Searching for Sunshine Read online

  Searching for Sunshine

  The Delaneys of Cambria, Book 4

  Linda Seed

  Contents

  Get a Linda Seed short story FREE

  By Linda Seed

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Get a Linda Seed short story free

  Read more by Linda Seed

  Get a Linda Seed short story FREE

  Sign up for Linda’s no-spam newsletter and get a free copy of the Main Street Merchants short story “Jacks Are Wild” and more exclusive content at no cost.

  * * *

  Grab your copy here.

  This is a work of fiction. Any characters, organizations, places, or events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  * * *

  SEARCHING FOR SUNSHINE

  Copyright © 2018 by Linda Seed

  * * *

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  * * *

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  * * *

  The author is available for book signings, book club discussions, conferences, and other appearances.

  Linda Seed may be contacted via e-mail at [email protected] or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/LindaSeedAuthor. Learn more about Linda Seed’s novels at www.lindaseed.com.

  Cover design by Teaberry Creative.

  Created with Vellum

  By Linda Seed

  The Main Street Merchants

  Moonstone Beach

  Cambria Sky

  Nearly Wild

  Fire and Glass

  * * *

  The Delaneys of Cambria

  A Long, Cool Rain

  The Promise of Lightning

  Loving the Storm

  * * *

  The Russo Sisters

  Saving Sofia

  First Crush

  1

  Breanna Delaney—raised by a no-nonsense mother who believed in hard work—was used to taking orders. But Mrs. Granfield, a tiny, elderly woman with an anxious expression and a pronounced limp, was much less comfortable giving them.

  “Breanna, dear, would you mind cleaning the Santa Rosa room before you go to lunch?” The owner of the Whispering Pines Bed & Breakfast, temporarily sidelined by a hip replacement, seemed almost embarrassed to assign the task. She fidgeted with a lace doily on the reception desk, avoiding Breanna’s eyes.

  “Of course, Mrs. Granfield. I’ll do it now.” Breanna had been refreshing the coffee service in the B&B’s parlor, but she was almost finished. She refilled the sugar bowl, then tidied up the sideboard where it sat and turned to head toward the Santa Rosa room.

  “I hate to even ask, but with my hip …” Mrs. Granfield fussed.

  Breanna paused to look at the woman with her cap of tidy white hair, her pressed and pleated slacks, and her fussy sweater set. Mrs. Granfield couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, and she probably wouldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds if she were carrying a sack of cement.

  “It’s no problem, Mrs. Granfield. It’s why I’m here. You don’t have to apologize,” Breanna reminded her.

  “Well, yes, but …” Mrs. Granfield wrung her small, wrinkled hands.

  If the shoe had been on the other foot, Breanna supposed she might be uneasy, as well. Breanna was one of the wealthiest people in Cambria—rivaled only by her own parents and her brothers. It was probably hard to tell someone what to do when that person could buy everything you owned—and everything your family owned—with the interest she earned on her investments over the course of a week.

  Breanna went to the woman and rested a hand on her bony shoulder. “I’m here to help. For goodness sake, use me.”

  Mrs. Granfield, looking relieved, relaxed a little. “Well, it is nice not to have to bend over to make beds and pick up wet towels off the floor.”

  “See?” Breanna said. “I’ll have it done in no time.”

  She headed into the Santa Rosa room—a four-hundred-square-foot space with honey-colored wood floors, walls in a pale buttery shade, and an attached bathroom—and started undoing the damage done by the guests who had checked out that morning.

  She could understand being a slob in your own home, but as a guest in someone else’s? She shook her head in wonder at the mess one couple could make in a single evening.

  She picked up empty food wrappers from the floor in the bedroom, scooped up a pile of wet towels from the bathroom tile, and then went to work stripping the linens from the bed.

  Mrs. Granfield might have had a hard time assigning her these kinds of tasks, but Breanna had two boys, so messy bedrooms and wet towels on the floor were a sight as familiar to her as her own face in the mirror.

  She was most comfortable when she was busy, when she had a to-do list of tasks a mile long. And she’d always believed in service, in helping others in the community. Mrs. Granfield couldn’t afford to hire help to get her through her recovery, so Breanna had stepped in. It gave her something to do now that her kids were growing up and needed her less. And it also helped get her mind off her impatience with a home renovation project that was taking longer than she would have thought possible.

  Breanna had bought an old, dilapidated house on Moonstone Beach the previous winter, planning to renovate it as a home for herself and her sons. Since Breanna’s husband, a Marine, had been killed during deployment more than nine years before, she and the boys had been living with her parents on the cattle ranch where she’d grown up. It was time that she and her kids moved on and built something that would be just their own.

  Almost a year later, the work on the place hadn’t started yet. But that was about to change, and Breanna could barely think of anything else. Working for Mrs. Granfield helped her not to obsess over countertops, floor plans, and bathroom finishes.

  She remade the bed in the Santa Rosa room with fresh linens, scrubbed the toilet, the shower, and the sink, polished the bathroom mirror, and vacuumed the braided rug next to the bed. Then she put fresh flowers in the vase that sat on the bedside table.

  Breanna stood back and surveyed her work. Not bad, she decided. The Amish quilt on the bed gave the room a hint of old-fashioned charm, and the light streaming in through the sheer window curtains gave the whole place a warm glow.

 
; While this wasn’t the look she wanted for her place—not exactly—it had the feeling she was after. Warm. Comforting. As though the room’s occupants had not only stepped into a pleasing retreat, but had also stepped several decades back through time.

  Of course, it might actually be several decades before the job was done.

  First there’d been the process of finding an architect and having plans drawn for the remodel, then there’d been the interminable wait for permits. Once that was done, there’d been a false start with a general contractor who had bailed on the project a couple of months after signing on, when he was almost scheduled to start work.

  She’d had to find another general contractor, and then—because demand in Cambria for that type of work was high—she’d had to wait months for him to fit her into his schedule.

  She was pretty sure she’d found someone good this time—her brother Colin had worked with him on a project in Los Angeles and had recommended him highly—but the wait for him to be available had been so daunting she’d almost wondered if it was worth the trouble.

  Now, at last, the renovation was about to begin, and Breanna was so excited she could hardly sleep at night. As she finished up in the Santa Rosa room, she thought about her own house and everything she wanted it to be.

  She wanted her place to be a retreat, an escape from the chaos of the world. She wanted to create a feeling of homey luxury, of relaxation, that would have her family eager to return there at the end of each day.

  Speaking of luxury, the more time Breanna spent at the Whispering Pines, the more ideas she had for better pampering the guests there.

  “Mrs. Granfield?” Breanna pushed the cleaning cart out of the Santa Rosa room and called to the older woman.

  “Yes?” Mrs. Granfield was at the front desk flipping through the reservations book.

  “Have you ever thought of putting bathrobes and slippers in the rooms? You know, nice and fluffy, Egyptian cotton …”

  “The guests stole them,” Mrs. Granfield said, a tone of weary regret in her voice.

  “They stole them? But couldn’t you just charge their credit cards if they—”

  “Well, yes. That’s what I thought until a couple from Milwaukee sued me, saying the robes had never been in the room in the first place. It’s not worth the effort, dear. Believe me.”

  * * *

  Breanna was still thinking about Egyptian cotton bathrobes, theft, and the relative risks and benefits of providing such amenities as she left the B&B for the day, driving east on Main Street toward the middle school where her two sons, Michael and Lucas, were waiting for her.

  Michael, thirteen, was in eighth grade, and Lucas, eleven, was in sixth. Both boys had always been sweet, loving, and relatively easygoing. Lucas, her baby, was still all of those things, but Michael was beginning to become a handful, and she sometimes worried that she wasn’t equipped to be everything he needed.

  Their father had been gone a long time now—nine years in June. A teenage boy needed his father, but an IED in Afghanistan had robbed the boys of that, and had robbed Breanna of the only man she’d ever loved.

  No sense brooding about that, though—she’d brooded enough, cried enough to last her a lifetime. Now, it was time to move on. Once work began on the Moonstone Beach property, it would be a big step toward that progress forward.

  The day was clear and bright, and the sun was warm as she pulled her car into the middle school parking lot. When she saw her boys standing in front of the school waiting for her, she felt a warm surge of love, the way she always did.

  Michael, who’d just gone through a growth spurt, was tall and thin, his knees looking knobby beneath the hem of the shorts he insisted on wearing year-round. Lucas, his sandy-colored hair askew, came only to his brother’s shoulder. His sweet face was dusted with freckles and was pink from the sun.

  She pulled up to the curb and they piled into the car in a mess of backpacks, unruly elbows and smelly shoes.

  Lucas, her talker, launched into a point-by-point recounting of his day, from having to run laps in PE to needing a new graph paper notebook to what he’d had for lunch, winding up with a story about how his friend Ethan had gotten in trouble for throwing Doritos.

  Breanna listened to it all, thinking how sad she’d be when her son no longer wanted to tell her everything that happened to him—when he no longer thought that an experience wasn’t real until he shared it with his mother.

  Michael, who sat sullenly in the back seat next to his brother, had entered that dreaded phase already, and his silence worried her.

  “Michael? How about you, honey? How was your day?” she prompted him.

  But she knew what the answer would be:

  “Fine.”

  He was always fine, even when he wasn’t.

  She drove onto Highway 1 and headed north toward the Delaney Ranch.

  When you were an adult and a mother, going home to live with your parents probably felt like defeat for most people. For Breanna, it had felt like a warm embrace. Her family had lived and worked on the land since 1865, and the place, with its acres of pasture, its working cattle ranch, its rolling, grassy hills, and the peaceful shade of pine trees and oaks had soothed her when nothing else could.

  Sometimes the comfort of home was just what you needed, but sometimes, you had to step out of that comfort in order to challenge yourself to find something more.

  When she’d spotted the for-sale sign on the Moonstone Beach property, an abandoned, dilapidated farmhouse in the most desirable spot in Cambria, she’d known that it was what she’d been looking for.

  But knowing what she wanted was one thing. Getting her boys on board with the plan was another.

  Lucas, as usual, was game for anything. But Michael didn’t like the idea of moving, and he’d made that clear since she’d first raised the topic more than a year before.

  “I can’t wait to get home,” Lucas said, rattling off the many varied things he planned to do when he got there.

  “It’s not our home,” Michael said, the sullen tone of his voice becoming more and more familiar to Breanna.

  “Of course it is,” Breanna told him.

  “Not for much longer.” Through the rearview mirror, she saw him sink down into his seat, his face dark as he glared out the window at the passing scenery.

  Breanna was beginning to think that getting the renovations done would be a breeze compared to dealing with her oldest son.

  “Hey, I know what. Do you guys want some ice cream?” They were about to pass Mojo’s, which had a good selection of flavors in cones or cups.

  “Yeah!” Lucas bounced up and down a little in his seat.

  “Whatever,” Michael said.

  Breanna figured she could use a little sugar right now herself, regardless of what the kids thought.

  2

  By the end of the workday, all Jake wanted was a shower, a hot meal, and a beer. A little mindless TV viewing wouldn’t have been unwelcome.

  But Sam, his roommate, had other ideas.

  Sam, a 150-pound Newfoundland with shaggy black and white fur and a drooling problem, bounded at Jake as soon as he came in the door. Sam’s customary greeting was always unsettling—it was all Jake could do not to let himself be hurled to the ground like Fred Flintstone.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sam, get down.” Jake ordered Sam to desist, as he did every day.

  Sam ignored him, like he did every day.

  The dog was standing on his hind legs with his paws on Jake’s shoulders, as though they were about to dance. Sam attempted to vigorously lick Jake’s face, but a man had to draw the line somewhere. With his hands grasping the dog’s armpits—assuming a dog even had armpits—Jake lowered Sam to the ground.

  The front door was still open; Jake hadn’t even made it past the threshold before the dog had overwhelmed him with a combination of bulk and affection.

  Sam, now with all four paws on the ground, was quivering with excitement. Jake wasn’t going to g
et a moment’s rest until he walked Sam, who’d been cooped up in the house all day while Jake was at work.

  “You could at least let a guy relax a little,” Jake grumbled as he went into the house to get Sam’s leash.

  He grabbed the leash from the hook by the door, then froze in horror.

  “Ah, jeez. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Jake had worried that Sam might have an accident on the floor, but what he’d done had been no accident. It had been deliberate as hell.

  While Jake had been at work, the dog had knocked over a side table, ripped a houseplant out of a pot that had been on the table, and dragged the plant around the living room, leaving a trail of potting soil over the carpet and the sofa, and even smearing some on the wall.

  The plant in question had been placed inside one of Jake’s shoes, as though it were being presented as a gift.

  Sam looked at him adoringly, trembling with excitement as Jake surveyed his handiwork.

  “Get in the car. I’m taking you to the pound.”

  Sam’s tail thumped against the floor.