Return to Rose Cottage by Sherryl Woods

Author:Sherryl Woods [Woods, Sherryl]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: MIRA
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

For the Love of Pete

Prologue

“Pack your bags and come to Virginia,” Ashley commanded the morning after Jo’s life had been turned upside down by her lying, cheating ex-fiancé.

Jo sighed. She’d planned to spend the whole day in bed, licking her wounds in private, maybe eating the en tire pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream she had stashed in the freezer. Her funk had been interrupted before it could even get going by this call from all three of her sisters. She knew they were all on the line, even though Ashley was the only one who’d spoken so far. She could hear them breathing, while they left the coaxing to their big sister.

“How did you find out?” She thought she’d made it absolutely clear to their folks that her broken engagement was something she’d wanted to announce to her sisters herself…maybe next June, when the shock had worn off.

Unfortunately Max and Colleen D’Angelo weren’t great at keeping quiet. They thought families should stick together in times of crisis. Her sisters had learned the lesson well. Until now, Jo had always found that com forting.

“Nothing stays secret in this family for long,” Ashley responded, stating the obvious. “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t say something yourself. You should have called us the minute you caught James cheating.”

“Why?” Jo grumbled. “So you could come up here and personally rip his heart out?” The image gave her a certain amount of bloodthirsty satisfaction, which she found deeply troubling. She liked to think of herself as kindhearted.

“That or some other part of his anatomy,” Ashley said.

“That’s precisely the reason I didn’t call,” Jo explained, shaking off the chill that had run down her spine at her sister’s words. Ashley was perfectly capable of making good on such a threat. She had the protective-big-sister thing down pat. “I handled it in my own way. Besides, I didn’t want all this sympathy, and I definitely don’t want to run away. The humiliation of discovering James in bed with another woman was bad enough. I won’t let him chase me off. My life is here in Boston. I’m not budging because of that scumbag.”

In fact, this whole mess had reminded her of just how determined she was to make a life for herself in Boston. It had brought back way too many memories of an other man she’d loved, another man who had cheated on her and forever ruined the love she’d once felt for Rose Cottage, her grandmother’s home in Virginia. Even now, fresh as this was, she was having a hard time deciding which betrayal had been more devastating.

Worse, even though they’d never known about that earlier disaster, Jo had anticipated exactly how her sisters would react to this one. Though she sometimes thought of herself as the odd man out—the only one whose name wasn’t somehow tied to Gone With the Wind, her Southern mother’s favorite book—she’d known they would rally around her and insist that she come to Virginia, where they could fuss over her.

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