Page 1 of Homecoming

Chapter

One

“Where thou art, that is home.”

—Emily Dickinson

They rodehome from the wedding in stunned silence. After a gorgeous day celebrating their dear friends Victoria and Shannon, Kara Torrington had received a phone call from her mother.

You and Dan need to come home. Your brothers have been charged with murder.

Her parents weren’t interested in gettingherhome to Maine as much as they were inher husband, a successful criminaldefense attorney who specialized in getting wrongly accused people exonerated.

Kara wasn’t sure if her brothers fell into that category. Some of them had been raising hell from the minute they were born, and she wasn’t at all surprised to hear serious trouble had found them, although she was shocked to hear that Kirby was one of the two who’d been charged.

Keith? That wasn’t as much of a surprise, but Kirby… He’d never been in any kind of trouble. She was fairly confident Keith would turn out to be responsible for whatever circumstances had landed them both in jail, accused of the worst possible crime. Not that she thought Keith was capable of murder. At least she hoped he couldn’t have done something like that.

Kara had seven brothers and three sisters but wasn’t particularly close to most of them. Not anymore. However, she talked to Kirby regularly and was truly shocked to hear he’d been arrested for anything, let alone murder.

Relocating to Gansett Island to run a division of the family business several summers ago had been the smartest move Kara could’ve made for herself. It had gotten her out of the hornet’s nest of family drama, away from her sister Kelly, who’d casually stolen Kara’s boyfriend—and then married him—and Gansett had brought Dan Torrington into her life. He was, without a doubt, the best thing to ever happen to her. And she never would’ve met him if Kelly—and Matt—hadn’t stabbed her in the back.

While things had worked out well for Kara on Gansett, where she’d made the kind of friends that made a life complete, the thought of going home to Maine and being surrounded by the unruly Ballard family was the last thing in the world she wanted to do, especially when she was seven months pregnant.

She placed a hand on her rounded belly and gasped when the baby gave a hard kick.

“Is Bruiser playing soccer again?” Dan asked as he parked the Porsche he’d inherited from his late brother, Dylan, in the driveway.

“He’s playing something.”

He reached over to put his hand on top of hers. “Does it hurt?”

“No, it’s just weird to have someone moving around in there.”

“Wait for me.” He got out of the low-slung car, came around to the passenger side and offered her a hand out.

Without his help, she wasn’t sure she would’ve been able to get out on her own. The pregnancy had left her feeling ungainly and off-balance.

Inside, she went straight to the bedroom and retrieved suitcases from the back of the closet.

Dan came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Babe.”

“What?”

“Look at me.”

She turned to face him.

“We don’t have to do this.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re under no obligation to go there or to deal with any of this. You’re in the third trimester. We have a perfectly good reason to tell them we can’t make it.”

Kara stopped to consider that. She was sorely tempted to use her pregnancy as an excuse to stay put on Gansett Island. She’d worked so hard to build a life for herself separate from her family, even if she still worked for the family business.

Everything was better from a distance.

She might’ve stayed away if her Kirby hadn’t been charged. He had to be freaking out, and there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him.

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