Read Online Carolina Dreaming: A Dare Island Novel by Virginia Kantra - Free Book Online Page A

Not this time. Never again.
    “I don’t think Gabe Murphy was casing out the bakery, Dad.”
    I was arrested for murder
, he’d said.
Not robbery.
    Hank scowled at her as if she had no more sense now than she had at nineteen. “You have no idea what he’s capable of. He could get violent again. You really want to take that chance?”
    Jane pressed her lips together.
    She wasn’t an innocent anymore. She had learned to run her business through trial and error, to move past her mistakes and trust her own judgment.
    But . . . Misgiving seeped into her stomach. Wasn’t it safer, where Gabe was concerned, to listen to her father the cop?
    She could take a risk for herself. But not for her bakery. And certainly not for Aidan.
    “I have a security system,” she reminded her father. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He’s just passing through. He’ll be leaving soon.”
    “Not soon enough,” Hank said.
    She thought of Gabe’s eyes, his arms, his grin, and her heart gave a little kick against her ribs. “No,” she agreed. “Not nearly soon enough.”

Six
     
    T HE PEAKED ROOF of the Pirates’ Rest, rising through the trees, felt weirdly familiar.
    Gabe had visited the Fletcher family’s bed-and-breakfast only once, eleven years ago. But that roofline was etched in his memory, embedded in his brain.
    Back in Afghanistan, everybody who had anybody got emails. Digital pictures from home. Mrs. Fletcher sent Luke actual photographs, tucked into care packages of socks and eye drops, baby wipes and hard candy, slid into envelopes along with the latest family news. Maybe because Luke’s dad had served in Nam and Beirut, and Mrs. Fletcher had never adjusted to communication in today’s Marine Corps. Or maybe because she knew, with a military wife’s understanding or a mother’s instinct, that sometimes a guy needed a tangible reminder of home. Something to hold on to.
    Somewhere Gabe had hit on the idea of sending his own postcards, palm trees and temples,
Greetings from Iraq
. He never knew what to say. His own mother never wrote back.But the very act of sending them reminded him there was a world beyond the sandbox. Something worth fighting for.
    There was this one picture Luke had taped to his locker—parents, Tess and Tom; older brother, Matt, with Matt’s teenage son, Josh; and their sister, Meg—all framed by the sheltering eaves and solid columns of the porch. The freaking perfect American family. Not Gabe’s family. But he used to sneak looks at them, the way they leaned into one another, casually touching, smiling and squinting in the sun, and think that would really be something to come home to.
    Maybe that’s why he found himself standing at the back gate, the entrance he’d used with Luke all those years ago as if he were family.
    The prodigal son returns
. He wondered if they’d killed the fatted calf for him or if he’d be eating with the pigs tonight.
    He never even thought to ask Luke if he still lived here. Too late now.
    A dog barked from one of the guest cottages. Gabe put his hand on the gate and swung it wide as the cottage door opened and Luke came out.
    He grabbed Gabe in a one-armed hug as if they hadn’t seen each other just yesterday. He pounded Gabe’s shoulder and released him, fixing him with that uncomfortably penetrating gaze. “You look . . .”
    Gabe smiled wryly. “Presentable?” he suggested.
    The shower and change of clothes had restored him, on the outside at least, to a semblance of the Marine Luke used to know. As if Gabe had scraped off three bad years along with the bristles and grime, leaving him without his layer of protective camouflage. Clean, but also raw and vulnerable.
    Luke grinned. “I was going to say ‘less like roadkill.’ Come inside.”
    Gabe glanced at the small yellow cottage. “You live here now?”
    Luke gestured for him to go ahead. “Good for Taylor to have her grandparents around.”
    “And the rent money probably comes in handy for your