Read The Beekeeper's Ball: Bella Vista Chronicles Book 2 for Free Online

planning, doing. She had the kind of energy that made caffeine jumpy. “I’m really sorry, Iz. Don’t be mad, okay?”
    “I never get mad,” said Isabel.
    “I know. It’s freaky. I’m about to become a stepmom to two school-age kids, so I need to take lessons from you on how to be mellow about things.”
    Isabel flashed on Calvin Sharpe, and she felt anything but mellow. “Hey, off the subject, but did you attend the last Chamber of Commerce meeting?”
    “Yep. I’m a card-carrying member. They’re going to feature Things Remembered on the Chamber website in December. Cool, huh?”
    “Very cool. And, um, was there any talk of that new restaurant coming in? It was in the newsletter...”
    “Yeah, I think it’s kind of a big deal. Some famous chef...Cleavon or Calvin...?”
    “Calvin Sharpe. A TV chef.” Isabel kept her face neutral. You never get mad. Great, just great.
    “Yeah, that’s the one. Super good-looking, and he had an entourage with him. I remember now—he’s calling the new place CalSharpe’s. So, you know this guy?”
    “He was an instructor at the culinary institute when I went there, years ago.”
    “And? What’s he like?”
    “Like a guy who thinks the sun rises every morning just to hear him crow,” Isabel said. “But he can cook. And it appears he’s got a restaurant empire going.” She didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She’d already given him too much space in her head. “Anyway. Back to the other guy—Cormac O’Neill. You call him Mac.”
    Tess grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the lounge room. “Come here,” she said. “Let me show you something.”
    She led the way to the big room, which had already been refurbished for the cooking school. It was light and airy with freshly whitewashed plaster walls and tall ceilings, filled with cookbooks and old furniture and Bubbie’s baby grand piano. When Isabel was growing up, the rolling ladder against the tall built-in bookcases had been her stairway to a different world. That was what books had offered her—all the voyages she wanted, to different realms. Even as a tiny girl, she’d been the consummate armchair traveler, seeing the world from the safety of her own home.
    Now she was a steward of this place. For her, Bella Vista lived and breathed with the essence of life, representing security and permanence in a world that had not always been kind to her. Her mission was to revive the place, resuscitate it after the hard times. Her grandfather’s accident last year had shaken Isabel’s foundations. Magnus was a father figure and besides Tess, her only family.
    Isabel still loved to pore over photographs of castles on the Rhein, Ayers Rock in Australia, Italy’s Amalfi coast. Sometimes, gazing at the pictures, she would feel a yearning deep in her stomach. Yet when it came to actually traveling to those places, something always made her balk. To her, adventure was always more appealing within the pages of a travelogue.
    Tess pulled a stack of new-looking books from a shelf and set them on the lid of the piano. “I met Mac for the first time when I was working in Krakow. I was tracing the origin of some paintings that had been hidden by the Nazis, and he was doing an article on restoring Nazi plunder. I’m actually a footnote in one of his books.” She flipped open a thick volume called Behind the Iron Curtain. “He talks about the Krakow treasure here.”
    Isabel felt a surge of admiration for her sister. They had grown up separately, in completely different circumstances, Isabel at Bella Vista, and Tess traveling the world with her mother, a museum acquisitions expert. Isabel could easily picture Tess examining old artifacts, ferreting out the truth about them. She’d had a high-level position finding lost treasures and researching their origins at an auction house in the Bay Area. In fact, her expertise had been instrumental in saving Bella Vista from bankruptcy.
    But along with the estate’s reversal