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Chapter One

Cami

Cami Porter walked into the lobby of the glass-walled building that housed the law offices of Porter, Garcia & Sheen, wishing she could curl up with her head down on her desk and take a power nap.

Insomnia sucked.

The past four months had been rough, worse even than those dark days after the implosion of her engagement.

She spent all day wishing she could stretch out on the nearest available flat surface and all night wondering why she couldn’t shut off the wild monkey brain and find the sleep she so desperately needed.

For some people, struggling through occasional bouts of insomnia was inconvenient but not debilitating. But Cami needed to be mentally sharp to keep up as a junior associate in her father’s firm, specializing in contract and intellectual property law.

She yawned, shifting her laptop case over one shoulder as she pushed the button of the elevator to take her to the top floor.

“Cut that out. Now you’re going to make me yawn.” Tiffany Tsu, a paralegal who worked for one of the junior partners, made a face at Cami as the elevator rose.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. I really hope that yawn means you had a wild night. Considering I was dealing with a teething baby all night long, I need to live vicariously through someone.”

Cami made a face. “You know me better than that. I just stayed up too late reading through law journals.”

And grieving.

She knew that was the reason for her insomnia. Every time she tried to settle into sleep, she saw her sister’s face. After four months, she might have thought the shock and sadness would ease a little. No. If anything, she seemed to be struggling more now emotionally than she had when she first heard the news.

When she reached her floor, she waved to Tiffany and headed for her small cramped office. If only she could slip off her shoes and lay down on the carpet for a moment… .

“How did everything go?” a chipper voice asked from the copy machine.

Cami pushed away the exhaustion and mustered a smile for her assistant and paralegal, Joe Lopez, who had been with her for three years—almost as long as her ex-fiancé—and knew Cami’s brain better than she did.

“Not bad. I think we’re close to an agreement. Pete made it clear today, he’s willing to walk away if they don’t agree to our amended clauses in the contract. I’m going to let them stew over the next few days and see if they’ll come back to the table with a counter offer.”

She was representing a video game developer in talks with one of the big players who wanted to take one of his ideas and adapt it for their system. It was Cami’s job to make sure her client, a naive little fish in a big pond, didn’t end up ripped to a bloody stump by sharks.

“Oh, that’s good news. Pete is such a nice guy. I’m glad he has you on his team.”

Joe gave her the look he did when he wanted to prepare her that something unpleasant was coming. “Now for some news that’s maybe not so good. Your mother has called three times. She sounded increasingly urgent with each call. She seems to think you’re ghosting her. That’s exactly the word she used. I wouldn’t have thought Rosemary knew what ghosting meant.”

Cami had learned not to be surprised at anything when it came to her mother.

“She said she has called you four times and texted you as many,” Joe went on.

Cami sighed. “My phone ran out of juice and my car charger isn’t working, for some reason. And I forgot the battery backup.”

“When it rains.”

“I know. I was planning to plug it in the minute I got back to the office. What’s so urgent?”

“She didn’t tell me. The most recent time she called, I apologized that you hadn’t reached out yet but told her you were in the middle of negotiations critical to a multimillion dollar deal and promised her I would make sure you phoned her as soon as you could break away.”

Her mother had been married to an attorney for more than fifteen years. She certainly understood that sometimes work had to come first.

“Thank you,” Cami said now to Joe. “Remind me to give you a raise.”

He grinned at her. “You just did that last month but if you want to give me another one, I certainly won’t complain. It all goes in the wedding fund.”

Joe and his partner were planning a gorgeous Maui ceremony at Christmastime and his lunch hour and breaks were filled with phone calls to their wedding planner.

Cami really needed to think about getting in shape, if she was going to attend a tropical wedding in December.

Inside her office, Cami fished her dead phone out of her laptop case and plugged it into her desk charger. As soon as it had enough juice to come on again, the phone immediately pinged with about a half dozen messages from her mother.

She was about to dial Rosemary’s number when the phone rang again and, no surprise, she saw her mother’s name on the caller ID.

She had only a few seconds to slip off her shoes under her desk and shove in her earbuds so she could take the call hands-free.

“Hi, Mom.”

After a beat, her mother’s voice came through with a frantic edge. “Darling! There you are! Oh, I’m so glad. I desperately need to talk to you.”

Yes. That was fairly obvious by the deluge of phone calls. “I’ve been in meetings all afternoon. Sorry about that. I’m here now. What’s up?”

Silence met her question. It only lasted about five seconds but long enough for her to begin worrying. What could be so dire? Her family had been hit with enough bad news lately, hadn’t they?

Rosemary’s sigh was long and heartfelt. “Oh, Camellia. Everything is a mess. I don’t know where to start.”

When Rosemary used her full name, things had to be bad. The thought barely registered before her mother burst into tears and muffled sobs came through the line.

“What’s going on?” She fought to stay calm.

Rosemary launched into a fumbling explanation, something about leases and rights of way and unused property.

Through the sobs, she could only pick up about one word in three.

“Slow down, Mom. I can’t understand you. Take a breath. Do some circular breathing.”

She could hear her mother take an audible breath and then another.

“Okay. What’s going on?” Cami asked again, when Rosemary seemed to calm.

“You know my neighbor Franklin Rafferty? The one who owns the land on the headlands that we’re leasing for Wild Hearts?”

She didn’t really, considering she had never lived in Cape Sanctuary. After Cami’s parents divorced, Rosemary and the twins had moved into a rambling old farmhouse her mother had inherited from a great-aunt in the Northern California seaside town. Cami, fourteen at the time, had stayed behind in Los Angeles with her father.

“I know you’ve mentioned him,” she said cautiously.

“Well, his son called me this morning, angry as a wet hornet. He’s been out of the country, I guess. Apparently, he just learned about Wild Hearts and he’s not happy about it.”

Rosemary gave another hysterical-sounding laugh that turned into a sob. “He’s so unhappy that he’s threatening to s-sue,” she sobbed. “He wants an eviction order right now. He didn’t come out and say it but he implied that he thinks Lily took advantage of Franklin and manipulated him into agreeing to the lease.”

Rosemary sniffled loudly, though Cami couldn’t tell if it was at the reference to Lily or at this threat to her sister’s latest passion project.

“It’s a horrid thing to say about your sister,” Rosemary went on, “especially after she’s…she’s gone and can’t defend herself. Tell me this is all a terrible mistake. He can’t just shut us down, can he? We’re completely booked all summer long!”

Cami closed her eyes. She hated situations like this, thrown headfirst into something she knew nothing about. Rosemary obviously expected Cami to sort it all out instantly, when she didn’t even know the particulars.

“I’m shaking, I’m so upset,” her mother went on. “I feel like I’m having a heart attack.”

“Do you need me to call 911?”

Rosemary made a sound halfway between a sigh and a sob. “Not yet. I’m sure it’s anxiety over this whole thing. He can’t put us out of business like that, can he? This was your sister’s dream. Our dream together. It’s…it’s all I have left of Lily.”

Her mother didn’t sob again but her voice hitched enough that Cami knew she was fighting back her emotions.

For the past four months, while Cami had been staring at the ceiling, desperately willing herself to sleep, Rosemary had poured all her energy into Wild Hearts, a ten-tent campground near her property offering glamping to discerning travelers.

The project had really been the brainchild of Lily, Cami’s beautiful younger sister, who had drowned four months earlier.

All the members of Cami’s nuclear family—Rosemary, Cami’s father and Violet, Lily’s identical twin—were trying to figure out how to go on without her.

Cami had a feeling a vital, unforgettable piece would always be missing from their lives.

“Jon Rafferty can’t close us down. He can’t. Your sister poured her life savings into this and I took out a second mortgage on the farm. I’ll lose everything.”

Oh damn. Cami sat up straighter in her chair. She had no idea Rosemary was so financially invested in the project.

“A second mortgage, Mom? Why?”

Rosemary turned defensive. “Because she couldn’t get a small business loan in time to open this summer. This seemed the fastest route. Oh, this is such a disaster! What should I do?”

Cami squeezed the bridge of her nose as the tension headache that had been building all day reached out with vicious tentacles to wrap around her brain.

“You have a legal lease agreement though, don’t you?”

Her mother didn’t answer for a long moment. An eternity—certainly long enough for Cami’s stomach to drop to the bare toes currently digging into the lush carpet of her office.

“Don’t you?” she pressed.

“We definitely have a verbal agreement and he did sign a paper that is kind of a lease agreement.”

“Kind of,” she repeated, feeling that headache clamp more viciously.

“We never had anything notarized,” Rosemary admitted in a rush. “Franklin Rafferty is the sweetest man but a little absent-minded lately. Lily made a couple of appointments with a notary and he didn’t show up. She planned to take someone out to his house but then I think she got so busy ordering the tents and the furnishings and… I guess it slipped her mind. And then she died and in all the chaos, a formal lease agreement was the last thing on my mind.”

Cami wanted to yank out her hair and utter a few well-chosen curse words but managed to swallow down both impulses. Still. Her mother knew better. Rosemary had an ex-husband and a daughter who were both attorneys. True, Ted was a criminal defense attorney but Cami specialized in contract law. Exactly this sort of thing.

Rosemary herself had been a secretary to a lawyer, once upon a time, when she was putting her husband through law school.

Her mother certainly knew how vital it was to follow procedure and make sure all the details had been ironed out.

“I think I need an attorney.” Rosemary’s voice sounded a little stronger.

You needed one four months ago when you started setting up infrastructure for a glampground without the legal right to be there.

“Sounds like it,” she said, trying to keep her tone mild and nonaccusatory.

“Can you please come up and sort this out?”

Ah. There was the crux of her mother’s phone call. “Right now?”

Her mother lived in Cape Sanctuary, at least an eight-hour drive north from Los Angeles. Cami could catch a flight, she supposed, into Redding or Eureka, then rent a car.

Even as one part of her mind started sifting through possibilities, another more strident part was urging her to slow down. She had responsibilities in LA. Clients who needed her. Consultations. Contracts to read. Depositions to take. She couldn’t drop everything to rescue Rosemary.

“Can you come? I hate to admit it, but I need help. Jon Rafferty was calling from Guatemala but he said he would be catching a flight back to California as soon as possible. He expects to be here in the next few days and I don’t have the first idea how to handle the situation. The man sounded absolutely livid on the phone.”

Her mother’s voice faltered. “If he shuts us down, I’ll lose Moongate Farm. The gardens. The yoga retreats. Everything I’ve worked for here.”

Cami felt a low thrum of resentment, an emotion she didn’t want to acknowledge. Everything her mother had built there had been created after Rosemary walked away from her marriage, from her eldest daughter, from their comfortable life in Los Angeles.

Cami had never been part of that Cape Sanctuary life Rosemary had created for herself, except on the periphery. Yet her mother was turning to her now, expecting her to help salvage that life from the brink of disaster.

“I’m sure it won’t come to that,” she said, though she wasn’t completely convinced of anything.

“I hope you’re right. Will you come? You’re the only one who can fix this. I need you, Cami.”

Those words would have been a healing balm when she was a lonely teenager, living with a father she rarely saw in the big echoing house in Brentwood Park.

Before she could come up with an answer, Joe poked his head through the door she had left ajar.

“You’ve got a conference call with the attorneys for Cherrywood Properties in ten minutes,” he reminded her in a low voice. “And Paulette Herriman wants a few moments to talk about the non-compete clause she wants to write into her new-hire contracts. I penciled her in for three.”

The vise around her temples squeezed harder. “Thank you,” she mouthed.

He slipped back out and she turned her attention back to her mother and the crisis playing out in Cape Sanctuary.

“It’s a busy time here but I’ll see what I can do. I should be able to swing a few days off.”

She wasn’t sure how yet, especially because she had planned to fly up later in the month anyway, but she would figure that out.

“Thank you, darling. Oh, thank you.” The relief in Rosemary’s voice was palpable and, Cami had to admit, gratifying.

“I’m not sleeping in one of your tents, though.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you saw them,” Rosemary retorted. “They’re absolutely gorgeous.”

“I’ll have to take your word for that.”

“Anyway, you couldn’t stay in one, even if you wanted to.” Her mother’s voice rang with pride. “They’ve been booked for months, almost from the moment Lily started taking reservations. But don’t worry. I’ll make sure you have somewhere to sleep. You and Violet can always share the bunkhouse.”

“Vi’s there?” She hadn’t seen her younger sister, Lily’s twin, since those first horrible days after Lily drowned. They had texted several times and Cami had tried to phone but her sister was either extraordinarily busy or avoiding her calls.

“She’s coming this weekend. Tomorrow is her last day of school. She has to clear out her classroom and finish final grades then will be driving up to stay and help me with Wild Hearts.”

“All summer?”

“She hasn’t decided that yet. I’m giving her space to make up her mind.” Rosemary paused. “I’m worried about her. Worried about both of you, if you want the truth.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Cami said. “You have enough to stress about right now.”

“I can’t help it. Worry is part of the job description as your mother.”

Cami ended the call a few moments later and looked down at the neat order of her desk: The pencils with their perfectly sharpened points in a holder, the inbox she worked long hours to keep empty, the briefs she had asked Joe to research for one of her cases, stacked in folders.

She had a wild impulse to take the neat stack of paper, the edges precisely lined up, and throw them all into the air.

She needed a break.

Other than the two days she had taken off to fly north for Lily’s funeral, Cami had been working without a vacation or sick day for years.

Even when her fiancé cheated on her and then had the gall to break the engagement before she could throw his ring in his too-perfect face, Cami had worked.

She was so very tired. Maybe a few days in Cape Sanctuary would help her recharge a little.

She had plenty of vacation time coming to her and her father would surely understand. Rosemary needed her, a rare enough circumstance.

Cami wasn’t sure how she could solve her mother’s dilemma but she wanted to try.

For Lily.

She pulled out her laptop and started making a to-list list for Joe of meetings that would have to be rearranged or changed to video conferencing.

As she made another list of files and briefs to take with her, Cami was surprised to realize the malaise that had been haunting her for months seemed to have lifted like sea fog receding in the sunshine.

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