Just South of Paradise Read online

  Just South of Paradise

  A Willow Beach Inn Novel (Book 1)

  Grace Palmer

  Copyright © 2020 by Grace Palmer

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Join My Mailing List!

  Also by Grace Palmer

  Just South of Paradise

  1. Georgia

  2. Tasha

  3. Drew

  4. Melanie

  5. Tasha

  6. Georgia

  7. Tasha

  8. Melanie

  9. Georgia

  10. Georgia

  11. Tasha

  12. Drew

  13. Melanie

  14. Drew

  15. Drew

  16. Georgia

  17. Georgia

  18. Tasha

  19. Melanie

  20. Tasha

  21. Georgia

  22. Melanie

  23. Tasha

  24. Melanie

  25. Drew

  26. Drew

  27. Melanie

  28. Tasha

  29. Melanie

  30. Georgia

  Coming Soon!

  Join My Mailing List!

  Also by Grace Palmer

  Join My Mailing List!

  Click the link below to join my mailing list and receive updates, freebies, release announcements, and more!

  * * *

  JOIN HERE:

  https://readerlinks.com/l/1060002

  Also by Grace Palmer

  Sweet Island Inn

  No Home Like Nantucket (Book 1)

  No Beach Like Nantucket (Book 2)

  No Wedding Like Nantucket (Book 3)

  No Love Like Nantucket (Book 4)

  * * *

  Willow Beach Inn

  Just South of Paradise (Book 1)

  Just South of Perfect (Book 2)

  Just South of Sunrise (Book 3) (coming soon!)

  * * *

  Cradle Beach Mama’s Club (coming soon!)

  Where the Watermelons Grow (Book 1)

  Can You Count the Stars? (Book 2)

  If Wishes Were Horses (Book 3)

  Just South of Paradise

  A Willow Beach Inn Novel (Book 1)

  Georgia Baldwin is just south of paradise, and just shy of a happy ending. Can she find the love she’s looking for?

  * * *

  Georgia had the perfect life—until her husband of nearly forty years leaves her for their inn’s much younger housekeeper.

  Starting over at fifty-eight is a terrifying prospect. And that’s not all.

  Her oldest child, Melanie, is trying to pick up the pieces of her broken heart after a difficult break-up.

  Georgia’s other daughter, Tasha, left Willow Beach to make it in Hollywood, but she’s having an awfully hard time coping with failure.

  Golden child Drew thought he was headed for the baseball Hall of Fame. But when he’s unexpectedly cut from his minor league team, he is forced to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

  Running the Willow Beach Inn, helping her grown children navigate the choppy waters of life, and rediscovering her own passions is no easy feat. Is there hope for Georgia to find happiness in the wake of heartbreak?

  Taste the salt on the air and feel the warm love of the Baldwin family in Book One of the Willow Beach Inn series from heartwarming women’s fiction author Grace Palmer.

  1

  Georgia

  With one week until Memorial Day, Georgia Baldwin can feel the busy season just ahead of her like a tingle of electricity in the air. It makes her climb out of bed a little faster and adds a little spring to her step.

  It’s rare for the Willow Beach Inn—the bed-and-breakfast she and her husband own—to ever be empty. But the summertime period bookended between Memorial Day and Labor Day is inevitably guaranteed to be chock-a-block full. And that means there is lots of preparing to do.

  Georgia wakes her husband Richard by gently prodding him as she brushes her teeth. He sleeps through any and every alarm, so a little jab in the ribs is often the only way to wake him in the morning. It’s one of his favorite things to grumble about, but Georgia doesn’t let that faze her. Besides, he gets her back whenever he gives her a playful pinch if she happens to bend over within arm’s reach. Fair is fair, Georgia supposes. She’s always thought that much of having a successful marriage comes down to deciding which of your partner’s little peccadilloes to tolerate or learn to love.

  “Good morning,” she chirps to him, voice muffled by the toothbrush. “I’ll see you downstairs in ten.”

  Richard groans and rolls over, but Georgia leaves him there. He’ll get up sooner or later. They have been running the inn together for the past fifteen years and Richard has never shirked his duties.

  Georgia heads downstairs to the living room of the owners’ quarters, then through the swinging door into the kitchen. She flicks on the light, dons her apron, and takes a deep breath.

  Of their six en-suite guest rooms, three are currently occupied. There is a lovely young newlywed couple in the Magnolia Suite, their most expensive ocean-view room that features its own sitting room. Mr. and Mrs. Kleinman are in room 2. They are regulars who have returned to the Willow Beach Inn every year for the past five years. They usually spend the week before Memorial Day here, which Georgia has always found quite odd since everything seems to happen in the weeks afterward, but the Kleinmans say they like Willow Beach best right before the crowds hit.

  It’s a sentiment Georgia can understand, even if she disagrees. Personally, her favorite time is the height of summer, when the inn is just as bustling as the beaches outside, and at all times of the day there is at least one person sitting on the breezy patio overlooking the ocean. When she has the time, Georgia likes to be that person.

  Room 4 has been taken by a man around Georgia and Richard’s age, Mr. Brunswick. He is attending a conference in Portland but would rather slog through the forty-five-minute commute every morning than stay in the big city—not that Portland, Maine, would be considered a big city by most people’s standards. Georgia can’t complain about Mr. Brunswick, though. He is quiet, respectful, and always complimentary about her breakfasts.

  Speaking of which, Georgia has a lot of work to do.

  She turns on the oven and starts grinding coffee beans, drinking in the fresh aroma as it fills the room. She procures the beans from a woman that Georgia’s middle child, Tasha, was friends with in high school. The woman and her husband owns a roastery and coffee shop on Main Street that always has a line out the door during the summer. The coffee is truly top-notch, and the smell alone is intoxicating.

  As soon as the coffee is on, Georgia pours the batter she made last night into a muffin tray. She pops it into the oven just as the first pot of coffee finishes brewing, which is when Richard makes his grand entrance into the kitchen.

  “Good morning, honey,” she greets him with a wry smile.

  “Mornin’,” he replies, still a touch surly as he pours two cups of coffee from the fresh batch. He adds milk to his and slides Georgia’s black coffee across the kitchen island, towards where she is opening a pack of bacon.

  Georgia glances up at the clock on the microwave. Beautiful—seven thirty on the dot and they are right on schedule. “Thank you,” she says. “Did you—”

  “Pick up the new tablecloths from Ginny’s Fabrics?” Richard guesses with a wink. “Yes, and they’re washed, ironed, and ready to go on th
e tables. I’ll go get them now.”

  “You’re a gem, you know that?” Georgia takes a sip of her coffee and smiles at her husband. “What would I do without you?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest,” he says in a horrendous fake British accent, pulling a wooden cart over to the fridge. “But I know you’d be doing it on threadbare tablecloths.”

  Richard loads the cart and disappears into the breakfast room to put out juice, butter, jams, and all the other little breakfast sundries the guests might want. As he sets up the breakfast room, Georgia takes her coffee over to the window and takes a sip while watching the first few beachgoers plod across the sand. The day is gray and a little misty so far but it usually burns off by the early afternoon. She likes watching that happen, like the day is opening up its own curtains to the citizens of the town.

  It’s remarkable how a place like Willow Beach can change so much and yet still stay the same. In all the years that Georgia and Richard have lived here, they’ve seen restaurants and businesses come and go—mostly the former, thankfully. Families, too, arrive and grow and spread, and little by little, the town takes on a life and a momentum of its own.

  But some things never change. There have always been cawing birds in the sky, and beautiful misty dawns, and the smell of salt on the air. Those are some of the things that keep her grounded here.

  The timer rings for the muffins. Georgia gets back to work.

  She sighs contentedly as she bustles around the kitchen. Life at the inn is busy, but there is a familiar cadence to it that Georgia has come to love. Her and Richard’s routine has been steadily worn in over the past decade and a half, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Richard and Georgia met in Italy when she was twenty-three. She loves telling their story to guests; they always delight in the romance of it all. She was fresh out of college, backpacking through Europe. He worked in a vineyard near Palermo, where she happened to find a short-term cash-paying gig, picking grapes, on her way down to Greece. Richard was ostensibly backpacking, too, but he’d taken a shine to the vineyard and had been there for several months, helping them with whatever odd jobs they needed done in exchange for room and board and a little vino each night when the sun began to set.

  The first time she met him, he was shirtless, sweating under the hot sun as he repaired an old fence. Richard was tanned with dark hair and dark eyes, and Georgia was surprised when he spoke folksy English with a Texan twang. He invited her to meet him for a drink that evening. She’d been a little hesitant—he was a stranger, after all—but she was on an adventure already, and she’d made a solemn oath to herself before embarking for Europe that she’d say yes to whatever opportunities came her way.

  That night, they sat on a blanket under the stars and drank bottle after bottle of wine while they talked about what the future held for them back in the States.

  For Georgia, the plan she had in mind on that starry Italian night revolved around finishing up her business degree, landing a corporate job, then maybe starting a little venture of her own once she had enough experience. Richard, on the other hand, already had a construction company waiting to be inherited from his father whenever they decided he was ready.

  Neither of their visions quite held up to the reality that followed, though it wasn’t necessarily for the worse. Just further proof that life is full of unexpected twists.

  Richard tried to hide from the responsibilities of real life behind grapevines and lattices while he was abroad. When the time came for him to pick up his father’s tools and take over, he just couldn’t bring himself to fully commit. He said the business failed to flourish because the market wasn’t there for it. Georgia, who retained the knowledge of her business degree even if she didn’t get a chance to use it, knew that wasn’t quite the case.

  Whatever the real reason was, Richard had been only too happy to sell the contracting firm once they inherited the inn. Georgia’s diploma ended up collecting dust while she raised three children and made their house a home.

  Some people might’ve seen that as disappointing. Failure, in a way. But in Richard and Georgia’s eyes, that was all well and good. The inn was what made their heart sing. It was exciting for both of them when they took over ownership. It had been exciting ever since then, too.

  Annika Holmes, the inn’s housekeeper, interrupts Georgia’s morning musings when she bustles through the door at 8:04. Her job is technically supposed to start at 8:00, but she hasn’t been on time even once since she started, though she lives only a ten-minute walk away. Annika is never late enough to bother lecturing her over it, but those few minutes have always irked Georgia just the tiniest bit, like a pebble in her shoe she can’t get rid of.

  Annika’s long dark hair is always plaited in a French braid, and her cobalt blue eyes are always lined in what Georgia thinks is a little too much eyeliner. The housekeeper is slim and pretty, but in a sort of understated way, the kind of person you might look right past without noticing if you happened to cross paths on the street.

  “Good morning,” Annika says in a singsong voice. “Brrr, it’s freezing! I thought it was May, not December.” She drops her sweater and bag on the kitchen island and pours herself a cup of coffee.

  Georgia starts watering the plants in the kitchen as she replies, “Good morning,” before pulling down the coffee beans to grind some more. “It should warm up soon. How is your mother?”

  “Fine,” Annika replies, before downing another mouthful of coffee and hoisting the coffee pot up to refill already. Her mother lives in town and has been suffering with a bad back recently. Or so Georgia has heard from Richard, anyway.

  Annika takes the pot into the breakfast room. It takes only a few seconds before Georgia can hear her and Richard laughing. Since Annika started working for them four years ago, she and Richard have been thick as thieves. Georgia has tried to bond with the girl, and has always blamed her inability to do so with any great success on their nearly thirty-year age difference—not that that has hindered Richard.

  Richard lumbers back into the kitchen a moment later with a breakfast order scribbled on a piece of paper. “Mr. Brunswick,” he explains, passing Georgia the note. She deciphers his scrawled writing—eggs over easy, bacon, toast, hash browns—and sets to work.

  Mornings are always the busiest time of day. Annika gets started on cleaning the common areas while Georgia finishes making breakfast. Then, once breakfast is wrapped up, Annika goes to tidy up the guest rooms while Georgia cleans the kitchen and breakfast room, and Richard checks guests in and out, answers emails, and monitors their booking system.

  Nobody is checking out today, which means Georgia doesn’t need to go upstairs after Annika has finished her chores. She usually likes to go over the freshly made rooms personally to make sure everything is just right.

  Richard continually insists that Georgia is only making more work for herself, and tells her that Annika is more than capable of meeting the inn’s sterling standard of service, but Georgia feels better knowing she’s had a last look at the room before it is rented out. Chalk it up to a bit of a control freak tendency, she supposes. Besides, there have been more than a few occasions where their young housekeeper has forgotten to properly refresh the selection of toiletries and amenities, or has missed a spot of dusting that a discerning guest might not. The Willow Beach Inn has a flawless rating on all the travel review sites, and that is how Georgia intends it to stay.

  The morning passes by swiftly. Around noon, Georgia makes sandwiches for herself and Richard. She takes his to the front desk, where he is playing poker on the computer.

  Richard has always loved playing cards, though he’s not very good. Luckily, he only plays for real money when he goes to the monthly house games a friend of his hosts in town, which isn’t often.

  “Do you want to come eat with me on the patio?” she asks.

  Richard shakes his head. “Can’t at the moment. Maybe later.”

  Georgia expected that response
, but it still stings a smidge. She and Richard used to spend most afternoons on the patio together. They would gossip playfully about the neighbors and guests, speculate on the secret lives of their children, and amuse each other by telling stories that they both already knew because they’d lived through them together. Just as often, they would simply sit in silence and watch the world pass by in slow motion. In fact, on one quiet September afternoon, when the weather was still gorgeous but the crowds had thinned after Labor Day, they both nodded off in their chairs and woke up with horrific sunburns hours later. They spent the next week applying aloe vera to each other, trying and failing to decide who bore more of the blame for the funny, if painful, predicament.

  Ironically enough, that’s a happy memory, one of hundreds that Georgia keeps tucked in her back pocket for a rainy day or a down moment. It’s small wonder that she thinks of it now as she looks at her husband, who hasn’t even glanced up from the computer screen. She needs a pick-me-up. Richard has been coming to join Georgia outside less and less recently and she doesn’t know why. He hasn’t been acting noticeably strange otherwise, but this little break in tradition has been bothering Georgia nonetheless.