The Cafe at Beach End by RaeAnne Thayne, Exclusive Excerpt

We are delighted to feature this excerpt from RaeAnne’s novel THE CAFE AT BEACH END!

THE CAFE AT BEACH END

“[Thayne] engages the reader’s heart and emotions, inspiring hope and the belief that miracles are possible.” —Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author

For fans of Debbie Macomber and Susan Wiggs, an emotional story of starting over and reclaiming happiness.

When Meredith Collins was a child, the little beach town of Cape Sanctuary lived up to its name. Spending summers there with her grandmother, Meredith finally felt safe and loved.

Now she’s returning in disgrace. Her late ex-husband swindled investors out of millions of dollars and made Meredith a figure of scorn—though she knew nothing about his scheme. But she still has the beach cottage she inherited from her grandmother and half ownership of the local café. It’s a place to work and earn a little money. That’s if her cousin, Tori, will let her through the door. Once, Tori and Meredith were as close as sisters—until Meredith chose her neglectful parents’ expectations over their bond. Now widowed with a teenage daughter, Tori isn’t setting out a welcome mat for the woman who let her down so badly.

While Meredith tries to make a fresh start, she is drawn to a mysterious writer renting the cottage next door. Liam Byrne’s kindness is a balm, though she worries he might not be so friendly if he knew who she was. But Liam has his own secret and a mission that will help Meredith confront her past—and maybe, claim a surprising future…

“This compelling tale of family and community will please Thayne’s legions of fans as well as readers of Susan Mallery and Robyn Carr.” – Booklist on The Café at Beach End

EXCERPT

CHAPTER ONE

The sky wept the day Meredith Rowland returned to Cape Sanctuary.

As the charming northern California town came into view, she did her best to peer through the heavily beating wipers of her car fighting a losing battle against sheets of rain.

Of course it was raining. It seemed only right, especially considering the dark, sinister cloud that had been following her for the past eighteen months.

As her tires splattered up rain from the wet road, Meredith checked the gas gauge of the ten-year-old compact car she had purchased with the last of her savings, after her beloved Mercedes was sold at auction.

The gauge read below the empty line, but she kept her fingers crossed that she could make it to the café before it ran out of gas.

The car sputtered a little. “Come on, Posy,” she said, using the nickname she had given it somewhere in Nebraska, not for a sweet-smelling floral arrangement but because the first three letters of POS made a particularly pungent acronym that described the car’s general quality.

The engine chugged and Meredith held her breath. “You’ve made it this far. Come on. Only another few miles to go. We’re almost there, baby. You’ve got this.”

Though she knew it was irrational, even delusional, she thought the car seemed to pick up a little energy, like an old horse that smelled the familiar stable of home. A moment later, Meredith chugged onto Main Street on fumes and prayer.

Miraculously, she found a parking space not far from the historic brick building that housed the Beach End Café.

As she gazed at the building, with its cupola and planters spilling over with red and purple flowers, a flood of memories washed over her. Most of them were good, but a few made her throat ache and her eyes burn.

She had adored this place, once upon a time. During her childhood, the café had been her happy place. Whenever she had been feeling lonely or sad or frightened, she would come here in her mind.

Here, she had found love and acceptance. Her grandmother hadn’t cared if she had a B in French literature or if she couldn’t remember how to conjugate “to plunder.” Frances and Tori had loved her just as she was.

If she closed her eyes, she could still picture herself and her cousin as they had been back then. One blond and fair, the other dark, but with the same hazel eyes they had inherited from Frances through their respective parents.

They had been as close as sisters. Closer, even. Sharing laughter and dreams and secrets during those halcyon summer months when Meredith would stay with her grandmother.

She could picture them now in a time-lapse age-progression that played across her mind. They were young girls, stopping at the candy store down the street to fill their pockets with sweets purchased using Meredith’s spending money. Then preteens, riding cruiser bikes through town and giggling at all the cute boys hanging out at the skate park at Driftwood Beach. Then teenagers, sitting around a bonfire and talking and laughing with those same cute boys while stars glittered overhead and the sea murmured its endless song.

Had that really been her? The memories seemed vague and undefined. Hazy and not quite real, as if it had all happened to someone else.

Probably because it had. Meredith was a different person than that lonely girl, yearning for affection.

She once had a nanny who used to tell her that all the cells in her body replaced themselves every three months, so she really did become a new person, like a snake shedding its skin.

She had learned as an adult that wasn’t wholly true—that some cells regenerated every few days, others had much longer lifespans into the decades and others never regenerated. Still, so many moments in her life had that ethereal, distant feeling, as if they had happened to someone else.

Certainly the past eighteen months seemed a nightmare from which she couldn’t quite wake up.

All of those things had happened to her, though. She couldn’t wish away her history.

She tightened her fingers around the steering wheel as she finished parking and turned off the engine.

Like it or not, she owned it and would have to figure out now how to take the broken pieces of that history and rebuild herself into something better.

Reaching beside her for her umbrella, Meredith climbed out of the car and extended it, every muscle in her body aching from the long drive and the uncomfortable seat that offered zero lumbar support.

Sharp yearning washed over her for the leather luxury of her Mercedes, complete with both heating and cooling properties. She pushed it away. That was part of her Before life. This was her Now.

With rain clicking against the nylon of the umbrella, she arched her back and inhaled a few deep breaths, for courage as well as calm.

The mingled scent of sea and storm washed through her, smells that immediately took her back to long rainy afternoons in Frances’s old cottage on Starfish Beach, playing board games and watching old movies.

Even in the rain, Cape Sanctuary seemed warm and welcoming, with flowers hanging from streetlamps and more in baskets in windows. Outside the café, a bench with peeling red paint beckoned visitors and their tired feet to stop and enjoy the view.

Did it also apply to those with tired spirits? Because her spirit was at low ebb right about now.

Other disheartened travelers might be welcome to rest here. Not her. Meredith knew she would not be greeted with the typical warmth and comfort the café usually exuded.

The people inside would not be thrilled to see her. Or at least one person wouldn’t be, anyway. Her cousin and once best friend, Tori Ayala, would probably slam the door in her face and send her straight back out into the rain.

Grow a spine, she chided herself.

Tori couldn’t send her packing. Not when Meredith owned half of the café.

She walked to the front door, lowering her umbrella once she was under the shelter of the entry. Heart pounding, she pulled open the door.

At the chime of bells from the front door, the low hum of conversation and clink of glasses inside seemed to die away and everyone turned to see the newcomer.

It was mid-afternoon, past the busiest hour of lunch. Still, the café seemed to be enjoying a healthy business, more than Meredith might have expected for the off-hour.

“Be with you in a moment,” a cheerful voice rang out. Nerves fluttered through Meredith. She knew that voice, entirely too well.

That voice had once been on the other end of all those secrets, sharing her own and taking Meredith’s too.

The last thing she wanted was a confrontation with Tori the moment she rolled into town, but she knew this one was unavoidable.

She straightened, hitching her last designer purse a little more securely on her shoulder. All she had left was a wreck of a vehicle and the three hundred dollars contained in a Louis Vuitton bag worth about six times that much.

Conscious of the patrons of the restaurant giving her sidelong, curious looks, Meredith shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket, fighting with everything inside her against the urge to grab her bag tightly, push her way out the door and flee back into the rain.

And then what?

She couldn’t leave. Not when she had nowhere else to go.

A moment later, the person she most dreaded seeing came out of the kitchen. Her cousin Tori wore a trim black apron with The Beach End Café embroidered across the front in white, and her arms competently hefted a tray of at least three or four orders.

Her brown hair was caught atop her head in a messy bun, and she had a pencil tucked behind one ear.

She looked as beautiful as ever, bright and vibrant and so dear that the sight of her made emotions rise up in Meredith’s throat.

The sentiment was obviously not reciprocated. As Meredith might have predicted, Tori stopped dead the moment she spotted her. The tray in her arms wobbled slightly, but she maintained control with the ease of long practice.

Meredith’s stomach rumbled as the smell of sizzling meat mingled with coffee and fried potatoes, scents she would forever associate with the café.

Meredith suddenly remembered she hadn’t eaten since a hurried meal the night before, an inexpensive frozen dinner she had bought at the convenience store next to her questionable hotel in Sacramento and cooked in the microwave of her room.

She pushed away the hunger pangs as something to deal with later. Which was becoming the mantra of her life.

“Hello,” she said, not sure what else to say.

Her tentative greeting was met by a wall of fury that seemed as tangible as those storm-tossed waves at Driftwood Park.

“Get out,” Tori snarled. “Get the hell out.”

Meredith could feel herself shrink. She hated confrontation. It made her want to disappear, to curl up around herself in the fetal position with her hands over her head.

At the anger in Tori’s voice, Meredith wanted to slink out the door, climb back into her car and drive away through the rain-spattered streets.

She couldn’t do that. She had come too far, literally and figuratively, to give up now.

She drew in a deep, café-scented breath and faced her cousin. “You want me to leave my own café? Why would I do that?”

“It is not your café,” Tori snapped, flushing.

“Not all of it. But half of it is.”

Tori’s mouth tightened and she hefted her tray higher. “Forty-nine percent. I’m still the controlling owner.”

“I know that,” Meredith said quietly.

She felt lucky to have any stake at all in the café, especially when she didn’t deserve so much as a box of straws.

Frances had clearly stipulated in her will that Tori would always have final say in all the café operations, given that she had spent her entire life working here whereas Meredith had only spent a few weeks every summer.

“I don’t have time for this right now,” Tori hissed. “I have customers. Some of us work for a living instead of existing on money we stole from gullible senior citizens.”

As she no doubt intended, her words cut deeper than any chef’s knife.

Before Meredith could muster a response, Tori gripped her tray and headed for a table in the corner where a group that looked like construction workers must have decided to take a break, probably because of the rain.

They, like everyone else in the café, were giving her surreptitious looks. Meredith wanted to disappear. Instead, she again straightened her spine.

She should be used to the whispers and stares by now. She was, in Chicago, but she had hoped for some respite here in Cape Sanctuary, thousands of miles away from the scene of the crime.

Excerpted from The Café at Beach End by RaeAnne Thayne. Copyright © 2023 by RaeAnne Thayne. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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#1 Publishers Weekly, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne finds inspiration in the beautiful northern Utah mountains where she lives with her family. Her books have won numerous honors, including seven RITA Award nominations from Romance Writers of America and a Career Achievement Award from RT Book Reviews magazine. RaeAnne loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her website at www.raeannethayne.com.

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