The Chesapeake Bride

  Praise for Mariah Stewart

  LAST CHANCE MATINEE

  “The combination of a quirky small-town setting, a family mystery, a gentle romance, and three estranged sisters is catnip for women’s-fiction fans.”

  —Booklist

  “A good read, with a nice blend of mystery, family drama, and romance. Readers will look forward to the next installment.”

  —Library Journal

  THE CHESAPEAKE DIARIES

  “The town and townspeople of St. Dennis, Maryland, come vividly to life under Stewart’s skillful hands. The pace is gentle, but the emotions are complex.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “If a book is by Mariah Stewart, it has a subliminal message of ‘wonderful’ stamped on every page.”

  —Reader to Reader Reviews

  “The characters seem like they could be a neighbor or friend or even co-worker, and it is because of that and Mariah Stewart’s writing that I keep returning again and again to this series.”

  —Heroes and Heartbreakers

  “Every book in this series is a gem.”

  —The Best Reviews

  “Captivating and heartwarming.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  A DIFFERENT LIGHT

  “Warm, compassionate, and fulfilling. Great reading.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “This is an absolutely delicious book to curl up with . . . scrumptious . . . delightful.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  MOON DANCE

  “Enchanting . . . a story filled with surprises!”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “An enjoyable tale . . . packed with emotion.”

  —Literary Times

  “Stewart hits a home run out of the ballpark . . . a delightful contemporary romance.”

  —The Romance Reader

  WONDERFUL YOU

  “Wonderful You is delightful—romance, laughter, suspense! Totally charming and enchanting.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Vastly entertaining . . . you can’t help but be caught up in all the sorrows, joys, and passion of this unforgettable family.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  DEVLIN’S LIGHT

  “A magnificent story of mystery, love, and an enchanting town. Splendid!”

  —Bell, Book and Candle

  “With her special brand of rich emotional content and compelling drama, Mariah Stewart is certain to delight readers everywhere.”

  —RT Book Reviews

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  For Robb, with much love. Welcome to the family, baby boy!

  Diary~

  I love the changing of the seasons—and I think summer into fall might be a favorite, being as how I relate to the whole “autumn of my years” thing. That’s how I see myself, anyway. If sixty is the new forty, I believe seventy must be the new fifty, eighty the new sixty, and so on. Therefore, I fall into that third quadrant. Don’t try to change my mind or confuse me with facts.

  One of the reasons I love this time of the year: the steady influx of tourists into St. Dennis begins to wane. Not that I don’t love our visitors. Why, without them, St. Dennis would have continued to languish and would never have become the Eastern Shore mecca it now is. But there’s something sweet about having your hometown belong to you and yours again, even if it’s just for a while. I know soon enough the holidays will be upon us and many will flock to town for all the beautiful festivities—the Christmas House Tour, the weekend of caroling, the tree lighting at the square on Old St. Mary’s Church Road, Christmas at the Inn (a favorite of mine), and, oh, yes, the shopping! But this little respite between the beginning of September, when the families leave to return their offspring to school, and the holiday madness belongs to us, we old St. Dennis folk who like a little downtime.

  Not to say there’s nothing going on here! There are new babies to celebrate and a special wedding on the horizon, one that makes me especially weepy. My dear nephew, Alec, will be marrying his lovely Lisbeth in an event that will be the talk of both St. Dennis and Cannonball Island for a long time to come. I’m not privy to all the details, mind you, but since my daughter, Lucy, is planning the wedding, I’ve heard bits and squeaks of what she has in mind, and it will, no doubt, be perfectly wonderful.

  When we were children, Mama told us that when good folks passed, they earned a star in the heavens where they could sit and shine down on all the goings-on here on earth. Our brothers scoffed, but we girls believed her, and so it is that I know my beloved sister, Carole, will be watching happily from her star as her son marries his bride out on the point in just a few more weeks.

  Thinking about the point makes me think of all the changes that are coming to Cannonball Island soon. So much, it could make your head spin! For the first time in roughly two hundred years, new dwellings will be going up on what had once been barren land. I heard from one in the know that some of the older homesteads—mostly those that have fallen into ruin or have been abandoned—will be replaced with new versions more suitable to modern living. Some are up in arms about this, but frankly, it’s about time. Those dilapidated old shells offer no shelter and, if anything, detract from the beauty of the island. My good friend Ruby Carter—the island’s matriarch—has given her blessing, and that’s good enough for me. Besides, Alec will be serving as the environmental consultant, so I feel confident that all will be well. The new homes are being designed with the island’s history in mind, so the legacy of those early settlers will be well protected. The architect is a lovely young woman who is serious about this project, so I know, eventually, all will be well.

  Of course I do.

  I know, too, that a certain islander with a “rolling stone” reputation will be finding his rolling days coming to a halt before too long. It will be amusing, to say the least, to see him meet his match. Will he be bested?

  The smart money’s on the new girl. That’s all I have to say about that.

  And so much excitement over all the goings-on at the mouth of the river on the other side of Cannonball Island! Who knew such mysteries lay beneath the water, waiting to be discovered—and now that they have been, well, the flurry of activity these days has my poor old head spinning like an old-fashioned top. I cannot wait to see what they find, and I’m more than happy that one of the principal players is staying at the inn. Not that I’d pry, but if one overhears a snippet of conversation now and then . . . well, let’s just say it’s good to keep informed. Now, how all this is going to affect the construction that was slated to begin in November, well, I suppose everyone will have to wait and see. Could be there will be delays, which will keep the new girl around for a while longer and will keep the rolling stone on his toes.

  My, what fun this will be~

  Grace~

  Chapter One

  Owen Parker shortened the last leg of his morning run, going over instead of around the dune behind the Cannonball Island General Store. The calendar might say September, but the thermometer mimicked July. Even the slight breeze off the Chesapeake did little to cool him. Sweat caused his T-shirt to cling to his chest and his sunglasses to continually slide down the bridge of his nose. He’d had enough for one day.

  His great-grandmother Ruby Carter stood on the back po
rch of the store and watched him approach, her hands on her hips. Her white hair was pulled back in a tidy bun at her nape, and she was dressed in one of her favorite uniforms: a white sleeveless blouse with a round collar and a cotton skirt that hit smack in the center of her calves. Today’s skirt was light summer green. Her other favorites were cotton-candy pink and a shade of lavender that precisely matched the color of the lilacs that grew around the back of the store in spring. While her height had diminished somewhat over her one hundred years, her back was still relatively straight and her voice strong. Her mind was as sharp as the proverbial tack. In her, the old island still lived, through her stories and through the speech patterns peculiar to Cannonball Island.

  “You get much more sun, boy, you’ll be fried like a fritter ’fore too long,” she said as he crossed the driveway. “There’s sunscreen there on one of the shelves inside—use some once in a while.”

  He smiled and kissed her on the cheek as he came up the steps. “I think it’s too late for sunscreen. I’ve been tan for months now. Since Costa Rica.”

  “Don’t know why you have to be running off to foreign places all the time. Sun’s just as good here as there.”

  “But it’s not always summer here, Gigi.”

  “Summer be overrated. God made all four seasons for a reason.”

  “What reason was that?” he teased.

  “Do I look like God?” Ruby frowned. “Not mine to know what he be thinking. He has his plan and it’s not mine to question. Yours either.”

  “Your garden’s still hanging in there.” He nodded in the direction of the fenced-in plot where she grew vegetables and her favorite flowers. “All those tall things still look pretty good.”

  “Tall things be hollyhocks and dahlias.” She turned to look at her pretties and admired them. “My Harold loved dahlias. Used to buy him one every year for Father’s Day. Those sweet things you see growing out there—that big pink one and the smaller yellow ones—they be offshoots of offshoots of offshoots of the ones I bought him years ago. You know how to divide ’em, you can keep ’em forever.” She turned back to him. “Least for as long as you be on this earth. Can’t know for sure who you can count on to tend to such things after you be gone.”

  “I’ll tend to your dahlias, Gigi. Just like you showed me. I’ll dig them up before the frost and I’ll wrap them in newspaper and put them in the shed, just like you do.”

  “Order to do that, you have to be around, boy. You saying you be staying on the island from now on? That you be back for good?”

  “No,” he said cautiously. “But I will plant your dahlias in the spring after the frost, and I’ll dig them up in the fall before it gets cold. I don’t have to be here full-time to do that.”

  She stared at him, and for a moment he thought she was going to say something, but the moment passed. When a car pulled into the driveway, she turned to go back into the store to see to her customer. “Folks need to know where they belong, boy. Just like I told your sister. See how she’s heeded me.”

  “Lis is marrying a local boy. Up until she fell in love with Alec, she had no intentions of ever coming back here to live. No matter how much you bugged her about it. Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you somehow made her fall in love with him.”

  “Just ’cause you can sometimes know don’t mean you can make folks do your will.” She smacked him on the arm as she turned and went into the store. “You be living proof of that.”

  Owen suppressed a smile and followed her. “I’m going to run upstairs and take a shower, Gigi.”

  “That be the best idea you had since you woke up today.” She went into the front of the store, and he took the steps to the second floor, still smiling.

  Until a year ago, Ruby lived over the store, which had been in her family for two hundred years. At one hundred years of age, though spry and lively, the time had come for her to eliminate taking that trip up and down the steps twice every day. The large storage area behind the store had been redesigned and renovated into her new living quarters—a sitting room, a modern kitchen, bath, and bedroom. Alec Jansen—engaged to Lis—had used his considerable carpentry skills to convert what had been empty, unused space into a comfortable, modern apartment.

  The bedrooms on the second floor above the store were mostly unused, except for the room Ruby had shared with Harold, which Lis, an artist, had taken over for her studio. The room Owen occupied was the same one he’d slept in when he visited as a boy. He knew some might find it strange that at thirty-eight he was living with his great-grandmother, but he couldn’t care less what anyone else thought about the arrangement. His masculinity was intact even though the old metal bed he slept in was still covered by the same white chenille spread from his childhood, and the walls remained painted in a light shade of blue. The upholstery on the chair that sat near the window was threadbare plaid, and the curtains hadn’t changed since he was in his teens, but Owen liked the familiarity of it all. After long periods of living elsewhere, it always soothed his soul to come back to this room where he’d spent so many happy times. It never occurred to him to stay anywhere else.

  Owen had only been back on Cannonball Island for a few months, having spent the past couple of years here and there like the rolling stone he’d always been. There’d been Alaska and the fishing boat he’d worked on before he flew a mail plane for a few months until he tired of the cold. Next he headed for Australia, where a friend owned a cattle ranch, but mending fences and chasing cattle bored him, so he retreated to Costa Rica and spent time diving off a sunken ship, rumored to have been loaded with gold from the California mines, that had gone down in a storm in 1853. Owen had joined up with an old friend, Jared Chandler, whose salvage company had bid on the wreck and won the right to excavate it. Owen had spent a few months there before something had told him it was time to go home to Cannonball Island. He’d assumed that inner voice had been prompted by his sister’s reminder that Ruby had celebrated her one-hundredth birthday without him, and the terrifying thought that she might pass on before he’d spent time with her. Jared’s offering Owen work on a ship that had sunk in his home waters had made the decision a no-brainer—that and his sister’s impending marriage added up to Owen’s being homeward bound.

  He’d thought of stopping in Arizona to visit his mother, Kathleen, on his way to the island, but she’d recently remarried—again—having found widowhood no more to her liking than her second husband had been. Apparently the third time for her was the charm, because she sounded happier than he could remember. Owen’d checked in with her but her calendar was full, she’d told him, with her stepgrandchildren’s events.

  Who knew that stepbabies and toddlers trumped your own grown children?

  Owen hadn’t minded, not really. His mom hadn’t had an easy time when his dad, Jack, was alive, and she was entitled to a happy life. Owen would never begrudge her that. He and his sister, Lisbeth—Lis—knew how unpredictable and unpleasant their father had been and the cloud they’d all lived under while he was alive.

  Showered and dressed, Owen made his way downstairs, pausing on the landing to look out the window. A stone’s throw from the store on the opposite side of the road flowed the narrowest section of the Waring River. A mile farther and it widened where it reached the bay. He hadn’t had cause to think about its course until last week. Not until Jared had started asking questions had the river, its mouth, and its relationship to the bay become relevant.

  “This diving job is going to be more complicated than I’d thought,” Jared had told Owen by phone late in the evening of the night before.

  “Anytime you’re diving in the Chesapeake, it’s complicated,” Owen had replied. “Visibility is always an issue because the water is dark pretty much everywhere, plus it’s a route on the way to Baltimore Harbor, and there are all those crab and oyster fishermen to be worried about. You’re talking about diving off Cannonball Island in the bay waters, and—”

  “That might be changing.
Something’s come up.”

  “Something like what?”

  “Something like the Maryland Historical Society thinks there’s something down there that they might not want disturbed.”

  “What are you talking about?” Owen had grown up on the island, and while old folks had been full of tales of the old days, he couldn’t recall a story about something in that area of the bay, and he said so.

  “Not the bay,” Jared told him. “The Waring River. The mouth of the river in particular.”

  “Start from the beginning.”

  “As you know, a builder’s bought up as much of the unused land on the island as he could. His plans include building a dock in the river where his buyers can tie up their boats. They’re all ready to start dredging in the mouth of the river so it’s deep enough to allow for all those pretty yachts. So in the meantime, the state EPA has done some testing to determine how many houses could be built, how development would affect the bay and its natural resources, waste water, drainage, that sort of thing.”

  “Right. All standard. My future brother-in-law is the environmental consultant for the builder, Deiter Construction.”

  “Well, in the process, they scanned the waters around the island and apparently found evidence of something at the mouth of the river that had not been seen before.”

  “You mean a vessel of some sort?”

  “Yeah. Maybe even more than one. They did some preliminary scanning, and it looks like there could be more than one. Like something sank at some point and landed on something else that was already down there. No telling what without diving and photographing, though, so that’s what we’re going to be doing.”

  “Huh. In the morning, I’ll ask Ruby if she’s ever heard about something sinking in the river.”

  “I guess if anyone local would know, she’d be the one. Is anyone on Cannonball Island older than Ruby?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “We’ll be doing our first dive as soon as I can get one of our smaller boats up here. The one we brought is too big for the job we’re going to be doing. It would have been fine for working out closer to the channel. I’ll be taking this one back to my dad’s place in South Carolina, and I’ll bring back the Juliana. I should only be gone a few days. Call me if anything comes up that I should know about, and be ready for that first dive when I get back.”