The Real Way Home

By Andi Winter

Can you ever go home?

Angry and reeling from her father's sudden death, Ava Garman goes on a girls' weekend to escape her life for a few blissful days. A trip to the Oregon Coast seems like the perfect solution: fresh ocean air, delicious seafood, and some refreshing time with her two best friends.

But when her best friends bail on her, leaving Ava as the sole guest on a whale watching trip, Ava finds herself stuck on a boat with a trip she never wanted, with an annoying boat captain.

An annoying and handsome boat captain who pushes her every button.

A contemporary romance story about family, identity, and how we define 'home'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andi Winter
• Release date: Feb 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201521271

Book preview

The Real Way Home

The Real Way Home

A Romance Short Story

Andi Winter

Rainy Mountain Publishing

The Real Way Home

Copyright © 2022 by Andi Winter

All rights reserved.

Cover art copyright © zstockphotos / 123RF

This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places, and incidents are either products of the imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people or incidents is coincidental. This book, or parts, thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

The Real Way Home

Read on for a preview

Spring Comes Twice

Other Titles by Andi Winter

About the Author

The Real Way Home

There are a lot of ways to go home, and I’m not talking about the different highways or side streets or even flight routes. I’m not talking about the physical.

I’m talking about the mental. Okay, really I’m talking about the emotional.

I’d been home a number of times ever since I left for college. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. Sure, I chose to go to a school out of state, but the glossy brochure with its gorgeous photos of lush green ivy scaling the red brick buildings, the happy students buying fresh flowers at the corner market stall, people of all shades and colors lying on the soft grass napping in the sun with their textbooks… After a childhood spent in Wyoming, a world of black, white, gray, and sage green, with the occasional dabs of pine green and rotting brown, seeing that college brochure was like Dorothy stepping out of her black and white Kansas and into full-on Technicolor Oz.

At eighteen, my soul demanded that I go to that paradise. Never mind that it was a thousand miles away from home, where I knew no one. All that mattered was that I had to go there, and then when the music scholarship came through, the Signs of the Gods all pointed to Oregon.

Now twelve years later I was headed back for my father’s funeral.

I hadn’t been back since I graduated. And I had never planned on going back. That place was the past, and I had my future to focus on. Looking backward never got anybody anything, other than regret and a crick in the neck.

Hey, do you mind tossing me the rope?

Images of light gray plains crashing into sharp black and white Rocky Mountains slipped away, replaced by a sour-looking guy about my age in a pale blue grease-dotted Haley’s Charter Tours t-shirt, loose khaki cargo shorts, and boat shoes. He had