The Cliff House Read online

  Three women—two sisters and their aunt—and the cliff house on the northern California coast that served as a beacon to them all...

  After the death of their mother, sisters Daisy and Beatriz Davenport found a home with their aunt Stella in the beautiful and welcoming town of Cape Sanctuary. They never knew all the dreams that Stella sacrificed to ensure they had everything they’d ever need. Now, with Daisy and Bea grown, it’s time for Stella to reveal the secret she’s been keeping from them—a secret that will change their family forever.

  Bea thought she’d sown all her wild oats when she got pregnant far too young. The marriage that followed was rocky and not destined to last, but it gave Bea her wonderful, mature, now eleven-year-old daughter, Marisol. But just as she’s beginning to pursue a new love with an old friend, Bea’s ex-husband resurfaces and turns their lives completely upside down.

  Then there’s Daisy—sensible, rational, financially prudent Daisy. She’s never taken a risk in her life—until she meets a man who makes her question everything she thought she knew about life, love and the power of taking chances.

  In this heartwarming story, Stella, Bea and Daisy will discover that the path to true happiness is filled with twists and turns, but love always leads them back home.

  Praise for New York Times bestselling author

  RaeAnne Thayne

  “[Thayne] engages the reader’s heart and emotions, inspiring hope and the belief that miracles are possible.”

  —#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

  “Serenity Harbor is riveting to the very end.”

  —BookPage

  “Entertaining, heart-wrenching, and totally involving, this multi­threaded story overflows with characters readers will adore.”

  —Library Journal on Evergreen Springs (starred review)

  “Deliciously flirty and totally engrossing.”

  —Library Journal on Sugar Pine Trail

  “RaeAnne Thayne is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.... Once you start reading, you aren’t going to be able to stop.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Endearing small-town residents and bratty cats add humor to this heartwarming, steady-paced holiday romance.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Sugar Pine Trail

  Also available from RaeAnne Thayne

  Haven Point

  Season of Wonder

  The Cottages on Silver Beach

  Sugar Pine Trail

  Serenity Harbor

  Snowfall on Haven Point

  Riverbend Road

  Evergreen Springs

  Redemption Bay

  Snow Angel Cove

  Hope’s Crossing

  Wild Iris Ridge

  Christmas in Snowflake Canyon

  Willowleaf Lane

  Currant Creek Valley

  Sweet Laurel Falls

  Woodrose Mountain

  Blackberry Summer

  For a complete list of books by RaeAnne Thayne,

  please visit www.raeannethayne.com.

  RaeAnne Thayne

  The Cliff House

  As always, I have legions of people to thank for helping to bring this story to life. I am deeply indebted to my editor, the wonderful Gail Chasan, and her assistant, Megan Broderick; to my indomitable agent, Karen Solem; to Sarah Burningham and her hardworking team at Little Bird Publicity for tirelessly helping spread the word about my books; to my assistants, Judie Bouldry and Carrie Stevenson, for keeping me on track; and to everyone at Harlequin—from the art department for their stunning covers to the marketing team to the copy editors, sales team, production crew and everyone else I may have failed to mention.

  I must also thank my hero of a husband and our three children, who somehow manage to love me even in the midst of deadline chaos. You are my heart.

  Finally, this particular book would not have been possible without three brilliant friends: Susan Mallery, Christine Rimmer and Jill Shalvis. I can’t thank you enough for all your help!

  About the Author

  RaeAnne Thayne finds inspiration in the beautiful northern Utah mountains, where the New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author lives with her husband and three children. Her books have won numerous honors, including RITA® Award nominations from Romance Writers of America and a Career Achievement Award from RT Book Reviews. RaeAnne loves to hear from readers and can be contacted through her website, www.raeannethayne.com.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  1

  DAISY

  A man was staring at her in the oral care aisle.

  A gorgeous, make-your-ovaries-shiver man.

  Though it taxed her considerable powers of restraint, Daisy Davenport McClure did not stare back. She wouldn’t give the stranger the courtesy of knowing he had rattled her.

  She couldn’t help feeling discombobulated, though. Dark, wavy-haired, green-eyed strangers did not stare at plain, boring her in the grocery store. Or on the street. Or in a car or on a boat or a train or anywhere else Dr. Seuss could have come up with. She simply wasn’t the sort of woman who drew that kind of male attention—and that was exactly the way she liked it.

  Why was he staring? She was almost positive she had checked her reflection in the rearview mirror when she picked up her sister outside their aunt’s house twenty minutes earlier. She didn’t remember seeing anything weird. No stray leaves from the yard work she’d been doing earlier, no smudges on her cheek, no splotched paint, no lettuce in her teeth.

  There was no reason she could think of why this man might be looking at her as if she were his salvation.

  She almost turned around to head down another aisle but despite her certainty that she didn’t have any leafy vegetable residue in her teeth, she still really needed toothpaste, which was why she was here. She drew in a breath.

  “Excuse me,” she murmured, reaching around him for her favorite brand, the one that promised to whiten, give her fresh breath and vanquish any hint of tartar or gingivitis.

  “Sorry,” he said, easing back a little. The man looked pale beneath his tan and she thought she saw white lines around his mouth.

  Probably hungover. Maybe he was a tourist who had started his vacation here on the beautifully rugged Northern California coast by doing his own Cape Sanctuary happy hour pub crawl and now was paying the price.

  He didn’t really look like a tourist, but one never knew.

  She grabbed her toothpaste, tossed it into her basket an
d stepped away, careful not to make eye contact.

  “Sorry. Have we met?” he asked. His voice was an appealing tenor with a slight accent she couldn’t quite place. Australian, maybe? New Zealand? It was as gorgeous as the rest of him. Naturally.

  “I’m sure we haven’t,” she answered curtly. While she considered herself eminently forgettable, she certainly would have remembered him.

  “Sorry. It’s odd. I feel as if I should know you, somehow.”

  “You don’t,” she assured him, then grabbed a box of dental floss she didn’t really need and hurried out of the aisle.

  It was the kind of interaction strangers had all the time—banal, meaningless—but somehow the encounter left her rattled. He left her rattled. When was the last time she had noticed how long a man’s eyelashes were or the strong angle of his jaw or the little indentation that hinted at a dimple?

  Longer than she could remember. That she had focused on those features of a stranger who was probably wasted did not say much for her taste or her wisdom, two things she usually took great pride in.

  Edgy and unsettled, she tried to put the guy out of her head and went instead to find her sister so they could finish their shopping and make it back to their aunt’s in time.

  As Daisy might have expected, she found Beatriz in the magazine aisle, leafing through a tabloid. Her sister might be a twenty-eight-year-old divorced mother, but she was sometimes a teenage girl at heart.

  Now, Bea was a woman that someone like the tipsy stranger in the toothpaste aisle would notice, with her dramatic dark curls, the little pierced diamond in her nose, her perfect makeup—though she wore it a little heavy to Daisy’s taste. Everything about Bea drew attention, from her clothes to her hair to her wide, generous smile.

  Bea had been boho before boho was a thing, with her own unique style and the voluptuous body and serenely classic features to pull off whatever look she wanted.

  Daisy was only a little envious of her sister’s style. They were half sisters and didn’t look much alike, except for the hazel eyes they had inherited from their mother. Daisy’s stick-straight hair was lighter, a boring chestnut color, and she wore it in a shoulder-length classic bob, using hairbands or pulling it up into an updo to keep it out of her face while she worked.

  She looked down at her own respectable three-year-old summer dress and matching sandals. She dressed for comfort and ease, not fashion, fully aware that she often looked like somebody’s boring aunt—which she supposed she was, since Bea’s daughter, Mari, was her niece.

  So why had the man with the delectable accent even noticed her, let alone stared at her like he was...hungry?

  It didn’t matter. She would likely never see him again. The tourist season on the Northern California coast never really ended but August was particularly crowded. Tourists rarely stayed long. He would probably be gone by Monday.

  She didn’t miss the fact that her sister’s arms were empty and there was no cart in sight. “You were supposed to be picking up the birthday cake and the candles!”

  She had a sinking suspicion they were going to be late.

  “Sorry. I got a little distracted by this.”

  She flipped up the magazine so Daisy could see the cover. There, in vivid color, was a picture of one of the most famous men in the country, looking tortured and sexy. Lean, tattooed, dangerous.

  Above his photograph read the headline in huge type:

  Cruz in seclusion after attack by crazed fan.

  In smaller type that ran across his legs, in the tight leather leggings his fans loved, another headline read:

  Whereabouts of rocker unknown.

  “They’ve done a two-page spread on it.” Bea flipped the magazine around so Daisy could see a scattering of several other pictures, one that looked like a grainy picture of Cruz on an ambulance stretcher and another of a man whose face she couldn’t see, slumped against a gray wall and holding his hands against his abdomen, a red stain spreading out across his shirt.

  She couldn’t read the caption from where she stood. Was that the assailant or the mysterious man who had rushed to the rescue?

  The attack on hometown boy Cruz Romero had been the talk of Cape Sanctuary since it happened a week earlier. People were talking about it everywhere she went in town. Every single client who came into Daisy’s accounting and financial planning office that week had brought it up to her, asking if she knew anything about where Cruz might be, how badly he had been injured, if it was true that he had been attacked by a jealous husband.

  She imagined Bea had it much, much worse.

  Cruz was her ex-husband, after all.

  “Still no word?”

  Bea shook her head. “Not since he called the night of the attack to make sure Marisol heard it from him first, before the rumors started flying at school, to assure her he only had a scratch. He was rattled and didn’t make much sense.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “I guess. After only a couple of minutes he said he had to go, that he was heading to the hospital for a few stitches and to check on the guy who saved his life. He promised he’d call, but it’s been radio silence since then.”

  “From Cruz, maybe, but you’ve heard from his people.”

  “Yeah, his manager calls every day. Cruz is in seclusion but Lenny assures me he’s fine and he’ll call as soon as he has the chance.”

  That was strange enough to Daisy, since Cruz loved connecting with his fans on social media. She had never had a close brush with death, though, so it wasn’t for her to judge.

  “Buy it, if you want. Buy all of them, but I would suggest you don’t let Mari see them yet. She’s still upset about her dad.”

  “She’s probably read the online edition on all their websites already, along with everything else she can find,” Bea muttered.

  Daisy didn’t doubt it. Her niece was not only tech-savvy and headstrong, but she also adored her father and would want to read as much as possible about the accident that had nearly claimed his life.

  “You buy your tabloids, I’ll pick up the candles and the cake. We still have to stop by Melenzana’s for the gnocchi she wanted.”

  “Right. Sorry. I’ll take care of the candles and grab a bottle of wine.”

  Bea snatched several other magazines with Cruz’s face on them from the racks and tucked them into Daisy’s basket.

  Daisy hurried to the bakery. Though located in the grocery store, where one might not expect to find gourmet fare, they still made the best cakes in town.

  For months, Stella had been insisting she didn’t want a grand party to mark her fortieth birthday. She said she only wanted their family—the three of them and Bea’s daughter, Mari—together for dinner, in the garden of Three Oaks, Stella’s two-story Craftsman.

  Her aunt deserved a party attended by everyone in town. She deserved a freaking ticker-tape parade, as far as Daisy was concerned. She knew all the other lost souls Stella had rescued over the years would certainly agree with her.

  She couldn’t go against Stella’s wishes, though. She loved her aunt too much. If Stella only wanted her immediate family to celebrate her milestone birthday with her—and the money they would spend donated to her charity instead—Daisy would make sure that was exactly what happened.

  She picked up the cake they had ordered weeks ago, threw in some crusty Italian bread and some of the high-quality olive oil the store stocked, then headed for the checkout.

  The cashier in her line had worked at the grocery store as long as Daisy had lived in Cape Sanctuary, while the bagger was another of her aunt’s rescues.

  “Hey, Daisy,” he said, not quite making eye contact. Tommy Mathews was on the autism spectrum. When he had come to Stella, he had been considered unmanageable and difficult, close to being institutionalized after his mother died. He had lived with Stella for two years, from sev
enteen to nineteen, and had thrived with her loving care before moving into his own apartment with two other young adults who had special needs.

  Now twenty, Tommy had a steady job at the supermarket and was taking classes to earn an associate’s degree at the community college in the next town over.

  He had come so far because of her aunt, whose circle of influence was legendary.

  “Hi, Tommy.” She adored him and all the other young people who had come in and out of their lives since Stella began opening her home up to other foster children in the years since she and Bea had moved out.

  They were the first, she and Bea. Stella’s nieces. Her aunt’s influence started there and rippled out like concentric waves from a tiny pebble thrown into a pond.

  The tears suddenly burning behind her eyes took her completely by surprise. She usually kept much better control over her emotions.

  “Is that cake for Stella?” Tommy asked. “It’s her birthday tomorrow.”

  “I know. It’s a big day, isn’t it?”

  “She said she didn’t want presents but I have one for her anyway. I’m going to take it to her tomorrow.”

  “Oh. That’s so sweet of you.”

  “It’s a plant, the kind she likes with pink flowers. I can get it for a discount from the floral department here. It was only sixteen dollars and twenty-three cents with tax, but don’t tell her, okay?”

  “I won’t say a word, Tommy. I know she’ll love it.”

  “Yeah. She will,” he said with a confidence that made her smile.

  Stella had fostered about twenty other children, some with special needs like Tommy and others just in need of a temporary home for a while, like Cruz Romero.

  So many lives, changed for the better because Stella was a generous, kind soul who loved to help people.

  Unlike Daisy, who hid away in her house on the cliff, afraid to even smile at men she didn’t know who talked to her in the toothpaste aisle.

  The checker had rung up the last item when Bea hurried up, candles and a wine bottle in hand. “Sorry. Took me a while to find them. Hi, Janet. Hi, Tommy! Daisy, put this on your check and we’ll split the total.”