A Wedding on Lilac Lane by Hope Ramsay (best book clubs .txt) 📕

because it had ridden up, but that didn’t make walking any easier.

The moment she stepped onto the boat, a member of the yacht’s crew, all of whom wore pristine white uniforms, handed her a flute of champagne and directed her aft.

She took a gulp of wine and then remembered the disastrous night at Cibo Dell’anima, when she’d had too much to drink and kissed Dylan in public. She needed to limit herself to this one glass. “Sip, don’t gulp” was the message of the day.

She moved toward the back of the boat, trying to outpace Dylan. “This is really beautiful,” she said, trying to fill the awkward silence. “I didn’t think they made boats with all this wood anymore.”

“They don’t. Synchronicity Too was originally built in 1930. The decking is all mahogany.”

She glanced up at him. “You seem to know a lot about it.”

“It’s been the talk of the yacht club since Jude bought it last year and completely refitted it.”

His mention of the yacht club irritated her, but maybe that was a good thing. She needed to be irritated; otherwise she might lose her mind and jump his bones…again.

She took another generous sip of champagne. “So I gather you spend a lot of time at the yacht club, huh?” Talking about his membership in the club seemed like a good way to remind her that they were not made for each other.

His gaze slid away. “I learned how to sail as a kid. And I guess it’s one of my hobbies. I have a small laser sailboat I take out when I get a chance.”

Of course he’d learned to sail as a kid. It was like a big red warning sign that they came from different places. She’d grown up in land-locked Muncie, miles away from Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. He grown up on a sea island, surrounded by bay and ocean.

 “Well, I didn’t learn to sail as a kid,” she said, leaning back to inspect the mast. “We’ve got lots of wind in Muncie, but no sailing.”

He chuckled. “Mom wanted me to learn. I was not quite ten when she signed me up for sailing camp. I remember her watching me from the dock.”

This was the first time he’d ever talked about his mother. It seemed like a confidence or something. Not the sort of thing someone who was looking for a tumble would share.

“Was she always giving you pointers from the sidelines?” she asked.

“No.”

His one-word answer seemed like an emotional retreat. Which was a good thing, right?

But it annoyed her. So she turned to face him and pressed the point. “Tell me about your mom.”

*  *  *

Oh great. The last thing he wanted to do was talk about his mother. How the hell had he even fallen into this conversational black hole? He hated talking about his mother, and today especially, he had no heart for it.

So he ignored her question, took a sip of his champagne, and tried not to let today’s news about Coreen Martel ruin this moment.

Ella had worn a dress that reminded him of Lauren. And that was annoying too. He didn’t want Lauren.

He wanted Ella. In fact, he wanted to convince her to come home with him after this cruise was finished because she might be the antidote to the poison running through his veins right at the moment.

Earlier today, Grant Ackerman, one of the volunteers with the Magnolia Harbor fire department, had called the office to let them know that Coreen Martel had been found dead in her bathroom, evidently the victim of a fall. She’d died utterly alone.

He’d lost patients before. And Coreen was suffering from end-stage heart failure, so her days had been numbered, but the manner of her death had left him feeling a deep melancholy he couldn’t shake.

He glanced at Ella. It might be nice if she would hug him, but he couldn’t ask for a hug. Not here on the boat with a crowd surrounding them.

“I take it from your silence that your mother is a forbidden topic,” she said, pulling him back into the conversation.

“Uh, no. It’s just that…”

“You never talk about her. Is that because you’re trying not to compare her to my mother? I’m sure your mother was a paragon.”

He actually managed a smile. What was it about Ella? She amused him sometimes. “I’m sure she was, but I was only ten when she died. I don’t remember her that well. And you know, she was sick for a long time before she passed away.”

“It was cancer, right?”

He nodded. “She’d lost her hair that summer when I started sailing camp.”

“I’m so sorry. I…”

“It’s okay. She loved sailing even more than Dad does. But I guess…” His voice faded out.

“She wanted you to learn to love sailing before she died. She wanted to live long enough to see you sailing by yourself.” What the hell. Could Ella could read his thoughts or something?

“I guess. I didn’t really understand at the time. All I knew was that I was younger than all the other kids at camp. And I felt like a loser.”

“You? Really?”

He leaned back onto the boat’s railing. “You know what they do on the first day of sailing camp?”

“Do I look like a sailor?”

“They make you capsize your boat. And then you have to get it upright and bail it out. Over and over again.”

“I guess that makes sense. But it doesn’t sound like much fun.”

He nodded. “The thing is, I was a year younger than everyone else because Mom had guilted the sailing school into making an exception for me. And since she was terminally ill and a member of the board, they broke the rules. So all the other kids got to practice capsizing their boats with seven-foot-long dinghies, but they gave me this tiny four-foot sailboat because I wasn’t big enough to capsize the bigger ones. I got teased. I hated it.”

“Did you get the boat upright?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Then don’t complain. I mean, they were just helping you succeed. When I