The Lemon Sisters Read online

  Dedication

  I always wanted a sister. It never happened for me, but it makes my heart full to have raised four girls, knowing they’ll always have one another. Over the years, they’ve been like a pack of kittens sometimes—can’t stand to be together, can’t stand to be apart. But at the end of the day, they love each other fiercely, and it makes me so proud. So to all the sisters, of blood or heart, this one’s for you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Praise for Jill Shalvis

  Also by Jill Shalvis

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  “I get that life sucks right now, but that’s never a reason to wear granny panties.”

  Without warning, the helicopter dipped sharply, and Brooke Lemon’s stomach went along with it. Her view of a pretty sky shifted, and suddenly they were sideways and she was staring out at a craggy mountain peak, seemingly close enough to touch.

  Compounding the terror, the previously benign sky had given way to a sudden cloud pack, dark and turbulent, and her heart pounded in tune to the thump, thump, thump of the rotors. The chopper shuddered, straining to right itself. Her palms went slick and nausea welled, making her regret that extra sleeve of cookies she’d inhaled at lunch, which now seemed a lifetime ago.

  Struggling through vertigo, she swallowed hard at the sight of the jagged cliffs, shooting up thousands of feet into the air, vanishing in the clouds.

  There was nowhere to land.

  “Brooke.”

  “Shh.” Afraid to so much as blink, she leaned forward, unable to tear her gaze away.

  “You’re green, Brooke. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. In fact, you’ve been at this for ten straight hours. Take a nap.”

  “I can’t nap! I have to stay awake for the crash!”

  “There’s no crash this time, I promise.”

  Pulling off her headphones, Brooke leaned back in her chair and gulped in a deep breath. The video paused, the lights came up, and a few words rolled across the screen.

  Brooke Lemon, producer extraordinaire . . .

  “Funny,” she managed, fighting her way back from the flashback.

  “And true.” Cole stood and studied her for a long beat. “You okay?”

  “You promised not to ask me that anymore.”

  “You miss being out there,” he said. “Being the one shooting the footage instead of putting it all together.”

  “No.” She still hadn’t taken her eyes off the screen, and the word producer was mocking her. Sure, it was safer on this side of the camera, but hell yeah, she missed it. She missed the old days like she’d miss air.

  Not that she was about to admit that to her boss. Not only would Cole pity her, he’d want to talk about it.

  And she never talked about it. What was the point? The only way to fix this was to face her past. Her mistakes. And she couldn’t do that. She didn’t know how. Avoiding Cole’s attentive eyes, she rose and grabbed her backpack just as Tommy poked his head into the editing room. “Hey, sweetness, how about some dinner?” His smile faded at whatever he saw on her face, and he exchanged a long look with Cole, who gave a slight head shake.

  Tommy held out a hand to Brooke. “Come on, chica, I’ll buy.”

  She knew when she was being managed. The three of them worked on a Travel Network show called Around the World, which followed adventure seekers, documentary-style, as they took on different goals such as climbing “unclimbable” mountains, rafting “unraftable” rivers . . . basically anything high-danger and high-adrenaline.

  Once upon a time, Brooke had been the principal photographer, but these days she worked solely from the studio, editing the footage and writing up the scripts for the so-called reality show, living a very different life from the one she’d always imagined herself living. But it worked for her. It was all good.

  Or so she told herself.

  Cole was Around the World’s showrunner and director. He was also a friend and, when it suited them both, Brooke’s occasional lover. It’d been a month since the last time it’d suited them. The show’s funding had been cut, leaving them on a tight budget and an even tighter deadline, which meant they’d been at each other’s throats much more than at each other’s bodies. Lust tended to take a back seat to murderous urges, at least for Brooke. Men didn’t seem to have a problem separating the two.

  Tommy was the show’s makeup artist and hairstylist, and Brooke’s BFF. They’d never been lovers. Mostly because Tommy preferred relationships with more than one person at a time, and she wasn’t wired that way.

  Since both guys knew her way too well, she avoided eye contact by going through her backpack to make sure she had her keys and wallet. Which she already knew she did, because she was a teeny-tiny bit compulsive about such things. Still, she touched each briefly and then zipped her pack. And then, because she liked things in even numbers, she unzipped and rezipped it a second time.

  Tommy turned to Cole accusingly. “Why is she upset? Did that new publicist cancel on her for that concert last night?”

  “You actually went out with that guy?” Cole asked Brooke. “I told you I’d take you.”

  “I canceled the date.” She shrugged. “He wears too much cologne.”

  “I don’t,” Cole said.

  Tommy still had his eyes narrowed at Brooke. “And the guy before him. Didn’t you say he had a crazy mother?”

  “He did.” But that hadn’t been the only problem. Before the waiter had even brought them drink menus, he’d told her he wanted to get married that year. Preferably in the fall, as that was his mother’s favorite season, and also, his mother wanted a big wedding with all the trimmings.

  The thought of being the center of attention like that had nearly given her hives, and at the memory, she ran the pads of her thumbs over the tips of her fingers, back and forth, back and forth. It was an old habit, a self-soothing mechanism. “Why are we even talking about this?”

  Tommy caught the movement of her hands before she could stop herself and he frowned. “Because you’re upset about something.”

  She shoved her hands in her pockets. “I’m fine.”

  “She had a flashback,” Cole said. “She always gets especially testy after one of those.” He met Brooke’s gaze, his own warm and full of concern. “Come home with me tonight. I’ll make you feel better.”

  Though she knew he could do just that, she hadn’t shaved in a few days. “I said I’m fine.” She slung her backpack over her shoulder. To keep either of them from following her, she went up on her tiptoes and brushed a kiss first on Tommy’s scruffy jaw and then on Cole’s shaved one. “I’m fine,” she repeated. “I’m also out. Saving you some overtime.”

  “You’re on salary.”

  “Yeah, which reminds me, I’m due for a raise.” She shut the do
or before he could respond and exited the studio into the LA heat.

  It was seven p.m. in Los Angeles, and ninety-eight degrees in late May. The humidity was high enough to turn her ponytail into something resembling a squirrel’s tail. Not that it mattered. She had no one to impress, nor the will to change that. Twenty-eight years old, and she was completely burned out on men.

  And possibly on life.

  She drove home, which was a rented bottom-floor condo in North Hollywood only eight miles from the studio—thirty minutes in gridlock traffic, like tonight. So she added LA to the list of things she was burned out on. She missed wide-open spaces. She missed fresh air and being outdoors. She missed thrill and adventure.

  She parked in her one-car garage and headed through the interior door into her kitchen, mindlessly counting her steps, doing a little shuffle at the end to make sure she ended on an even number. Another self-soothing gesture. Some days required more of that than others.

  Inside, she took a deep breath and tried to let go of the ball of stress in her gut. The flashback had been the first she’d had in a long time, and she’d nearly forgotten the taste of bone-deep terror, a sensation most people would never experience.

  She looked around. Her place was clean, her plants were alive—well, semi-alive, anyway. Everything was great.

  She was working on believing that when a knock came at her door. And actually, it was more of a pounding, loud and startling in the calm silence of her living room. Not Tommy—he would’ve knocked while yelling her name. Cole would’ve texted her before getting out of his car.

  No stranger to danger, Brooke grabbed her trusty baseball bat on the way to the door. She hadn’t traveled the planet over and back more times than she could count without learning how to protect herself. Just as she leaned in to look out the peephole, there came another round of pounding.

  “Brooke!” called out a female voice. “Oh God, what if you’re not home? Please be home!”

  Brooke went still as stone. She knew that voice, though it’d been a while. A long while. It belonged to her older sister, Mindy. Mindy had her shit together. She wore a body armor of calm like other women wore earrings, didn’t have to count in her head, and had never lost her way or screwed up her entire life.

  The frantic knocking continued, now accompanied by something that sounded suspiciously like sobs.

  Brooke yanked open the front door, and Mindy fell into her arms. They hadn’t seen each other in over a year, hadn’t spoken in months, and the last time they had, they’d hung up on each other.

  “What the hell?” Brooke asked.

  They weren’t a demonstrative family. Hugs were saved for weddings and funerals, or the very occasional family gathering where there was alcohol, copious amounts of it. Emotions were kept tight to the vest. But Mindy was demonstrating boatloads of emotion at high volume, clinging like Saran Wrap while crying and talking at the same time in a pitch not meant for humans.

  “Min, you gotta slow down,” Brooke said. “Only dogs can hear you right now.”

  Mindy sucked in a breath and lifted her head. Her mascara was smudged so badly that it was possibly yesterday’s mascara that just hadn’t been removed. She wore no other makeup. She was at least fifteen pounds heavier than Brooke had ever seen her. Her clothes were wrinkled and there was a suspicious-looking dark stain on her T-shirt, which was odd because Mindy didn’t wear tees. Her shoulder-length hair was the same honey color as Brooke’s, but Mindy’s hair always behaved. Not today. It was outdoing Brooke’s in the squirrel-tail impersonation and looked like it was a week past needing a shampoo. Mindy hiccuped, but thankfully stopped sobbing.

  Brooke nodded gratefully, but braced herself. She had a very bad feeling. “Okay. Now who’s dead?”

  Mindy choked on a low laugh and swiped beneath her eyes, succeeding only in making things worse. “No one’s dead. Unless you count my personal life.”

  This made no sense. Mindy had been born with a plan in hand. At any given moment of any day, she could flip open her fancy binder and tell you exactly where she was in that plan. “You’ve got a little something in your hair,” Brooke said, and gingerly picked it out. It was a Cheerio.

  “It’s Maddox’s. He was chucking them in the car.” Mindy’s eyes were misting again. “You don’t know how lucky you are that you don’t have kids!”

  It used to be that a sentence like that would send a hot poker of fire through Brooke’s chest, but now it was more like a dull ache. Mostly. “Why are you falling apart? You never fall apart.”

  Mindy shook her head. “Meet the new me. Remember when we were little and poor because Dad had put all his money into the first POP Smoothie Shop, and everyone called us the Lemon sisters?”

  “We are the Lemon sisters,” Brooke said.

  “Yes, but they made it a play on words, like we were lemons. As in, bad lemons. As in, worthless. Well, I’m a bad Lemon!”

  “First of all, you were the one who told me to ignore it back then because we weren’t worthless,” Brooke said, “so I’ll tell you now—we’re still not. And second, you’ve got a great life, a life you’ve planned out in great detail, I might add. You married a doctor. You now run and manage the Wildstone POP Smoothie Shop. You bake like no other. People flock to the shop on the days you bring in your fresh stuff to sell alongside the smoothies. You’ve got three kids. You live in a house with a real white picket fence, for God’s sake.”

  Mindy sniffed. “I know! And I get that on paper it looks like I’m the together sister, but I’m not!”

  That shouldn’t have hurt, but it did. Mindy didn’t have the first clue about Brooke’s life these days. Which was another problem entirely. “Min, what’s really going on here? We don’t do this. We’re not . . . close.”

  “Well, whose fault is that?” Mindy’s eyes filled. “I burned the school cupcakes and the firefighters had to come, and now the whole block knows I’m losing my shit. Dad wants to sell off some of the POP Smoothie Shops, including the Wildstone one, so he can ‘retire’”—she put “retire” in air quotes, probably because their dad was already pretty much hands-off with the business—“which puts me out of work. Linc says I should buy it, and I love that store, you know how much I love working that store, but I can’t so much as potty train Maddox, even though he’s thirty-two-point-five months old.” She drew in a shuddery breath. “And I think Linc’s having an affair with Brittney, our nanny.”

  Whoa. Brooke stopped trying to do the math to figure out how old 32.5 months was in years and stared at her sister. “What?”

  “Look, I know you hate me, but when it all started to fall apart in the car on the way home from Mom and Dad’s in Palm Springs, I looked you up. Google Maps said you were right on the way home to Wildstone.”

  Wildstone. Their hometown on the central coast of California, tucked among wineries and ranches and gorgeous rolling hills dotted with oaks. Just the thought of it conjured up a sense of longing so painful it almost buckled her knees. “I don’t hate you,” she murmured. She shook her head. “And do you really think your husband, the guy you’ve been in love with since the second grade and who worships the ground you walk on, is having an affair with the nanny? And since when do you have a nanny?”

  “Since I went back to work at the shop right after Maddox was born.” Mindy sighed. “She’s only part-time, but yes, I really think he’s cheating on me. Which means I’m going to be single soon.” She clutched Brooke’s arm, the whites of her eyes showing. “I can’t go back to being single, Brooke. I mean, how do you know which way to swipe, left or right?”

  “Okay, first off . . . breathe.” Brooke waited until Mindy had gulped in some air. “Good. Second, why do you think Linc’s having an affair?”

  “Because Cosmo says that married couples our age are supposed to have sex two to three times a week, and we don’t. I’m not sure we managed to have sex once this whole month!” She tossed up her hands. “It used to be every day. Every day, Brooke, and we used to
role-play, too, like sexy bad cop and sassy perp, or naughty nurse and—”

  “Oh my God.” Brooke covered her ears. “Please stop talking.”

  “We have a chest full of costumes and props that we never even use anymore.”

  “Seriously,” Brooke said, with a heartfelt grimace. “I can still hear you.”

  “I miss it. I mean, I really miss it. I need a man-made orgasm or I’m going to have to buy more batteries.”

  “Okay, I get it, you miss sex! Jeez! Let’s move on! So you’ve got the problems with Linc, the nanny, and your, uh, lack of new batteries . . . but instead of fixing any of these problems, you, what, ran away from Wildstone six hours south to Mom and Dad’s in Palm Springs?”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” Mindy said. “It was a rough visit. Mom thinks Millie needs therapy because she’ll only answer to ‘Princess Millie’ and that Maddox should be talking more than barking. And Dad says Mason shouldn’t wear pink shirts, but it was salmon, not pink, and he picks out his own clothes and dresses himself. I don’t want to squash that. Also, Dad thinks that my ass is getting fat.”

  “Dad did not say that,” Brooke said. The man was a quiet, thoughtful introvert. He might think it, but he’d never say it.

  “Okay, no, he didn’t,” Mindy admitted. “But it’s true and that’s probably why Linc won’t sleep with me!” She started crying again.

  “Momma.”

  At the little-kid voice, Brooke and Mindy both froze and turned. In the doorway stood Mindy’s Mini-Me, eight-year-old Millie, outfitted in a yellow dress with black elephants and giraffes on it. Her hair was held off her face by a headband that matched the dress. But it was her eyes that got to Brooke. They were the same jade green as Mindy’s. And as her own, she supposed. “Millie,” Brooke said. “Wow, you’re all grown up.”

  “Hi, Aunt Brooke,” Millie said politely before turning back to her mom. “Momma, Mad Dog peed on Mason again.” She held up her hands like a surgeon waiting to have her gloves put on. She ran the pads of her thumbs across the tips of her fingers four times in a row. “I’ve got to wash my hands. Can I wash my hands?”

  “Down the hall,” Brooke said, heart tugging for the kid. “First door on the right’s the bathroom.”