It's a Wonderful Wife by Janet Chapman

be conceived on Hundred Acre Isle.
    â€œI bet you’ll get to go with him on overseas business trips, too,” Cadi muttered to the nondescript woman as she stood up and pulled her shirt over her head without bothering to unbutton it. She unfastened her slacks, then pushed them down and stepped free. “But probably what I envy about you the most is your obvious sophistication,” she added as she headed to her en suite bathroom, knowing Jesse would marry a woman who wasn’t only beautiful but who could socialize with business clients from all over the world. “You’ll also have to know how to put on fancy parties at Rosebriar for his pet charities,” she continued out loud, “entertain his wealthy friends with witty banter, and talk to their wives about the latest fashions.”
    Well, that certainly put her dreams in perspective, didn’t it, since she doubted potluck church suppers counted as sophisticated . . . anything. And the most experience she’d had with people from away had been foreign students in college, and then she’d been too shy to talk to them.
    Nope, she definitely didn’t have any business picturing herself spending summers on Hundred Acre Isle, much less living at Rosebriar the rest of the year.
    But that didn’t mean she had to
stay
old-fashioned and unsophisticated.
    The reason wealthy clients chose Glace & Kerr Architecture instead of a big-city firm was because they wanted homes just like the ones dotting the coast from Kittery to Eastport: large, opulent structures with weathered cedar shingles, meandering screened-in porches, and huge granite fireplaces. That’s why she’d barely been able to contain her excitement when Jesse had said he wanted a modern house. But seeing the terror in Stanley’s eyes, since he’d started with Owen Glace right out of college to find himself working almost exclusively on traditional homes, Cadi had given him a thumbs-up and mouthed the word
yeah
, then started drawing in her sketchbook. Hearing that Mr. Sinclair was a top executive at an international shipping company, she’d instantly thought . . . Waves. Steel ships. Concrete docks. And large expanses of glass like on a ship’s wheelhouse, instead of dozens of perfectly lined-up windows.
    Jesse had been adamant the home be state-of-the-art without being pretentious, saying the only people he wanted to impress were his children—catching Cadi by complete surprise, since the guy wasn’t even married. That’s when the idea of Winnie the Pooh had come to her—he had bought Hundred Acre Isle—and she’d realized the outside of the house had to be just as important as the inside. So she’d drawn an outdoor fire pit, a big scruffy dog, swings hanging from several tall pines, a fountain shaped like an open clamshell that would double as a wading pool, and, of course, hidden pots of honey. But it wasn’t until Stanley had taken her to the island a third time that she’d added a working periscope rising up through the roof of the children’s playroom, footpaths spidering through the forest, a freshwater pond fed by the spring she’d found, and a treehouse overlooking the small, sheltered beach on the south end of the island.
    Oh yeah, she’d had many dreams of playing on that beach with her handsome, sexy husband and their children, not one of them wearing a wide-brimmed hat as they’d splashed around all the way up to their necks in the numbingly cold water.
    Cadi turned on the shower. “I might have missed the boat—
ship
—with Jesse Sinclair,” she murmured as she shed her bra and panties and stepped under the warm spray, “but after a couple of years of travel, there’s no reason I can’t be witty and sophisticated for when the
next
Mr. Right comes along.”
    Wait; why was she expecting him to come to her? Heck, there was a good chance Mr. Right