Chesapeake Blue

Chesapeake Blue is a 2002 novel by Nora Roberts, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons and recorded under the Chesapeake Bay Saga.

Seth Quinn is the youngest. His early years were spent with a mother addicted to drugs, and the Quinn family took him in and raised him alongside Cam, Ethan and Phillip, so the novel opens with his return as an adult rather than with his childhood. He comes back from Europe established as a painter, and the return is described in domestic terms: the small house with a boat at the dock, a rocker on the porch and a dog in the yard. He grew up with three older brothers watching over him, and the house he comes back to now holds their wives and children as well as the brothers themselves.

Against that homecoming the book sets Dru Whitcomb Banks, a woman who has moved to the town to run a florist's shop and who wants to establish herself without the weight of her family's influence. The romance therefore works on two kinds of independence, his from a damaged beginning and hers from a privileged one, and the changes in St. Christopher while Seth was away provide the friction between them.