Winter Storms by Elin Hilderbrand Read Free Book Online

and raises his arms in a V. “She said yes!” he shouts. “She! Said! Yes!”
    Ava laughs. She gets to her feet and kisses him.
    From behind the wheel, the captain calls out, “Congratulations!”
    â€œThank you!” Ava says. Her eyes follow the trajectory of the contrails until they fade away.
    Later, over a dinner of oyster sliders and lobster rolls at Cru, Nathaniel says, “I signed on for a new job today.”
    â€œYeah,” Ava says. “As Mr. Ava Quinn.” She can’t stop looking at the ring on her finger. She feels like a completely different person—a person who has been proposed to, and in the most romantic way possible.
    â€œWell, yeah,” Nathaniel says. “And I also got a new building job. It’s a compound like nothing I’ve ever seen—a six-thousand-square-foot main house, a pool house, a four-car garage, and three guest cottages for the kids.”
    â€œWow,” Ava says. She greatly respects Nathaniel’s skills as a carpenter—he is held in very high esteem professionally— but where work is concerned, she has more in common with Scott.
    She has to stop comparing them, she thinks. She’s made her decision, right? Nathaniel. She looks at the ring. She hates herself for imagining what Scott will do when she tells him, but the shocked, incredulous expression that will appear on his face keeps looping through her mind.
Please
don’t tell me you only said yes to Nathaniel in order to one-up the trip to Tuscany,
she scolds herself.
    â€œWhere is it?” Ava asks. “The job?”
    She’s expecting him to say Shimmo or Madaket, Quaise or Madequecham. Or, maybe… Sconset. (Like a true islander, she thinks:
Please not Sconset. It’s so far away!
)
    â€œBlock Island,” he says.
    She gapes. Her jaw drops, her eyes pop, her mind races.
Block Island?
    Last year, Nathaniel did an enormous project on Martha’s Vineyard. Chappaquiddick, to be specific. At least Ava has reference points for the Vineyard—it’s got seven towns to Nantucket’s one and it’s fifteen miles closer to the mainland. Ava has been to the Vineyard at least a dozen times. She has shopped at Nell’s in Edgartown, jogged down the bike path to Katama Bay, seen the requisite sunset from the bluffs of Aquinnah, and eaten ice cream at Mad Martha’s. But the only thing she knows about Block Island is that it’s part of Rhode Island.
    â€œI’d like to get married before we move there,” Nathaniel says.
    â€œWe?” Ava says.
    â€œYes,” Nathaniel says. “We.”
    Ava gulps and slides the ring off her finger.
    Â 
KELLEY
    K elley and Mitzi are hosting Margaret and Drake’s wedding on August 20. Margaret calls the inn, and both Kelley and Mitzi get on the phone to discuss the details. Margaret wants to keep it
simple, simple, simple.
Just family and a few close friends, she says—but where to draw the line? Margaret and Drake; Kelley and Mitzi; Patrick, Jennifer, and the kids; Kevin, Isabelle, and Genevieve; Ava and Scott; Margaret’s assistant, Darcy; Drake’s nephew, Liam; Ava’s friends Shelby and Zack; Jennifer’s mother, Beverly, from San Francisco; Drake’s colleague Jim Hahn and his wife, but not their five children. Margaret has to invite Lee Kramer, the head of the network, and his wife, Ginny, who is the editor of
Vogue
,
but Margaret is pretty sure they’ll decline. They’re Hamptons people.
    Mitzi says, “Would it be too off-the-wall to invite George and Mary Rose?”
    â€œYes,” Kelley says.
    â€œIf you want to invite George, it’s fine with me,” Margaret says. “He has been a part of our larger story this past year.”
    You can say that again!
Kelley thinks. He knows that Mitzi and George Umbrau—the man Mitzi had been conducting an affair with for twelve straight Christmases when he came to the