Shore Lights Read Free Page A

delightful little girl who had entertained Rose with her songs and stories last Christmas in Seattle was now a withdrawn and painfully sad child whose smiles never quite reached her stormy blue eyes.
    Rose knew that Tom and Maddy’s breakup had nothing to do with her, but decades of guilt were hard to ignore. She hadn’t prepared Maddy for the real world of men and women. She had taught her how to balance a checkbook, shop for the best auto loan, and make minor plumbing repairs, but she hadn’t taught her the fine art of living with a man.
    The truth was, she hadn’t a clue herself. Rose had grown up in a world of women, with an absentee father, three sisters, and more aunts and nieces than you could shake a bra strap at, and between them all they had about as much luck at keeping a man as they had at the slot machines in Atlantic City.
    Some women were lucky in love. Some were lucky in business. One look at the bare ring fingers and flourishing IRAs of the four DiFalco sisters, and you knew which way the wind blew. Lucy, the eldest, said a DiFalco woman couldn’t hold on to a man if she had him Krazy Glued to her side. Over the years Rose had come to realize the truth of that statement.
    In the best of times love was a puzzle Rose had never been able to unravel. She had married a wonderful man, the salt of the earth, and still hadn’t been able to find a way to hold on to love for the long haul. He offered her the world, and she had found herself longing for the stars. She had a beautiful daughter who was bright and talented and loving, yet somehow that wasn’t quite enough for Rose, either. She wanted Maddy to have everything she never had, to be everything she could never be, and when Maddy had turned out to be lacking the ambition gene, Rose’s disappointment knew no bounds.
    Maddy was a dreamer, same as her father. She followed her heart wherever it led, and she never thought to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so she could find her way safely home. Maddy’s unplanned pregnancy had filled Rose with a combination of elation and dread. She hadn’t known Tom Lawlor well, but she did know that he had already earned his parenting stripes and wasn’t in the market to add a few more to his sleeve. He was her age, after all, and she understood him even if she didn’t approve.
    But not Maddy. Not her daydreaming, foolish optimist of a daughter. She hadn’t seen it coming, not even when he spelled it out for her in neon letters a foot high. She had still believed they would find a happy ending, believed it right up until the moment Tom and Lisa flew off to Vegas for one of those quickie weddings in a chapel on the Strip.
    She longed to gather Maddy and Hannah up in her arms and kiss away their tears, mend their broken hearts until they were better than new.
    All of the things she didn’t have time to do when Maddy was a little girl.
    Instead there she was, a successful sixty-two-year-old businesswoman with the hottest B&B between Rehoboth Beach and Martha’s Vineyard, trying to summon up the guts to knock on the door to her own office and see how her daughter was getting on with the Web site. Rose had bearded wild bankers in their lairs, charmed free advertising out of jaded local radio stations, spun pure gold from straw. Spending five stress-free minutes with her only child should be a piece of cake.
    So what if she and Maddy had exchanged words last night. It wasn’t the first time and God knew it wouldn’t be the last. They were mother and daughter, hardwired to get on each other’s nerves. Nothing was going to change that fact, but she could make it better. She knew she could.
    If she could just bring herself to knock on that door.
    Â 
“OH, NO!” MADDY hit the backspace key three times, then retyped the number. This was no time to screw up, not when the auction was sliding into its final minutes and she was struggling to maintain high bidder status