Inner Harbor (Chesapeake Bay Saga, Band 3) - Softcover

Roberts, Nora

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425262758 ISBN 13: 9780425262757

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

The third novel in #1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts' stunning Chesapeake Bay Saga, where the Quinn brothers must return to their family home on the Maryland shore, to honor their father's last request...

Phillip Quinn has done everything to make his life seem perfect. With his career on the fast track and a condo overlooking the Inner Harbor, his life on the street is firmly in the past. But one look at Seth and he’s reminded of the boy he once was.

Seth’s future as a Quinn seems assured—until a stranger arrives in town. She claims to be researching the town of St. Christopher’s for her new book, but the true objects of study are the Quinns. Her cool reserve intrigues Phillip. He is determined to uncover her motives, but she is holding a secret that has the power to threaten the life the brothers have made for Seth. A secret that could tear the family apart—forever...


Don't miss the other books in the Chesapeake Bay Saga
Sea Swept
Rising Tides
Chesapeake Blue

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nora Roberts is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 novels. She is also the author of the bestselling In Death series written under the pen name J. D. Robb. There are more than 500 million copies of her books in print.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

     Phillip loosened the windsor knot in his Fendi tie. It was a long commute from Baltimore to Maryland's Eastern Shore, and he'd programmed his CD player with that in mind. He started out mellow with a little Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

    Thursday-evening traffic was as bad as predicted, made worse by the sluggish rain and the rubberneckers who couldn't resist a long, fascinated goggle at the three-car accident on the Baltimore Beltway.

    By the time he was heading south on Route 50, even the hot licks of vintage Stones couldn't completely lift his mood.

    He'd brought work with him and somehow had to eke out time for the Myerstone Tire account over the weekend. They wanted a whole new look for this advertising campaign. Happy tires make happy drivers, Phillip thought, drumming his fingers on the wheel to the rhythm of Keith Richards's outlaw guitar.

    Which was a crock, he decided. Nobody was happy driving in rainy rush-hour traffic, no matter what rubber covered their wheels.

    But he'd come up with something that would make the consumers think that riding on Myerstones would make them happy, safe, and sexy. It was his job, and he was good at it.

    Good enough to juggle four major accounts, supervise the status of six lesser ones, and never appear to break a sweat within the slick corridors of Innovations, the well-heeled advertising firm where heworked. The firm that demanded style, exuberance, and creativity from its executives.

    They didn't pay to see him sweat.

    Alone, however, was a different matter.

    He knew he'd been burning not a candle but a torch at both ends for months. With one hard slap of fate he'd gone from living for Phillip Quinn to wondering what had happened to his cheerfully upwardly mobile urban lifestyle.

    His father's death six months before had turned his life upside down. The life that Ray and Stella Quinn had righted seventeen years ago. They'd walked into that dreary hospital room and offered him a chance and a choice. He'd taken the chance because he'd been smart enough to understand that he had no choice.

    Going back on the streets wasn't as appealing as it had been before his chest had been ripped open by bullets. Living with his mother was no longer an option, not even if she changed her mind and let him buy his way back into the cramped apartment on Baltimore's Block. Social Services was taking a hard look at the situation, and he knew he'd be dumped into the system the minute he was back on his feet.

    He had no intention of going back into the system, or back with his mother, or back to the gutter, for that matter. He'd already decided that. He felt that all he needed was a little time to work out a plan.

    At the moment that time was buffered by some very fine drugs that he hadn't had to buy or steal. But he didn't figure that little benefit was going to last forever.

    With the Demerol sliding through his system, he gave the Quinns a canny once-over and dismissed them as a couple of weirdo do-gooders. That was fine with him. They wanted to be Samaritans, give him a place to hang out until he was back to a hundred percent, good for them. Good for him.

    They told him they had a house on the Eastern Shore, which for an inner-city kid was the other end of the world. But he figured a change of scene couldn't hurt. They had two sons about his age. Phillip decided he wouldn't have to worry about a couple of wimps that the do-gooders had raised.

    They told him they had rules, and education was a priority. School didn't bother him any. He breezed his way through when he decided to go.

    No drugs. Stella said that in a cool voice that made Phillip reevaluate her as he put on his most angelic expression and said a polite No, ma'am. He had no doubt that when he wanted a hit, he'd be able to find a source, even in some bumfuck town on the Bay.

    Then Stella leaned over the bed, her eyes shrewd, her mouth smiling thinly.

    You have a face that belongs on a Renaissance painting. But that doesn't make you less of a thief, a hoodlum, and a liar. We'll help you if you want to be helped. But don't treat us like imbeciles.

    And Ray laughed his big, booming laugh. He squeezed Stella's shoulder and Phillip's at the same time. It would be, Phillip remembered he'd said, a rare treat to watch the two of them butt heads for the next little while.

    They came back several times over the next two weeks. Phillip talked with them and with the social worker, who'd been much easier to con than the Quinns.

    In the end they took him home from the hospital, to the pretty white house by the water. He met their sons, assessed the situation. When he learned that the other boys, Cameron and Ethan, had been taken in much as he had been, he was certain they were all lunatics.

    He figured on biding his time. For a doctor and a college professor they hadn't collected an abundance of easily stolen or fenced, valuables. But he scoped out what there was.

    Instead of stealing from them, he fell in love with them. He took their name and spent the next ten years in the house by the water.

    Then Stella had died, and part of his world dropped away. She had become the mother he'd never believed existed. Steady, strong, loving, and shrewd. He grieved for her, that first true loss of his life. He buried part of that grief in work, pushing his way through college, toward a goal of success and a sheen of sophistication—and an entry-level position at Innovations.

    He didn't intend to remain on the bottom rung for long.

    Taking the position at Innovations in Baltimore was a small personal triumph. He was going back to the city of his misery, but he was going back as a man of taste. No one seeing the man in the tailored suit would suspect that he'd once been a petty thief, a sometime drug dealer, and an occasional prostitute.

    Everything he'd gained over the last seventeen years could be traced back to that moment when Ray and Stella Quinn had walked into his hospital room.

    Then Ray had died suddenly, leaving shadows that had yet to be washed with the light. The man Phillip had loved as completely as a son could love a father had lost his life on a quiet stretch of road in the middle of the day when his car had met a telephone pole at high speed.

    There was another hospital room. This time it was the Mighty Quinn lying broken in the bed with machines gasping. Phillip, along with his brothers, had made a promise to watch out for and to keep the last of Ray Quinn's strays, another lost boy.

    But this boy had secrets, and he looked at you, with Ray's eyes.

    The talk around the waterfront and the neighborhoods of the little town of St. Christopher's on Maryland's Eastern Shore hinted of adultery, of suicide, of scandal. In the six months since the whispers had started, Phillip felt that he and his brothers had gotten no closer to finding the truth. Who was Seth DeLauter and what had he been to Raymond Quinn?

    Another stray? Another half-grown boy drowning in a vicious sea of neglect and violence who so desperately needed a lifeline? Or was he more? A Quinn by blood as well as by...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0425262758
• ISBN 13: 9780425262757
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: BERKLEY; https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY; ; Unit 2 Limavady Business Park; Limavady; County Londonderry; BT49 0HR; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland