She’d spent every summer as a young child traveling from Boston to Washington State to visit her grandparents, Frank and Judy. She’d loved every second outside on the sandy beach, swimming in the cool lake water, roasting marshmallows by the campfire...and spending time with the two warmest, most loving people she’d ever known.
In all those summers, her parents had only come to visit the lake house a handful of times, and each visit had been awkward, borderline uncomfortable. Mostly because her parents and grandparents hadn’t seen eye to eye on much of anything...especially her. Her mother and father weren’t ogres by any stretch of the imagination, but they had always been so focused on their careers that they often seemed to forget they had a child who wanted to have fun. And when they had focused on her, she’d often sensed their disappointment that she was neither cuttingly sharp like her lawyer mother, nor brilliant like her economist father.
They’d wanted a little baby Einstein. Instead, they’d gotten Strawberry Shortcake.
On top of that, it had been so difficult for her mother to get—and stay—pregnant with her that from the moment Brooke was born, her parents had treated her like a terribly fragile glass sculpture. All her life, they’d been afraid of her getting hurt, even though Brooke had been the most careful, conscientious child and teenager around for miles. Well, apart from that one night when she’d snuck out of the house like every sixteen-year-old on the planet and made a mistake they'd never let her forget...
Brooke was twenty-three years old when her grandparents died, their car skidding out on a patch of ice on a remote mountain pass. Though three years had passed, the hole in her heart was as big as ever. They had willed their summer cabin to her, obviously knowing her parents had no interest whatsoever in it, along with the full contents of their bank account.
She’d been so devastated by their sudden deaths that, after the funeral, her parents had tried to convince her that it would make more sense to go back home to Boston and then return later to go through their things when she was stronger. But once she’d gotten to the gate at the airport, instead of getting on the airplane, she’d kissed her stunned parents good-bye before turning right back around.
Everything in her grandparents’ lakefront home was just as they’d left it. How could they be gone? She’d stumbled into the house and barely made it to her grandmother’s favorite rocking chair in the living room before her legs gave out.
Her grandmother’s recipe book had been on the coffee table, and she’d picked it up with shaking hands. Her grandfather had made the wooden cover engraved with a heart surrounding their initials in his wood shop, a gift of love for the wife he’d adored from the first moment he’d set eyes on her. Age and one fall too many onto the floor from the kitchen counter had made a large crack down through the center of the wooden heart. When Brooke opened the cover, on top of the first recipe she’d found a picture of herself and her grandmother standing together at the kitchen counter, both of them wearing flowery aprons and huge smiles. Their hands were covered in chocolate, and shavings dusted the counter all around them.
Brooke had been her happiest each summer making truffles with her grandmother, who was passionate in her hobby to share her love with friends and family through chocolate. As she’d stared at the picture, Brooke realized why she hadn’t been able to get on the plane with her parents to go back to her human resources job in Boston: Life was too short, and far too precious, to waste. Brooke finally knew exactly what she was supposed to do with her life: stay here at the lake, in her grandparents’ house, and make chocolate.
Her first year had been a rather daunting crash course not only in the art of artisan chocolate making, but also in how to start and run her own business, especially in the wake of her parents’ horror at her chucking in a lucrative career to do something so risky with "so little upside," as they’d put it. Fortunately, she’d been able to sign up several small stores in town before the cushion her grandparents had left her came anywhere near close to running out.
Moving to the lake and starting her own company doing what she and her grandmother loved had been like following a faint ray of light, but she’d always known it would grow bigger every day. That’s what her grandparents had taught her—to believe in herself and others, no matter what. The whole community had helped her succeed, which only proved that belief to be true.
After cleaning up the kitchen, Brooke walked back into her bedroom, stripped off her jeans and T-shirt, and slipped on her bikini. It was a daring purchase that had sat unworn in her dresser until the house next door became vacant and she could be certain that no one would see her wearing it. She was just heading out to the front porch when her phone rang. When she looked at the caller ID and saw her mother’s number, her gut tightened for a split second before she picked it up.
"Hi, Mom, thanks for calling me back."
"Darling," her mother said, "it’s always so nice to hear your voice. I just wish you didn’t live so far away. Your father and I worry about you. Is everything all right?"
When, Brooke wondered, would her parents stop worrying about her? Especially since she’d only ever done one wild, stupid thing in her entire life…and that had been a decade ago.
"Everything’s fine. It’s great, actually." She had some fairly big news to give them and hoped they’d respond well to it. "Did I ever mention to you that Dad’s colleague, Cord Delacorte, came out to the lake to visit me a short while back?"
"Oh, Brooke," her mother said in an extremely concerned voice, "please tell me you aren’t dating him. He’s a brilliant businessman, but from the rumors we heard during his visiting professorship a few years ago, he’s exactly the kind of man you should be staying away from."
I’m not sixteen anymore, she wanted to shout.
Instead, she told her mother, "Don’t worry, Cord and I aren’t dating. In fact, he’s happily married."
Besides, didn’t her mother realize that men like him never looked Brooke’s way? She was too cute. Too sweet. A good girl through and through, especially after her one attempt at being bad had gone so horribly wrong.
Quickly, she explained that Cord had been given a box of her chocolates as a Christmas gift. He’d enjoyed them so much that he’d driven the two and a half hours from Seattle to Lake Wenatchee to make her a business proposition about expanding the reach of her chocolates beyond her local area, starting with a small boutique storefront in Seattle that he’d oversee. If that went well—and he seemed very confident that it would—he wanted to look toward further expansion into other large cities and even mail-order. Just this morning she’d signed the partnership papers.
"Why didn’t you tell us about this before now?" her mother asked. "I would have liked to look over your partnership agreement before you signed anything."
Brooke’s gut tightened just a little more. "Don’t worry, I found a great lawyer here, and we went over the agreement carefully several times."
Her mother was silent for a long moment. "Well, at least Cord isn’t a stranger, and I know your father thinks very highly of his business acumen." Brooke heard someone speak to her mother in the background, likely one of her half-dozen legal aides. "I’m sorry, honey, but I’ve got to go now. I’ll give your father the news. I’m sure he’ll want to discuss it with you as well."
Brooke sighed as she hung up the phone, more thankful than ever that she had a lake to jump into to clear her head. She loved her parents, but they could be a tad overbearing, even from across the country. One day soon, she hoped they’d finally realize she was all grown up, her big mistake was well behind her now, and that she was more than capable of making good decisions on her own. It was why she hadn’t involved them in her new partnership plans. Not because they wouldn’t have had great advice, but because she needed to prove that she could do this—and do it well—on her own.
Finally moving out to her covered front porch, she breathed in the sweet-smelling air, scented by fir trees. She didn’t bother to wrap a towel around her bikini-clad body as she headed down to the dock in front of her house. She’d always been on the curvier side—a sharp contrast to her slim and willowy mother—and as she’d hit her mid-twenties, though her weight hadn’t gone up more than a half-dozen pounds, her curves had become much more pronounced.
Brooke walked across the short stretch of grass and was nearly at the sandy shore when she heard a truck come up the driveway next door. From where she was standing, she could see a man get out and put a sold sign up in front of the house.
Wait a minute—hadn’t the house only gone up for sale a day or two ago? Sure, it was on a perfect stretch of sandy beach, but it still seemed like the sale had happened at warp speed. More than that, though, even after all these years she simply couldn’t imagine anyone but the Sullivans living there.
The Wild Sullivans was what her parents had christened them, utterly appalled by the behavior of the family next door. Oh, how Brooke had secretly longed to be as wild, and as free, as they were. She had also, if she was being completely honest with herself, had more than a couple of moments of longing for parents as warm as Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan. Her grandparents were full of hugs and smiles for her, but her parents were more inclined to praise a good grade than applaud a perfect cannonball off the dock. Heck, they probably didn’t even know what a cannonball was, whereas Max and Claudia Sullivan had been out there going head-to-head with their own kids in the competition. It still made her laugh to think of that day when she and her grandparents had been roped into being the judges.
And she still remembered who’d won the contest: Rafe Sullivan.