Return to Me a Blue Harbor novel OLIVIA MILES Rosewood Press ALSO BY OLIVIA MILES Blue Harbor Series A Place for Us Second Chance Summer Because of You Small Town Christmas Stand-Alone Titles Meet Me at Sunset (Evening Island) This Christmas Oyster Bay Series Feels Like Home Along Came You Maybe This Time This Thing Called Love Those Summer Nights Still the One One Fine Day Had to Be You Misty Point Series One Week to the Wedding The Winter Wedding Plan Sweeter in the City Series Sweeter in the Summer Sweeter Than Sunshine No Sweeter Love One Sweet Christmas Briar Creek Series Mistletoe on Main Street A Match Made on Main Street Hope Springs on Main Street Love Blooms on Main Street Christmas Comes to Main Street Harlequin Special Edition ‘Twas the Week Before Christmas Recipe for Romance Copyright © 2021 by Megan Leavell All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission. Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental. Return to Me contents Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Epilogue 1 Brooke Conway had a secret. A couple of them, really, not that she was particularly proud. The most pressing one was that she was back in Blue Harbor, her hometown, and even though she’d let her sisters and parents know of her plans, they hadn’t known that plans had changed. That instead of arriving in town today, she’d actually been here for four whole days. Laying low. Fighting that pull in her chest that said coming here was a bad idea. It hadn’t been easy to pull off, exactly, not when her new apartment was located smack in the middle of Main Street, for all to see. She’d changed her flight, flagged a cab, fought back the apprehension as each mile ticked by, bringing her closer to the northern Michigan coast. She’d waited in the cab for a full ten minutes in case she’d been spotted, shielded behind sunglasses and happy that the inexpensive moving company she’d hired wouldn’t be delivering most of her belongings until the following week, so she didn’t have to worry about carrying too much, or drawing attention with a big unloading day. Not that she had much. In Manhattan, she was rarely in her apartment. Other than a few pieces of furniture and boxes of dishes that served as mere trays for her take-out containers, she didn’t own much other than fabric, and her most prized possession, the thing she had invested in and couldn’t live without, her state of the art, industrial-grade sewing machine, she had managed to take with her, though not without paying dearly for its transport, and even then she had fretted as she’d sipped her diet soda and stared out the small oval window at the clouds, hoping that it hadn’t gotten lost in transit, only exhaling when she saw it coming down the cargo line in baggage claim. This she’d carried up the stairs, as carefully as others might hold a newborn baby. The apartment was semi-furnished with a guest bed in the second room, a small sofa in the living room, and a kitchen table and chairs near the front bay window. She’d set her sewing machine on the table, retrieved grocery bags with darting eyes, and then made one final trip for her suitcase and tote, tipping the driver handsomely for allowing her to stop off at the big supermarket near the airport along the way. Once the door was locked behind her, she’d pulled all the blinds. And that was how she had stayed for the past four days. Hiding in her own hometown. Maybe there was no excuse. Maybe it was shameful. But coming back had been difficult enough—staying wouldn’t be easier, but she’d gotten over the hurdle, dove headfirst, like she used to do in the icy waters of the lake on the first warm day. Eventually, she’d get used to things. Acclimate. Eventually, it would all be okay. So she told herself. When the cab had driven over the town line, she’d immediately questioned her decision, causing her heart to speed up and her mind to spin and a hundred excuses to turn right around, even though U-turns were possibly illegal in Michigan (she hadn’t been back in so long, she couldn’t be sure) and she was fairly certain that the driver was losing patience. But there was nowhere to go back to, and that was the reason she pressed on, quietly moved into the space that she’d rented on Main Street—a vacant storefront for her wedding dress boutique and a small apartment conveniently above—even though her sister Gabby’s flower shop was only a block down and several of her cousins were within reach, too. She just needed…a moment. She needed to settle in, catch her breath, and find her footing. Her family would see plenty of her going forward. She was back now. Back. Just thinking of that made the knot tighten in her stomach, even though she knew it was the
