Love at the Lighthouse: St. James Sisters Collection, #1

By Tana Jenkins

In this poignant tale, award-winning author Tana Jenkins lays the foundation for a love story that is tender, exquisite, heart-rending, and dear.

She was the underdog. He was her champion. Together they planned to take on the world, or at least the biggest sail boating race their small island town had ever seen.

Ten years ago, if you'd told Sydney St. James that Devin Fox, her best friend and adventure partner extraordinaire, would one day become her enemy, she wouldn't have believed you.

Find out about the plot twist she never saw coming in Love at the Lighthouse, the prequel to Sailing into the Heart, Book One in the St. James Sisters sweet, interracial, multicultural romance collection. 

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tana Jenkins
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201328962

Book preview

Love at the Lighthouse

(Prequel to Sailing into the Heart)

Tana Jenkins

Oxford House Publications

Prequel to Sailing into the Heart

Copyright © 2022 by Tana Jenkins

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This book is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination and not to be taken as real. Any resemblance to anything actually in the real world is entirely coincidental.

First edition

Contents

1. Chapter 1

2. Chapter 2

3. Chapter 3

4. Chapter 4

5. Chapter 5

6. Chapter 6

7. Chapter 7

About Author

Also By Tana Jenkins

Chapter one

image-placeholder

Sydney - Mackinac Island - Five Years Earlier

"W ill you marry me?" he’d asked.

Even the crickets fell silent. Waves lapping the rocky shore down below seemed to still.

Sydney remembered turning to face the boy crouched beside her in the boxwoods. Summer shadows from light-dappled leaves fell across his high, spoon-shaped cheekbones and full lips, which curled only slightly at one corner—into that mystifying smile she’d yet to comprehend. Inches from her nose, a foraging bumblebee hovered, dipped, then buzzed away on wings as fast and light as her heart had suddenly become.

Maybe it was the hiding, or the heat of their recent run from the water catching up with her. Maybe it was the play of clouds leaving her exposed to the island’s powerful sun, but her palms moistened and her throat went dry as she searched his dark eyes eagerly, uncertain if she’d heard him correctly.

His words had been whisper-soft, barely audible against the backdrop of a flute’s lilting melody and a cello whose deep chords were both sad and sweet at the same time.

She frowned. If he had said what she’d thought he’d said, were his words even meant for her? After all, they were spying on a wedding.

Was he just guessing ahead like she and her sisters did when they watched television? Or was this another joke she didn’t get? Chicago, as he’d explained several times, was a whole different world from her small shoreside town across the channel, St. Ignace, population 2,452—and that was counting the chickens.

It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d misunderstood something he’d said. In the two summers they’d been palling around on Mackinac Island, where his grandfather had a small cabin in the woods and her grandmother had a cleaning job, her seasonal friend joked about her slow country wit at least once a week, if not daily.

No, his sweet question couldn’t have been directed at her, though the possibility sent her silly heart skipping, and she wanted to ask him to be sure.

A fleet of horse hooves clopping on cobbled stones echoed above the music, snatching the moment, and Sydney’s attention in time to see a Cinderella-like woman and her carriage roll to a stop a few feet away. Led by a majestic team of ten white Clydesdales, their manes festooned with ribbons, the woman’s smile glittered more brightly than the stones in her tiara or the jeweled bodice of her ball gown. Her pumpkin-shaped coach, silver and bedecked with flower garlands, looked like something from a Disney movie.

Sydney’s chest stilled when a