Lilac Lane (Chesapeake Shores #14)(59)

“Why do we need judges if everyone in town is going to cast a vote?” Luke asked reasonably, apparently abandoning any hope of trying to win an argument with his grandmother.

“Then assemble the team of participating chefs,” Nell said readily. “Then we can determine what specialty each of them will prepare, and invite challengers.”

“I like that,” Bree said. “The more entries we have, the more excitement we can generate.”

“I like it,” Shanna said.

Nell nodded in satisfaction. “Okay, then. All in favor?”

Kiera had listened silently up till now, but after one glance in Bryan’s direction and catching his increasingly horrified expression, the competitor in her roared to life.

“I’m game,” she said, obviously startling them all. If this had been Nell’s trap, Kiera couldn’t seem to find fault with it. “It’s for a good cause, after all. And I imagine Bryan won’t want me showing him up. He’ll agree.” She turned a challenging gaze on him. “Won’t you, Bryan?”

“I’m pretty sure I was doomed from the minute I walked in the door,” he muttered, then shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

Luke groaned. “And just when the two of you were starting to get along so well.”

But, of course, that was precisely the reason Kiera was willing to give it a try. She and Bryan were getting along a little too well these days. It scared her to death. And this was a surefire way to guarantee there would be some nice, safe distance between them once more.

*

Deanna was sitting in the break room in the research center trying to make a decision about what she might do for the upcoming Fourth of July holiday. It was only a few days away, and it seemed everyone she knew had already made plans.

The Baltimore newspaper that someone had left lying open to an upcoming events page seemed to offer a surprising number of alternatives. Any one of them might be fun and might delay the oft-postponed trip she’d been meaning to take to Chesapeake Shores.

Then, as if fate were stepping in to taunt her, she spotted the headline on a sidebar article touting the charm of the holiday in the beachside town of Chesapeake Shores. A picture of the very shops she’d noticed on her drive through town decorated with red, white and blue bunting made it look like the quintessential small-town celebration. There was a band playing in the gazebo on the town green and a sea of children waving American flags and eating ice-cream cones.

One of her coworkers, another intern here for the summer, leaned over her shoulder. “That looks like fun,” Milos Yanich commented. Though he’d been born in Ukraine and grown up in Europe, his English was flawless with only an occasional hint of an accent to give away his roots. He pushed his dark-rimmed glasses back into place, then gave her a hopeful look.

“I’ve never been to an all-American Fourth of July celebration,” he said wistfully. “Are you thinking of going?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Is this town is close by?”

“Not too far,” she said.

“Have you been there before?”

“I passed through once, but I’ve never spent any time there,” she told him.

Now there was no mistaking the hopeful look that spread across his face. “Then why don’t we go? We need a day away from the lab to clear our heads. Sitting inside on a holiday would be a terrible waste, I think.”

Deanna hesitated. There were a dozen reasons she should stay away from Chesapeake Shores and two compelling reasons for going. One of them was standing right before her. The other was the man she’d spent weeks now avoiding.

Milos clearly misread her silence. “Not as a date,” he said quickly. “I have a girlfriend back home. She keeps asking what I’m doing besides work and I have nothing to tell her. You would be doing me a favor. I don’t want her to start thinking that I’m boring. We could go as friends, unless there is someone in your life who might object.”

“No one,” she admitted. She could hardly explain that she would be tempting fate by going to the very town in which her father lived. What if they accidentally crossed paths? Would he recognize her? That would be highly unlikely since she’d been less than a year old the last time he’d seen her. She would recognize him only because of that photo in the well-worn article she kept in her purse.

Maybe this was what she needed to do, spend a little time in Chesapeake Shores, in his world. If she started to feel more comfortable there it would prepare her for the next time, for the day when she’d go to confront him, to ask why he’d let her go so easily.

“Let’s do it,” she said, meeting Milos’s gaze with a smile. “I definitely don’t want your girlfriend to think that your life in America is boring. You should experience an American Fourth of July celebration, and the newspaper says this is the best sort of place to do that.”

“Will they have a parade?”

“I imagine so.” She glanced at the article again and confirmed it. “Yes, there’s a parade at noon.”

“And fireworks at night?”

She laughed at his eagerness. He was usually such a somber young man, dedicated to the science that had drawn them both here for the summer. “I think fireworks are probably a requirement for any self-respecting Fourth of July celebration.”