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“Wow. You should have told me! Kelli and I are related,” Amanda said. “In fact, I’m having my wedding right here next week.”
“Same time, same place,” Kelli said, wavering with nerves.
“What a wonderful location for a wedding,” Sandra said.
“How do you two know each other?” Kelli asked.
“Sandra and I met at yoga class,” Amanda explained. “Probably about a month ago, now, right?”
“I started going when I arrived,” Sandra explained.
“That’s right. Sandra’s a brand-new islander! But I think we already have you wrapped around our fingers,” Amanda teased. “You won’t know how to leave after a summer here.”
Amanda then turned back to Kelli and touched her elbow delicately. “How are you holding up, Kelli?”
Kelli lied through her teeth. “Everything is going perfectly. I’m over the moon!”
“Everything has been divine so far,” Amanda said, just as her fiancé, Sam, approached, placed his hand on Amanda’s lower back, and beamed at Kelli.
“This place is spectacular,” Sam said. “And the staff are superb.”
“If you like it so much, maybe I’ll steal you away from the Sunrise Cove to help out,” Kelli teased.
“I don’t know about that. Even after just two years, the Sunrise Cove has my heart,” Sam said.
Sam worked as the hotel manager at the Sunrise Cove Inn because everyone else in the Sheridan family had separate projects and couldn’t work at the inn full-time. Now that he was marrying Amanda, the hotel would again be a family-run business— yet another generation, seeing the inn through tourist season after tourist season.
“Why don’t you come over and have a drink with us?” Amanda urged Kelli.
Kelli’s head rang with the thoughts of everything she still had to do, everything she still had to check up on.
“You have time,” Sandra told her quietly. “Dinner starts in an hour, at which time you can do everything else you need to do.”
Kelli tilted her head, wondering how the young woman had read her thoughts so clearly. “Well, all right. Just one drink.”
Sandra smiled and tapped her nose. “I have to run. I’ll see you later, Amanda. Maybe even at yoga on Monday?”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Amanda said as she guided Kelli back through the crowd.
Familiar, smiling faces called out to Kelli as she approached. First, her little brother, Andy, burst up to hug her, overwhelming her with his excitement.
“I can’t believe this place, Kelli,” he said.
“You built some of the furniture in here! You were such a help in bringing the old magic to life,” Kelli reminded him.
Andy blushed and palmed his neck. “Sure. Yeah. But we delivered that furniture a few months back, and it feels like the whole place has changed since then.”
“Oh, Kelli.” Kelli’s younger sisters, Charlotte and Claire, hurried forward to hug Kelli, their eyes alight. Charlotte and Claire had always been the best of friends, and now, even their careers aligned— one a florist and the other a wedding planner. Unfortunately for the Martha’s Vineyard families, now that Charlotte’s daughter was off to college in the fall, Charlotte had agreed to move to Orcas Island with Everett, her fiancé, who’d taken a job as a travel writer on that island all the way across the continent.
And finally, behind her sisters came the stoic face of her elder brother, Steve, who, as it turned out, had a plus one. “Kelli, it really is something special,” he said as he hugged her. “I hope you don’t mind that I brought a friend?”
“Rita!” Kelli greeted the woman with the short, black bob with a genuine smile and a hug. “It’s good to see you again. Are you back from California for long?”
“Just a week,” Rita explained. “Steve invited me to the wedding, and I was lucky enough to finish out a project back home and hit the road.”
“What project was it?” Charlotte asked, her voice lowering.
“Yeah! Give us the gossip,” Claire said.
