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on the last of the itinerary when she lost her long battle with breast cancer.
    Maddy’s eyes filled with tears at the memory of her stepmother. “Has it gotten any easier?”
    â€œNope.” He glanced away toward the curb where her Mustang idled loudly. “Didn’t expect it to.”
    â€œYou’ll stop by and see us in Seattle during your travels, won’t you?”
    He grinned and tugged on a lock of her hair. “Not if you’re in New Jersey.”
    â€œFat chance.”
    â€œSix months,” he said as she hugged him goodbye. “Give your mother six months. What can you lose?”
    â€œMy sanity,” Maddy said and they laughed, but the truth was out there and she couldn’t take it back. She wanted one more chance to get things right because sometimes even the most independent woman was only a daughter at heart.

Chapter Two
    Paradise Point, New Jersey—three weeks before
Christmas
    Â 
ROSEMARY DIFALCO SWORE off men in August of 1992, and as far as she could tell, that was when Lady Luck finally sat up and took notice. All her life Rose had been waiting for her ship to come in, and when it finally sailed into view she swam right out to meet it.
    You didn’t get anything in this world by being shy, and you sure as hell didn’t get anything by waiting for some man to hand it to you on a silver platter.
    For longer than she could remember her mother, Fay, had rented out rooms in her ramshackle old Victorian house, sharing their living space with retired schoolteachers, penniless artists, and an assortment of hard-luck cases whose only common ground was the bathroom on the second floor. When Fay died almost five years ago, she left the house to her four daughters, three of whom wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. Rose, however, saw possibilities lurking behind the cracked plaster and faded carpets, and she bought out her sisters’ shares and settled down to the hard work of building a new life for herself at a time when she needed it most.
    She took early retirement, then traded in her fancy condo on Eden Lake. She cashed in her 401(k), then plowed the proceeds into the house where she had grown up, a wreck of a Victorian that just happened to boast ocean views from almost every bedroom.
    The Candlelight Inn was born and Rose never looked back. To her delight, she found that she enjoyed the constant parade of guests. She loved the challenge of staying one step ahead of the needs of a nineteenth-century house with a mind of its own. Most of all, she loved the fact that the Candlelight’s success had made it possible for her to offer her daughter a way out of the mess her life was in.
    Anyway you looked at it, this should have been a slam dunk. Rose needed help running the place; Maddy needed a job. The perfect example of need meeting opportunity.
    So why did Rose wake up every morning with the sense that she was preparing for war? She had created an oasis of peace and tranquillity for her paying guests, a place people came to when they wanted to leave the stresses of the real world behind. You would think at least a tiny bit of that tranquillity might spill over onto the innkeeper’s family. Take this morning, for instance. Maddy had been holed up in the office working on the Inn’s Web site for hours now. Rose hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her since they’d laid out the breakfast buffet in silence. They had exchanged words late last night over something so trivial that Rose couldn’t even remember what it was, yet the aftermath had left her wondering for the first time if she had made a terrible mistake inviting Maddy and Hannah to come back home.
    It was painfully clear they weren’t happy. Her daughter was prickly and argumentative, more reminiscent of the seventeen-year-old girl she had once been than the grown woman pictured on her driver’s license. And Hannah—oh, Hannah was enough to break your heart. The