Sea Glass Winter Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE SHELTER BAY NOVELS

  Moonshell Beach

  “Ms. Ross writes a story that wraps around your heart and ensnares you… . She is a master storyteller.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Ross gradually builds up the sexual tension between her characters with convincing tact in a comfortingly idyllic milieu where nearly everyone else is in love… . [She] satisfyingly fleshes out their mating dance with secondary characters familiar from her earlier books and tantalizing glimpses of stories to be told in future installments.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This is a lovely addition to the Shelter Bay series. Ross builds a charming town filled with good, solid people… making Shelter Bay a place that readers will really want to visit.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “I immediately dug into Moonshell Beach and read it cover to cover in two days. I just couldn’t put it down… . Shelter Bay is the kind of town I’d love to live in myself.”

  —Love Romances & More

  On Lavender Lane

  “Cooking, romance, and a warm, inviting setting work their delectable magic in this tender charmer that introduces new characters (and some serious issues) and reprises previous series players.”

  —Library Journal

  “[A] tear-jerking tale of a commitment-shy professional cook learning to love a former Navy SEAL in idyllic rural Oregon… [a] savory romance.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The Shelter Bay novels have been lauded, and this one is a worthy entry in the series. The characters, especially the recurring ones, are so likable that the reader can’t help getting caught up in the story… engrossing with just enough humor to keep the readers on their toes. I await each new story with anticipation.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Shelter Bay is a town that envelops readers in warmth. This latest entry in the series features a lovely romance that rolls in with the inevitability of the tide. Warning: It is also a foodie book that will leave you hungry—and hungry for the next book, too!”

  —Romantic Times

  One Summer

  “Ms. Ross knows how to tell a story that pulls her readers in and takes them on an emotional journey as they turn the pages. If you’re looking for a fulfilling story that you can’t help but fall in love with, then this along with her other novel in the series, The Homecoming, are two books you shouldn’t pass up!”

  —Night Owl Reviews

  The Homecoming

  “Quintessential Ross, with a terrific romance [and] mystery. Not to be missed.”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  “Ross has again hit a homer… an outstanding job.”

  —Fallen Angel Reviews

  “One of the best books I’ve read this summer… . Ms. Ross penned such emotion into her story line and created characters that you easily fall in love with.”

  —Night Owl Reviews

  PRAISE FOR OTHER NOVELS BY JOANN ROSS

  Breakpoint

  “An action-packed thriller that never decelerates until the finish… one of the better high-octane sagas on the market today.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  Crossfire

  “The plot is riveting, the characters sizzle, and the ending will blow you away. Trust me, you do not want to miss Crossfire. But keep in mind once you pick it up, it’s impossible to put down.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “[A] can’t-put-down-forget-the-housework-cereal-for-dinner book. The chemistry between Quinn and Cait screams off the page and practically singes your fingers.”

  —Romance Junkies

  Freefall

  “A page-turning mix of danger, suspense, and passion.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Iris Johansen

  “An incredible story!”

  —Fresh Fiction

  No Safe Place

  “Sizzles with the sensuality and danger fans of her romantic thrillers have come to expect.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A page-turner… . Hop on the Ross Express for a lightning ride.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard

  Impulse

  “[A] great love story with all the thrills and chills that will have the readers coming back for more.”

  —Fallen Angel Reviews

  Blaze

  “Seamlessly plotted… . Ross keeps the heat on right to the last page.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Dynamic… fast-paced, utterly engrossing.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  Out of the Storm

  “Out of the Storm sizzles! A captivating and entertaining blend of romance, mystery, and suspense.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  Out of the Blue

  “[An] adventurous, exhilarating story. Danger and intrigue are a constant presence. Highly passionate… outstanding.”

  —Romance Junkies

  River Road

  “Skillful and satisfying… with its emotional depth, Ross’s tale will appeal to Nora Roberts fans.”

  —Booklist

  “The romance… crackles and the verbal sparring keeps the narrative moving along at an energetic clip… delightful.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Confessions

  “[A] hot, steamy… page-turner.”

  —A Little Romance

  Also by JoAnn Ross

  Shelter Bay Novels

  Moonshell Beach

  On Lavender Lane

  One Summer

  The Homecoming

  High Risk Novels

  Freefall

  Crossfire

  Shattered

  Breakpoint

  SEA GLASS WINTER

  A SHELTER BAY NOVEL

  JoAnn Ross

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  ISBN 978-1-101-59023-2

  Copyright © The Ross Family Trust, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Printed in the United States of America

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any contro
l over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The recipe contained in this book is to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipe contained in this book.

  Contents

  Praise

  Also by JoAnn Ross

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  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

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Dillon Slater’s Steam Clam Recipe

  Special Excerpt from Castaway Cove

  Again, to all the men and women of the military, and their families, for their service and sacrifice.

  To Maureen Hallet. When I used Google Earth to buy a lot for our new home three thousand miles away, I had no idea I’d end up living next door to such a great friend and neighbor.

  And, as always, to Jay, my very own hero.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With huge thanks to my fantastic publishing team at NAL—

  Publisher Kara Welsh, for her unwavering support over so many years; editor extraordinaire Kerry Donovan, for her ability to see the forest for the trees and being, hands down, the best brainstorming editor ever; NAL editorial director Claire Zion, who literally changed my life when she pulled my manuscript out of her slush pile thirty-one years ago; and last, but certainly not least, Mimi Bark, who, with watercolor artist Paul Janovsky, has wrapped my Shelter Bay stories in such beautiful covers.

  War is hell!

  William Tecumseh Sherman

  I’ve got a theory that if you give one hundred percent all of the time, somehow things will work out in the end.

  Larry Bird

  1

  Tech sergeant Dillon Slater’s business was bombs. And in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, Dillon’s business was booming.

  The landscape he was driving his Buffalo armored mine-disposal vehicle through could have come right from the pages of the Old Testament. Years of baking beneath the hot Afghan sun had turned the mud of the compounds as hard as concrete. Unlike some of the royal palaces he’d seen while deployed in Iraq, these dwellings boasted no gaudy exterior decoration. Uniformly putty colored, they were purely functional.

  Children waved as the twenty-six-ton vehicle bounced over what felt more like a goat trail than a real road crossing the bleak, moonscape surface.

  In earlier deployments, he’d been lucky if his EOD batphone rang a dozen times a week. But the enemy was nothing if not adaptive, and since the country had turned into the Wild West, they’d figured out that it was a lot easier to blow up coalition forces from a distance than to take them on in a shoot-out-at-the-O.K.-Corral-style gunfight situation.

  In the past week alone, 212 IEDs had been discovered and detonated. Doing the math—and he had—that worked out to more than 11,000 a year. What had once been a cottage industry—guys making bombs in their mud homes—had turned into an industrial complex capable of knocking out one IED every fifteen minutes, thanks to global jihadists sharing technologies and procedures.

  “Crazy,” he muttered as he pulled into the area where a Ranger unit was standing around waiting for him.

  He’d been called to this same spot yesterday to remove a crude pressure-plate device next to a basketball court he’d helped build. Together with other unit volunteers, he’d cleared the space and poured the surface, using Quikrete donated by some Navy SEALs. One thing Dillon had learned early on was that SEALs could get their hands on just about anything. Another thing he’d learned was to never ask them where they’d gotten it.

  What really chapped his hide was that whatever cretin had planted that IED had been willing to take out the children who played on the court every day—often with troops. The pickup games were more than just a way to burn off energy—they served as yet another attempt to win hearts and minds. Which personally Dillon wasn’t so sure was working, since more people kept trying to kill him every day. But hey, military war policy and nation building were way above his pay grade.

  Unlike the previous day, when the square had been filled with civilian onlookers, today the place was mostly deserted.

  Which was not good. One of the first things Dillon had learned in training was to look for the absence of normal and the presence of abnormal. Both of which they definitely had here.

  Did everyone but them know what was going on? Had the kids who were usually playing roundball on this court been warned to stay away?

  The hair on the back of his neck stood up as combat intuition, borne from years of experience, kicked in.

  “We’re being set up,” Jason West, one of his team members, said from the backseat as they pulled up next to a Hummer with Arabic writing painted on the side.

  On Dillon’s first tour here he’d learned that the script translated to “Not EOD” (Explosive Ordnance Disposal). Having the guys on your side wanting to make sure no one mistook them for bomb guys was an indication of how popular Dillon and his team tended to be with the local population.

  “Could be,” he agreed, drawling out his words in his native west Texas twang as he considered that unpleasant prospect. “Then again, we could have some hotshot showing off to his pals by playing with us.”

  He jumped down from the Buffalo and went over and talked to the Rangers, the ones who had called in the possible explosive, and they reported that none of the few civilians they’d been able to question had seen anyone plant an IED.

  Surprise, surprise.

  One of the cool things about the Buffalo was its thirty-foot mechanical arm with both a claw and a camera attached. Returning to the vehicle, he extended the arm to get a better look at the device, which was only partially buried right behind the basket pole.

  “Bingo,” he said as the camera eye caught the familiar pink wire an eagle-eyed Ranger, who’d come here for a pickup game, had spotted. “This has cell phone guy’s fingerprints all over it.”

  In the beginning, the IEDs Dillon had dealt with had been simple pressure plates. Drive over it, step on it, two pieces of metal connected, and boom.

  They’d been crude. Hell, if he�
��d been into bomb making when he was a kid, he could’ve put one together in ten minutes for a fourth-grade science fair project. But they didn’t need to be fancy and high-tech to kill.

  The problem was that they also killed indiscriminately, meaning they were just as likely to take out civilians as they were American or NATO forces. Which hadn’t exactly made their makers all that popular.

  Then the insurgents had upped their skill set, adding command-wire remote controls to the mix. Bury one in the middle of the road, and if the patrol you’d planned to hit changed routes, you simply turned it off and avoided the collateral damage of blowing up some poppy farmer’s donkey. Or wife. Or child.

  Then, just as easily, it could be switched on again when the timing proved right.

  In the beginning, garage door openers had been popular. More and more, though, Dillon had been running into cell phones all tied up with pretty pink wires, which tended to make his team edgier—and even, from time to time, paranoid. Was that guy over there talking on his phone really speaking to his wife, telling her what time he’d be home for dinner? Or was he about to hit talk and blow more Americans sky-high?

  “We could wait for another robot to be brought in,” said West, who’d been riding shotgun.

  Their own robot, Larry, named for robot Larry Fine in Revenge of the Nerds, had been injured when it rolled off a ledge two days earlier, and they were still waiting either to get him back or receive a replacement.

  “If it’s a setup, the longer we stay here, the more we become sitting ducks,” said Chance Longstreet, who was in the back, pointing out what they all already knew. “The bastards have already gotten rid of Larry. Why let them take out some more of us?”

  Although they’d all been pissed to have Larry out of commission, Longstreet, who operated the robot from a military-grade laptop, took the loss personally.

  “Good point,” Dillon said.

  Maybe it wasn’t a bomb at all. Maybe just some buried wires designed to pull the team into sniper range. Or worse yet, a kill box. The Buffalo might be armor clad, but if mortars started raining down on them from the roofs of those buildings, they’d all be toast.