Room at the Inn (Novella): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (13 page)

He wiped his thumbs across her cheekbones, catching the moisture there.

“Believe me,” he said. “This time, I’m a good bet.”

He saw it in her eyes when she rose on her toes to bring her mouth to his. Her faith. A fragile trust. She kissed him gently, sinking her fingers into his hair, and said, “I do.”

The relief made his knees weak, and he kissed her hard to hide it. Kissed her through the polite applause, a few whoops, some catcalling, an earsplitting whistle. Carson kissed her until he knew in his bones that this was real, and it was right.

When he broke the kiss, she whispered against his mouth, “You jackass.”

Epilogue

“Don’t forget about the roof.” Julie handed him a mug of coffee, admiring the way his damp hair fell over his forehead.

“Thank you. What about the roof?”

“The pop-out part over the Sarasota room is leaking. You told me you’d look at it.”

“I did?”

“Last night. While we were getting ready for bed.”

“Did you have a shirt on?”

“I don’t know. No?”

He caught her as she tried to walk by with a basket of warm muffins. With his free hand, he stole a muffin. At the same time, he stole a kiss.

Warm, soft, wet. Sexy as sin.

Carson Vance. The best thing that had ever happened to her.

“This is something you need to know if we’re going to stay married,” he said. “If you tell me something while you’re not wearing a shirt, I’m not going to remember it.”

“But you agreed!”

“I would agree to eat dirt in order to get you naked. That doesn’t mean I’m actually going to remember later, or that I’ll eat the dirt.”

“Duly noted. So will you go up on the roof today and look at the pop-out over the Sarasota room?”

“Sure. It’s supposed to rain later on, so I’ll get up there after I meet with Leo this morning.”

Carson and Leo had made a lot of headway on the shoe factory over the winter. If everything went the way it was supposed to, Carson would start shoring up the foundation in the fall, handle the renovations on the interior over the long winter, and wrap up cosmetic improvements in the spring. By this time next year, the place might have tenants, all of them part owners with an investment in the community. Leo’s girlfriend, Samantha, was talking about opening a second location of her successful Albany restaurant, and there was talk of studio and gallery space for local artists.

“Are you on the dome at all today?”

“No, I have to give that test patch a few weeks to see what it does in the weather. I’m supposed to take the historical-society ladies up to look at it next Friday, and if they approve, the bank will let me finish the restoration.”

“I can’t believe they’re being so fussy. It’s not like it looks good
now
. How much worse do they think it will look if you screw it up?”

“I’m not going to screw it up.”

“I know that.” She kissed him. “But not everybody has as much faith in you as I do.”

“They should when it comes to this kind of stuff.”

“They should when it comes to every kind of stuff.”

He gave her a crooked smile. “I’m glad you think so.”

His hands fell to her hips, and he tugged her between his legs on the barstool and kissed her again, soft for a moment, then more seriously as one hand smoothed over her butt. More urgently as he began to stir in his jeans, hardening in time with the throbbing between her legs.

“I bought you a present last time I went to New York.” He nipped her ear.

“What kind of present?”

“The kind we have to keep on the top shelf of the closet where the kids can’t find it.”

They didn’t have any kids, but she got his drift.

He thumbed her nipple through her bra. “What’s your day look like? Got an hour for me?”

She had fifteen people eating breakfast and waiting for her to bring out muffins and butter. Not to mention that Martin could walk in at any moment. He treated her kitchen like his own.

She had rooms to clean and guests to talk to, a delivery of donated baby layettes to take to the hospital, and leftover fudge and brownies that she was supposed to drop off at the VFW.

She had an insanely hot husband who had bought her a sex toy.

A woman as busy as Julie knew how to set priorities.

“Two o’clock.”

“Sooner.”

“Your meeting—?”

“It’s not ’til ten thirty. Come upstairs at nine.”

“All right.”

When she stepped back and away from him, lest he talk her into sneaking upstairs and abandoning the guests midbreakfast, something about the posture he settled into caught her eye.

He had both feet hooked in the rung of the stool. One elbow sitting on the countertop, his hand resting under his chin. He was smiling at her, and he looked gorgeous and familiar and deeply, astonishingly dear.

But that wasn’t it.

She wrapped her arms around her stomach to hold in a fierce surge of emotion, and it took her a minute to figure out why.

He looked settled.

At some point in the last few months, Carson had lost his forward tilt. He’d stopped looking like he was on his way out of town, out of her life, out into the bigger, more fascinating world.

He’d started looking at her like
she
was the bigger, more fascinating world that he’d been missing all along.

“You came home,” she said, wonderingly.

And he must have caught her meaning, captured it from her face, because his expression turned somber and his eyes full of feeling, and he said, “I did. For you, I did.”

Acknowledgments

The beating heart of this novella is the small town in Upstate New York where my not-at-all-curmudgeonly father grew up. Dolgeville, I miss you. Thanks for letting me play fast and loose with your past and present in order to write the story I wanted to write.

Carson, Julie, and Leo owe a lot to Frank Capra’s
It’s a Wonderful Life
, a movie I’ve seen dozens of times and for which I have an abiding but conflicted love. It saddens me that George never gets to leave Bedford Falls, and it irritates me when we learn that if George had never been born, Mary would have become a cringing spinster librarian. This story began with my attempt to imagine what might have happened if George really did shake the dust of his crummy little hometown off his feet and see the world.

I’m grateful to my mother-in-law, Joyce, for collecting Julie and Glory’s story and handing it to me. “I have something you need to put in a book,” she said. So I did.

Huge thanks to Serena Bell for her head-patting and incisive comments as I wrote this novella. Serena is the sort of friend who knows how to say, “This is magnificent! You’re going to have to do it all over again.” Every writer needs one of those. Anna Cowan, Elisabeth Barrett, and Amber Lin all read the story and pointed out different flaws. I’m grateful for their honest criticism and hopeful that the final product is better for all the revising I did in response. Thanks, too, to Faye and Emily, for the encouragement, and to my editor, Sue, for giving me this project in the first place. I never thought I’d write a Christmas story—and now I have.

Read on for an excerpt from Ruthie Knox’s
Along Came Trouble

Chapter One

“Get out of my yard!” Ellen shouted.

The weasel-faced photographer ignored her, too busy snapping photos of the house next door to pay her any mind.

No surprise there. This was the fifth time in as many days that a man with a camera had violated her property lines. By now, she knew the drill.

They trespassed. She yelled. They pretended she didn’t exist. She called the police.

Ellen was thoroughly sick of it. She couldn’t carry on this way, watching from the safety of the side porch and clutching her glass of iced tea like an outraged Southern belle.

It was all very well for Jamie to tell her to stay put and let the professionals deal with it. Her pop-star brother was safe at home in California, nursing his wounds. And anyway, this kind of attention was the lot he’d chosen in life. He’d decided to be a celebrity, then he’d made the choice to get involved with Ellen’s neighbor, Carly. The consequences ought to be his to deal with.

Ellen hadn’t invited the paparazzi to descend. She’d made different choices, and they’d led her to college, law school, marriage, divorce, motherhood. They’d led her to this quiet cul-de-sac in Camelot, Ohio, surrounded by woods.

Her choices had also made her the kind of woman who couldn’t easily stand by as some skeevy guy crushed her plants and invaded Carly’s privacy for the umpteenth time since last Friday.

Enough
, she thought.
Enough
.

But until Weasel Face crushed the life out of her favorite hosta—her
mascot
hosta—with his giant brown boot, she didn’t actually intend to act on the thought.

Raised in Chicago, Ellen had grown up ignorant of perennials. When she first moved to Camelot, a new wife in a strange land, she did her best to adapt to the local ways of lawn-mowing and shade-garden cultivation, but during the three years her marriage lasted, she’d killed every plant she put in the ground.

It was only after her divorce that things started to grow. In the winter after she kicked Richard out for being a philandering dickhead, their son had sprouted from a pea-sized nothing to a solid presence inside her womb, breathing and alive. That spring, the
first furled shoots of the hosta poked through the mulch, proving that Ellen was not incompetent, as Richard had so often implied. She and the baby were, in fact, perfectly capable of surviving, even thriving, without anyone’s help.

Two more springs had come and gone, and the hosta kept returning, bigger every year. It became her horticultural buddy. Triumph in plant form.

So Ellen took it personally when Weasel Face stepped on it. Possibly a bit too personally. Swept up in a delicious tide of righteousness, she crossed the lawn and upended her glass of iced tea over the back of his head.

It felt good. It felt
great
, actually—the coiled-spring snap of temper, the clean confidence that came with striking a blow for justice. For the few seconds it lasted, she basked in it. It was such an improvement over standing around.

One more confirmation that powerlessness was for suckers.

But then it was over, and she wondered why she’d wasted the tea, because Weasel Face didn’t so much as flinch. Seemingly unbothered by the dunking, the ice cubes, or the sludgy sugar on the back of his neck, he aimed his camera at Carly’s house and held down the shutter release, capturing photo after photo as an SUV rolled to a stop in the neighboring driveway.

“Get
out
of my
yard
,” Ellen insisted, shoving the man’s shoulder for emphasis. His only response was to reach up, adjust his lens, and carry on.

Now what?
Assault-by-beverage was unfamiliar territory for her. Usually, she stuck with verbal attack. Always, the people she engaged in battle acknowledged her presence on the field. How infuriating to be ignored by the enemy.

“The police are on their way.”

This was a lie, but so what? The man had already been kicked off her property once this week. He didn’t deserve scrupulous honesty. He didn’t even deserve the tea.

“I’ll leave when they make me,” he said.

“I’m going to press charges this time.”

The photographer squinted into his viewfinder. “Go ahead. I’ll have these pictures sold before the cops get here.”

“I’m not kidding,” she threatened. “I’ll use every single sneaky lawyer trick I can think of to drag out the process. You’ll rot in that jail cell for days before I’m done with you.”

And now she sounded like a street-corner nut job. Not the kind of behavior she approved of, but what was she supposed to do? It was already too late to give up. If she stopped pushing, he would win. Unacceptable.

A tall man stepped out of the SUV. One of her cedar trees partially blocked the
view, but she caught a glimpse of mirrored sunglasses and broad shoulders.

“You’re going to be so sorry you didn’t listen to me.”

Weasel Face didn’t even look at her. “Go away, lady.”

“I live here!” She hooked her fingers in his elbow and yanked, screwing up his aim.

The stranger at Carly’s must have heard the escalating argument, because he turned to face them. Ellen’s uninvited guest made an ugly, excited noise low in his throat, edged forward, and smashed a lungwort plant that had been doing really well this year.

Ellen considered kicking him in the shin, but she hadn’t remembered to put shoes on before she rushed out of the house. She settled for a juvenile trick, walking around behind him and sinking her kneecaps into the back of his legs. His knees buckled, and he lost his balance and staggered forward a few paces, destroying a bleeding-heart bush. Then he shot her an evil glare and went right back to taking pictures.

“
Leave
,” she insisted.

“No.” He snapped frame after frame of the stranger as he sauntered toward them, and Ellen fumed with anger, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment, fear—all of it swirling around in her chest, making her heart hammer and her stomach clench.

By the time the SUV driver reached her property line, she recognized him. In a village as small as Camelot, you got to know who everybody was eventually. This guy hadn’t been around long, maybe a few months. She’d seen him at the deli at lunchtime, always dressed for the office. Today, he wore a white dress shirt with charcoal slacks, and he looked crisp despite the damp July heat.

One time, she’d been chasing after Henry at the Village Market, and she’d turned a corner and almost walked right into this man. They’d done a shuffling sort of dance, trying to evade one another, and for a few seconds, she hadn’t had a single thought in her head except
Whoa
.

Big guy. Very
whoa
, if you went for that kind of thing.

The two invaders assessed each other for a few beats before
whoa
took off his sunglasses and tucked them into his pocket. He stepped around the obstructive cedar tree and extended his hand to Ellen. “Hi. Caleb Clark.”