Room at the Inn (Novella): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (3 page)

Oven cleaner would take the paint off, but Carson didn’t tell her. He didn’t like the idea of Julie on a ladder, spraying caustic chemicals at the ceiling.

“Can’t you afford to hire someone else to do it?”

Another personal question. He was no good at playing by the rules she set.

But all she said was, “Sure.”

She wore an ancient denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, men’s canvas pants, and old running shoes. Her eyes were the same blue he spotted in odd places. A field of wildflowers in Afghanistan. The claws of a crab in the Indies. A brightly dyed dress in a North African marketplace.

Never on another woman, though. Only Julie had eyes that color—almost purple.

Only Julie ever looked at him so cold. Downright icy.

He should go before he got both of them into something they’d regret. But he needed the bed.

He tried another tack. “When was the last time you were in my dad’s house?”

“Right before I heard you were back in town.”

She’d been avoiding him. He’d suspected as much, but he still didn’t like hearing it.

“Have you seen upstairs lately?”

“I saw.”

“I can’t keep sleeping on the couch.”

“Why not? I thought that was your thing.”

“You thought what was my thing?”

She made a vague, looping gesture with one hand. “Carson Vance, world explorer. I thought you slept in the dirt most nights.”

“I’m thirty-six. I’m too old to sleep in the dirt. Ten days on the couch, and my back is killing me.”

She pursed her lips, then gave him an emotionless smile. “The Canal Inn over in Fenimore has Tempurpedic mattresses now. I can get you a discount.”

“It’s twenty miles to Fenimore, and it’s gonna snow tonight.”

“You’re an excellent snow driver.”

“Come on, Jules. I don’t even have a car here.” He reached out for her arm, but that was a mistake. She backed around to the other side of the counter, her smile turning wary.

“I’m too busy to have a guest,” she said.

“So don’t treat me like a guest. Just give me a bed and ignore me.”

Julie crossed her arms. “It’s not a good idea.”

No use denying that he knew what she meant. Not when his eyes had homed in on the top button of her shirt as soon as her innocently crossed arms plumped up her breasts and yanked his attention downward.

Creamy skin and a hint of lace. God help him, he wanted to ask her if she was seeing anybody. It used to be the first thing he asked when he came to town. Sometimes she was, and he cut his visits short because he couldn’t stand seething over Julie’s sex life any more than he could stand spending more than a couple days at a time in Potter Falls.

Other times she wasn’t, and they got caught up together at the wrong moments for the wrong reasons. In back rooms, broom closets, hallways. One memorable occasion behind the woodpile.

Always stupid and impulsive, and always he regretted it, because afterward he had to watch her pull herself together and put that distant, untouchable look back on her face, like a blanket she drew over her shoulders.

He’d stopped allowing himself “accidents” with Julie years ago, when his mother had not-so-delicately implied that he was stringing her along, and she needed to get on with her life.

She’d gotten engaged a year or so later, but the wedding never happened. His mom would say only that it hadn’t worked out.

“I’ll keep out of your hair,” Carson said, putting all his control into keeping his voice low and persuasive. It was the tone he relied on to talk Foreign Service contractors into working overtime for regular pay. It worked on everybody.

“You won’t have to wash my towels or sheets or cook me breakfast,” he added. “Hell, you can put me to work. I’ll strip the ceiling for you.” If his father wasn’t going to let him clear out the upstairs room, Carson needed to rustle up another form of distraction anyway.

Her frown deepened.

“Julia,” he said, because she hated being called that, and he wanted to put a crack in her frozen expression.

Her eyes flared to life. His cock pulsed and grew heavy. Just like that.

But she didn’t respond except to say, “Carson.”

He gave up and pushed the one button he knew would work. “You know what’s going on with my dad. I need to stay here. I need your help.”

She turned her back on him and looked out the window over the sink. Her shoulders dropped. “You can have a spare room in the attic.”

“Wonderful.”

“It’s nothing fancy. I’m not giving you one of the good rooms because I have to get them all aired out and decorated. You’ll just be in my way.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. The room comes with breakfast, and I’m charging you 120 a night.”

“Fine.”

“And you have to be out by December 21. I’m booked for the holidays, and I don’t want you hanging around being all …”

“Charming?”

The frown again. He hated that frown.

“Sexy?”

It turned into a scowl.

“Irresistible?”

“Annoying.” She considered him for a moment, head cocked. “You don’t even plan to stay that long, do you?”

“No.”

He wasn’t going to intend about it one way or the other. He’d take the three weeks she
gave him, work on her ceiling, visit his dad every day, and play the cards he got dealt.

Julie did something with her lips, a form of wordless disapproval. It took him a second to recognize it as an expression out of his mother’s arsenal.

Julie and Glory had spent fifteen years learning each other’s mannerisms. They’d grown close that first summer, when Carson brought Julie to Potter Falls—the summer his mother was finally giving in to diabetic renal failure and he’d dragged Julie home to help shore him up against the inevitable.

“That’s my mom’s face,” he said.

Her eyes widened, then brightened with a sudden grief that flooded him.

Stunned, he looked down at the countertop.

There was the honest reaction he’d wanted, slicing through all the awkward pretending they were doing and surprising them both.

Julie got a cloth from a drawer, wet it, and began wiping down the area around the sink. “If I have to put up with you,” she said lightly, “I might as well start channeling your mother.”

There was the old Julie.

And now Carson felt hollow and dark, unfit for company. It wasn’t his mother—he thought he’d about done all his grieving for her already. Her death hadn’t been a surprise.

No, he just got this way in Potter Falls. A physical unease built up in him, a harried bleakness, until he had to leave because … well, he didn’t know because why. Because it would get worse if he didn’t.

Ten days was longer than he’d stayed in a very long time.

Julie blustered around the kitchen, turning on a burner beneath a small saucepan full of water, cinnamon sticks, and orange peel. She’d gotten that from his mother, too.

A weird thought. A weird situation. But then, life was often that way—full of improbable occurrences and awkward human attachments. A girlfriend who donated a kidney to her boyfriend’s mother, then moved into his childhood home and released him to carry on with his life. A father who filled his house with trash to lure home the prodigal son.

Tricky business, navigating the minefield of his past.

Carson sipped the coffee experimentally. Delicious. He took a deeper swallow, savoring the heat that spread down his throat and fanned across his chest to settle in his belly. Julie swiped at another countertop, small and tidy as a sparrow in her baking-soda-spattered pants and sneakers. He caught himself staring at her ass and looked away, out the far window, down toward the frozen pond.

A cold, unwelcoming view. But even wrecked, Julie’s kitchen was warm, and it smelled like home.

“Thanks for taking me in.”

“I’m pretending you’re the Virgin Mary.”

He blinked. She picked a bucket up off the floor.

“Bad weather? Room at the inn? Mary having a baby in the stable—any of this ring a bell?”

The comparison amused him, lightening the atmosphere. When she tried to hustle past him a second later to dump the water in the sink, he had to work to keep from flattening his hand over her stomach and holding her in place, just to look at her.

“Honey, I’m not the virgin anything.”

Her eyes dropped. “Don’t start that.”

It definitely wasn’t only him.

But he wouldn’t do anything about it. Julie was a trap. Worse, she was his father’s trap.

Carson wasn’t getting caught.

Chapter Four

Bruce smiled when Carson walked through the door of the hardware store. “Nephew!”

“Uncle!” he shouted. The customary reply. They’d been doing it since Dad started bringing him to the store, probably around the time Carson was weaned.

If poker was his common ground with his father, home improvement was their battlefield. Weekends and evenings, Dad had always been dragging him along to paint rental units or help him sand and refinish cabinets and floors. If Bruce or Martin had work to do—and they
always
had work to do—Carson had been expected to tag along and help out.

“How’d that oven cleaner work out?” Bruce asked.

A big, burly man in his late seventies, he was six years older than Carson’s father and considerably easier to get along with. He’d opened the Potter Falls hardware store–slash–mercantile right after he came home from the Korean War.

“It’s working. I need a bunch more, though.”

“That’s a big kitchen your Julie’s got.”

She’s not my Julie
. But he didn’t bother correcting Bruce. Everyone in town did it, had always done it, would always do it. Carson had brought her to Potter Falls, so as long as they both remained single, Potter Falls mentally coupled them up.

Hell, he’d been mentally coupling them up himself. In any number of different positions.

Julie had failed to mention that the spare room was part of her living quarters. They were at opposite ends of the sprawling attic, but they shared a bathroom. They could ignore each other all day long—and did, once breakfast was done with—but when the sun went down, they each had to strip naked and get wet within ten feet of the other.

At least he was making rapid progress on the kitchen job. Sublimation could be productive. He spent mornings working at his dad’s, afternoons on Julie’s ceiling, and he still had more energy left than he knew what to do with.

“Lotta ceiling,” he agreed. “I’m uncovering about a three-foot clean strip with every can.”

“Taking more than one pass, like you thought?”

“Yeah, twice over, letting it sit on there, then spot treatments and scrubbing with the toothbrush.”

“Better you than me,” Bruce said with a smile.

“Yeah, no kidding. So have you got four or five more cans?”

“I think so. Check the shelf, and if there’s not enough, I’ll look in the back.”

Carson wound his way through the narrow aisles of the store to the row of aerosols. “You decide yet if you’re going to lacquer it when you’re done?” Bruce called.

“Going to let Julie decide.”

He’d talk to her about it. It would give them something to discuss at breakfast besides the weather.

Carson wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Julie had managed to become even more distant and haughty since their first conversation in the kitchen. She served him breakfast in the formal dining room, elaborate omelets and scones with currants, linen napkins and heavy silver. Every time he got a conversation going, she remembered something he ostensibly needed—ketchup served in a little ceramic dish with a doily underneath it, a refill on his coffee. Then she cleared the table and went to work, and he didn’t see her until the afternoon, when she’d already had lunch and was usually on her way out to a meeting with the historical society or the Methodist ladies that kept her through dinner.

She disappeared into her room at night, and he sat on the couch in her living area, watching TV alone for hours.

Carson ran a finger along the row of aerosol cans.

“You need to put some kind of sealant on there,” Bruce shouted. “It’ll discolor on you if you don’t.”

“I hear you, Uncle.” His finger stopped at the oven cleaner. Six cans still sat on the shelf. He swept all of them against his chest with one arm and carried them up to the front.

“Leo was in here the other day,” Bruce said.

“Leo Potter?”

“You know another Leo?”

Carson shook his head. “He still a self-important wanker with too much money and no common sense?”

Bruce made a tsking noise. “Shouldn’t speak ill of him. With his dad gone, he owns the whole town these days.”

“Bet he acts like it, too.”

“He’s not so bad. Was askin’ me about you.”

“Oh, yeah?” Carson wondered if that was supposed to spell trouble. What could Leo Potter care about him these days? They hadn’t spoken since high school. Their ancient, juvenile animosity couldn’t possibly carry weight any longer.

“Wanted to know why you were staying with his girlfriend.”

Or maybe it could. His fingers balled into fists, which he shoved into his front pockets for lack of anything better to do with them.

“Julie’s going out with Leo?”

“She has a few times.”

“How many’s a few?”

“Ask the ladies over to the cafe. They keep better tabs on that kind of thing than I do.”

“I’ll ask Julie.” His voice came out sounding exactly like his father’s. Irritable and bitter.

“There’s an idea. Tell her I said hello, will you?”

“Sure.”

Bruce rang up the oven cleaner, smiling because it was his default expression, and because he took great pleasure in making trouble.

“That girl’s a marvel,” he said. “If I were your age, I’d be half in love with her myself. Pretty, smart, and she’s made a world of difference in this town.”

“All right,” Carson said, handing over a fifty. “That’s enough.”

“You don’t put a ring on her finger, somebody else is going to do it soon enough. I heard Leo Potter was looking at ’em down at the mall in Fenimore.”

“Who told you that?” The idea of Leo shopping for rings at a down-market mall jewelry store was absurd.