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Excerpt

Excerpt

Three Sisters: A Blackberry Island Novel

Being left at the altar is not for sissies. Aside from the humiliation and hurt, there are actual logistics to worry about. Odds are if a guy is willing to leave you standing alone in front of three hundred of your closest friends and relatives, not to mention both your mothers, he isn’t going to sweat the little stuff like returning the gifts and paying the caterer. Which explained why three months after going through that exact experience, Andi Gordon was putting her life savings into a house she’d only seen twice, in a town she’d only visited for seventy-two hours.

Go big or go home. Andi had decided to do both.

After signing the final paperwork and picking up the keys, she drove up the hill to the highest point on Black­berry Island and stared at the house she’d just bought. It was known as one of the “Three Sisters.” Three beauti­ful, Queen Anne–style homes built around the turn of the last century. According to the Realtor, the house on the left had been restored perfectly. The ice-cream col­ors reflected the style and fashion of the year it was built. Even its garden was more traditionally English than ca­sual Pacific Northwest. A girl’s bike leaned against the porch, looking modern and out of place.

The house on the right was also restored, but with less period detail. The slate-gray trim framed stained-glass windows and there was a sculpture of a bird taking flight in the front yard.

The house in the middle still had a For Sale sign planted in the unkempt grass. While like the others in style and size, the house she’d bought had little else in common with its neighbors. From the roof, with missing shingles, to the peeling paint and broken-out windows, the house was a testament to neglect and indifference. If the building hadn’t been historic, it would have been torn down years ago.

Andi had seen the seller’s disclosure—listing all the problems with the house. It was pages long, listing every major issue, from an electrical upgrade done twenty years before to lousy and nonfunctioning plumbing. The build­ing inspector Andi had hired to look over the place had given up halfway through and returned her money. Then her agent had tried to show her a lovely condo overlook­ing the marina.

Andi had refused. She’d known the second she saw the old place that it was everything she’d been looking for. The house had once been full of promise. Time and circumstance had reduced it to its present condition—un­loved and abandoned. She didn’t need a degree in psy­chology to understand she saw herself in the house. She understood the pitfalls of believing if she fixed the house, she would also be fixing herself. But knowing and doing, or in this case not doing, weren’t the same thing. Her head might be busy pointing out this was a mistake of mam­moth proportions, but her heart had already fallen in love.

Given her recent, very public broken engagement, fall­ing for a house seemed a whole lot safer than falling for a man. After all, if the house abandoned her at the altar, she could simply burn it down.

Now parked in front of the three-story disaster, she smiled. “I’m here,” she whispered, offering the promise to both herself and the house. “I’ll make you whole again.”

Copyright © 2013 by Susan Mallery

Three Sisters: A Blackberry Island Novel
by by Susan Mallery

  • Genres: Fiction, Women's Fiction
  • paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
  • ISBN-10: 0778314340
  • ISBN-13: 9780778314349