Regardless of what his father had been telling him in those letters, Kaegan had trusted Bryce. He’d believed the plans they’d made for their future were solid and that some guy like Samuel wasn’t going to turn her head. He hadn’t cared they were attending Grambling together, which gave them every opportunity to be close. Bryce was his girl and that was that.

Although it was close to two in the morning when he’d arrived in the cove that night, he’d immediately gone to Bryce’s house to surprise her. He’d been anxious to ask her to marry him and to give her the ring. Since her brothers had married, she had taken over the garage apartment at the back of her parents’ home.

He had walked toward the garage when suddenly the door to the apartment opened and a man came out. She was walking him to the door and the man was Samuel Abbott. Kaegan had stopped and stared at them. Neither had detected his presence since he’d been in the shadows. In total shock, he watched Bryce lean up on tiptoes and wrap her arms around Samuel’s neck. Angry and hurt, Kaegan turned and walked away while pain had sliced through him. He left town that night without Bryce or his parents knowing he’d even been there.

It had taken a week before he’d called Bryce. He’d even refused to take her call, the one she made to him every Sunday. When he did call her, he didn’t give her a chance to say anything. He told her of his surprise visit home the week before, although he didn’t tell her why he’d specifically come home that night.

Kaegan told her about seeing her in Samuel’s arms on her doorstep at two in the morning. He’d told her he hoped to never see her again and that he would be blocking her calls. When he ended the call, he figured that would be that. She’d cheated on him and had been caught. There had been no one he could talk to about the pain he felt. Not even Vashti. She’d left town years earlier, the week after she’d graduated from high school, saying she would never return to Catalina Cove again. She had her own issues with the town and the people in it. He was left to deal with the pain of Bryce’s betrayal alone.

He certainly hadn’t expected Bryce to show up in North Carolina a week later wanting to see him and tell him her side of things. There was nothing she could tell him. It hadn’t been about what his father had told him but about what he’d seen with his own eyes. He doubted he would ever forget seeing her in Samuel’s arms as they’d been about to kiss.

Coming back to Catalina Cove to live was the last thing he’d planned to do. When he had returned home after his father’s death it was to find a seafood shipping company that was barely making ends meet. On top of that, the machinery and boats were in need of repair or replacement, and it had been weeks since the crew, shrimpers and oyster shuckers had been paid.