Last Call at Fairley's
Meredith Fairley has seven days to sell her late father's harbor bar and every intention of being back in Boston before anyone asks the one question she can't survive answering.
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The story
The story
Meredith Fairley has seven days to sell her late father's harbor bar and every intention of being back in Boston before anyone asks the one question she can't survive answering.
The plan doesn't survive the front door. The taps are clean, the regulars are on their stools, and the man she left without a word ten years ago has kept Fairley's open because her father asked him to.
Beck Whitaker fixes what's broken with patient hands and says almost nothing. He makes her coffee exactly the way she takes it, unasked. He lays a fair offer on the bar, contents included. What he wants more can't be bought: the truth about why she left, from her own mouth.
Then there's Duncan Fiske, who holds paper on half the harbor. His $64,000 note on her father's bar started its clock the day she came home, and Beck's boatyard is pledged on it too.
Beck's knuckles pass close enough to her wrist that her skin has opinions.
A steamy small-town second-chance romance on the Maine coast.
Spice map
Where it gets hot
Heat, chapter by chapter. No spoilers, just warning.
The world
Know your way around
Character
- Beck Whitaker
- The man who has kept Fairley's running for two years because her father asked him to. He planes a swollen door until it swings sweet and silent, lifts a crate off her one-handed, and makes her coffee exactly as she takes it. He has left her an offer to buy the bar.
- Clive Rooney
- A regular who takes the third stool from the door, which has developed a new pinch on the left cheek. He chases people off Edmund's stool, refuses a replacement out of loyalty to the old one, and will tell you his own is not dead yet.
- Edmund Fairley
- Meredith's late father, who owned the bar. His coat still hangs by the pass, his reading glasses sit folded in a chipped dish behind the register, and nobody is allowed to sit on his stool, the one by the register with the brass ring worn to a shine.
- Jorie Bell
- Meredith's best friend, who walks in with two coffees because Jorie has always carried two, and works a shift at the library. She has a gift for putting a stone in your pocket and smiling while you find it, and ten years of unanswered texts in her face.
- Meredith Fairley
- A Boston wedding planner who fixes other people's disasters in four minutes flat and runs her own plan off a clipboard. She has driven home for the first time in ten years to sell her late father's bar in seven days, and her list has no line for the stool by the register.
- Sylvie Pender
- The town's pie supplier, who arrives with a towel-wrapped dish carried like a rescued animal and the announcement that it is her last experiment: 'I mean it this time.' She beams over a good one like a lighthouse.
Place
- Fairley's
- The oldest bar on the harbor. The door makes two notes, the chalkboard promises fish chowder in block letters, and the photograph wall holds lobster boats and the '89 regatta. The jukebox is unplugged, its chrome dulled by forty years of elbows, and the floor was mopped this morning for customers coming back tonight.
Term
- Keeping the lights honest
- Edmund's request of Beck two years ago, before the hospital: keep the taps clean and the regulars fed, and let nobody raise the price of a pint more than small change, once a year, if the year deserves it. Beck says Edmund was serious about the small change.
- The offer
- Beck's proposal to buy the bar, laid beside her coffee in a folded packet: a price, a closing date, and a list in his square hand of the building, the license and the fixtures, contents as they stand. Most buyers strike the contents. Beck says he knows what he's buying.
Spoiler-safe. Only what you learn in chapter 1.
