Serena's Choice - Coastal Romance Series Read Online Free

her
small grandmother.
    “ I’m going to change,”
Serena said. “We can sit on the back porch for a while if you want
to.”
    “ Okay,” Jeff said. “I’ll
go get my bag while you change.”
    In her bedroom, Serena looked at
herself in the mirror of her dresser. The days since her mother had
died had been filled with activity. Now, that was over and Serena
would be left with her solitary thoughts. The woman that looked back
at her from the mirror was changed. She had crossed a threshold. She
was now a child without a mother. She looked away from the mirror and
got her jeans and a T-shirt out of the dresser.
    Jeff was sitting on the couch
when she went back downstairs. His gray duffle bag sat on the floor
beside him.
    “ Let me show you where you’ll
be staying,” Serena said. Jeff followed her upstairs and Serena led
him to the spare bedroom, a very small room but it had everything
that was necessary. She couldn’t put him in her mother’s room.
She had only gone in there to find a dress for her mother to wear in
her coffin. That had been painful enough.
    “ I’m afraid it’s pretty
small,” Serena said.
    “ This is fine,” Jeff said. He
said he would join her downstairs after he changed out of his suit.
    Serena got a bottle of chilled
white wine from the refrigerator and pulled down fresh wine glasses
from the cabinet. She put the wine in a deep bowl with ice and took
it to the porch. By the time she walked back in the kitchen from the
porch door, Jeff was there. He picked up the two wine glasses and
followed Serena back out to the porch.
    “ Is that a pier I see?” Jeff
asked after they had settled in their seats.
    “ Yes, it’s a little pier.
We’re on an inlet from the bay.”
    “ It’s nice,” Jeff said.
    Serena had lit a small lantern
and she could see Jeff’s face in the faint light.
    “ I was surprised to see you
today,” she said. “I never expected you to come. I don’t even
know how you knew when the funeral was.”
    “ I Googled it,” Jeff said. “I
found it in the Luna Bay News online.”
    Of course. The Luna Bay News had gone online several years ago. Serena read it every day when she
was in Atlanta.
    “ I remember when my nonna
died,” Jeff said.
    His what? His nonna? That was
what Italians called their grandmother. What did he mean his nonna?
    “ Your nonna?” Serena said.
“Are you Italian?”
    Serena realized she didn’t know
anything about Jeff. Not anything.
    “ Yes. Well, I’m one-fourth
Italian. My nonna married a Scottish man and my mother married my
American father. So I’m one-fourth.”
    “ I never knew that,” Serena
said.
    “ I know,” Jeff said. “I
grew up in Philadelphia and my nonna took care of me while my parents
worked. Your grandmother reminds me of my grandmother. It was hard
when she died.”
    “ I’m sorry,” Serena said.
    “ It was a long time ago,”
Jeff said. “I was fifteen at the time. I still miss her, though.”
    The early October night was
still. It was silent except for an occasional deep-throated croak
from a frog. A quarter moon shone down on the inlet. Serena had spent
her life on that water. She had fished countless times from the pier.
    “ Let’s walk on the pier,”
Serena said, standing up.
    She and Jeff walked through the
grassy yard and onto the pier. It was dark except for the moonlight.
    “ This must have been a great
place to grow up,” Jeff said. “I grew up in a city and hardly
ever saw the coast.”
    “ It was pretty great,” Serena
said, remembering. She grew up in the diner, like her grandmother and
her mother before her. She grew up on the water, the inlet, the bay,
the ocean.
    Her mother tended the garden,
both at the cottage and behind the diner. Serena remembered that when
she was very small, her mother pinched the herbs between her
fingers—basil, oregano, rosemary, lemon mint—and put her fingers
to Serena’s nose. “That’s rosemary,” she would say. Or,
“that’s basil.” Serena could