The Cafe at Beach End, page 1
Praise for the novels of RaeAnne Thayne
“RaeAnne Thayne gets better with every book.”
—Robyn Carr, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Ms. Thayne’s writing is emotional, riveting, and keeps you hoping all turns out well.”
—Fresh Fiction on The Sea Glass Cottage
“Draws the reader in from the first page to the gratifying conclusion.”
—New York Journal of Books on The Sea Glass Cottage
“[Thayne] engages the reader’s heart and emotions, inspiring hope and the belief that miracles are possible.”
—Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Thayne is in peak form in this delightful, multiple-perspective tale of the entwined lives and loves of three women in a Northern California seaside community... A warmly compelling and satisfying work of women’s fiction.”
—Booklist on The Cliff House, starred review
“The heart of this sweet contemporary story is in the women’s relationships with each other, and it will suit readers on both sides of the blurry romance/women’s fiction divide.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Cliff House
“RaeAnne Thayne is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.... Once you start reading, you aren’t going to be able to stop.”
—Fresh Fiction
RaeAnne Thayne finds inspiration in the beautiful northern Utah mountains, where the New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author lives with her husband and three children. Her books have won numerous honors, including RITA® Award nominations from Romance Writers of America and a Career Achievement Award from RT Book Reviews. RaeAnne loves to hear from readers and can be contacted through her website, raeannethayne.com.
RaeAnne Thayne
The Cafe at Beach End
To my sisters-in-law: Karla, Melanie, Amanda, Tahsha, Rose and Sherri. I consider each of you a sister of my heart.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
1
Meredith
The sky wept the day Meredith Rowland returned to Cape Sanctuary.
As the charming northern California town came into view, she did her best to peer through the heavily beating wipers of her car fighting a losing battle against sheets of rain.
Of course it was raining. It seemed only right, especially considering the dark, sinister cloud that had been following her for the past eighteen months.
As her tires splattered up rain from the wet road, Meredith checked the gas gauge of the ten-year-old compact car she had purchased with the last of her savings, after her beloved Mercedes was sold at auction.
The gauge read below the empty line, but she kept her fingers crossed that she could make it to the café before it ran out of gas.
The car sputtered a little. “Come on, Posy,” she said, using the nickname she had given it somewhere in Nebraska, not for a sweet-smelling floral arrangement but because the first three letters of POS made a particularly pungent acronym that described the car’s general quality.
The engine chugged and Meredith held her breath. “You’ve made it this far. Come on. Only another few miles to go. We’re almost there, baby. You’ve got this.”
Though she knew it was irrational, even delusional, she thought the car seemed to pick up a little energy, like an old horse that smelled the familiar stable of home. A moment later, Meredith chugged onto Main Street on fumes and prayer.
Miraculously, she found a parking space not far from the historic brick building that housed the Beach End Café.
As she gazed at the building, with its cupola and planters spilling over with red and purple flowers, a flood of memories washed over her. Most of them were good, but a few made her throat ache and her eyes burn.
She had adored this place, once upon a time. During her childhood, the café had been her happy place. Whenever she had been feeling lonely or sad or frightened, she would come here in her mind.
Here, she had found love and acceptance. Her grandmother hadn’t cared if she had a B in French literature or if she couldn’t remember how to conjugate “to plunder.” Frances and Tori had loved her just as she was.
If she closed her eyes, she could still picture herself and her cousin as they had been back then. One blond and fair, the other dark, but with the same hazel eyes they had inherited from Frances through their respective parents.
They had been as close as sisters. Closer, even. Sharing laughter and dreams and secrets during those halcyon summer months when Meredith would stay with her grandmother.
She could picture them now in a time-lapse age-progression that played across her mind. They were young girls, stopping at the candy store down the street to fill their pockets with sweets purchased using Meredith’s spending money. Then preteens, riding cruiser bikes through town and giggling at all the cute boys hanging out at the skate park at Driftwood Beach. Then teenagers, sitting around a bonfire and talking and laughing with those same cute boys while stars glittered overhead and the sea murmured its endless song.
Had that really been her? The memories seemed vague and undefined. Hazy and not quite real, as if it had all happened to someone else.
Probably because it had. Meredith was a different person than that lonely girl, yearning for affection.
She once had a nanny who used to tell her that all the cells in her body replaced themselves every three months, so she really did become a new person, like a snake shedding its skin.
She had learned as an adult that wasn’t wholly true—that some cells regenerated every few days, others had much longer life spans into the decades and others never regenerated. Still, so many moments in her life had that ethereal, distant feeling, as if they had happened to someone else.
Certainly the past eighteen months seemed a nightmare from which she couldn’t quite wake up.
All of those things had happened to her, though. She couldn’t wish away her history.
She tightened her fingers around the steering wheel as she finished parking and turned off the engine.
Like it or not, she owned it and would have to figure out now how to take the broken pieces of that history and rebuild herself into something better.
Reaching beside her for her umbrella, Meredith climbed out of the car and extended it, every muscle in her body aching from the long drive and the uncomfortable seat that offered zero lumbar support.
Sharp yearning washed over her for the leather luxury of her Mercedes, complete with both heating and cooling properties. She pushed it away. That was part of her Before life. This was her Now.
With rain clicking against the nylon of the umbrella, she arched her back and inhaled a few deep breaths, for courage as well as calm.
The mingled scent of sea and storm washed through her, smells that immediately took her back to long rainy afternoons in Frances’s old cottage on Starfish Beach, playing board games and watching old movies.
Even in the rain, Cape Sanctuary seemed warm and welcoming, with flowers hanging from streetlamps and more in baskets in windows. Outside the café, a bench with peeling red paint beckoned visitors and their tired feet to stop and enjoy the view.
Did it also apply to those with tired spirits? Because her spirit was at low ebb right about now.
Other disheartened travelers might be welcome to rest here. Not her. Meredith knew she would not be greeted with the typical warmth and comfort the café usually exuded.
The people inside would not be thrilled to see her. Or at least one person wouldn’t be, anyway. Her cousin and once best friend, Tori Ayala, would probably slam the door in her face and send her straight back out into the rain.
Grow a spine, she chided herself.
Tori couldn’t send her packing. Not when Meredith owned half of the café.
She walked to the front door, lowering her umbrella once she was under the shelter of the entry. Heart pounding, she pulled open the door.
At the chime of bells from the front door, the low hum of conversation and clink of glasses inside seemed to die away and everyone turned to see the newcomer.
It was midafternoon, past the busiest hour of lunch. Still, the café seemed to be enjoying a healthy business, more than Meredith might have expected for the off-hour.
“Be with you in a moment,” a cheerful voice rang out. Nerves fluttered through Meredith. She knew that voice, entirely too well.
That voice had once been on the other end of all those secrets, sharing her own and taking Meredith’s too.
The last thing she wanted was a confrontation with Tori the moment she rolled into town, but she knew this one was unavoidable.
She straightened, hitching her last designer purse a little more securely on her shoulder. All she had left was a wreck of a vehicle and the three hundred dollars contained in a Louis Vuitton bag worth about six times that much.
Conscious of the patrons of the restaurant giving her sidelong, curious looks, Meredith shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket, fighting with everything inside her against the urge to grab her bag tightly, push her way out the door and flee back into the rain.
And then what?
She couldn’t leave. Not when she had nowhere else to go.
A moment later, the person she most dreaded seeing came out of the kitchen. Her cousin Tori wore a trim black apron with the Beach End Café embroidered across the front in white, and her arms competently hefted a tray of at least three or four orders.
Her brown hair was caught atop her head in a messy bun, and she had a pencil tucked behind one ear.
She looked as beautiful as ever, bright and vibrant and so dear that the sight of her made emotions rise up in Meredith’s throat.
The sentiment was obviously not reciprocated. As Meredith might have predicted, Tori stopped dead the moment she spotted her. The tray in her arms wobbled slightly, but she maintained control with the ease of long practice.
Meredith’s stomach rumbled as the smell of sizzling meat mingled with coffee and fried potatoes, scents she would forever associate with the café.
Meredith suddenly remembered she hadn’t eaten since a hurried meal the night before, an inexpensive frozen dinner she had bought at the convenience store next to her questionable hotel in Sacramento and cooked in the microwave of her room.
She pushed away the hunger pangs as something to deal with later. Which was becoming the mantra of her life.
“Hello,” she said, not sure what else to say.
Her tentative greeting was met by a wall of fury that seemed as tangible as those storm-tossed waves at Driftwood Park.
“Get out,” Tori snarled. “Get the hell out.”
Meredith could feel herself shrink. She hated confrontation. It made her want to disappear, to curl up around herself in the fetal position with her hands over her head.
At the anger in Tori’s voice, Meredith wanted to slink out the door, climb back into her car and drive away through the rain-spattered streets.
She couldn’t do that. She had come too far, literally and figuratively, to give up now.
She drew in a deep, café-scented breath and faced her cousin. “You want me to leave my own café? Why would I do that?”
“It is not your café,” Tori snapped, flushing.
“Not all of it. But half of it is.”
Tori’s mouth tightened and she hefted her tray higher. “Forty-nine percent. I’m still the controlling owner.”
“I know that,” Meredith said quietly.
She felt lucky to have any stake at all in the café, especially when she didn’t deserve so much as a box of straws.
Frances had clearly stipulated in her will that Tori would always have final say in all the café operations, given that she had spent her entire life working here whereas Meredith had only spent a few weeks every summer.
“I don’t have time for this right now,” Tori hissed. “I have customers. Some of us work for a living instead of existing on money we stole from gullible senior citizens.”
As she no doubt intended, her words cut deeper than any chef’s knife.
Before Meredith could muster a response, Tori gripped her tray and headed for a table in the corner where a group that looked like construction workers must have decided to take a break, probably because of the rain.
They, like everyone else in the café, were giving her surreptitious looks. Meredith wanted to disappear. Instead, she again straightened her spine.
She should be used to the whispers and stares by now. She was, in Chicago, but she had hoped for some respite here in Cape Sanctuary, thousands of miles away from the scene of the crime.
She stood gripping her damp umbrella, not sure what to do.
She had faced worse than this, she reminded herself. Tori couldn’t kick her out, and she couldn’t call the police on her. Meredith had as much right to be here as her cousin did.
When Tori was done delivering the meals, she headed back with the empty tray. The polite smile she had donned for the customers slid back into a glare.
“I thought you were leaving,” she snapped. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Or do let it hit you. I don’t care either way, as long as you go.”
Meredith let out a breath, wishing she could find amid the animosity some trace of the cousin who had once been her dearest friend in the world, the one she knew she could always count on. The one who invariably cried when Meredith had to leave every summer to return to her real life.
She knew she wouldn’t find what she wanted here. She had burned that relationship to the ground long ago.
“I’m afraid I’m not leaving,” she said, fighting for calm. “Not this time. Grandma Frances left me half of the café—yes, I know, forty-nine percent. The only way I’ll leave is if you can buy me out.”
She had hoped they could have politeness between them, if nothing else, but she didn’t blame Tori for her anger. Meredith knew she had earned all of it and more.
“Can you?”
Her cousin’s features tightened. “Buy you out? You know I can’t.”
Meredith shrugged, trying for a placating smile. “Then I’m afraid you’re stuck with me until I figure out what to do next.”
“What do you mean, stuck with you?”
She shrugged. “I might only have a half stake in the café, but Frances left me all of Spindrift Cottage. I’ll stay there while I start to learn the ropes of things here.”
“Learn the ropes,” Tori echoed, as if she couldn’t quite make sense of the words.
“Yes. I’ll move into the cottage today and then report for duty tomorrow.”
Tori made a low sound of frustration in her throat. “So typical. You show up out of the blue and expect the whole world to start revolving around you.”
“I’m sorry you see it that way,” Meredith said with a calmness she didn’t feel. “I only want to help. Since Frances died, I’ve left the entire burden of running the café to you, which isn’t fair. I’m here to do my part now. I would have come earlier but I had...a few things going on.”
Meredith was aware her fingers were trembling, and she had to hope Tori couldn’t see.
“You’re not welcome here,” her cousin snapped again.
The impulse to escape overwhelmed her. She could always live in her car, since that was about all the shelter she could afford now.
When had she become such a coward?
She unfortunately knew the answer to that entirely too well.
As much as she didn’t like confrontation, she couldn’t avoid this one. Tori couldn’t make her leave. Despite everything, even though Meredith knew how little she deserved it, Frances had loved her. Her grandmother had given her a cherished legacy, part of the café Frances had loved as well as ownership of a small two-bedroom cottage on the beach.
That cottage was hers. No angry creditors could take it away.
“Do you have the key to Spindrift Cottage, or would you prefer I reach out to the attorney handling Frances’s estate?”
“I hate to break it to you but Spindrift Cottage is a mess. It’s barely habitable. The previous tenants trashed it before their lease expired last fall and then the roof leaked during the winter. I had it fixed, which I’ll bill you for, but I haven’t done anything else to it.”
Meredith swallowed, feeling vaguely queasy. Maybe she would end up sleeping in Posy after all.
“Thank you for that, anyway.”
