”
Mae wrinkled her nose. She was trying to bite back her laugh—Lord knows Dominic didn’t need the encouragement when he got going like this, with such pep in his step—but she wasn’t doing such a good job of keeping her smile hidden from him.
“What makes it so extraordinary?” she asked.
“That is a secret I’ll take to my grave,” he answered. “Now, shoo. I’m annexing this kitchen into my domain.”
She laughed, shook her head, and went to fetch the newspaper from the stoop outside. It had been two years since Dominic first walked into her life. Two years of listening to that rolling Irish brogue, and yet she never tired of hearing how words came out of his lips, smooth like mossy pebbles in a riverbed. Toast wasn’t just crisped-up bread when Dominic said it. It was something new, something special, something different.
But he was a terrible cook, so her expectations for the dish itself were quite low. She’d probably just have another yogurt when he wasn’t looking. What he didn’t know wouldn’t kill him, right?
She chuckled under her breath as she opened the front door and stepped outside into the Nantucket June sun. It wasn’t yet hot, but it would be, no doubt. The sun was making its way up the sky like an egg yolk sliding around in the pan. Clear blue sky, not a cloud in sight, and the not-so-distant murmur of waves sliding across the sand. Marvelous.
She eyed the mailbox at the end of the drive and had a quick internal debate about whether she ought to drag her tail down there to see if they’d received anything. She decided that if the bird feeder on the side of the house was empty, it was a sign she should go fetch the mail. Sticking her head around the doorjamb, she saw that it was in fact empty.
“Drat!” she said to herself, laughing. Oh well. A little stretch of the legs on such a fine day wasn’t exactly cruel and unusual punishment. She had a sneaking suspicion that one of the squirrels who lived in the pine tree in the neighbor’s yard was responsible for emptying the bird feeder. Dominic, whose little writing nook upstairs looked out on the tree in question, had named the squirrels. He swore he could tell them all apart, but Mae was doubtful. Pistachio, Cashew, Pecan, Almond, and Walnut looked way too similar for that.
She kept an eye on the tree, looking for any Nuts who looked particularly well-fed, as she waltzed down to the mailbox. When she got there, she saw that it was bursting full. “Oh goodness.” Dominic’s publisher must have forwarded all his fan mail here. They got bundles of the stuff periodically. It always fell to Mae to force Dominic into a seat so he could respond to the letters. Left to his own devices, Dominic would’ve used them for wall insulation. Typical man, she bemoaned. No sense of personal touch whatsoever.
She hefted the bundle under one arm, newspaper under the other, and made her way back inside. The squirrels must be sleeping off their illicit snack. Lucky little critters. They’d catch her wrath if she saw them stealing from her feeder again.
She coughed as soon as she crossed the threshold back into the living room, finding it filled with acrid smoke. The fire alarm was going off, too. She waved a hand in front of her face, still coughing, and ran into the kitchen. Dominic was standing in the middle, flapping a dish towel frantically at the toaster, where all the smoke was coming from. When he saw that she’d returned, he froze and looked at her like a little kid caught doing something naughty.
“‘World famous,’ my behind!” She laughed. “Get out of my kitchen, you goon, before you burn the whole house down.” She took the dish towel from his hand and swatted him on the bottom as he trudged sheepishly past her.
Typical man, she thought again. But he was her typical man.
That was marvelous, too.
2
Eliza
No one had ever told Eliza Benson that wedding planning was so freaking difficult.
Actually, that wasn’t true. Lots of people had told her. Just like lots of people had told her that motherhood was hard. She hadn’t listened to that, either. Wrong on both counts, as it turned out. Wedding planning was hard. Motherhood was hard. She really ought to start heeding others’ warnings.
Lord, was she getting stubborn as she approached her mid-thirties! She was becoming more like her sister Sara. And, now that she thought about it, Sara was becoming more like her, too. Like a strange, Freaky Friday-esque switching of bodies and personalities. Sara the business owner? Eliza the headstrong? That was completely backwards.
And yet, it was the state of the world these days. Such is life, she had learned. We grow, we change, we all turn into our parents. It was both a blessing and a curse.
Speaking of parents, Mom was thriving these days. It made Eliza’s heart sing to see her so happy with Dominic. It was still weird, of course, to see her mother in the arms of a man who wasn’t her father. But Dominic was a good man; he loved Mom and he treated her well.
Happiness was by no means limited to Nantucket’s Sweet Island Inn, either. Eliza’s house was full of joy, full of her daughter’s laughter and her fiancé’s music.
After their spontaneous, preemptive, quasi-but-not-quite-honeymoon to Bermuda, the burgeoning Patterson family had come home to Nantucket. They were tan and in love with each other. Eliza loved Oliver, Oliver loved Winter, Winter loved Eliza. Winter, coming up on eighteen months, loved lots of things. She loved clapping and the song “Wheels on the Bus” and waddling around the house at breakneck speed. She had a little toy guitar that she played while Oliver made up words to songs, and when he picked her up and raced down the hallway with her, Winter squealed with that little girl laughter that instantly melted Eliza’s heart.
As a matter of fact, that was what they were doing right this second. Oliver called the game “Rocket Ship.” He made the sound effects to match as he zoomed up and down the hallway in his socks, sliding across the hardwood with Winter held out in front of him so she could feel the wind on her face.
“You know, some of us are trying to work!” Eliza hollered after him with a smile on her face. She was seated at the computer that lived in one corner of the living room, working out the kinks of a new set of Facebook ads for the Sweet Isl
and Inn. Since Dominic’s purchase of the inn from Aunt Toni, Eliza had been officially installed as the inn’s business manager. Dominic had even ordered her business cards, which was both thoughtful and completely unnecessary. Honestly, the inn did all the work for her. Who could resist the allure of Nantucket in the sunshine? Beaches and lighthouses and quaint shops lining the cobblestone streets—sign me up, please, was the standard response. Eliza checked on the set of ads she’d pushed through this morning. There were already a few comments from potential customers.
OMG—how do i get here?? said one.
Heaven on earth, said another.
Eliza grinned. Well, they weren’t wrong.
“Work, shmork!” Oliver shouted back as he vroom-vroom-vroomed back down towards Eliza. Winter was still cackling like a maniac.
“You better make sure she breathes,” Eliza warned. “I can see all the blood rushing to her face already.”
“This is literally the greatest moment of her life thus far,” Oliver shot back as he got a running start and went skidding down the hallway once more. “Until tomorrow’s session of Rocket Ship, that is.”
