title: Love on the Rocks: Stories of Rusticators and Romance on Mount Desert Island
author: Kathryn Muether
description: Love on the Rocks will give you a verbal-stereopticon view from several writers that specialized in a novella-genre known in the golden age as The Bar Harbor Novel. Much like today's romance-novel placement, they were hugely popular (and reading them, one can see why) and scorned by the snobby. I ate up the whole collection like a chocoholic on Godiva. --Marilis Hornidge, The Lincoln County News
zlib_text: Acknowledgments
  
  I want to thank Sally Sorenson and Will Sankey for their help with things
  Hawaiian. Colorado girl Nicole Burnham helped get me to Telluride. Christina
  Dodd showed me Seattle, Mary Lou Jarrell took me to Kansas, and Mary Dickerson
  put her Philly Girl experience at my disposal. Thank you, my friends!
  
    
  
  Thanks, also, to my editor, the _wonderful_ Laura Cifelli, for loving the
  Callahan men and being such a joy to work with.
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter One
  
   _Late summer_  
  _Lanai, Hawaii_
  
    
  
  _The things we do for family._
  
  Mark Callahan sucked a peppermint while his bloody hands clutched the coarse
  holds of the blue-black rock face. Halfway up the two-hundred-foot cliff, he
  searched for the next foothold. Below him, ocean swells crashed violently
  against the rocks. Above him, a three-quarter moon and a sky full of stars
  cast a silvered light across the land. When the wind blew just right, he could
  hear soft music and occasional laughter drifting from the grounds of the
  estate called