A Charmed Place

"Buy this book! A truly fantastic read
!"
--
Suzanne Barr,
Gulf
Coast
Woman
 

From
USA TODAY
bestselling author Antoinette Stockenberg comes an original and wonderfully romantic story of star-crossed lovers who have been apart for twenty years and who rediscover one another in an idyllic coastal village on Cape Cod.
 

A SECOND CHANCE AT LOVE.
 
It's a deep, aching need for anyone whose heart has ever been broken.
 
Maddie Regan and Dan Hawke were college lovers who were compelled to go separate ways after a horrific event for which Dan was blamed.
 
She settled down and raised a family; he roamed the planet as a war correspondent.
 
But a near death experience brings Dan in search of the only woman he has ever loved.
 
His plan to win Maddie is simple:
 
take up residence in a lighthouse just a stone's throw from her family's summer home, and then make her fall back in love with him.
 
He knows her family will object and suspects that her daughter might; but he refuses to believe that Maddie herself -- the woman who has haunted his dreams for two decades -- can be any less in love with him than he is with her.

It's not that simple for Maddie.
 
She has a jealous ex-husband to deal with ... a feisty, resentful teenager ... a widowed mother unable to emerge from mourning ... and the ongoing heartbreak of her father's unsolved murder.
 
Is it possible to throw all of that aside for the chance to be happy?

"A captivating mixture of romance and suspense with characters so real they jump off the pages."

--
Writers Write Website

"A truly charming contemporary romance [with an] uplifting theme that second chances at love are possible."

--
Regency World

"A great read, filled with extraordinary characters, compelling subplots, long-buried secrets, and a hero who is strong, tender, and irresistible."

--
Heart to Heart

"
He'd look perfect tied to my bedposts," Norah
murmured
.

Joan lifted the binoculars from her friend's grip and focused them on the lighthouse at the tip of the windswept peninsula. After a minute, she said, "They'd better be pretty strong bedposts."

She held out the binoculars to Maddie Regan, who, as always, was the first to show up at Rosedale, her family's summer cottage on the
Cape
. "Here, Maddie. Have a look."

"Thank you, no," said Maddie, walking away from the kitchen window with her box of books. "Unlike the two of you, I happen to have a life."

Norah arched one perfectl
y shaped eyebrow. "Well, la-di-
da. Doing what? Spending another summer on the
Cape
, watching the beach erode? Get with the program, Maddie. Women our age have to keep their eyes open. Especially women our age in Dulltown."

Maddie managed a wry smile and said, "There's nothing wrong with
Sandy
Point
. It's where I want to be every year come June. It's where I want a teenage daughter to be. It's quiet; it's safe; it's—"

"Dull. Let's face it. It's
dull.
We aren't the
Hamptons
. We aren't the Vineyard. We aren't even
Newport
. There's nothing to do in
Sandy
Point
, and no one rich to do it with."

Joan, still focused on the peninsula, said, "This one could change your mind, Norah. No kidding. Wow. Killer aura.
He's standing in front of the lighthouse, looking out at the ocean. The wind's blowing his hair around. You can't mistake the guy. It really is him. Sure you don't want a peek, Maddie?"

Maddie shook her head and kept to her box of books.

Norah took Maddie's refusal personally. "You do understand our situation here? Three women, nada men—none worth bringing down from
Boston
, anyway? How are we going to network? This is turning into a serious dry spell, Maddie. I'm still separated. Joan's still single. And you're still—"

"All right, all right. Divorced," Maddie conceded. "But unlike you two,
not
dribbling with lust."

"Why should you be?" Norah shot back. "Your ex has a condo two miles away, and he's willing to bed you any time you want."

"But I don't want."

"I've never really understood that," Joan admitted. "Michael's always been so kind, so considerate to me."

"So considerate to
everyone
," said Norah with a caustic smile. She repossessed the binoculars from Joan and aimed them on her prey. "Nuts. He's gone. No, wait. Here he comes out of the lighthouse—with a basket of laundry. Good Lord. Dan Hawke is going to hang his own laundry. Dan Hawke!"

Joan, as usual, had a theory. "He's a war correspondent. He's probably used to washing his socks in some dead soldier's helmet."

"Joannie, the way you put things. Okay, here we go. First item out of the basket: jeans. I'd s
ay a thirty-four waist, thirty-
six, tops. How cute—he's holding the clothespins between his teeth. Oh, Maddie, you
should
look. He looks nothing like he does on TV."

Maddie dropped another box of books onto the kitchen table and began unlocking its cardboard flaps. "How would you know, Norah? You never watch CNN."

Without taking her focus away from the lighthouse, Norah said, "Now, now. Just because I sell shlock art for a living, it doesn't mean I don't watch CNN."

"Have you ever actually seen him in a broadcast from a war zone?"

Norah shrugged and said, "No. But it doesn't mean I don't watch CNN."

"Well, I watch it," Joan chimed in, "and I can tell you, the guy makes an impression. It isn't his tousled hair or his flak jacket; they all have that.
And he's not especially to-die-
for handsome. It's more his air of—I don't know—reluctance. As if he can't stand what he's doing but he does it anyway because somebody has to, and he can do it better."

"Bullshit," Norah argued. "War pays his bills."

Joan, less assured but more introspective than taller, thinner, richer, red-haired Norah, decided to dig in her heels. "He hates his work. I'll bet my house on it. He's come to
Sandy
Point
because he's burned out."

"Pillowcases," said Norah, looking up from her binoculars and flashing the other two women a knowing grin. "That's a good sign. He's only been renting for a couple of days. He must be fastidious."

"Fastidious!" Joan had another theory. "That's the last thing he'd be. War correspondents eat leaves and grass if they have to, and sleep in the crotches of trees."

"A waste," said Norah with a snort. "He should be sleeping in another kind of crotch altogether."

"Norah!"

Maddie said it too sharply for someone who wasn't supposed to be listening. She looked away. Norah was being outrageously—well—Norah. It didn't mean anything.

Norah seemed oblivious to the scolding. A second or two later, still gazing through the binoculars, she said, "One, two three, four, five, six hankies. How quaint: he uses handkerchiefs."

Joan had theories for that, too. "Of course he uses handkerchiefs. Do you really think he can buy purse-sized Kleenex in the
mountains of
Afghanistan
? Besides, they make good tourniquets."

Sh
e added in a thoughtful voice,
"
I remember one of his reports from Chechnya. Ther
e were half a dozen rebels huddl
ed around a campfire, trying to keep warm, and most were in rags. He wasn't wearing anything better. I suppose he bartered his jacket for information."

"Whatever." Obviously Norah wasn't listening. Her high cheekbones had become flushed with the first faint sign of her formidable temper. Maddie braced herself.

Norah turned to Maddie in a fed-up way and said, "You know what your problem is, Maddie Regan? You're too damned prim. You're too damned proper. And you're too damned passive."

She handed off the binoculars to Joan and launched into an all-too-familiar lecture. "You assume the Right One will just drop in your lap while you're sipping iced tea on your patio." She folded down one of the box flaps over Maddie's forearm, forcing her to pay attention. "And meanwhile life is passing you by. You've been divorced for four years, Maddie," she added, sounding extremely annoyed about it. "You're almost forty. What're you waiting for?"

Maddie reached into the box and pulled out a hardcover. "I'm waiting for this guy to make the
New York Times,"
she quipped, waving a
Jensen
novel in front of Norah. "He's vastly underrated."

Norah responded with a stony look, so Maddie gave her an honest answer. "I'm not waiting for the Right One
... or the Wrong One
... or anyone, Norah. I have my hands full with all the relationships—"

"None of them sexual!"

"—that I can handle at the moment."

Nudging the cardboard flap open again, Maddie lifted
Philip Roth's
Goodbye,
Columbus
out of the box, and
a novel
by
Orwell
, and Vonnegut's
Cat's Cradle.
This was the summer to
update
the Freshman survey
of
the modern novel
that she taught.
  Morrison, Rushdie, maybe even King?  Much more relevant.
She'd meant to
revamp the course
last summer, but last summer she was still caught up, along with the rest of her family, in shock. No one did much of anything last summer.

"And I'm not prim," she threw out over her shoulder.

Passive, maybe. Proper, obviously. But not prim.

"Of course you're prim!" snapped Norah. "Who the hell else could resist gawking at a bona fide celebrity who's spending the summer a few hundred yards away from her?"

"The man is renting a lighthouse," Maddie reminded her friend. "In a backwater summering hole. It's obvious, at least to me, that he wants privacy."

"It's obvious that he
doesn't
want it. He went and became a celebrity of his own free will! If you had a shred of decency in you, you'd be fawning over him like the rest of us. He's entitled to it!"

"Oh, pooh," said Joan in a disappointed voice. "He has a woman with him."

"What? Let me have those," said Norah, snatching the binoculars back from Joan with such vigor that she knocked Joan off balance.

"Watch it!" Joan snapped.
The edge in her usually soft-
pitched voice was a clear sign, at least to Maddie, that Norah had gone over the line again.

He has a woman with him.

Norah stared intently through the binoculars. After a thoughtful silence she said, "Hard to say. If she's his lover, she's not a recent one. They seem too used to one another. She's leaning against the mud shed with her hands in the pockets of her sundress, mostly listening to him—the wind just blew her dress up;
great
legs—and nodding once in a while. I get the sense that she's just soaking him up. As if they go back together."

Norah looked up for a moment. "I'm right that he never married?"

Joan said, "
Not as far as I know. He made
People
's most-
eligible list a few years ago—after the War—but then he kind of faded. So it's possible he went off and did something stupid, but I doubt it. We would've read about a wedding, in
People
if not in
Newsweek.
I imagine he was just living with someone. Probably her."