by Grace Palmer
“Mom!” Drew exclaimed. “That’s huge! Huge! That would turn everything around.”
“Drew’s right, Mom,” Melanie chimed in. “A story in a big paper like that could change everything.”
Joel cleared his throat then. “Well, not just the paper.” He grinned sheepishly. “I managed to talk them into featuring you, and the inn, on their podcast as well. It’s nationwide.”
Georgia frowned at this. “Podcast?” She’d heard of the term, but wasn’t quite sure what it meant.
Drew, realizing her confusion, beamed. “It’s awesome! It means everyone can and will hear about our story. Business is going to boom, I promise you.”
Georgia broke into a smile then, hope suddenly restored. She and Joel had made an agreement not to talk about the business until after the New Year, but it seemed that plan might have to be changed, thanks to this wonderful development.
She turned and wrapped her arms around Joel. “I cannot believe you! You’re a star!” She kissed him on the cheek and he ran one finger along her cheek.
“No, you are. My star. My guiding light,” he said. His voice was low so nobody could hear the sweet words but her.
“Oh, look!” Ashley called out then. “It’s snowing again.”
Georgia turned her head and through the large windows she could see her future daughter-in-law was right. A light sprinkle of snow was once again falling. Georgia smiled.
It was perfect, this Christmas.
She had her children, every last one of them was happy and starting a life of their own. She had her children’s uncle figure and his wife and son, and later on that evening, her good friends Pam, Barb, Alma, Cheri, and Gwen would join them all with their families for eggnog and late-night Christmas snacks.
She was about to snuggle into Joel’s shoulder when the doorbell rang. She frowned and got up. It was too early for her friends to join them as it was only a little before eight. They weren’t scheduled for another hour or two.
As she opened the door to the inn, she stepped back at once at the sight before her.
“Merry Christmas!” A crowd of carolers called out to her. She clasped her hands in front of her face.
“Alma! Gwen! I didn’t expect you to stop here! I thought this was the end point for you.”
“It is in another hour, darlin’, but we thought we’d stop by here and let you pick a song, too. You’re the true Winter Queen of Willow Beach, after all.”
“After me!” Caroline Piedmont called out with a giggle.
“I love all of you, my dear friends. And I’d love a song. How about Jingle Bells? Something cheerful!”
Alma nodded and was about to turn to her choir when Tasha and Eddie rushed out, followed by the rest of the crew.
“Wait! Tasha and I want to join you!” Eddie and Tasha joined the carolers while the rest of the family stood back and listened as the joyful crowd broke into song.
Georgia smiled as she recognized some of the faces in the choir. There was Liza, standing beside Ben. Caroline, of course was there, as was the sheriff who’d paid them a visit of a different nature that morning.
Georgia stood and smiled as the song ended. She clapped, along with her family and neighbors who were out on their porches too.
“We are off to the next house. But we’ll be here later for your eggnog.” Alma stepped forward and hugged Georgia before leading her carolers away to the next location with Tasha and Eddie joining them for the last leg of the singing tour.
Just as Georgia was about to head back inside, Drew shrieked. She turned in alarm but found herself laughed when she realized the cause of her son’s alarm. He’d been hit by a snowball, the next of which was being fired from the sidewalk then.
“Hey! Superstar! Still know how to throw?”
Georgia turned and to her surprise saw Rachel Roberts, Drew’s co-worker on the sidewalk with her partner, Jax, Vivienne and her husband, as well as several other friends from high school. It seemed that part of the caroling troupe had broken off from the rest to engage in a snowball right with the freshly fallen snow.
Drew looked at Ashley, who winked at him and then stepped out onto the porch, rolling a snowball with snow he scooped up from the railing.
“Wanna know if I can still throw? How’s this for an answer?” He tossed the ball then, hitting the fleeing Rachel squarely on the back. A moment later, Vivienne fired another snowball toward the house, hitting Melanie.
“Hey! You just wait!” Melanie called back with a laugh and turned to Colin. “Mind if I take my vengeance?” He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek.
“Go get ‘em, beautiful.”
With that, Melanie grabbed Ashley by the hand and the two girls ran down the steps, followed by Drew. Bandit rushed out of the house and ran between the participants, excited at the flying snowballs. As the snowball fight raged on, the caroling commenced.
“Life is good, isn’t it?” Joel said. He stood behind Georgia and wrapped his arms around her waist, resting his chin on her shoulder.
“Yes, Joel, life is indeed good. I dare say, it’s wonderful.”
Georgia leaned against the man she loved and together, they watched as her family and friends laugh and play before her in the falling snow.
As she basked in this restored happiness, outside the home she so cherished, she knew one thing for certain. She was truly blessed and her life was indeed, almost perfect.
Just in time for Christmas.
Thanks for reading JUST SOUTH OF CHRISTMAS! If you loved the Baldwin family and Willow Beach, you’ll fall head over heels for the Benson family in my beloved Sweet Island Inn series, set on the gorgeous island of Nantucket. Take a sneak preview below of Book 1 in the series, NO HOME LIKE NANTUCKET.
NO HOME LIKE NANTUCKET:
A Sweet Island Inn Novel (Book 1)
Nantucket was their paradise—until reality came barging in.
An unexpected pregnancy.
A marriage on the rocks.
A forbidden workplace romance.
And a tragedy no one could have seen coming.
Take a trip to Nantucket’s Sweet Island Inn and follow along as Mae Benson and her children—the Wall Street queen Eliza, stay-at-home mom Holly, headstrong chef Sara, and happy-go-lucky fisherman Brent—face the hardest summer of their lives.
Love, loss, heartbreak, hope—it’s all here and more. Can the Benson family find a way to forgive themselves and each other? Or will their grief be too much to overcome?
Find out in NO HOME LIKE NANTUCKET.
Click here to start reading now!
Chapter One: Mae
Mae Benson never ever slept in.
For each of the one thousand, two hundred, and eleven days that she’d lived at 114 Howard Street, Nantucket, Massachusetts, she’d gotten up with the dawn and started her morning the second her eyes opened. It wasn’t because she was a busybody, or compulsive, or obsessive. On the contrary, snoozing for a while was tempting. Her bed was soft this morning. The first fingers of springtime sunlight had barely begun to peek in through the gauzy curtains that hung over the window. And she was in that perfect sleeping position—warm but not too warm, wrapped up but not too tightly.
But force of habit could sometimes be awfully hard to break. So, being careful to make as little noise as possible, she slid out from underneath the comforter, tucked her feet into the fuzzy slippers she’d received for her sixtieth birthday last year, and rose.
Her husband, Henry, always called her his little hummingbird. He’d even bought her a beautiful handblown hummingbird ornament for Christmas last year from a glassblower down by the wharf. It had jade-green wings, little amethysts for eyes, and a patch of ruby red on its chest. She loved how it caught and refracted the winter sunbeams, and she always made sure to put it on a limb of the tree where it could see the snow falling outdoors.
“Flitting around the house, are we?” Henry would say, laughing, every time he came downstairs from their master bedroom to fin
d Mae buzzing from corner to corner. She would just laugh and shake her head. He could make fun of her all he wanted, but the fact remained that each of the little projects she had running at all times around the house required love and care from the moment the day began.
She ran through the list in her head as she moved silently around the bedroom getting dressed for the day. She needed to water the plants on the living room windowsill, the ones that her daughter, Sara, had sent from her culinary trip to Africa and made her mother promise to keep alive until she could retrieve them on her next visit. Crane flowers, with their gorgeous mix of orange- and blue-bladed leaves; desert roses, with their soft blush of red fading into the purest white; and her favorites, the fire lilies, that looked just like a flickering flame.
She had to check on the batch of marshmallow fluff fudge—a Mae Benson specialty—that she’d left to set in the freezer overnight. Her friend Lola, who lived down the street, had just twisted her ankle badly a few days prior and was laid up at home with a boot on her leg. Mae didn’t know much about ankle injuries, but she had a lot of hands-on experience with fudge, so she figured she’d offer what she knew best.
She should also start coffee for Henry—lots of cream and sugar, as always. Henry had an outing planned that morning with Brent to go check on some fishing spots they’d been scheming over for the last few weeks. Mae knew he was excited about the trip. He’d been exhibiting trademark Happy Henry behavior all week long—eyes lighting up with that mischievous twinkle, hands rubbing together like an evil mastermind, and the way that he licked the corner of his lips, like he could already taste the salt air that hung on the wind and feel the bouncing of the boat as it raced through the waves.
Just before she turned to leave the bedroom and start her day, she looked over at her husband. He was sleeping on his side of the bed, snoring softly like he always did. It was never enough to wake her, thankfully. Not like Lola’s ex-husband, who’d been a snorer of epic proportions. Henry hadn’t bothered a single soul in the six and a half decades he’d been alive on this earth. Matter of fact, she couldn’t think of a single person who disliked him—other than Mae herself, whenever he took the liberty of dipping into the brownie batter, or when he insisted on sneaking up behind her while she was cooking, nipping at the lobe of her ear, then dancing away and laughing when she tried to swat him with a spoon and inevitably sprayed chocolate batter all over the kitchen.
But the truth of the matter was that she could never bring herself to stay irked at him. It wasn’t just his physical looks, although he certainly wasn’t hurting in that department. The same things she’d fallen in love with at that Boston bar forty-plus years ago were still present and accounted for. The long, proud nose. Full lips, always eager to twitch into a smile. Bright blue eyes that danced in the sunlight when he laughed, cried, and—well, all the time, really. And that darn shock of hair that was perpetually threatening to fall over his forehead. She reached over and smoothed it out of his face now. Time had turned his sun-drenched blondness into something more silvery, but in Mae’s eyes, he was all the more handsome for it.
But, even more than his good looks, Mae loved Henry’s soul. He was a selfless giver, an instant friend to every child who’d ever come across his path. He loved nothing more than to kneel in front of an awestruck five-year-old and present him or her with some little hand-carved trinket, one of the many he kept in his pockets to whittle whenever he had an idle moment. She loved that he laughed and cried in all the wrong places during romantic comedies and that he knew how to cook—how to really cook, the kind of cooking you do with a jazz record crooning through the speakers and a soft breeze drifting in through an open window.
She let her hand linger on Henry’s forehead just a beat too long. He didn’t open his eyes, but his hand snaked up from underneath the sheets and threaded through Mae’s fingers.
“You’re getting up?”
“Can’t waste the day away.”
It was a ritual, one they’d been through practically every morning for as long as either could remember. For all that he’d become a proud father to four children, a state-record-holding fisherman, a much-sought-after contractor and builder on the island of Nantucket, Henry loved nothing so much as to stay in bed for hours, alternating between sleeping and poking Mae until she rolled over and gave him the soft kisses he called her “hummingbird pecks.” There was a perpetual little boy spirit in him, a playfulness that another six or sixty decades couldn’t extinguish if it tried.
“Stay with me,” he murmured. “The day can wait a few more minutes, can’t it?” His eyes were open now, heavy with sleep, but still gazing at her fondly.
Mae tapped him playfully on the tip of the nose. “If it was up to you, ‘a few more minutes’ would turn into hours before we knew it, and then I’d be scrambling around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to get everything done before Holly, Pete, and the kids get here tonight.”
Holly was Mae and Henry’s middle daughter. She and her husband, Pete, were bringing their two kids to Nantucket to spend the weekend. Mae had had the date circled on her calendar for months, excited at the prospect of spoiling her grandkids rotten. She already had oodles of activities planned—walks downtown to get rock candy from the corner store, sandcastles at the beach, bike rides down to ’Sconset to ogle the grand houses the rich folks had built out on that end of the island.
Grady was a little wrecking ball of a seven-year-old boy, and Mae knew that he’d love nothing so much as building a massive sandcastle and then terrorizing it like a blond Godzilla. Alice, on the other hand, was still as sweet and loving as a five-year-old girl could be. She let Grandma Mae braid her long, soft hair into fishtails every morning whenever they were visiting the island. It was another ritual that Mae treasured beyond anything else. Her life was full of those kinds of moments.
“It ain’t so bad, lying in bed with me, is it?” Henry teased. “But maybe I just won’t give ya a choice!”
He leaped up and threw his arms around Mae’s waist, tugging her over him and then dragging them both beneath the covers. Mae yelped in surprise and smacked him on the chest, but Henry was a big man—nearly six and a half feet tall—and the years he’d spent hauling in fish during his weekend trips with Brent had kept him muscular and toned. When her palm landed on his shoulder, it just made a thwacking noise, and did about as much good as if she’d slapped a brick wall. So she just laughed and let Henry pull her into his arms, roll over on top of her, and throw the comforter over their heads.
It was soft and warm and white underneath. The April sun filtered through the bedsheets and cast everything in a beautiful, hazy glow. “You’ve never looked so beautiful,” Henry said, his face suspended above hers.
“Henry Benson, I do believe you are yanking my chain,” she admonished.
“Never,” he said, and he said it with such utter seriousness that Mae’s retort fell from her lips. Instead of poking him in the chest like she always did whenever he teased her, she let her hand stroke the line of his jaw.
He pressed a gentle kiss to her lips. “Stay with me for just a few more minutes, Mrs. Benson,” he said. She could feel him smiling as he kissed her. She could also feel the butterflies fluttering in her stomach. Forty-one years of marriage and four children later, and she still got butterflies when her husband kissed her. Wasn’t that something?
“All right, Mr. Benson,” she said, letting her head fall back on the pillows. “Just a few more minutes.”
Henry grinned and fell in next to her, pulling her into his embrace. She could feel his heartbeat thumping in his chest. Familiar. Dependent. Reliable. Hers. “You just made my day.”
“But I’m warning you,” she continued, raising one finger into the air and biting back the smile that wanted to steal over her lips. “If you start snoring again, I’m smothering you with a pillow.”
“Warning received,” Henry said. “Now quit making a fuss and snooze with me for a while, darling.”
So Mae did exactly that. Sara’s plants could wait.
Click here to keep reading!
Also by Grace Palmer
Sweet Island Inn
No Home Like Nantucket (Book 1)
No Beach Like Nantucket (Book 2)
No Wedding Like Nantucket (Book 3)
No Love Like Nantucket (Book 4)
* * *
Willow Beach Inn
Just South of Paradise (Book 1)
Just South of Perfect (Book 2)
Just South of Sunrise (Book 3)
Just South of Christmas (Book 4)