Want to escape with feel-good beach reads?

Excerpt from SEABREEZE INN:

"Where is she?” Ivy muttered. Impatient to board the flight to the west coast, she stood by the boarding gate, waiting for her sister, Shelly, who had disappeared in the crowded Boston Logan airport.

A flight attendant in a crisp uniform approached her. “We need to close the gate, ma’am.”

“My sister will be here. Just another minute, please?”

The attendant pressed her perfectly outlined lips together. “One minute. That’s all. She can take a later flight, but we have a plane full of passengers and a schedule to meet.”

“I understand.” Ivy shot her sister a text, and then leaned against a wall, willing her perennially late sister to make it. She didn’t want to take this flight alone.

Closing her eyes, Ivy imagined the beachside community of Summer Beach in southern California. She hadn’t been there in several years—and frankly, she hadn’t expected to be visiting now—but she could still conjure the pale gold sand squishing between her toes, the morning sunshine warming her shoulders, and the salty spray misting her face.

Even though she’d been living in Boston for more than two decades, the sound of the waves breaking on Summer Beach was an altogether different pitch to her ears than that of any shoreline along the New England coast. And the sunsets! What she coveted most of all was watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.

She recalled gathering on the beach with her friends to watch the sun slip beneath the horizon. Almost every evening was a spectacular show as the sun fanned golden rays into a cerulean sky. To her artist’s eye, blazes of coral and rose and cadmium yellow spilled onto indigo waves like paint across a canvas.

Ivy glanced at the sweeping minute hand on her wristwatch—a reassuring analog throwback in a digital age where you were only as connected as your phone’s battery life.

Forty-five seconds.

To Ivy, no two sunsets were ever alike. Watching majestic swirls forming in the darkening sky was like witnessing an artist’s broad strokes on a masterpiece that all too soon vanished in the mild evening air. The thought of it sent shivers through her, and she remembered photographing sunsets and setting up her easel in the late afternoon.

However, this trip to Summer Beach and San Diego County would be nothing like that. She had her late husband to thank for this unfortunate surprise. She pressed a finger against her throbbing temple.

Thirty seconds.

Where was she? Standing on tiptoe and craning her neck, Ivy spied Shelly—her sister was racing toward her, dodging travelers and airport trams with the nimbleness of a dancer.

Shelly thrust an arm of colorful bangles into the air. A pink shopping bag dangled from her fingers like a trophy, while her thick mane of chestnut hair looked intent on escaping from a messy bun.

“She’s almost here,” Ivy told the flight attendant, whose frown had deepened into one likely specially reserved for the tardiest of passengers.

Twenty seconds.

Ivy had been putting off this visit for months. Her real estate agent in Summer Beach had been insisting that she needed to inspect the house left to her after Jeremy’s death—the only asset in his debt-ridden estate. With private college tuition and board for their daughters, they hadn’t saved much except for funding his retirement account at work.

Still, she missed her husband so much—the way he’d tuck her loose hair behind her ear or wake her with coffee on the weekends. His faint French accent imbued even ordinary words with such a musical tone. When she’d complain about a birthday, he’d tell her fine wine only improved with age.

All those years, and now she wondered if she’d ever really known him. She chewed her lip.

Clearly, she hadn't. Or she wouldn't have needed to hire her old summer crush of 27 years ago to sell this old beach house she'd known nothing about.

Why on earth hadn't Bennett been able to sell it?

She couldn't help but wonder what he looked like now. And if he still sang.