Page 1 of Beachfront Pages

Chapter 1

Fiona Wells had gotten fifteen protagonists out of worse trouble than this. Pity she couldn't plot her own way out.

So far her grand escape plan amounted to driving south until the road ran out. She'd missed the turn for the lighthouse twice, then a third time for good measure. Some detective she'd make. Her own characters would be ashamed of her.

The GPS announced, in its calm and faintly smug way, that she had arrived.

"Did I?" Fiona said to it.

She hadn't, though. Not really. She'd just stopped driving.

The lane curved through a stand of palms and opened onto a gravel parking lot, and there it was. The lighthouse. Taller than she'd pictured from the photos online, white and plain against a sky going gold at the edges. Six cottages sat around a garden courtyard in a loose semicircle. Each one was painted a soft beachy color. Each one had a porch. Somewhere past them the Gulf threw light around like it had money to burn.

It was, she had to admit, exactly the sort of place she'd put in a book. Charming little coastal town. Heroine arrives wounded but plucky. Finds herself.

Fiona did not feel plucky. She felt fifty-four and tired, like a fraud who'd driven nine hundred miles to be one in a prettier setting.

She put the car in park and sat there staring at the lighthouse.

A woman was already coming down the path toward her. Older, small, with silver-white hair pinned up neatly. She moved carefully but not slowly, like someone who'd decided long ago exactly how much energy each step was worth.

Fiona checked the mirror and put on the face. The one she wore for the publisher's holiday parties and a hundred dinners she'd rather have skipped. Pleasant and composed. The look that said, "I'm fine."

She got out of the car.

"You found us," the woman said. "I'm Winnie. You'll be Fiona."

"I will be." Fiona shook her hand. The older woman's grip was strong, her fingers a little gnarled, and a bracelet of sea glass wrapped in silver wire slid down her wrist. "Fiona Wells. Thank you for taking me on short notice. I know it was last minute."

"Most of the good things are." Winnie tipped her head toward the row of cottages. "Yours is the fourth one down. Sea Glass."

"Okay, thank you."

"There are a lot of books inside." Winnie was already walking, so Fiona fell in beside her. "Last tenant left a whole library behind and I never had the heart to box it up. Mostly local history. Old maritime things. I figured a writer might make use of it instead of staring at the wall."

A writer. Fiona's pulse kicked. Did she know? Had someone talked, made a call, set the name F. L. Maxwell down next to the name Fiona Wells?

But how could she? As far as the reading world knew, F. L. Maxwell was a man who'd never shown his face. There was only Fiona Wells here, a line on a booking form, and the two had never once shared a sentence in public.

Then it came to her. She'd told Winnie she wanted somewhere quiet to write when she'd arranged the cottage. Of course she had. That was the whole of it. A writer. Not the writer F. L. Maxwell.

"I do plenty of staring at walls. It's most of the job."

Winnie laughed, a short warm sound. "Honest, anyway. We don't always get honest around here. We get a lot of folks who say they've come to relax and then reorganize my whole toolshed by Thursday."

"I won't touch your toolshed. You have my word."

"A woman who knows her limits. I like that." Winnie glanced sideways at her. "What is it you write?"

There it was. The question, two minutes in. Fiona had a whole drawer of answers for it, polished smooth from use.

"Fiction, mostly," she said. "Nothing you'd have heard of."

"Don't be so sure. I read everything. Slow, but everything." Winnie didn't push, though. She just nodded, like the not-pushing was a thing she'd practiced too. "Well. Sea Glass is yours as long as you need it. Month, season, however the writing goes."

"A month should do it," Fiona said.

"Mm," Winnie said, in the tone of a woman who'd heard it all before.