The Sweetheart Bargain (A Sweetheart Sisters Novel) Read Online Free Page A

spilled down her cheeks. She dropped to the ground and gathered the only friend she had in Rescue Bay into her arms.

Two

    Greta Winslow celebrated her eighty-third birthday the way she celebrated most everything: with a heaping plate of windmill cookies and a double shot of Maker’s Mark. Her father had been a Jim Beam man. He’d line up his empty liters along the top of the kitchen cabinets, and as the collection grew, they created a prism when the morning light first hit. When Greta was a little girl, she’d sit at the scarred kitchen table, the one with the black divot in the center from one of Uncle Abe’s forgotten cigarettes, and watch the dance of colors. By the time her father died at the ripe old age of ninety-seven, the bottle row was two, some places three deep, but the rainbow still came every morning. Greta missed that rainbow. Missed her daddy something fierce, too. So she started her day the way her father always had. With a few nips of the hard stuff.
    Esther Gerke frowned at the shimmering contraband amber liquid in Greta’s glass. “Does Doc Harper know you’re drinking that? At this time of day?”
    “Doc Harper is still drying the ink on his degree. I like that boy, but he’s got a lot to learn about getting old.” Just to spite Esther, Greta took a long sip of the bourbon. It slid down her throat in one warm, practiced move. “Besides, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt me.”
    Esther’s lips knitted into a knot. “It’s scandalous. Drinking that”—she waved a hand at the glass—“devil’s brew. And in here, no less.” The last she added in a whisper, with a worried glance at the staff across the room.
    Greta had been sneaking drinks into the morning room from day one. A couple bottles of Jim for the staff at major holidays and they all turned a blind eye to her morning “coffee.” “Esther Gerke, I have seen you imbibe a time or two. Why that time at the Casino Night, you had three—”
    “It was after five.” She sat back in her chair as if that settled the issue. Beside her, a wedding ring quilt formed a lumpy blue-and-white cloud that poufed up and across the long table. Every Thursday morning for as long as anyone could remember—which at their age, wasn’t much beyond breakfast—the Ladies’ Quilting Club had met in the big room in the back of the Daily Grind across the street. Then the coffee shop had shut down, no word, no notice, and they’d had to move their quilting to the morning room at the Golden Years Retirement Village—a fancy name for an assisted-living facility that charged a small fortune to provide the comforts of home while a nursing staff hovered and fretted. Greta would have been just fine staying in her own house, at her own kitchen table, but her son had insisted on forking over the cash to keep her “safe.” More like under constant observation like a captured escapee in Alcatraz. Greta didn’t get into trouble, exactly; more like trouble found her.
    So she got distracted sometimes. She forgot to shut off the stove, left the front door open, and occasionally forgot to pay at the Sav-A-Lot. Edward worried too much, and overreacted too often, acting more like a mother hen than a child.
    Greta now lived at Golden Years and sat in the bright yellow-and-white morning room with all the other little old ladies—of which she was the smallest and the youngest—purportedly quilting while they sat in high-backed oak chairs with wide cushioned seats and watched other residents drift in and out of the room. Greta had been bringing the same set of squares for the last six months. She didn’t quilt—she groused. And that suited her just fine.
    “What’d I miss?” Pauline Lewis breezed into the morning room in a burst of Estée Lauder. A waterfall of personal possessions tumbled out of her hands and into an empty chair—tote bag, purse, wool coat, knitted hat. Pauline dressed like an Eskimo heading to the Antarctic for the twenty-yard walk from her