Sisters by Choice Read online

  Her only friends in the area had been work-related and with no more work, they’d quickly faded away. In the end, there’d been no one to see her off, so several weeks after the fire, at seven on Friday morning, she fought her way to the freeway, then merged onto I5 north.

  Around ten, Kristine called.

  “Where are you?” her cousin asked.

  “North of the Grapevine.”

  “You should have let me fly down and drive up with you.”

  “I’ll be fine. You have eight kids to deal with. They would die without you.”

  Kristine laughed. “It’s three kids.”

  “When I visit, it feels like more.”

  “That’s because they’re loud.” Her humor faded. “You okay?”

  “Never better.” Especially if she didn’t count her broken heart and ragged spirit.

  “You’re lying.”

  “I am, but that’s okay.”

  Kristine sighed. “I’m glad you’re coming home. I’m worried about you.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I think the warehouse is still for lease. I want you to see it the second you get here. This is Blackberry Island. It’s not as if we have more than one warehouse. If you don’t grab this one, you’re going to have to have your offices on the mainland, and driving there every day would be a drag.”

  Sophie felt her sense of dazed sadness ease a little. “Already done.”

  “What?”

  “I signed the lease last week.”

  “Seriously?” Kristine’s voice was a shriek. “But you haven’t seen it.”

  “I know, but you said it was great. Besides, you’re right. It’s not as if there are six warehouses to choose from.”

  “I said it was available, but I don’t know what you need. Sophie, you signed a lease? What if you hate it?”

  “Then I’ll be mad at you.” She smiled. “It’s fine. I’ll make it work. Really. Right now I just want to be home.”

  “You leased a warehouse you’ve never seen. Sheesh. Next you’re going to tell me you rented a house, sight unseen.”

  “Technically, I saw pictures online.”

  “Sophie!”

  “It’s just for a few months, while I figure things out.”

  “That’s insane,” Kristine told her. “I will never understand you. Okay, focus on your driving. I can’t wait for you to get here tomorrow. The boys are very excited to see you.”

  “I’m excited to see them. You have six, right?”

  “Sophie!”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  * * *

  “Think of it as a rite of passage,” Kristine Fielding said cheerfully. “You’re twelve now. You deserve to take on more responsibilities.”

  “You say that like it’s a good thing,” her twelve-year-old son, Tommy, grumbled. “I’m a really good kid, Mom. Maybe I deserve not to do laundry.”

  “You’d rather I did it for you?”

  “Well, yeah. Of course. Nobody wants to do chores.”

  They were in Tommy’s bedroom, facing a massive pile of laundry. Kristine had been doing her best to convince her middle son it was time for him to learn a few life skills. As his older brother had before him, Tommy resisted. In the end, she’d had to threaten JJ with the loss of Xbox privileges before he was willing to take on the task. She was hoping she wouldn’t have to resort to anything that dire with Tommy.

  “So it’s okay for me to take care of this entire house, cook the meals and do your laundry, while you do nothing?”

  Tommy grinned. “It’s your job, Mom. My job is school. Remember how I got an A on my last math test? Being a great student takes a lot of time.” His expression turned sly. “Which would you rather have? Me doing my own laundry or a super-intelligent kid who gets straight A’s?”

  “It’s not an either-or proposition. You’re twelve now. It’s time to start doing your own laundry.”

  “But I already help Dad out with the yard.”

  “We all do that. Look at my face. Is there anything about my expression that makes you think I’m going to change my mind on this? Let us remember the sad summer from two years ago when JJ refused to do his laundry. Think about the layer of dust on his Xbox controller and how he cried and pouted and stomped his feet.”

  “It was embarrassing for all of us.”

  “Yes, it was. Now, you can either be an example to your little brother, or you can provide me with a very humorous story to tell everyone who’s ever met you, but at the end of the day, you will still be doing laundry. Which is it to be?”

  “Maybe I should ask Dad what he thinks.”

  Kristine knew that Jaxsen would take Tommy’s side—not out of malice, but because when it came to his kids, he was the softest touch around.

  “You could and then you would still have to face me.” She kept her tone cheerful. “Am I wrong?”

  “No.” Tommy sighed heavily. “I surrender to the inevitable.”

  “That’s my boy. I’m proud of you. Now, collect your dirty clothes and meet me in the laundry room. You’re going to learn how to work the washer and dryer. I have a schedule posted. You’ll have certain days and times when you will have the privilege of using the washer and dryer. If you use them at other times, when they’re scheduled for JJ or when I want them, you will not enjoy the consequences.”

  “No Xbox?”

  “No skateboard.”

  “Mom! Not my skateboard.”

  Kristine smiled. Both her mother and mother-in-law had taught her that the key to getting kids to do what you wanted was to find out what they wanted and use that as leverage. For JJ it was his Xbox, for Tommy it was his skateboard and for Grant it was being outside. She tried to use her power for good, but she did absolutely use it.

  “And on Saturday, you’ll change your sheets and wash those,” she said happily. “It’s going to be great.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “I know. Isn’t it fabulous?”

  “What if I don’t care about clean sheets?”

  “I think you care about clean sheets about as much as I care about driving you into Marysville to that skate park you love.”

  Tommy’s brown eyes widened in horror. “You wouldn’t not take me, would you?”

  “Of course not. Any young man of twelve years old who has washed his own sheets deserves to be driven to a skate park.”

  “Is that blackmail?” he asked.

  “I think of it as persuasion.”

  “I don’t want to grow up. It’s too much work.”

  “Interesting. Someone should write a book about a boy who refuses to grow up. It sounds like a great story.”

  “It’s Peter Pan.”

  “Is it? Shocking!” She pointed to the pile of laundry on the floor. “I will be giving laundry lessons in ten minutes. If you’re not there, I will start without you. If I start without you, I will do so with your favorite skateboard in my possession.”

  “When I have kids I’m letting them do whatever they want.”

  Kristine pulled her son close and kissed the top of his head—something she wouldn’t be able to do much longer. He’d grown at least two inches in the past year. JJ already towered over her and he was only fourteen. In a couple of years he would be taller than his dad. Even little Grant wasn’t so little. When he fell asleep outside, studying the stars, she couldn’t carry him to bed anymore. She had to call Jaxsen to hoist him up and get him inside.

  “I’m sure you will,” she said with a laugh.

  “You don’t believe me.” Tommy shook his head. “You’re wrong. I’m going to be the best parent ever.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m looking forward to that first panicked phone call.” She lowered her voice. “Mom, the baby’s crying and I don’t know what to d
o.”

  “I would never make that call. I’ll be at work.”

  “Oh, I think you’ll be a stay-at-home dad,” she teased.

  He looked horrified at the idea.

  So far she’d managed to teach her boys to clean their bathroom and help in the kitchen. She was working on getting them to do their own laundry. But she’d been unable to convince them that child rearing should be shared. Probably because she’d always been a stay-at-home mom as were most of the moms of their friends. Jaxsen was a hands-on kind of father but he was more into taking the boys on adventures than shopping for their school clothes or helping out with the homework. She wasn’t setting a very feminist example.

  They needed more exposure to strong women with killer careers. Now that her cousin Sophie was back on the island, they could all have dinner and Sophie could talk about what it was like to run a business empire. Because sending her boys out with life skills was one thing, but sending them out with the belief a woman could be in charge was another.

  Still, they were good kids who were kind and respectful. At least out in public and with adults. With each other they were wild monkeys testing her patience every single day.

  “I should have had girls,” she said with a sigh.

  Tommy rolled his eyes. “You would have hated girls.”

  “They’re clean and pretty and they smell nice.”

  “Boys do smell bad,” her son admitted. “And some girls are really smart. But you’re stuck with us, Mom. No matter what and you have to love us.”

  “Yes, that is the rumor. All right, middle child. Laundry room. Ten minutes or I’m taking your you-know-what for a ride.”

  “You’d fall in like ten feet.”

  “No way. I could totally go twenty.”

  He gave her a quick hug, then started loading the pile of dirty clothes into the clothes basket she’d brought with her.

  She left him to his work and headed for the kitchen. Dinner was in the Crock-Pot. She’d taken care of that this morning. She glanced at the calendar—a large, framed, wall-sized rectangle with big squares for every day of the month and cute pictures of cats around the outside—and saw that JJ would finish up with baseball practice at four and Grant was at his friend Evan’s house until four thirty. Jaxsen would pick up both kids for her, which meant between now and dinner she only had to fold towels, prepare her grocery list for her weekly shopping, decide on a menu for her catering client and write up a grocery list for that, double-check her baking supplies because she would spend all night Thursday making cookies for the upcoming weekend and remind Jaxsen they really had to decide on summer camps for the boys. It was only April but the camps filled up quickly. And speaking of April, it was spring break in two weeks and she needed to know if he was still going to take the boys up in the mountains because if he was, he needed to get out the equipment and make sure everything was still functional.

  Tonight, after dinner and homework, she had to finish her book for book club and get the May calendar put together and order more bags for her cookies and do her March books for her cookie sales, because she hadn’t yet and if she got too behind, she never got caught up. And in those five seconds between brushing her teeth and falling asleep, she would really like to run the numbers on that little space by Island Chic that had gone up for lease last week. Because if she could ever catch her breath, and scrape together the cash, she wanted to talk to Jaxsen about opening a bakery. It had never been the right time before, but maybe now would work. The kids were older and...

  “Mom, I’m ready. I’ve sorted my clothes by colors, like you said. But is it really a big deal if I don’t?”

  “Girls,” she murmured, walking toward the laundry room. “Girls would have been so much easier.”

  Chapter Two

  The Blackberry Island Inn featured comfortable beds, views of the water and a daisy motif Sophie wasn’t sure she totally understood. Daisies weren’t exactly a big thing on the island. If a business wanted to appeal to tourists, then the more blackberries, the better. Yet, there were daisies in the room, daisies on the wallpaper and hundreds, possibly thousands, of daisies planted along the driveway leading from the parking lot to the main road.

  As Sophie walked toward her car, she shivered in the damp, chilly air. She’d forgotten how the island was given to real seasons, unlike back in LA where there was nearly always sunshine. Today there were gray skies and the choppy, black waves of the Sound.

  Under normal circumstances, and on a Monday morning, Sophie wouldn’t have noticed any of that. Instead, she would have been totally focused on her business and what needed to get done that day. But—and she would never admit this to anyone but herself—these days she was feeling a little fragile and disoriented.

  It was the fire, she told herself. Losing her business, not having any of her employees want to move. Okay, and the loss of CK. That reality still had the ability to bring her to her emotional knees. And maybe the fact that she was thirty-four years old and she wasn’t any closer to having her life together than she had been at twenty. She was all about the work and with CK Industries in limbo, she felt lost.

  “Not after today,” she whispered as she turned right at the end of the drive and headed toward the very small industrial area on the island.

  The real estate agent was meeting her at the warehouse at nine. Sophie would get the key and have a look at the space she’d leased for the next five years.

  She drove past touristy shops and wineries before heading inland. There was a small shopping center, the K through eighth-grade school and a few medical buildings. Behind all that were a few office buildings, a handful of small businesses that would do everything from repair your car to clean your carpets. At the end of the street was the large warehouse.

  She parked by the front door. She was early and the place looked closed up tight, so she walked around the outside of the building.

  There was a front office and reception area with big windows and lots of parking for employees. The loading dock was plenty large. Products would come in and then be shipped out to customers. Given that this was literally the only warehouse on the island, she figured she’d been lucky to get it. Now she just had to make everything work.

  Sophie returned to her car and waited for the agent. She sat in the front seat, with the driver’s door open, sipping her take-out coffee. She’d skipped breakfast at the inn, feeling too yucky to bother eating.

  A salty breeze blew in from the west, but despite the gray skies, she didn’t think it was going to rain today. Sophie wondered if her years in Los Angeles would make it difficult for her to adjust to the weather, or if it would matter at all. She assumed she would be working her usual sixteen-hour days. As long as the roof didn’t leak, she wasn’t sure she would even care about something as mundane as the weather.

  A small SUV pulled into the parking lot. Sophie stood to greet the real estate agent. Once the key was in her hand, she would feel better, she told herself. She could get started on rebuilding CK Industries and everything would be fine.

  Twenty minutes, two signatures and a brief conversation later, Sophie walked into the warehouse and waited for a sense of relief or even elation. The space was huge—nearly double what she’d had in Valencia. There were about a dozen offices, plenty of bathrooms and a massive open area where she could install miles of shelves and have the shipping center of her dreams. It was great. It was better than great, it was...

  “Awful,” Sophie whispered, turning in a circle and taking in the emptiness around her.

  She’d started CK Industries in the second bedroom of a two-bedroom apartment she’d rented while still in college, although the concept had been born in her freshman dorm room. From there she’d moved to a small space in a Culver City industrial complex. Two years after that she’d needed more square footage. The move to Valencia had come after her divorce and at the time, she’d felt e
xcited—as if she were escaping to a new life.

  This relocation wasn’t that. This had been forced upon her by bad electrical wiring. She hadn’t been prepared for the devastation—physical and emotional—of it all and to be honest, she wasn’t excited about the work she was going to have to do. It was overwhelming.

  She wanted to stomp her feet and demand a do-over. Or at least a recount. But there was no one to complain to. This was her baby and only she could make it a success.

  “Lead, follow or get out of the way,” she reminded herself. “Winners win. I am the champion. It’s up to me. I can do this.”

  None of the words seemed to be getting through but at least saying them was better than admitting defeat. She walked over to one of the huge loading dock doors and pushed the button to open it. Cool air blew in. Sophie lowered her backpack to the floor, sank down to sit cross-legged and prepared to get to work.

  She needed everything. Employees, product, shelves, shipping supplies, office supplies, office furniture and Wi-Fi. While still in Los Angeles, she’d picked out everything she wanted but had waited to order until she knew the size of all the various spaces. She also had a big, fat insurance check sitting in her bank account to pay for it all.

  She got out her computer and, using her phone as a hotspot, logged on to the local internet provider and arranged for service. She would order everything else back in her room at the inn. The house she’d rented wouldn’t be available until the end of the week. Once she was settled there, she could fully focus on the business. In a couple of months everything would be running smoothly and it would be like the fire never happened. Or so she hoped.

  “Anybody home?”