Delia's Place

Book excerpt: Delia Eleanor Walker's life is perfectly planned, the wedding date set, the invitations mailed, and her family gathered at the North Carolina beach house ready to celebrate-when Delia receives Prentice's unexpected fed-ex announcing he's married someone else! What on earth will she do? She's centered every aspect of her future around her upcoming marriage, and Delia knows her family will somehow blame the break-up on her. They always do. They'll call it one more immature botch-up by the baby of the family. In her lap, among the mail just received, Delia seizes on an answer-an invitation from Maureen Cross for a last visit to her Aunt Dee's old cottage behind Gatlinburg. It's cowardly to run, but Delia does, hoping to find in the mountains time to heal and space to chart a new direction for her life. Instead of peace and quiet, Delia finds a troubled cousin she's never met hiding out in her aunt's house and an old childhood playmate and heartthrob, Tanner Cross, back in town, reminding her of yet another time she made a fool of herself romantically. To top it off, a criminal is on the loose, along with an increasingly complicated array of new problems that Delia never, in a million years, expected to encounter.