Chances Are Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Epilogue

  PRAISE FOR Girls of Summer

  “A moving romance . . . Barbara Bretton provides a deep tale of individuals struggling with caring connections of the heart.”—Midwest Book Review

  “A book readers will want to savor.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Insightful . . . Bretton excels at women’s fiction that engages the emotions without manipulating them . . . I highly recommend that discriminating readers pay a visit to these Girls of Summer.”—The Romance Reader

  “Barbara Bretton is a master at touching readers’ hearts. Grab this one when it hits the shelves! A perfect ten!”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  Shore Lights

  “An engrossing tale of hope, promise, heartache and misplaced dreams . . . Its uplifting message and smooth story-telling make it a pleasant read any time of year.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Bretton’s warm, wonderful book presents complex familial and romantic relationships, sympathetic characters, and an underlying poignancy . . . will please fans of Kathryn Shay and Deborah Smith.”—Booklist

  “Entertaining . . . Barbara Bretton bestows a beautiful modern-day romance on her audience.”—Midwest Book Review

  “Her women’s fiction is well-written and insightful with just the right blend of realism and romance . . . [Shore Lights] may be her best novel yet . . . A rich novel full of wry humor and sweet poignancy . . . The novel’s magic comes from the author’s ability to portray the nuances of human relationships at both their worst and best . . . Powerful.”

  —The Romance Reader

  “A lovely book . . . It’s an uplifting story, warm and cozy, and easily recommended.” —All About Romance

  “An absolute wonder of creative writing that comes right from Barbara Bretton’s heart . . . It flows with realism and features characters that are so well drawn that you may recognize the same personalities in people you know. A perfect ten.”—Romance Reviews Today

  AND ACCLAIM FOR THE OTHER NOVELS OF BARBARA BRETTON . . .

  “Bretton’s characters are always real and their conflicts believable.”—Chicago Sun-Times

  “Soul warming . . . A powerful relationship drama [for] anyone who enjoys a passionate look inside the hearts and souls of the prime players.”—Midwest Book Review

  “[Bretton] excels in her portrayal of the sometimes sweet, sometimes stifling ties of a small community. The town’s tight network of loving, eccentric friends and family infuses the tale with a gently comic note that perfectly balances the darker dramas of the romance.”—Publishers Weekly

  “A tender love story about two people who, when they find something special, will go to any length to keep it.”

  —Booklist

  “Honest, witty . . . absolutely unforgettable.”—Rendezvous

  “A classic adult fairy tale.”—Affaire de Coeur

  “Dialogue flows easily and characters spring quickly to life.”—Rocky Mountain News

  Titles by Barbara Bretton

  CHANCES ARE

  GIRLS OF SUMMER

  SHORE LIGHTS

  ONE AND ONLY

  A SOFT PLACE TO FALL

  AT LAST

  THE DAY WE MET

  ONCE AROUND

  SLEEPING ALONE

  MAYBE THIS TIME

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CHANCES ARE

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition / September 2004

  Copyright © 2004 by Barbara Bretton.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-0-425-19796-7

  BERKLEY® Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. BERKLEY and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  With love and thanks to the three greatest sisters this only child could possibly have: Sandra Marton, Dallas Schulze, and Bertrice Small. How did I get so lucky?

  Chapter One

  Paradise Point, New Jersey

  THREE WEEKS TO the day after Maddy Bainbridge announced her engagement to Aidan O’Malley, she found herself stripped and held hostage in the bridal department of the Short Hills Saks in front of her family, her future in-laws, and a PBS research assistant named Crystal whose tattoos were outnumbered only by her piercings.

  Her mother had told her she was taking her out for lunch to celebrate the pending nuptials, a splashy, fun get-together with family and friends on hand to share the good news. She had set her taste buds for the amazing chicken burritos at Casa Mexicana in Spring Lake and was dismayed when they rolled right past the exit and kept on heading north. Visions of one of those terrible spa lunches—three lettuce leaves, a grape tomato, with a side of guilt—made her wish she’d stashed a bag of chips in her purse along with her daughter Hannah’s current favorite Barbie.

  As it turned out, a spa lunch would have been a vast improvement over what her mother actually had in mind.

  “Where is she taking my clothes?” Maddy protested as a fiercely groomed sales associate disappeared with her favorite cotton sweater and jeans.

  “Don’t worry,” Rose DiFalco said to her daughter. “This is the only way we can be sure you won’t make a run for it.”

  Her fashionable aunt Lucy turned her critical eye on Maddy’s nearly naked form. “Does Aidan know about that underwear?” she asked, and the assembled aunts and cousins and future in-laws burst into laughter. Crystal, the research assistant, stood near the door trying very hard to be inconspicuous, which wasn’t easy, given the scene from Lord of the Rings tattooed down the length of her right arm.

  “Turn around,” Maddy’s cousin Gina ordered her. “I want to see if you have Monday embroidered on your butt.”

  The dream she’d been having lately—the one about being naked at Stop and Shop—suddenly seemed prophetic. How she had ended up standing on a carpeted pink pedestal in front o
f her nearest and dearest—and future in-laws—while wearing a pair of cotton bikini panties and a bra that predated the premiere of Friends was a question a Talmudic scholar couldn’t unravel.

  She was a grown woman. She had a child. She had a degree from an accredited university. She had figured out a way to balance work and romance with the equally demanding jobs of daughterhood and motherhood, but from the moment she said yes to Aidan, it seemed that control of her life had been handed over to a powerful force called The Wedding.

  The questions were endless. How many bridesmaids? (Don’t forget your cousins, Maddy.) Church or hotel? (Is there something wrong with The Candlelight?) Catered dinner or upscale buffet? (Why not ask Aunt Lucy to bake the cake?) Local band or big-city musicians? (You mean you’re not going to ask your cousin Benny to sing at your wedding?) Long dress with a short train or short dress with a long train or maybe some combination nobody had even thought of yet. There were flowers and menus to consider, seating arrangements and engraved invitations to design, and whatever you do, don’t even let them get started on hairstyles, makeup choices, and Brazilian bikini waxes for the blushing bride-to-be.

  When Gina asked her if she was registered, it took Maddy a second to realize she was talking about wedding gifts and not the AKC.

  Within moments of learning her daughter was planning to be married, Rose was on the phone to a multitude of sources, lining up auditions for bands, booking appointments to check out hotel ballrooms, and conferring with her sister Lucy about the all-important dress.

  As a rule, Maddy was very happy to fly beneath her mother’s radar, but as the days passed, she began to feel like a guest at her own impending nuptials.

  How come nobody ever told you that finding your soul mate was the easy part?

  Falling in love with Aidan had been as natural as breathing. One moment she was moving through life, concentrating on being the best mother she could possibly be, and the next she was floating somewhere on cloud nine, madly in love and dreaming of a rose-covered cottage with a satellite dish. In her own mind she made the leap from courtship to marriage seamlessly, with maybe a few well-chosen words uttered in a small church while a handful of nearest and dearest dabbed at their eyes and toasted to their happiness.

  Fat chance.

  Her own clan hadn’t the slightest idea how she was feeling. Between them, Grandma Fay’s girls had walked down the aisle a total of sixteen times, which meant a total of sixteen engagement dinners, sixteen bridal showers, sixteen trips to the bridal department of every major store in the tristate area, and sixteen wedding receptions complete with laughter, music, and promises that this time it was going to last forever.

  The trouble was, it never did last forever. In fact, on one memorable occasion, the marriage barely managed to last past the reception. When Aunt Toni grasped the knife to cut the pricey six-tier Weinstock wedding cake, you could hear the sound of three hundred wedding guests as they held their collective breath and prayed the groom didn’t make any false moves.

  She wondered if anyone would share that anecdote with Pete Lassiter, the historian/journalist currently gathering up tales of Paradise Point’s past for a documentary on Jersey Shore towns. The second Lassiter heard that a DiFalco was planning to marry an O’Malley, his journalistic imagination shot into high gear, and he began to shape his narrative around the upcoming nuptials. The town’s oldest families, whose establishments anchored the north and south ends of Paradise Point, were about to merge before man and God and a pair of PBS’s best cameramen. Maddy had endured a series of preinterviews with Lassiter’s underlings, long and exhaustive question-and-answer sessions that dug up details not even her own mother found very interesting. Aidan, not always the most cooperative man in town, made it halfway through his first interview before he called it quits in a fairly dramatic fashion.

  “I’ll bet that makes it into the documentary,” she had teased him, laughing at his unprintable response. He had already sat for a preliminary interview at his old firehouse, held in place more by the memory of the brother he had lost than any desire to see his face on camera. She didn’t blame him for not wanting to go through a lengthy retelling of the warehouse fire that had taken his brother’s life almost three years ago. Aidan had been cited for bravery for his own part in fighting that fire in a ceremony that was held in his hospital room a week after Billy’s funeral, a fact she had to learn from his sister-in-law Claire.

  The O’Malley and DiFalco families had both settled in Paradise Point in the early 1920s, immigrant families with nothing going for them but the fact that they had nothing left to lose. After decades of struggle, both families were finally beginning to reap the reward of over eighty years of back-breaking work. The town wasn’t even a town back then, just a stretch of sand and hope with a couple of dilapidated Victorian houses facing the beach, a reminder of better days.

  Under Aidan’s guidance, O’Malley’s Bar and Grill was taking giant steps into the twenty-first century and had posted its first profitable quarter in longer than anyone cared to remember.

  But that success was nothing compared to the killing Maddy’s mother Rose had made when she turned her own late mother Fay’s rundown old boardinghouse into the most popular B and B on the East Coast. There had even been some talk of buying the B and B next door and upgrading it to meet The Candlelight’s standards, but so far Rose hadn’t made her move. Maddy knew it was only a matter of time. When it came to making money, her mother had the golden touch.

  Out of all the DiFalco cousins, and they were legion, only Maddy had managed to reach her thirties without a divorce under her belt. “Don’t look so smug,” her cousin Gina had pointed out last week over nachos and margaritas at O’Malley’s Grill. “That’s only because you never married Tom. You were with him for six years before you two split—and that’s longer than both my marriages put together—but let’s face it, kid: he still walked out that door. If you ask me, I’d say you’re upholding family tradition just fine.”

  Not something Maddy particularly wanted to hear, but since when had Gina—or any of her other relatives, for that matter—ever worried about anyone’s sensibilities? Maddy loved them all dearly, but every now and then she was reminded why she had spent fifteen years living a continent away from their well-meaning observations. Maddy’s one serious relationship had ended shortly after their daughter Hannah was born, and with it went her dreams of building a family with the man she had loved.

  But then one day everything changed. Maddy left her old life in Seattle behind and brought Hannah home to Paradise Point, where she fell in love with Aidan O’Malley and, to her delight, the object of her affections returned the sentiment tenfold. Of all the surprises the fates might have had up their sleeves, that was the biggest one of all.

  She glanced around the enormous dressing room and did a quick head count. “Where’s Hannah?” she asked Rose, trying to keep her tone even as visions of her five-year-old daughter running amok through row upon row of ten-thousand-dollar gowns made her knees knock.

  Rose looked up from the book of fabric swatches she had been inspecting. “Kelly found her turning somersaults across a stack of bridesmaid dresses.”

  “Oh God—”

  “She scooped Hannah up midroll and took her out for some ice cream.”

  Bless her future stepdaughter for always knowing the right thing to do.

  “The bridesmaid dresses—?” She steeled herself for the damage.

  “Are fine,” Rose said, her attention clearly divided between her daughter and a shimmering square of rum pink duchesse satin. “The child is full of high spirits. There’s nothing to be concerned about.”

  A year ago Maddy wouldn’t have been able to hold back the sharp retort, but times had changed. Now she counted to three before she opened her mouth.

  “Did you see the price tags on those outfits? Hannah could somersault her way through a year’s salary while I’m standing here in my underwear waiting for some snippy salesclerk to
bring me a pile of—”

  “And here we are,” said the snippy salesclerk as she sailed into their midst, arms piled high with gowns. “I brought three size eights and a ten . . . just in case.”

  Aunts Toni and Connie exchanged knowing looks. Maddy considered telling them she would choose padded hips over drooping jowls any day of the week but doubted anyone but Gina would see the humor in her remark.

  Get me out of here, she silently pleaded to Gina as she stepped into a frilly white confection that seemed better suited to Scarlett O’Hara than a thirty-something Jersey girl.

  Too late, Gina said with a grin and a shrug of her shoulders.

  “We’ve all been through it, too,” Aunt Lucy whispered in her ear as she helped button Maddy into the too-snug bodice. “The worst is almost over.”

  Sure it was. Try saying that when you were standing there in your underwear.

  Rose, her usually practical and levelheaded mother, the woman who would be first in line to tell her it was time to cut a few calories, held up a narrow tube of ivory satin that looked like a ribbon of heavy cream. “This would look wonderful on you.”

  “On my right thigh maybe.”

  “Try it on.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Madelyn, you can’t judge a gown on the hanger.”

  “I can judge that one. It’s too small.”

  “I’m sure it will fit.”

  “She’s probably right, Rosie,” Aunt Toni piped up. “Better you try it in a ten or twelve.”

  “Sleeveless?” Aunt Connie sounded dubious. “No woman should go sleeveless after thirty-five.”

  “I’m thirty-three,” Maddy said, praying for a well-timed lightning bolt or a minor earthquake to put an end to this hideous scene.