Pelican Point (Bachelors of Blueberry Cove) Read Online Free

finally been settled. What could be sold off had been sold off to resolve the debts her father had owed, none of which she’d known about, and the rest had gone to the lawyers. Thank God there’d been some life insurance money to cover the medical costs from the day of the accident, and, later, her father’s burial. She’d been grateful to have had that much, but nothing was left.
    Less than five days after packing up and moving out, she sat in her grandfather’s banged-up sideboard truck a thousand miles away on a wind-whipped coastal road on the edge of Maine. Their oldest and only remaining trailer was hooked on the back. Between the two, she was carrying pretty much everything she owned. Well, everything worth hauling anyway. Except for four generations’ worth of accumulated tools and her laptop, she’d sold off everything else of value, including their newer and sturdier work trucks.
    No one had wanted Grandpa Mac’s old truck or trailer, which had been parked at the house back in Thunder Bay after he’d passed four years ago. She’d hung on to them, then used every trick she had to get the damn truck running again. But running it was, and had been—with a few additional nudges and a steady string of swearwords along the way—all the way from her home on the shores of Lake Huron. The home that someone else lived in now.
    She’d made it all the way to this ramp, leading down to the beautiful old stone causeway that ran across a corner of Pelican Bay and out to a rocky point jutting into the sound, atop which sat Pelican Point lighthouse. The entire vista was picture postcard perfect—from the boats dotting the water, the shops and homes lining the harbor across the sound, to the weathered keeper’s house perched on the promontory, fronted by the lighthouse itself, a proud, majestic old sentinel, keeping watch over it all.
    It was hers to rediscover, to heal, to make whole.
    After everything she’d been through, all that she’d had to arbitrate, settle, overcome, and simply live through and survive . . . and with the answer to her most pressing needs sitting right there in front of her . . . the very last thing that should have undone her was a blown tire. She even had a spare, buried . . . somewhere in the back.
    There was no reason, none at all, to be sitting there, blubbering like an idiot. Or, her little voice piped in, like a woman who’d lost one too many things and just didn’t have it in her to lose so much as a single tire more .
    She was working her way through the onslaught of tears, knowing that at some point she’d surely get her act together, climb out, and do what she always did, what she’d been taught to do since before she could walk, and what she’d been doing ever since . . . she’d fix it.
    A big, white, sports utility truck pulled in behind her, with official-looking blue lights flashing on the roof. It looked like someone else was going to beat her to it. Or try, anyway. They’d soon discover it wasn’t the busted tire that needed assistance . . . it was the broken-down mess of a driver sitting behind the wheel.
    Alex instinctively scrubbed at her face only to realize she’d crumpled up the paper with the names, contact information, and directions on it into her fist. She smoothed it out, thinking she should have stopped in town and talked to Fergus McCrae directly before finding her way out to the Point. That had been the plan, actually, but she’d arrived early, a full day early in fact. Sleep hadn’t been her friend for quite some time, so she’d driven on. She hadn’t felt like talking to anyone as she’d pulled into Blueberry Cove any more than she had on the long drive.
    She had called the number, however, and spoken to Mr. McCrae. She’d asked if it would be okay to head straight out to Pelican Point to take a cursory look around, then come back into town and meet up with him later, around dinnertime, when they could discuss business. It was the smart thing to