Read Online Once in a Blue Moon by Eileen Goudge - Free Book Online

Arlene’s long, graying brown hair, the color of salt-silvered planks, which she normally wore braided, was blowing in the wind, making her look, in her navy peacoat and billowy skirt, like a character out of an eighteenth-century novel—a sailor’s wife keeping watch for her husband’s ship. “I wanted to be where I’d always know it was there, even when I couldn’t see it. Where I’d hear it whispering to me at night. Does that make sense?” She turned to Lindsay, her eyes bright and cheeks flushed. Lindsay, all of fourteen at the time but in many ways wiser than most adults, nodded in response. It made perfect sense. Didn’t she feel the same way?
    “I hope I never get married,” she told her adoptive mom with all the passion of a young girl who hadn’t even been kissed. “That way I’ll get to stay here always.”
    All these years later the grown-up Lindsay smiled, thinking, Be careful what you wish for .
    But would she have wanted anything different? This was where she belonged, where she’d always belonged, even before she’d known of this place. She was as sure of it as she was that her being placed with Ted and Arlene had been no accident of fate. To lose her home would be cruel enough, but to be an accomplice in her own eviction—no, it was unthinkable.
    She’d be a traitor to the community as well. Not everyone in Blue Moon Bay was as gung-ho about the proposed resort as those with a vested interest in the jobs and tax revenue it would generate. There were the recent transplants, like her closest neighbors, Bill and Janice Harkins, who’d moved here to escape such rampant development, as well as those like Ollie’s dad, a third-generation fisherman, for whom a sprawling resort and all it would spawn—a plethora of Jet Skis and pleasure boats, kayaks and whale-watching expeditions—wouldn’t be just the end of a way of life but a threat to his livelihood.
    She glanced over at Ollie, manning the café in back. His full name was Sebastian Oliveira, but everyone knew him as Ollie. He caught her eye and grinned as he sent a cloud of steam hissing from the fancy La Pavoni espresso machine he’d insisted would be the best investment she could make—which it had been, though she suspected the increase in business had more to do with Ollie himself. Since he’d taken over managing the café, its revenues had doubled.
    Ollie was one of those people for whom every obstacle was a movable object and every problem a challenge to be met. Whenever a customer approached the counter with a long face, he’d joke until he had the person smiling and laughing. In cases of true suffering, Ollie would do his best to console the person with a kind word or gesture. It didn’t hurt, either, that he was cute in a goofy-kid-brother kind of way: tall and loose-limbed, with thick hair that shot straight up, like the bristles on a brush, and that no amount of gel could tame. She knew his parents well—his mother and Arlene had been great friends—and Ollie was a perfect mixture of both. He had his Irish mother’s dimples and wide, mobile mouth and his Portuguese father’s olive skin, black hair, and brown eyes—eyes that perennially forecast clear weather, however cloudy the actual skies might be. The thing that was pure Ollie, though, was his smile. If scientists could find a way of tapping into it, she thought, it would solve the energy crisis. There would be no further need for books like the one she was presently holding— The Great Thaw: Global Warming and What the Future Will Look Like .
    She wandered over to have a word with him about tomorrow’s event, for which he’d need to have a good supply of coffee and baked goods. She was expecting a sizable turnout for Wall Street wunderkind-turned-author Randall Craig, whose first novel, Blood Money , was the buzz book of the moment. It had been quite a score landing an appearance from him. Luckily for her, he was a local author—he lived just up the coast, in