The Road to Rose Bend, Naima Simone [jenna bush book club .TXT] 📗

me out of it. Because I couldn’t bear letting you down. Again. “I just didn’t,” she finished quietly. “I’ve prepared for this move. As a grant writer, I can work from anywhere. And I make enough to support myself and the baby. Daniel and I agreed that while I’m pregnant, he will keep me under his insurance to cover my medical expenses. And then after he or she is born, Daniel will add the baby. I already contacted Moe Dennison on the drive here, and she agreed to lease me one of their rental cottages for the next couple of months while I decide on a permanent place here in town.”

“Basically live in a B&B? No,” Luke balked, frowning. “What would people think? That we kicked our own daughter out of our house? No,” he repeated, with a decisive slap of his palm to the table. “I won’t have that kind of talk.”

A small, humorless smile curved Sydney’s lips. “Right. Can’t have the Rose Bend townspeople gossiping about us. Glad to know that’s the first reason that pops into your head for inviting me to stay here.”

“You know that’s not what I meant,” her father objected.

“Sydney,” her mother murmured at the same time, but she held up a hand to still their protests.

“I’m tired,” Sydney said, a soul-deep weariness winding through her veins and infiltrating every muscle. The baby, she silently convinced herself. Fatigue came with the territory. It had nothing to do with her parents’ not-so-warm welcome. Pushing back from the table and her barely touched dinner, she stood. “If it’s okay with you, I’m going to crash in my old bedroom for the night. I’ll head out to Kinsale Inn in the morning.”

“Sydney, really,” her mother pleaded.

And in that moment, Sydney desired nothing more than to circle the dining room table and lay her head on her mother’s shoulder as she’d done as a little girl. Have her mother wrap her arms around her and whisper everything would be okay, that God never gave them more than they could handle.

The need for that embrace, for those words, throbbed inside her chest like a barely healed wound. One that had just scarred over and could be ripped open with just a careless movement.

But Sydney didn’t round the table. Didn’t seek the hug, the comfort that most likely wouldn’t be offered.

Instead, she murmured good-night and left the room, climbing the stairs she hadn’t treaded in years. What was the saying? You can’t go home again? Thomas Wolfe had meant a person could try to return to a place from their past, but it wouldn’t be the same as they remembered it.

Oh, Thomas.

If only that were true.

CHAPTER FOUR

“DAMMIT,” COLE SWORE as freshly made coffee sloshed over the rim of his mug and scalded his fingers. Gingerly lowering the cup to the kitchen counter, he lifted his hand to his mouth and sipped at the drops of the dark brew.

Because it was a crime to waste good coffee. Any amount.

The pounding at his front door that had caused the accident in the first place echoed through the living room and into the kitchen, as the two rooms were separated only by a long breakfast bar. He didn’t have long to wonder who waited on the other side of the door. Not when his thirteen-year-old twin brother and sister yelled his name through the wood.

“Cole! Hey, Cole! Open the door!” Sonny boomed.

“We know you’re in there!” Cher added, following it up with more obnoxious knocking.

Yes. Sonny and Cher.

Moe and Dad had named Wolf, Leontyne and Sinead at birth, and Cole’s biological parents had given him his musical name. Florence, his second to youngest sister and now eighteen, had come into the family when she’d been four. The twins had arrived six years later, when they were five. Upon their official adoption, Moe and Dad had allowed them the choice of keeping their birth names or selecting new ones. Each child had decided on a musician-inspired name like their older siblings. At least Florence, obsessed with the Supremes at the time, had chosen the gifted but tragic figure of Florence Ballard as her namesake. But the twins...

Cole shook his head as he strode across the room. That should’ve been a time when his parents put their collective feet down. He smiled as he unlocked the cottage door and pulled it open.

The fraternal twins grinned up at him. Though they shared the same, tall-for-their-age height and dark eyes, all similarities ended there. Sonny’s light brown skin shone with a summer tan even though it was just the middle of June, in contrast to Cher’s gleaming, beautiful, mahogany skin. Sonny wore his dark brown hair cut close like Cole’s, while his sister’s thick, almost sandy-colored corkscrew curls haloed around her head. Both were beautiful kids, but Sonny’s features were already losing their boyish curves and maturing into stronger, bolder masculine lines.

Both of them still remained boisterous, a bit wild and totally fun and loving.

Yeah, he adored his baby brother and sister.

Even though they really tried him on Saturday mornings when he’d planned on nothing more strenuous than a good book and reruns of Gunsmoke. With the motorcycle rally nearing, this would probably be his last free weekend, but staring down at the twins, he abandoned plans for a lazy day. Especially since he’d lay odds they were on a mission from Moe. Maybe because she’d run a B&B for the last thirty-plus years or she’d raised seven children, but his mother didn’t believe in idle hands—or his ass planted on his couch when she could find things for him to do.

“What’s up, monsters?”

“What took you so long to answer the door?” Cher demanded, throwing herself against him and wrapping her arms around his waist. She continued smiling up at him, but her hug was tight. His heart clutched as he squeezed her back. Tonia had been the twins’ first real experience with death as they’d both been so young when their parents died. But since