Chesapeake Blue by Nora Roberts

This is the 4th book in the Chesapeake Bay/Quinn Brothers series. The first three were written as a trilogy of the adult Quinn brothers who were taking care of Seth as a child. This is Seth's story, 18 years later.

While focusing on Seth's return to St. Christopher, and his developing relationship with a newcomer, Drusilla, Roberts brings us up to date on all the other characters I loved in the first three books: Cam and Anna, Ethan and Grace and Aubrey, and Phillip and Sybill, as well as all their children. Aubrey was Grace's daughter before she married Ethan, and is now 20 years old, and a major player in the Boats by Quinn business.

Drusilla aka Dru comes from money and power in D.C., and has moved to the quiet town in Maryland to escape the pressures of that life. She had been engaged to a D.C. mover and shaker who cheated on her during the engagement. Her parents use her as a pawn in their own tortured relationship, and she just wants a quiet, uneventful life as a florist, away from those people and pressures.

The intrigue in the story comes again from Seth's birth mother Gloria, who was a major thorn in the side of the first 3 books. Somehow she convinces Seth, starting at age 14, that he must continue to pay her hush money as Ray Quinn did, to keep her quiet about what she knows and what she makes up about Seth and the other Quinn brothers. Although it really isn't enough to cause an actual scandal, she threatens to harm the Quinn children, and Seth believes her. Now that he is a famous artist, he has a lot of money and she wants it.

Although the cover blurb hints at secrets in their pasts, I'll go ahead and give a spoiler - there aren't any Quinn secrets we haven't already learned, which is good because I kept wondering what could have happened that we didn't already know. It's a wonderful comfort read to catch up on the lives of the Quinns and to watch as the relationship blooms between Dru and Seth. Dru is drawn in by a number of factors, one of which is the wonderful Quinn family life, which is so different from her own.

5 stars.