No Beach Like Nantucket

by Grace Palmer

  Perhaps she should go for a walk to calm her mind. The beach would be lovely now that the rain had stopped on her end of the island, and it was just a couple of blocks away. She always loved the sight of the moon over the midnight ocean. She pulled on a sweater and sweatpants, slipped her feet into her sneakers, and went quietly out of the house with a flashlight in hand.

  Making her way through the dunes, she stepped out onto the wide expanse of the Nantucket beach. It was every bit as quiet as she expected, like the world hadn’t yet realized that the rain was gone. The moon was bright and clear, as were the stars. The only noise was the shush-shush-shush of the waves on the sand, and her own footsteps and breathing.

  She settled down cross-legged. The sand was a bit wet, but she didn’t mind. Its coolness felt good. She let the gentle breeze pass by as she exhaled.

  She wanted so badly to stay here forever. But that choice might soon be taken from her. Any day now, Toni would call again with the news that the inn had been sold and it was time for Mae to begin again somewhere new. Mae was surprised that it hadn’t happened already. She wondered what could be stalling that. Toni had sounded like she was on the verge of selling during that first call. Had she changed her mind? Well, best not to think like that. It wouldn’t do Mae any good to get her hopes up, only to see them crushed again when the inevitable happened.

  In a way, Mae understood Toni’s desire. This place held only hurt for her after Henry’s passing. Mae could never blame her sister-in-law for wanting to leave it in her past.

  But for Mae, this beach, this island, this place … this was home. It had embraced her, given her life and happiness and children and the gorgeous moon rising huge and luminescent over these beautiful waters. No matter what happened, she would find a way to stay here as long as she possibly could.

  She belonged to Nantucket, and Nantucket belonged to her.

  “I thought I might find you here,” said a man’s voice from behind her.

  Mae nearly jumped out of her skin. She’d been so absorbed in her own thoughts that she hadn’t heard him come up. As she turned and saw Dominic standing a few steps behind her, hands in his pockets and smiling, she had to blink a few times before she believed what she was seeing.

  “Are you a ghost?” she asked.

  Dominic laughed. “No, that fate has yet to befall me, though there is no telling what the future holds.”

  “I suppose that’s a good thing,” she said, with remarkable poise given how badly he’d scared her. “But you shouldn’t go sneaking up on old ladies like that. You’re liable to give someone a heart attack!”

  “My apologies,” he murmured, chastened.

  “You’re liable to give me a crick in my neck, too. Won’t you come sit down instead of standing behind me like that?”

  “As you wish.” He came over and settled into a seat next to her. “What a gift has been given to you here.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “What do you mean?” Mae asked.

  He swept a hand around to include everything that lay before them. “This is magnificent. Nature’s finest work. She outdid herself when she shaped Nantucket.”

  It was Mae’s turn to laugh. He was always waxing quixotic about the beauty of the island. Like on the sailboat before his sudden departure. He’d said something remarkably similar, actually. It made her smile. For such an introspective, even melancholy man, he had a cute trait of seeing the world through the fresh eyes of a child sometimes. “That’s quite poetic, even for you, Dominic.”

  “I’m in a poetic frame of mind these days. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the world and the things that make it up,” he said.

  “Now you’ve really lost me.” She chuckled. “I’m just an old lady and an innkeeper.”

  He turned to look at her. His eyes were bright and inquisitive. “I didn’t tell you why I left, did I?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t believe you did,” she replied carefully.

  He rubbed at his jaw uncomfortably. “I apologize for that. I was uncertain about the outcome of my trip, so I didn’t want to sow false hope.”

  “Hope for what?”

  “I overheard you,” he mumbled like he was embarrassed. “I am quite sorry for that. It was never my intention to eavesdrop on you or anything of the sort.”

  Mae shivered despite the warmth of the night air. “Overheard what?”

  “About the sale of the inn. Your sister-in-law.”

  She gasped, then stifled it. “Oh,” was all she could say. Why did it feel like Dominic was keeping secrets? He’d been so open with her from the start. What had changed?

  “And—I do hope you’ll forgive me for this one day—I took it upon myself to see if there was something I could do about it.”

  Mae had no idea what he was talking about. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “I left to attend some meetings with my agent and sell the rights to my book,” he explained. “That was the purpose of my excursion. It took quite some time—Hollywood types are as fickle as they come, I’m afraid. But ultimately, we were successful.”

  What this had to do with the inn and with Toni, Mae didn’t know. But she stayed quiet and let him talk. It seemed like he had such a burden to get off his chest.

  “I was fortunate to receive a generous offer. And I was likewise fortunate that I did overhear you that day, despite my guilt in doing so. Because, if you’ll let me, Mae … I’d like to buy the inn from your sister-in-law and gift it to you.”

  Mae’s jaw fell open.

  Dominic’s eyes searched her face, looking for an answer. She knew what he was asking her. It wasn’t just about the inn, or about Toni, or about Nantucket, even. It was about the two of them. He was saying, Here I am. Will you accept me?

  The stars and the moon and the ocean and the night and the island all held their breath while Mae weighed the question in her heart. Somewhere out there, she thought she could sense Henry’s smile, too. Urging her to live her life. To look forward. To move into the future, not stay mired in the past.

  So, seated next to this foreigner on the beaches of Nantucket, Mae did just that.

  She leaned forward and kissed Dominic.

  And it felt right.

  Coming Soon! (Sneak Preview)

  NO WEDDING LIKE NANTUCKET

  Preorder Book 3 in the Sweet Island Inn series now!

  Click here to pre-order!

  Or keep reading below to get a sneak preview.

  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 the third volume of the heartwarming Sweet Island Inn series from author Grace Palmer.

  Take a peek inside!

  A beautiful Sunday morning in June. Seven days until Eliza’s wedding.

  MAE

  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, actually. 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. No guests—that was all well and good, but 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. She 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 quite 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?” he asked playfully.

  “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 gravely. “Now, shoo. I’m annexing this kitchen into my domain.”

  She laughed, shook her head, and walked away 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 on a random whim 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, she saw that it was in fact empty. Not a morsel to be seen.

  “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 wri
ting 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 (all the members of the Nut family, according to Dominic) 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,” she sighed. Dominic’s publisher must have forwarded all of 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.