Lisa Carter - Coast Guard Sweetheart

She’d have a full house this weekend if the storm didn’t scare the tourists away. And the big wedding scheduled on the lawn for Sunday should be fine. Although the bride from off-Shore with her last-minute demands might make Honey lose her carefully wrought reputation for no-hitch weddings, not to mention her mind. But with the deep-pocketed father of the bride renting out the entire property—inn, cabin and dock—for the day, Honey could afford to give his diva daughter some leeway.

Her current guests were no doubt busy kayaking through the Inner Passage off Kiptohanock. Birding, boating and doing a hundred other Eastern Shore activities she and the Accomack County Tourist Board had worked so hard to highlight. So far, so good. This season had been a tremendous success and blessing—she grimaced.

Amelia, get out of my head.

With registration complete for the day and her guests otherwise occupied till breakfast the next morning, the rest of the day belonged to Honey. She had yeast rolls rising in the commercial-grade kitchen and a load of laundry going in the front-loading washer on the back screened porch. Off limits to non-Duers.

She trailed her hand down the graceful, curving bannister as she did a look-see of the downstairs common area. Guests found her dad’s piecrust table checkerboard folksy. The sea glass and driftwood decor she’d collected from the barrier island charming and beachy. The knotted pine interior rustic and homey.

Homey Honey. That was her.

She straightened an errant sofa cushion, which had gone catabiased—to use one of Dad’s favorite Eastern Shore expressions. And as usual, whenever in the remodeled family room, her gaze drifted to the one thing she refused to change. The Duer family portrait taken on the lawn overlooking the inlet. Taken when everything had been safe in her childhood world.

Before Caroline went off to college and never returned. Before Mom succumbed to cancer. Before Dad lost himself to a decade of grief. Before her oldest sister, Lindi—like Honey—unwisely loved a Coastie and in the process paid for it with her life.

Other than Honey’s nonexistent love life, things were better now. With Amelia happily married, Max healthy and whole, and her dad once more in business with his oldest love, the sea, Honey had the time to make her fondest dream a reality—bringing the Duer Lodge back to life. Home to seven generations of Duers, Virginia watermen one and all.

During the last century, Northern steel magnates roughed it at the Duer’s fisherman lodge while her ancestors oystered and served as hunting guides in the winter. Crabbed and ran charters in the summer. The lodge’s heyday—and the steamers from Wachapreague to New York City—had long ago passed into history. But with Honey’s hand on the proverbial rudder?

What had once been lost would finally be regained.

She bit her lip.

If only everything else in her life could be so easily restored.

* * *

Sawyer drove around the Kiptohanock village square, occupied by the cupola-topped gazebo.

Not much had changed in the seaside hamlet. The post office and bait shop. The white-steepled clapboard church. The CG station. Boat repair business. Victorian homes meandered off side lanes.

But he’d not understood until he left this place behind three years ago how much the village and its hardy fishing folk had seeped into his heart.

Especially Honey.

By his own choice, he’d believed himself cut off from her forever. And he’d worked hard—on and off duty—to forget her. To no avail.

The emptiness remained no matter what he did. California girls had not proven—like Honey’s favorite song declared—to be the best in the world for him. He’d stopped hanging out with the guys when off watch. Because nothing stopped the ache in his chest when he thought of the doe-eyed girl he’d left behind on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

Nothing and no one—until that last tragic search and rescue off the coast of San Diego. At the end of his strength—mental, physical and spiritual—he’d reached in a last desperate attempt for the God the Duers served. And in the reaching—he’d been found.

And in turn found peace. Sufficient to wash away the sadness and the fears. More than enough for any situation he faced.

It had been the picture of the white-steepled church hugging the shoreline of coastal Kiptohanock that came to his mind amidst the uncertainty and fear of that mission gone wrong. The steeple—rising like a beacon of hope above the tree line as the boats came into harbor—which he remembered when pitted against the elements in a life and death struggle. The image kept him tethered to life in those horrible hours in the Pacific when he struggled to survive.

The steeple—a lifeline of hope and mercy. A lifeline that led afterward to a relationship with the Creator of the vast and deep.

A relationship Sawyer looked forward to nurturing. There was so much this former foster kid needed to learn. Unlike the Duers, his backside had never darkened a church pew until recently.

He was eager before he shipped out again to find out more about this God Braeden and the Duers served at the small, country church in Kiptohanock. Braeden had encouraged him to meet with Reverend Parks. But in the secret places of his heart, Sawyer worried like a dog with a bone whether God could ever really love someone like him.

Sawyer shook his head to clear the troublesome thoughts as he followed Seaside Road, which paralleled the main Eastern Shore artery of Highway 13 on one side and the archipelago of shoals, spits and islands that dotted the ocean side. He turned into the long dapple-shaded Duer drive.

Thrusting open the door of his truck, he took a quick breath for courage. His sneakers crunched across the oyster-shelled path leading to the wraparound porch. Where he found the very pregnant Amelia ensconced on a white wicker chaise lounge chair, sipping a tall cool glass of sweet tea.

His mouth watered. Another thing this Oklahoma boy missed about the Eastern Shore and the South. That and Amelia Scott’s sister.

Amelia deposited her glass with a plunk onto the small table at her elbow.

His eyes narrowed.

Their last encounter—with Amelia declaring his utter unfitness to be a part of her baby sister’s life—had not gone well. And there was the harpoon incident the first time she met her future husband whom she mistook for an intruder. A case of mistaken identity, which three happily married years later, Braeden still liked to joke about.

Amelia gestured toward the pitcher. “Want some tea?”

Sawyer moistened his lower lip with his tongue, but he shook his head. “No, ma’am. Thank you, though.”

He stayed on the bottom step, ready to flee should Amelia decide to chuck the contents at him. Couldn’t be too careful with these Duer girls.

She scrunched her face, wrinkling the freckles sprinkling the bridge of her nose. “You make me feel so old when you call me ma’am. But I can’t fault your manners. Someone taught you well.”

His gaze swept across the black urns filled with fire-engine red geraniums positioned on either side of each planked step. That would’ve been the last foster mom who’d encouraged him to give rodeo a try.

“What did you come here for, Sawyer?”

His eyes darted upward. “I came for Honey.”

She laughed.

He flushed. “I—I mean I came to talk to her. To apologize before I head out in a few days.”

Amelia skewered him with a look.

He shuffled his feet.

“I think you said exactly what you meant the first time.” She reached for her glass. “And don’t be in such a rush to leave us again.”

He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his cargo shorts. “Is she in the house? Could I talk to her? Will she talk to me?”