No Secret Like Nantucket (A Sweet Island Inn Book 5) Read online

  No Secret Like Nantucket

  A Sweet Island Inn Novel (Book 5)

  Grace Palmer

  Contents

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  Also by Grace Palmer

  No Secret Like Nantucket

  1. Eliza

  2. Brent

  3. Sara

  4. Mae

  5. Holly

  6. Sara

  7. Eliza

  8. Brent

  9. Mae

  10. Eliza

  11. Sara

  12. Mae

  13. Brent

  14. Eliza

  15. Mae

  16. Holly

  17. Eliza

  18. Mae

  19. Brent

  20. Holly

  21. Mae

  22. Holly

  23. Sara

  24. Holly

  25. Sara

  26. Brent

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  Also by Grace Palmer

  Copyright © 2021 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.

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  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)

  No Secret Like Nantucket (Book 5)

  No Forever Like Nantucket (Book 6)

  No Summer Like Nantucket (Book 7) (coming soon!)

  Willow Beach Inn

  Just South of Paradise (Book 1)

  Just South of Perfect (Book 2)

  Just South of Sunrise (Book 3)

  Just South of Christmas (Book 4)

  No Secret Like Nantucket

  A Sweet Island Inn Novel (Book 5)

  A secret bundle in a dusty corner sends the Benson family reeling.

  It wasn’t meant to be uncovered.

  But when her son Brent stumbles across something curious hidden in the workshop, innkeeper Mae Benson must relive events she thought she left thirty years in the past.

  Her boyfriend Dominic is doing his best to help. But the arrival of a movie crew on Nantucket to film the adaptation of his latest novel has upended everything at the Sweet Island Inn.

  And Mae’s children are just as preoccupied.

  Eliza, eight months pregnant, can’t be reached—and Mae is terrified that something is going wrong with the baby.

  Holly is dealing with an unexpected houseguest with a grim and mysterious past.

  And Sara is struggling to answer a thorny question: who is stealing from her restaurant?

  Follow along with the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the Benson family in this sweet, clean women’s fiction novel.

  If you haven’t already, check out the other books in the series:

  No Home Like Nantucket (Book 1)

  No Beach Like Nantucket (Book 2)

  No Wedding Like Nantucket (Book 3)

  No Love Like Nantucket (Book 4)

  Eliza

  AN EARLY FRIDAY MORNING IN MID-JUNE—ELIZA & OLIVER’S HOUSE—NANTUCKET

  Summer on Nantucket was usually postcard-perfect.

  Bronze sun over an azure ocean. Sand dunes, white as pearls, framed by lush beach grasses waving in the sea breeze.

  Everything warm. Everything beautiful. Everything glowing with life.

  Today was… not that.

  Today, even though it was the middle of June, the clouds outside Eliza Patterson’s window were gray and thick and her toes felt like ten chips of ice on the end of her feet.

  The moment she stepped out of bed—though “rolled out” is more like it, seeing as how she was eight months pregnant and nothing she did was done gracefully anymore—she hissed and pulled her feet back off the frigid hardwood floor.

  Getting out of bed was tough enough these days, with the exhaustion and the extra weight around her middle.

  But add cold feet to the mix? Nothing had ever seemed more difficult.

  Her husband, Oliver, emerged from the bathroom by the time she finally coaxed herself upright. He was still in his pajamas, his dark hair an unruly mass on top of his head.

  “You were snoring,” he informed her. “Loudly.”

  “I most certainly was not,” Eliza retorted.

  Truth be told, he was probably right. If her sisters Holly and Sara were to be believed, she’d snored while pregnant with her first daughter, Winter, too.

  But Eliza preferred to believe her sisters and her husband were dirty, rotten liars, the whole lot of them.

  Growing a child came with enough embarrassing symptoms. She didn’t need people around her pointing them out.

  Oliver flopped down on the bed next to her and pulled the blanket up to his chin with a shiver. “Alrighty then. Must’ve been someone else snoring in our bed.”

  “Must’ve been,” Eliza agreed.

  “Or maybe the neighbors were running their leaf blower all night. Right outside our bedroom window. As they like to do.” Oliver rolled over and batted his eyes. “Was that it, dearest?”

  “Don’t ‘dearest’ me,” she snapped, tossing the comforter over his face.

  Eliza’s husband had taken to calling her any number of pandering pet names over the course of their eight-month-long marriage—usually when she was annoyed with him. She hated them all equally.

  She didn’t hate his teasing, though. It was how he expressed love.

  Thirty-five years old hardly qualified for a senior citizen discount, but Eliza needed reminding of that from time to time.

  Oliver sure didn’t.

  He still teased and laughed and played games like he lived his life in a sandbox. Everything in his world was a game. To this day, he’d never seen a grocery cart he didn’t want to turn into a race car. Clouds weren’t clouds to him, they were creatures, a whole menagerie in the sky to be cooed at and admired.

  And whenever Oliver roped their eighteen-month-old daughter into his little fantasies, she’d laugh and laugh and laugh. The kind of laughter a mother never forgets.

  She felt lighter with Oliver around. Younger.

  She felt like she could breathe.

  Winter’s cries echoed fuzzily through baby monitor speakers. Oliver jumped out of bed before Eliza could budge.

  “You take a shower and get ready for your appointment,” he said on his way out the door. “I’m on dad duty.”

  “Aye-aye,” Eliza murmured. She threw a salute at his retreating back. Then she turned her attention to the arduous trek from bed to bathroom.

  But with the promise of an uninterrupted hot shower, walking across the chilly hardwood floor wasn’t such a daunting chore.

  Alone time—especially time spent taking care of herself—happened so rarely that Eliza snatched at it when she could. Even before Winter, Eliza hardly had time for herself.

  Until a few years ago, she’d been running the rat race as an investment banker in Manhattan. She’d been engaged to a narcissistic drug addict and failing miserably at keeping in contact with her parents.

  And then came the changes.

  The breakup with her ex-fiancé, Clay Reeves. The une
xpected pregnancy. The exodus back home to the island paradise where she was raised.

  But it was the death of her father that had done more to make Eliza feel older than almost anything else.

  She’d always thought she’d be in her fifties at the very least before she had to consider losing a parent. But Henry Benson had died suddenly. Tragically. Now, even three years later, Eliza had to work hard not to be bitter about the theft her family had endured.

  Especially as her daughter—daughters, she amended silently in her head; that was still taking some getting-used-to—grew up without their grandfather.

  On the flip side, she didn’t have to work to be thankful for the family that still surrounded her.

  All of her siblings were back in Nantucket, her mother was the most devoted grandmother in existence, and Oliver had stepped up as not only a husband, but a father to Winter in a way Eliza never dared imagine.

  For all the heartache, beauty still reigned.

  After dressing in maternity jeans and a fluttery, short-sleeved top—one of only four shirts that still fit over her belly—Eliza walked down the hallway to the sounds of Winter giggling and Oliver talking.

  “…Attention, passengers, this is your pilot speaking…”

  Oliver held a bite of pancake high in the air, his hand cupped over his mouth as he pretended to speak over an airplane intercom.

  “…We seem to have encountered an unexpected obstacle in the form of a giant, hungry baby...”

  He swirled the spoon through the air, dodging Winter’s attempts to catch the pancake. The little girl cackled. Eyes bright, hands reaching.

  “…I’m doing my best to reroute. Please remain seated and belted in, and I will update you as—Ahh! Mayday! Mayday!”

  He let out a long scream and then crackly static as the bite swooped down into Winter’s open mouth.

  “A little macabre, don’t you think?” Eliza grabbed the coffee Oliver had left on the table for her. “Most parents go for a simple choo-choo train.”

  “Winter has an extremely advanced sense of humor. It’s actually rather dark, I’m afraid.”

  “She’s a year-and-a-half old.”

  He shrugged. “Hey, you provided half the DNA. I’m just catering to my audience.”

  Eliza could only laugh and shake her head as she gathered her things for the day’s errands.

  Behind her, Oliver had switched gears. This new pancake-related catastrophe had something to do with black holes and the spacetime continuum. It too ended in Winter laughing like a loon and chewing up her breakfast greedily, so there wasn’t much Eliza could do to object.

  As Winter ate, Oliver looked over his shoulder at Eliza. “What time is your appointment this morning?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  Eliza reached absently for her phone to check the time, but it wasn’t in her pocket. She must have left it in the bedroom.

  “It’s just a check-up, right? I don’t need to be there?”

  “No. And thank goodness for that. Your plaid pajama shorts aren’t exactly suited for a doctor’s office.”

  Oliver frowned. “You bought these for me. Anyway, dress code aside, I can hurry and get ready if you want me there.”

  A few appointments back, the doctor had told Eliza the baby was in a breech position.

  “There’s still time for the baby to turn, but you should prepare yourself for the possibility of a C-section,” Dr. Geiger had warned.

  Despite the doctor’s assurances that the baby was doing fine, Oliver was deeply concerned. He insisted Eliza keep her feet up and rest as much as possible. That she not lifting anything heavier than their daughter. That she do some horrendously boring stretching routine he’d found on the Internet.

  It took weeks for him to relax enough to let Eliza go back to her normal habits.

  She didn’t want to worry him anymore than he already was. Especially since she felt confident the doctor would have good news for her today.

  “It’s a standard, boring appointment. We aren’t even doing a scan today. I can go alone.” Eliza caught a glimpse of the digital clock above the oven and yelped. “I have to leave right now, though.”

  Eliza swallowed one more sip of coffee while Oliver jogged to the door. He grabbed the car key from the hook next to the wall and held it up in the air, demanding a quick kiss before Eliza could snatch it from his hand and hustle down the porch.

  “No running. You don’t want to go into labor,” he joked, waving from the doorway. “And no speeding!”

  “Yes, yes!” She waved him off and hurried away.

  Everything was going to be fine. Oliver had no reason to fret at all.

  Even if Eliza had wanted to speed, the traffic in Nantucket wouldn’t allow it.

  There weren’t many cars on the road, but Eliza still managed to find herself trapped behind the slowest folks in existence. They puttered over the cobblestones mere inches at a time.

  Her haste to get from one place to another was one of the New York habits Eliza had yet to break. She’d grown up in Nantucket, but New York had a way of resetting one’s expectation of personal pace for good.

  After parking in the lot in front of Dr. Geiger’s practice, Eliza jogged inside and gave the receptionist her name through a wheeze.

  “Sit down and take a rest,” the kind, middle-aged woman said. “The doctor will be with you in just a moment.”

  Eliza dropped down into her usual spot in the back corner of the waiting room and took long, deep breaths in through her nose and out through her mouth.

  A whole slew of magazines were fanned out across the coffee table in front of her. Fishing and boating, cooking and interior decorating. “The Nantucket Special,” her brother Brent always called it. “I swear there’s a mail order subscription that just sends you all this junk every month. Along with nautical wallpaper and a pair of boat shoes.”

  Eliza didn’t much feel like reading, though. And the small, square television in the corner was tuned to soap operas, which was if anything even less appealing than the latest trends in marlin-luring technology.

  So she leaned her head back against the chair, still trying to catch her breath.

  As she did, her stomach tightened.

  Braxton Hicks contractions were common enough this late in pregnancy, but this clamp-down viciously snatched away what little breath Eliza had left.

  She sat forward, hands on her stomach, and bit down a pained groan that wanted badly to force its way out of her.

  Two or three or maybe twenty seconds of sharp, unrelenting pain—she wasn’t sure how long it lasted—until the contraction passed and she could finally release the breath she’d been holding.

  The contraction was just practice, she knew. Her body’s way of preparing for delivery.

  Still, it unnerved her. Thrilled her, of course, but unnerved her.

  Just a few more weeks, little one, she thought, patting her stomach. You have to stay put for a few more weeks.

  “Eliza Patterson!” a short-haired nurse called, holding the wooden door open with her hip. She held a clipboard in her other hand.

  “That’s me,” she croaked in an odd voice that sounded nothing like her. She stood, still a little light-headed, and tottered along after the nurse.

  As they walked, Eliza tried to peek at the clipboard in the woman’s hand. The folks who worked here were always scrutinizing those pesky things. Dr. Geiger, especially. After a few months of visits, Eliza was more familiar with the top of his head than with his face.

  She never asked to see the clipboard and he never offered to show her. But Eliza wondered what it said all the same.

  The nurse led her back to the exam room, took her blood pressure, and asked her the usual questions.

  “How have you been feeling?”

  “Tired,” Eliza admitted. “But good.”

  “Any discomfort?”

  “I’ve had a few contractions this morning. I suppose that means there’s a light at the end of the tu
nnel.”

  The nurse smiled, but her mouth was pinched. “Any pain beyond what is considered normal?”

  Eliza shook her head, but before she could answer properly, her stomach tightened again. She winced.

  “Well, what’s normal?” she joked. When the nurse didn’t laugh, she sobered and added, “That one kind of hurt, I suppose. But I’m fine.”

  “Mhmm.” The nurse made a hurried note of something on the clipboard. “Dr. Geiger will be with you in just a few minutes.”

  Then she was gone.

  Eliza looked around when she was alone again. She had always loved doctor’s offices. A place for everything and everything in its place.

  The walls were beige, the floor tiles square and flecked with mottled browns, and the exam table covered in the white, crinkly paper that existed nowhere else on planet Earth.

  Without a window to glimpse the sky outside, Eliza could have been in a doctor’s office anywhere in the world.

  Except for the wall of island babies.

  Someone—Eliza presumed it wasn’t Dr. Geiger, but you never knew for certain; some people had odd ways of making a space their own—had put up a bulletin board in the room, and it was absolutely dripping with pictures of newborns.

  Some of them were dated, almost as old as Eliza was. Others looked brand new, fresh as the dawn.