Summer at Lake Haven Read online

  A lakeside summer, a new beginning...

  Samantha Fremont has been struggling with the weight of her mother’s expectations for years. But now that her mother has passed away, it’s time for Sam to be bold and finally establish the fashion design business she’s always dreamed of. And the perfect opportunity has fallen into her lap. Her friend’s getting married and has asked Sam to create her wedding dress...if only she can avoid the bride’s infuriating brother, who’s temporarily the boy next door.

  Ian Summerhill knows a sabbatical in Haven Point is exactly what he and his children need to recover from their mother’s death. His romantic relationship with his ex-wife may have ended years ago, but caring for her throughout her illness broke his heart. All he wants is to watch his little sister walk down the aisle and to see his kids smile again. And somehow his lovely new neighbor is instrumental in both. But as their uneasy truce blossoms into a genuine friendship and more, Ian has obligations in England he can’t ignore—and a secret that threatens the fragile trust he and Sam have built.

  Praise for RaeAnne Thayne

  “[Thayne’s] books are wonderfully romantic, feel-good reads that end with me sighing over the last pages.”

  —#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

  “Emotional and deeply satisfying.”

  —Sarah Morgan, USA TODAY bestselling author, on The Cliff House

  “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

  “Serenity Harbor is riveting to the very end.”

  —BookPage

  “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

  and HQN

  The Cliff House

  The Sea Glass Cottage

  Haven Point

  Snow Angel Cove

  Redemption Bay

  Evergreen Springs

  Riverbend Road

  Snowfall on Haven Point

  Serenity Harbor

  Sugar Pine Trail

  The Cottages on Silver Beach

  Season of Wonder

  Coming Home for Christmas

  Hope’s Crossing

  Blackberry Summer

  Woodrose Mountain

  Sweet Laurel Falls

  Currant Creek Valley

  Willowleaf Lane

  Christmas in Snowflake Canyon

  Wild Iris Ridge

  For a complete list of books by RaeAnne Thayne, please visit www.raeannethayne.com.

  Look for RaeAnne Thayne’s next novel

  Christmas at Holiday House

  available soon from HQN.

  RaeAnne Thayne

  Summer at Lake Haven

  Table of Contents

  Summer at Lake Haven

  A Haven Point Beginning

  To my wonderful readers, who have made writing each Haven Point book a joy. Thank you!

  Summer at Lake Haven

  Contents

  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

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  TWO STRANGE CHILDREN were playing on her dock.

  Frowning with concern, Samantha Fremont looked out the window of the house she had lived in all of her twenty-eight years, on the shore of Lake Haven in the small, picturesque town of Haven Point, Idaho.

  She didn’t recognize them. Who were they and what were they doing on her property? From here, she could see the trespassers looked to be a girl of about eight and a boy a few years younger. They were dressed in summer wear that even from here Sam could tell was costly, even designer quality. A sundress for the girl of a pale peach cotton dotted with white flowers, and khaki shorts and a blue striped shirt for the boy.

  She looked out at the water and then back at the dock. The children were still there. Not a mirage, then, induced by a combination of too much work and too much time spent hunched over her sewing machine or looking at fashion magazines.

  Most likely, they were renting the house next door and didn’t realize the dock stretching twenty feet out into Lake Haven belonged to her house, not theirs.

  Her mother would have had a fit. Linda had hated that the house next door had been turned into a vacation rental after the previous owner, a kindly older woman, passed away. She had complained to anyone who would listen about the noise level, strange people coming and going at all hours of the day and night, the lack of respect she claimed the short-term tenants showed for the established neighborhood.

  If she had been here to see those two children out on the dock without any sign of supervision, Linda would have marched out there, grabbed them both firmly by the hand and trotted off in search of their absentee parents. Once she found them, she probably would have spent the next half hour haranguing said parents about the importance of teaching children to respect the property of others and the dangers inherent in allowing children to play next to a large body of water without adequate supervision.

  But her mother wasn’t here anymore.

  The little spasm of hurt in her chest was as familiar to her now as her favorite pair of scissors. For all her mother’s crankiness, the house didn’t feel the same without her. Five months had passed since Linda Fremont died of a massive heart attack in her sleep. Five months without her tart tongue or her pessimism or her dire prognostications.

  Sam wouldn’t have believed it possible but she still missed her mother.

  Betsey whined and she looked at the large pen where three puppies were crawling all over the little Yorkie/shih tzu cross lying on her side.

  Her mother would have had a fit about the dog, too. Despite pleading, cajoling and, okay, even a few outright tantrums, Sam had never been allowed to have a dog. Or a pet of any sort, really. Linda would never budge.

  Dogs were too much of a bother, her mother had always said, and cats were too sneaky. As Sam wasn’t a fan of reptiles or rodents, she had contented herself as a child with pretending her stuffed animals were real or that her friends’ dogs were really hers.

  Months after her mother’s death she had still been lost and grieving in that weird irrational place where the world didn’t seem quite right when she had made an after-work visit to the grocery store for more TV dinners. Outside, she encountered a young couple who looked like ski bums holding up a sign claiming they had a dog for sale.

  “Betsey is the sweetest thing,” the woman, little older than a teenager, had assured her. “We love her and it will break our hearts to lose her. It’s just that now the ski season is over, we have new jobs on the Big Island and it’s a real pain to take a dog over there.”

  “Plus, you know, we’re really not pet people,”
the young man had said in an apologetic voice, his eyes sorrowful beneath his dreadlocks.

  Sam had fought the overpowering urge to tell him that since they had taken on the responsibility for a dog that made them pet people.

  Before she could find herself channeling her mother, Sam had taken one look at that cute little furry face, with its big brown eyes and floppy ears, and had felt a sharp tug in the vicinity of her heart.

  You could take her, a seductive voice had whispered. What’s stopping you?

  Her mother was gone. She was alone in the house. She was an adult running her own boutique. Surely she could have a dog now. What was the harm?

  “Betsey is totally house-trained and hardly ever barks,” the woman had pushed, obviously sensing blood in the water. “We’ll throw in her crate, her toys, a bag of her favorite treats and a whole container of food. All we’re asking is two hundred dollars to help us out with gas money.”

  Sam had been such a sucker. Looking back, she could see exactly how stupid she had been. She might as well have had Soft Touch tattooed on her forehead. For one thing, how would gas money help them get to the Big Island? For another, they had been entirely too eager to get rid of the dog, especially if she was as perfect as they claimed. Sam had been blinded by her own long-buried childhood desire for a pet and hadn’t for a moment pondered why they were selling this cute pup outside the supermarket.

  She wasn’t sure if she had been lured more by their words, by the dog’s extraordinary cuteness or her dread at returning to this empty house night after night. Whatever the reason, she had handed over all the cash in her wallet down to her last dollar, scooped up the little dog and her small assortment of supplies and headed home with a feeling of deep exhilaration.

  Samantha didn’t have to try hard to imagine how her mother would have rolled her eyes with a chorus of I told you so’s the next day, after she took the dog to her friend, veterinarian Dr. Dani Morales, to have her checked out and learned the little dog wasn’t simply chubby, she was expecting puppies.

  That was six weeks ago. Now, instead of living out her grandiose image of having one sweet-natured, quiet little lapdog who would sit at her feet while she sewed, she had one exhausted, stressed-out mama dog and three very active, very demanding, month-old puppies.

  She sighed, turning her attention away from the puppies and back to the children on her dock. Where were the parents? She couldn’t see a single adult in sight.

  She was scanning the area when she suddenly heard a splash and then a scream. When she jerked her gaze back to the dock, she saw the boy in the water and the older girl, likely his sister, belly down on the dock, frantically trying to pull him back up.

  It wasn’t deep there, only about four feet or so, but would still be over a little boy’s head. Sam yanked open the door of her sunroom and raced to the dock. At her arrival, the girl looked at her with mingled terror and relief.

  “My brother’s fallen in,” she exclaimed in what Sam noticed was a British accent. “Please. Can you help him? Don’t let him drown!”

  Sam was already shucking her shoes and taking off her baggy sweater. She wore yoga pants and a workout tank underneath, her favorite sewing clothes.

  The boy hadn’t resurfaced, she realized as panic now washed over her, thick and greasy. Where were his blasted parents?

  She didn’t want to go in the water. If she could, she tried to avoid it at all costs. She could swim, she just didn’t like to. It all traced back to a time when she had nearly drowned herself when she was four or five at this very same dock, trying to follow her father, who was getting into a fishing boat and hadn’t noticed when she wandered out of the house to join him.

  Inky water closing over her head, the instinctive gasping for air, the cold fear. It was probably her earliest memory.

  She had overcome it, for the most part. She lived on the lake, after all, and loved it most of the time. Once in a great while, the old phobias came back.

  None of that mattered right now. A child needed her.

  Without giving herself time to think further about it, she jumped off the dock near the area where she thought she had seen the boy go into the water.

  Though it was early June, the lake was icy with runoff from the mountains surrounding Haven Point. In her opinion, it should be against the law for anyone to swim in Lake Haven until at least August. By then, the summer sun had time to warm the water a little, at least in the shallows.

  She ignored the cold, focusing only on trying to feel around for the child. The boy resurfaced finally about three feet away, slapping his arms wildly and gasping for air.

  She pushed from the muddy floor and grabbed hold of him.

  “Calm down. You’re okay. I’ve got you now. We’ll get you out.”

  “Cold. S-s-so cold.”

  He had a British accent, as well, she heard through his chattering teeth.

  “I know. We’ll get you warm soon enough. I’m Sam, by the way. Samantha.”

  “T-Thomas.”

  Though the shallow lake bottom here was muddy, making it difficult for her feet to find purchase, she managed to feel around with her bare feet until she found a rock, then stood on that and hefted the boy onto the dock, where his sister waited. A moment later, Sam pulled herself after him and flopped onto the wooden dock, shivering in the June sunshine while adrenaline still surged through her.

  “Here you go. Safe and sound. See?”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” The girl said the word like “mum” as Samantha wrapped her sweater around the boy.

  “You’re very welcome,” she answered.

  “Thomas can be a bother but I would miss him. So would our father and Nana and Grandfather.”

  She couldn’t help noticing the girl didn’t mention anything about their mother missing them. What was that about? Did they have a mother? She had to wonder. Before she could ask, a man hurried out of the house next door toward the children.

  A gorgeous man.

  He had startling blue eyes and dark hair that looked tousled, as if he had only recently dragged a hand through it. He wore a blue Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up and one button on the collar undone. She had a wild, completely irrational urge to straighten his hair and fasten his button.

  She coughed a little, telling herself the sudden tightness in her throat must be a delayed reaction from the cold water.

  The man took in the scene at a glance. “Thomas. Did you fall in?”

  “I did. And then the nice lady helped me out,” the boy said, his teeth still chattering.

  His father hardly gave her a look. “What are you two doing out here? I thought you were unpacking your things in your rooms.”

  “We finished and decided to go exploring,” the girl said apologetically. “You were on your mobile so we didn’t want to bother you and Mrs. Gilbert was having a rest. And then Thomas was looking at a fish in the water. We thought it might be one of your salmon. He bent down a little too far and lost his balance. Next thing we knew, he was in the lake. He didn’t come up and then this very kind woman came and helped him out.”

  The man finally turned his gaze to her, and Sam was suddenly intensely conscious that she was now wearing dripping wet yoga pants and a thin workout tank. She felt exposed, vulnerable, as if she’d walked into Serrano’s, her favorite restaurant in town, wearing only a bikini.

  “Is that what happened?”

  She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She gave a modest shrug. “I was watching from the window and saw him go into the water.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Ms....”

  “Fremont. Samantha Fremont. I live just...there.”

  She gestured back toward her house, feeling breathless and silly. Oh, good grief. This was ridiculous. So he had brilliant blue eyes and a rumpled air she found irresistible. The last thing she needed in her life right
now was a man. Any man, especially a good-looking man with an accent and two adorable children.

  “Hello. I’m Ian Summerhill and these wild creatures are my offspring, Amelia and Thomas.”

  At his introduction, a few of the pieces began to fall into place and she made a connection she should have earlier. “Summerhill. Are you any relation to Gemma Summerhill?”

  “She’s our aunt,” Amelia exclaimed.

  “You know Gemma?” Ian Summerhill asked.

  “Yes. We’re friends. I’m actually making her wedding dress.”

  Why on earth had Gemma never mentioned her gorgeous brother was coming to town for the wedding and bringing along his extraordinarily cute children?

  Also, where again was the children’s mother?

  “We’re here all summer,” Thomas declared. His teeth had largely stopped chattering in the June sunshine and his hair had even started to dry, the dark locks turning blond.

  “We’re having an American adventure before Aunt Gemma’s wedding.” Amelia sounded less than enthused at that particular prospect.

  “How fun for you. Welcome to Haven Point,” Sam said, eager suddenly to escape. She was growing increasingly aware that she was drenched and wearing skintight clothing...and also that she hadn’t been around a good-looking man in a very long time.

  “I hope you have a lovely stay. I’m sure we’ll see each other around.”

  “No doubt, especially if you’re friends with Gemma.”

  That did make things awkward, considering she had to deliver bad news.

  “I should tell you the dock actually belongs to me. The property line is just there, on the far side of the dock.”

  “That’s impossible.” He frowned. “The real estate agent assured me we had dock access. I’ve rented a boat for the summer for my work.”

  Oh, her mother would have loved telling off him and whatever unscrupulous real estate agent had lied to him about the dock access.

  “I’m afraid it’s not only possible but reality. The dock is our property. You were misled. But I’m sure we can work something out, if it’s that important to you.” She didn’t want to be a jerk about it, especially not to Gemma’s family. She wasn’t using the dock. In fact, it hadn’t been used since Sam’s father died, though her mother continued to make sure it was maintained properly as if it were some kind of shrine to Lyle Fremont’s memory.