Beach Lane. Sherryl Woods

suggestion had been enough to keep him away from Mack. For now.

      He glanced at the list Susie had given him of things he needed to do on Saturday morning. Bringing her into the real estate management company had been the smartest thing he’d ever done. She could organize an army battalion without batting an eye. He could easily see her with a houseful of kids underfoot, handling the chaos with total competence and ease. A part of him longed for the time when she’d do just that. Watching his older brother with his grandkids had made Jeff just a little envious.

      “Are you heading over to Shanna’s now, Dad?” Susie called out to him. “I told her you’d be there first thing to check on that plumbing. Dwight’s good, but we don’t want to take any chances that he missed something.”

      “On my way,” he assured her, then paused after taking a closer look at her pale complexion. “You okay?”

      She looked startled by the question. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

      “You don’t look so hot, and you took off pretty suddenly on Thanksgiving.”

      “I…I didn’t feel well,” she said, then hurriedly added, “Then. I didn’t feel well then. I’m perfectly fine now.”

      “Something you ate? I haven’t heard about anyone else feeling ill.”

      “Maybe nobody else got thrown on the ground as many times as I did right after dinner,” she retorted with a faint grin.

      Jeff recognized the perfect opening. “About that,” he began.

      “Dad, leave it alone,” she said tersely, her expression forbidding.

      “You sure? If you ever want to talk, your mother and I, we’re always on your side. You do know that, don’t you?”

      She managed to pull off a reassuring smile that Jeff didn’t entirely buy. “Of course I know that,” she promised. “Now, get started. It’s going to take you all day to get through that list I gave you, and Mitzi Gaylord is coming in at five to sign the contract for the Brighton house.”

      “On my way,” he said, still oddly reluctant to leave his daughter.

      A few minutes later, though, he was in the bookstore when he overheard someone make a comment about Mack’s column not being in the paper. He realized he’d noticed the same thing this morning at breakfast, but hadn’t seen any reason to be alarmed by it.

      “Well, I heard he was fired,” one of the women said. “That’s why he’s been hiding out the past few days. Who can blame him? His whole identity was wrapped up in that job. I think he was convinced it was his ticket to respectability—not that he needed one as far as I’m concerned. Still, after all he went through as a boy, this had to be a blow.”

      “Fired? Are you sure?” a second woman asked. “The paper’s been making a big fuss about him for a long time now. Have you been up to Baltimore? Everywhere you look, his picture’s right there. It’s even on the sides of buses. He’s like some kind of sports columnist superstar.”

      Jeff stepped out of the back room and looked around to identify the speakers. One of them was Ethel, whose nearby shop specialized in souvenirs and local gossip. He glanced around and caught Shanna’s eye, then beckoned her to the back.

      “Did you hear them?” he asked.

      She nodded. “But I have no idea if what they’re saying is true. I only know Mack’s been really upset. He wouldn’t tell Susie why. That’s why they fought on Thanksgiving.”

      Jeff nodded, absorbing that news. “I see.”

      “Please don’t tell her I told you about the fight,” Shanna pleaded. “She’d hate having you worry about her.”

      “Yeah, Susie never wants anyone to worry,” he said. “Thanks, though, Shanna.”

      After he’d finished checking to make sure the plumbing had been fixed, he was about to leave when he saw Will browsing through the nonfiction section. Jeff confronted him. If anyone would know what was going on, Will would.

      “Have you got a minute?” he asked Will.

      “Sure. What’s up?”

      “Outside,” Jeff commanded, not wanting Ethel to overhear anything she could pass along to her customers.

      When he and Will had walked to one of the benches along the bay and sat down, Jeff asked, “Has Mack been fired from his job? That’s the talk going around town this morning.”

      Will’s uncomfortable expression was answer enough. Jeff sighed. “Then it’s true?”

      Will nodded. “It happened the week before Thanksgiving. It’s really rocked him.”

      “I can imagine,” Jeff said, feeling a certain amount of pity for him. Like everyone else in town, he know how much the job had meant to Mack. It had been his dream, and as Ethel had noted, it had given him the respect he’d always craved. Of anyone Jeff knew, no one had been more deserving of finding a little happiness.

      “Has he told Susie?” he asked. “She hasn’t mentioned it to us.”

      Will frowned. “I don’t think she knows. Can you leave it alone, Jeff? She should hear it from Mack.”

      “I don’t know. Seems to me it’s something she deserves to know before everyone else in town starts blabbing about it. From what I overheard back at the bookstore, it won’t take long for the word to get back to her. Ethel has a pipeline that those TV tabloids would envy.”

      “I agree with you. I’ll see if I can get Mack to talk to her today, but frankly, he hasn’t wanted to discuss it with anyone. Jake and I found out only after going over to his apartment and confronting him.”

      “Tell him to do it today,” Jeff said. “Or I’ll see to it she finds out tomorrow.”

      Will nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll do my best, but Mack’s not exactly listening to reason right now.”

      “While Mack has my sympathy, he’s not the one I’m worried about,” Jeff said grimly.

      And whatever it took, he was going to try to make sure Susie wasn’t the one who wound up getting hurt because Mack didn’t have the guts to own up to what was going on in his life. There was no shame in losing a job. But there was something wrong with not sharing that news with someone who supposedly mattered.

      Susie had been living on her own in a small apartment above the shops on Main Street ever since she’d graduated from college and gone to work for her father. It was convenient to her job, which was just downstairs, and in the heart of downtown Chesapeake Shores, which was lively in the summer and quiet this time of year.

      Though the apartment wasn’t spacious—just an open kitchen, living room and dining room area, plus a single bedroom and bath—it suited her, or at least it had until it filled up with her parents and her brothers, as it did on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

      It wasn’t as if she’d been expecting them. They’d all turned up uninvited, armed with coffee and croissants from Sally’s, apparently staging some sort of intervention. She was still trying to get a fix on what had them in such an uproar.

      “Okay, slow down,” she finally shouted, hoping to be heard over the commotion. “I can’t even think, much less understand a word any of you are saying.”

      Thankfully, they all shut up and looked to her mother. Josephine O’Brien had been a high school and college athlete who, as a physical education teacher, had encouraged Susie’s love of sports and who’d coached her on the high school track team. She’d been the perfect mother for two energetic, athletic boys, and an even better one for a tomboy daughter. When she had something to say, they all listened.

      “We’re worried about this ongoing infatuation you seem to have with Mack Franklin,” her mother began. “Especially right now.”

      Susie