Carolina Blues by Virginia Kantra Read Free Book Online

wouldn’t give in again. That Travis was out of their lives forever. But like most promises in her life, this one had crumbled like a piecrust under pressure.
    It’s only money
, she told herself as she walked away. A couple hundred dollars was a small price to pay for her stupidity ten years ago.
    She would have paid a lot more to save face with her father. To protect her son.
    She inhaled slowly, breathing in the familiar island smells, sand shoals and shell banks, mudflats and rolling sea. Above the electric lines and utility poles, the sky was as bright and blue as an inverted mixing bowl.
    She set off toward the bakery, resisting the urge to walk by the school where six-and-a-half-year-old Aidan was in camp. He needed normalcy. Routine. Not a mother who embarrassed him in front of his friends by hanging around the playground, hoping to reassure herself with the sight of him.
    The buildings were a jumble of shingle, brick, and cinder block, separated by sandy strips of short, thick grass. Jane was born on this island, one of a tough, perennial breed as hardy as the daisies blooming beside the road. Her roots were here, in the island brogue that occasionally haunted her speech, in the centuries-old gravestones marked CLARK . After her mother left them, Jane’s life had totally changed. But the island was constant.
    She belonged here. And so did Aidan.
    Maybe sometimes Jane dreamed of a second chance, a fresh start, a cooking apprenticeship in New York or Paris. But she’d never
act
on it. A sense of belonging, of continuity, was critical to a child growing up with only one parent.
    Besides, as her father once pointed out, who would watch Aidan if she left?
    It took a village to raise a child. On the island, there was always a neighbor around to provide snacks, supervision, and car pool rides. Jane was grateful for the help of other single moms like Cynthie Lodge. And she absolutely depended on her dad. She had to leave for the bakery at four every morning. She catered weddings on weekends. Somebody had to be home to see Aidan off to school, to be backup in an emergency.
    No matter how bad things got between Jane and her father, Hank was always there for her son.
    She swallowed against the ache in her throat. Maybe Dad’s semiretirement gave him more time. Or maybe he was simply more comfortable with his grandson than he had ever been with his daughter.
    After her mother took off, Hank’s days went on the same as before. He went to work, came home, ate in front of the TV, fell asleep after dinner in his old recliner. At twelve, Jane was already taking care of herself and the house, washing the dishes and their laundry, doing her best to fill her mother’s place.
    She was lonely, haunted by the awareness that she was somehow unworthy of her mother’s love and her father’s attention.
    Most island kids worked, at least during the season, waiting tables, babysitting, helping out in their parents’ shops or on their fathers’ fishing boats. But Jane had felt isolated, set apart by her father’s job as deputy sheriff, hedged by rules, afraid of letting him down. Mortified when he stopped her friends or moved them along when they hung out under the pier or on the sidewalk.
    She would never marry a cop.
    Jack Rossi, lean and dark and tough-looking, was not for her. If only he’d been a little more approachable or a little less dedicated, if only he’d reminded her a little less of her father, she might have . . . But no. She was done living with
if-onlys
. Because they never worked out. Jack’s quiet attention was flattering, but she wanted more in her life than another man’s neglect.
    By the time Jane was eighteen and Travis sauntered into her life, she had been starved for affection and ripe for rebellion. Hank had tried to warn her.
Shiftless son of a bitch
. But her father’s disapproval only increased the thrill of her first romance. Travis was four years older, already—at least in her mind—a man, a