Spotlight & Giveaway: The Cafe at Beach End by RaeAnne Thayne

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author RaeAnne Thayne to HJ!

Hi RaeAnne and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, The Cafe at Beach End!

 
Thanks so much for having me!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

After her scheming ex-husband left her broke and in disgrace, Meredith Collins has nowhere left to turn but Cape Sanctuary, where her beloved grandmother left her part ownership of a struggling cafe, as well as a dilapidated beach cottage. Her cousin Tori, who owns the other half of the cafe, wants nothing to do with the woman she once considered the sister of her heart, still hurt that Meredith was quick to walk away and betray everything they once meant to each other. Alone and friendless, Meredith turns to newcomer Liam Byrne, who claims to be writing a book … but might have secrets of his own!
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

Meredith let out a breath, wishing she could find amid the animosity some trace of the cousin who had once been her dearest friend in the world, the one she knew she could always count on. The one who invariably cried when Meredith had to leave every summer to return to her real life.

She knew she wouldn’t find what she wanted here. She had burned that relationship to the ground long ago.

***

Meredith couldn’t refrain from follow her gaze, to find a tall, dark-haired man with lean features standing inside, waiting to be seated. He had a little dark stubble brushing his jawline and his blue eyes looked tired, as if he were at the tail end of a long journey.
To her shock, Meredith felt a little tug of awareness.

Where did that come from?

She blinked in shock. No. Definitely no. She needed to nip that right in the bud before it had any chance of taking root.

She was nowhere close to ready to find herself tangled up with any man, especially not a sexy, disreputable-looking stranger.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• I wrote this book when we were in the middle of a MAJOR remodeling project at our house so elements of what I was dealing with definitely crept into the story. I also had to do lots of research about running a small cafe.
• During the summer after my freshman year of college, I got a job as a housekeeper at the Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park. In the evenings, I decided to take a second job busing tables in the cafe at the lodge, which was the only food service job I’ve ever had! It was a great experience.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

Initially, my hero has good reasons to despise the heroine. As Liam comes to know Meredith beyond her reputation, he begins to have great respect for her courage and strength.

As for Meredith, she only knows Liam at first as the handsome writer who comes into the cafe to work every day. He is kind to her when no one else is and helps her feel a little less alone.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

I loved writing all the scenes between Meredith’s cousin Tori and the brother of her late husband’s brother. The heat between them crackled every time they were together!

Readers should read this book….

If they like emotional, heartfelt stories about family and community. THE CAFE AT BEACH END has two separate romances but it also tells the reunion story of two cousins (and dear friends) finding their way back to each other.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m currently writing the final book in my Women of Brambleberry House series. This is the story of Jenna Haynes, who first appeared in my book A BRAMBLEBERRY SUMMER. When I finish that one, I’ll be starting a new single title series, this one about two sisters, both survivors of a terrible ordeal in their teens who have handled their trauma in very different ways.
 
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: 3 Signed copies of THE CAFE AT BEACH END, U.S. only.

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Excerpt from The Cafe at Beach End:

The sky wept the day Meredith Rowland returned to Cape Sanctuary.
As the charming northern California town came into view, she did her best to peer through the heavily beating wipers of her car fighting a losing battle against sheets of rain.
Of course it was raining. It seemed only right, especially considering the dark, sinister cloud that had been following her for the past eighteen months.
As her tires splattered up rain from the wet road, Meredith checked the gas gauge of the ten-year-old compact car she had purchased with the last of her savings, after her beloved Mercedes was sold at auction.
The gauge read below the empty line, but she kept her fingers crossed that she could make it to the café before it ran out of gas.
The car sputtered a little. “Come on, Posy,” she said, using the nickname she had given it somewhere in Nebraska, not for a sweet-smelling floral arrangement but because the first three letters of POS made a particularly pungent acronym that described the car’s general quality.
The engine chugged and Meredith held her breath. “You’ve made it this far. Come on. Only another few miles to go. We’re almost there, baby. You’ve got this.”
Though she knew it was irrational, even delusional, she thought the car seemed to pick up a little energy, like an old horse that smelled the familiar stable of home. A moment later, Meredith chugged onto Main Street on fumes and prayer.
Miraculously, she found a parking space not far from the historic brick building that housed the Beach End Café.
As she gazed at the building, with its cupola and planters spilling over with red and purple flowers, a flood of memories washed over her. Most of them were good, but a few made her throat ache and her eyes burn.
She had adored this place, once upon a time. During her childhood, the café had been her happy place. Whenever she had been feeling lonely or sad or frightened, she would come here in her mind.
Here, she had found love and acceptance. Her grandmother hadn’t cared if she had a B in French literature or if she couldn’t remember how to conjugate “to plunder.” Frances and Tori had loved her just as she was.
If she closed her eyes, she could still picture herself and her cousin as they had been back then. One blond and fair, the other dark, but with the same hazel eyes they had inherited from Frances through their respective parents.
They had been as close as sisters. Closer, even. Sharing laughter and dreams and secrets during those halcyon summer months when Meredith would stay with her grandmother.
She could picture them now in a time-lapse age-progression that played across her mind. They were young girls, stopping at the candy store down the street to fill their pockets with sweets purchased using Meredith’s spending money. Then preteens, riding cruiser bikes through town and giggling at all the cute boys hanging out at the skate park at Driftwood Beach. Then teenagers, sitting around a bonfire and talking and laughing with those same cute boys while stars glittered overhead and the sea murmured its endless song.
Had that really been her? The memories seemed vague and undefined. Hazy and not quite real, as if it had all happened to someone else.
Probably because it had. Meredith was a different person than that lonely girl, yearning for affection.
She once had a nanny who used to tell her that all the cells in her body replaced themselves every three months, so she really did become a new person, like a snake shedding its skin.
She had learned as an adult that wasn’t wholly true—that some cells regenerated every few days, others had much longer lifespans into the decades and others never regenerated. Still, so many moments in her life had that ethereal, distant feeling, as if they had happened to someone else.
Certainly the past eighteen months seemed a nightmare from which she couldn’t quite wake up.
All of those things had happened to her, though. She couldn’t wish away her history.
She tightened her fingers around the steering wheel as she finished parking and turned off the engine.
Like it or not, she owned it and would have to figure out now how to take the broken pieces of that history and rebuild herself into something better.
Reaching beside her for her umbrella, Meredith climbed out of the car and extended it, every muscle in her body aching from the long drive and the uncomfortable seat that offered zero lumbar support.
Sharp yearning washed over her for the leather luxury of her Mercedes, complete with both heating and cooling properties. She pushed it away. That was part of her Before life. This was her Now.
With rain clicking against the nylon of the umbrella, she arched her back and inhaled a few deep breaths, for courage as well as calm.
The mingled scent of sea and storm washed through her, smells that immediately took her back to long rainy afternoons in Frances’s old cottage on Starfish Beach, playing board games and watching old movies.
Even in the rain, Cape Sanctuary seemed warm and welcoming, with flowers hanging from streetlamps and more in baskets in windows. Outside the café, a bench with peeling red paint beckoned visitors and their tired feet to stop and enjoy the view.
Did it also apply to those with tired spirits? Because her spirit was at low ebb right about now.
Other disheartened travelers might be welcome to rest here. Not her. Meredith knew she would not be greeted with the typical warmth and comfort the café usually exuded.
The people inside would not be thrilled to see her. Or at least one person wouldn’t be, anyway. Her cousin and once best friend, Tori Ayala, would probably slam the door in her face and send her straight back out into the rain.
Grow a spine, she chided herself.
Tori couldn’t send her packing. Not when Meredith owned half of the café.
She walked to the front door, lowering her umbrella once she was under the shelter of the entry. Heart pounding, she pulled open the door.
At the chime of bells from the front door, the low hum of conversation and clink of glasses inside seemed to die away and everyone turned to see the newcomer.
It was mid-afternoon, past the busiest hour of lunch. Still, the café seemed to be enjoying a healthy business, more than Meredith might have expected for the off-hour.
“Be with you in a moment,” a cheerful voice rang out. Nerves fluttered through Meredith. She knew that voice, entirely too well.
That voice had once been on the other end of all those secrets, sharing her own and taking Meredith’s too.
The last thing she wanted was a confrontation with Tori the moment she rolled into town, but she knew this one was unavoidable.
She straightened, hitching her last designer purse a little more securely on her shoulder. All she had left was a wreck of a vehicle and the three hundred dollars contained in a Louis Vuitton bag worth about six times that much.
Conscious of the patrons of the restaurant giving her sidelong, curious looks, Meredith shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket, fighting with everything inside her against the urge to grab her bag tightly, push her way out the door and flee back into the rain.
And then what?
She couldn’t leave. Not when she had nowhere else to go.
A moment later, the person she most dreaded seeing came out of the kitchen. Her cousin Tori wore a trim black apron with The Beach End Café embroidered across the front in white, and her arms competently hefted a tray of at least three or four orders.
Her brown hair was caught atop her head in a messy bun, and she had a pencil tucked behind one ear.
She looked as beautiful as ever, bright and vibrant and so dear that the sight of her made emotions rise up in Meredith’s throat.
The sentiment was obviously not reciprocated. As Meredith might have predicted, Tori stopped dead the moment she spotted her. The tray in her arms wobbled slightly, but she maintained control with the ease of long practice.
Meredith’s stomach rumbled as the smell of sizzling meat mingled with coffee and fried potatoes, scents she would forever associate with the café.
Meredith suddenly remembered she hadn’t eaten since a hurried meal the night before, an inexpensive frozen dinner she had bought at the convenience store next to her questionable hotel in Sacramento and cooked in the microwave of her room.
She pushed away the hunger pangs as something to deal with later. Which was becoming the mantra of her life.
“Hello,” she said, not sure what else to say.
Her tentative greeting was met by a wall of fury that seemed as tangible as those storm-tossed waves at Driftwood Park.
“Get out,” Tori snarled. “Get the hell out.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

For fans of Debbie Macomber and Susan Wiggs, an emotional story of starting over and reclaiming happiness.

When Meredith Collins was a child, the little beach town of Cape Sanctuary lived up to its name. Spending summers there with her grandmother, Meredith finally felt safe and loved.

Now she’s returning in disgrace. Her late ex-husband swindled investors out of millions of dollars and made Meredith a figure of scorn—though she knew nothing about his scheme. But she still has the beach cottage she inherited from her grandmother and half ownership of the local café. It’s a place to work and earn a little money. That’s if her cousin, Tori, will let her through the door. Once, Tori and Meredith were as close as sisters—until Meredith chose her neglectful parents’ expectations over their bond. Now widowed with a teenage daughter, Tori isn’t setting out a welcome mat for the woman who let her down so badly.

While Meredith tries to make a fresh start, she is drawn to a mysterious writer renting the cottage next door. Liam Byrne’s kindness is a balm, though she worries he might not be so friendly if he knew who she was. But Liam has his own secret and a mission that will help Meredith confront her past—and maybe, claim a surprising future…
Book Links:  Amazon | B&N |
 
 

Meet the Author:

RaeAnne Thayne is the New York Times, USA Today and #1 Publishers Weekly bestselling author of more than seventy books. Her books have been described as “poignant and sweet,” with “beautiful, honest storytelling (that) goes straight to the heart.” She finds inspiration from the beautiful northern Utah mountains, where she lives with her family. She loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her website.
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