Sisters by Choice (Blackberry Island #4)(5)
Tommy rolled his eyes. “You would have hated girls.”
“They’re clean and pretty and they smell nice.”
“Boys do smell bad,” her son admitted. “And some girls are really smart. But you’re stuck with us, Mom. No matter what and you have to love us.”
“Yes, that is the rumor. All right, middle child. Laundry room. Ten minutes or I’m taking your you-know-what for a ride.”
“You’d fall in like ten feet.”
“No way. I could totally go twenty.”
He gave her a quick hug, then started loading the pile of dirty clothes into the clothes basket she’d brought with her.
She left him to his work and headed for the kitchen. Dinner was in the Crock-Pot. She’d taken care of that this morning. She glanced at the calendar—a large, framed, wall-sized rectangle with big squares for every day of the month and cute pictures of cats around the outside—and saw that JJ would finish up with baseball practice at four and Grant was at his friend Evan’s house until four thirty. Jaxsen would pick up both kids for her, which meant between now and dinner she only had to fold towels, prepare her grocery list for her weekly shopping, decide on a menu for her catering client and write up a grocery list for that, double-check her baking supplies because she would spend all night Thursday making cookies for the upcoming weekend and remind Jaxsen they really had to decide on summer camps for the boys. It was only April but the camps filled up quickly. And speaking of April, it was spring break in two weeks and she needed to know if he was still going to take the boys up in the mountains because if he was, he needed to get out the equipment and make sure everything was still functional.
Tonight, after dinner and homework, she had to finish her book for book club and get the May calendar put together and order more bags for her cookies and do her March books for her cookie sales, because she hadn’t yet and if she got too behind, she never got caught up. And in those five seconds between brushing her teeth and falling asleep, she would really like to run the numbers on that little space by Island Chic that had gone up for lease last week. Because if she could ever catch her breath, and scrape together the cash, she wanted to talk to Jaxsen about opening a bakery. It had never been the right time before, but maybe now would work. The kids were older and...
“Mom, I’m ready. I’ve sorted my clothes by colors, like you said. But is it really a big deal if I don’t?”
“Girls,” she murmured, walking toward the laundry room. “Girls would have been so much easier.”
Chapter Two
The Blackberry Island Inn featured comfortable beds, views of the water and a daisy motif Sophie wasn’t sure she totally understood. Daisies weren’t exactly a big thing on the island. If a business wanted to appeal to tourists, then the more blackberries, the better. Yet, there were daisies in the room, daisies on the wallpaper and hundreds, possibly thousands, of daisies planted along the driveway leading from the parking lot to the main road.
As Sophie walked toward her car, she shivered in the damp, chilly air. She’d forgotten how the island was given to real seasons, unlike back in LA where there was nearly always sunshine. Today there were gray skies and the choppy, black waves of the Sound.
Under normal circumstances, and on a Monday morning, Sophie wouldn’t have noticed any of that. Instead, she would have been totally focused on her business and what needed to get done that day. But—and she would never admit this to anyone but herself—these days she was feeling a little fragile and disoriented.
It was the fire, she told herself. Losing her business, not having any of her employees want to move. Okay, and the loss of CK. That reality still had the ability to bring her to her emotional knees. And maybe the fact that she was thirty-four years old and she wasn’t any closer to having her life together than she had been at twenty. She was all about the work and with CK Industries in limbo, she felt lost.
“Not after today,” she whispered as she turned right at the end of the drive and headed toward the very small industrial area on the island.
The real estate agent was meeting her at the warehouse at nine. Sophie would get the key and have a look at the space she’d leased for the next five years.
She drove past touristy shops and wineries before heading inland. There was a small shopping center, the K through eighth-grade school and a few medical buildings. Behind all that were a few office buildings, a handful of small businesses that would do everything from repair your car to clean your carpets. At the end of the street was the large warehouse.
She parked by the front door. She was early and the place looked closed up tight, so she walked around the outside of the building.
There was a front office and reception area with big windows and lots of parking for employees. The loading dock was plenty large. Products would come in and then be shipped out to customers. Given that this was literally the only warehouse on the island, she figured she’d been lucky to get it. Now she just had to make everything work.
Sophie returned to her car and waited for the agent. She sat in the front seat, with the driver’s door open, sipping her take-out coffee. She’d skipped breakfast at the inn, feeling too yucky to bother eating.
A salty breeze blew in from the west, but despite the gray skies, she didn’t think it was going to rain today. Sophie wondered if her years in Los Angeles would make it difficult for her to adjust to the weather, or if it would matter at all. She assumed she would be working her usual sixteen-hour days. As long as the roof didn’t leak, she wasn’t sure she would even care about something as mundane as the weather.