Room at the Inn (Novella): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (5 page)

When she wasn’t pretending not to know him, Julie could make him laugh like nobody else.

He hadn’t laughed for a year after he left her. Maybe longer than that. Nothing was funny.

It wasn’t a choice he’d ever wanted to make—Julie or the rest of the life he’d planned. She’d known that. She released him from having to make it. But he never had been able to leave her behind, any more than he’d left his hometown behind. He carried them around with him. He dreamed of deep snow and the factory by the river, chopping wood with Dad and Bruce, his mother’s lemon pound cake.

He dreamed of Julie, laughing.

Carson burnished the tin and brought out its secrets. The ceiling had a quiet shine, a dignity that had been here all along, concealed beneath the paint.

She’d uncovered so many secrets here. He felt a weird mix of pride and jealousy, admiring what she’d done with the place. All he’d had to do was point it out to her, and she’d taken it on as a project.

Oh, Carson, I want to live there!

A possibility that had never crossed his mind—but then, he’d always been mentally packing to leave.

Yesterday, he’d had a call from his boss.
Give me three more weeks
, he’d said.
I’m in the middle of something
. His deputy could cover for him for that long.

Of course, another guy could do the ceiling, too. Or Julie could.

But it felt right to be doing it himself. Right to give her something, to pay her back for everything he’d done to her over the years.

He was here. This was what he had to give.

“Don’t mind Carson,” Julie told Alicia. “He just stands on the ladder and buffs things.”

The girl smiled and covered her mouth with her hand, hunching her shoulders in that way thirteen-year-olds had, as if she wished she could fold her body into a smaller space.

“What?” Julie asked.

She leaned closer and whispered under the sound of the radio, “He’s cute.”

“I know,” Julie whispered back. “But cute isn’t everything. Come on, I’ll show you where to put the cake.”

They went into the dining room, where the table was filling up with sweets for the Friends of the Library bake sale.

“Thanks, honey,” Julie said when they’d found a spot. “I’ll get the pan back to your mom next week.”

On the way back through the kitchen, the girl shot her gaze over to Carson, then covered her mouth again.

He did make quite a picture up there. Tight butt, flexing muscles, broad back beneath a white T-shirt. Her own personal slice of beefcake, on display to half of Potter Falls this morning.

As Alicia slid out the door, an older, much larger woman pushed through carrying a tray of cupcakes. “It’s fixing to snow again. We’ve had more snow this winter than—Carson Vance! What are you doing on that ladder?”

“I’m polishing the ceiling, Mrs. Miller.”

The third-grade teacher put her hands on her capacious hips, her mouth set in a habitual frown. But after a few moments’ inspection, the frown softened. “It’s coming along very nicely.”

“I think so, too.”

“See that you don’t fall off.”

“Will do.”

Julie tried to take the cupcakes, but Mary Miller said, “I’ll carry them,” and marched into the dining room.

“Thank you so much for making these.”

“I always make cupcakes for the bake sale.” Her eyes narrowed. “What’s he doing here?”

“Polishing the ceiling?”

“Don’t treat me like I was born last Tuesday.”

Julie mentally rolled her eyes. When she’d arranged to have bake-sale donations dropped off at her house, she’d thought it would be more convenient than finding somewhere to put them all at the library, then carting them over to Bruce’s store, where the sale would take place. She hadn’t counted on everyone’s bringing their treats through the back door into the kitchen to ogle Carson.

They were doing it on purpose. Everyone in town knew he was staying here, and thanks to Bruce, most of them probably knew he was working on her ceiling. They all wanted a look at him.

They wanted a look at him and her together.

“It’s temporary.”

Mary made a snorting sound. “Of course it’s temporary. It’s Carson.”

“His dad sent him over.”

“His dad should know better. I thought you were done with that boy.”

“Do you need anything else? I’ll get your tray back to you next week.”

Her frown lines deepened. “Just be careful.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

When she’d gone, Julie checked out the window for more cars. The drive was empty. For now.

She got herself a glass of water and sat at the kitchen island. “I’m sorry about all the disruption,” she said.

He twisted around to look down at her. “I feel like a monkey at the zoo.”

“I didn’t think.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “They’re all just curious. And very, very protective of you.”

“What did she say?”

He flapped the hand that was holding the rag and climbed down from the ladder. “Don’t worry about it. You can make it up to me by letting me eat one of those cupcakes with the white frosting.”

“Knock yourself out.”

He washed his hands and retrieved one from the dining room, and Julie got him a plate, thinking how much easier it was to talk to him since they’d cleared the air. Still awkward, but at least not so … tense. Carson took a bite from the cupcake, then peeled a twenty out of his wallet, setting it on the counter. “For the bake sale.”

“Thank you. That’s very generous.”

The comment earned her a sideways smirk—the smirk she thought of as his spinster smile, since he saved it for when she said something that came out particularly old-maidenish.

It wasn’t her fault. It was tricky trying to figure how to be with him. He was hardly a
stranger, but she knew only one way to treat him other than icy. It wasn’t an option.

Meanwhile, all the pretending was wearing on her. Pretending not to hear him walking in her hallways, not to notice his damp towel hung over the towel rod in his room. Not to be thinking about his body, stripped and wet.

Pretending that she was here to serve him breakfast and change his sheets, and that she didn’t want to talk to him or see him smile, to tackle him in the hallway and roll around on the floor with him until she was wet and panting and out of her mind.

“You always run the bake sale?” he asked.

“Always.”

“And you spend Sunday mornings doing the Methodist breakfast.”

“Yep.”

“And organize the volunteers for the hospital gift shop.”

“Yeah.”

Carson smiled that wide, crooked grin of his, and her stomach filled up with adorable cartoon grasshoppers, springing around on their grasshopper feet. “Taken over any more of my mom’s jobs?”

She had. She’d taken over almost all of them at one point or another in the past five years, as Glory’s health declined. He probably thought that was old-maidenish, too, or weird, or unnecessary. Julie was the youngest person on every board she belonged to, and the only outsider.
Why don’t you just write a check?
her mother would ask.

But she appreciated having been given so many ways to belong. Growing up, she’d felt like she was supposed to become nothing more than a polished, unemotional set of accomplishments to be admired or envied by others. As though society were nothing but a collection of individuals, preening for one another. Her parents weren’t bad people, but their way of life felt so lacking to her. When she moved to Potter Falls, she’d wanted nothing more than to be one of a group, pulling together toward a common goal. Ordinary. Useful.

“I like it,” she said simply. His lips quirked again, and she had to fight off an answering smile. “Don’t judge me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of judging you.” He wiped his fingers over his jaw with a scraping sound, feigning deep thought. “You’re a very superior sort of person, Julie Long. I’m not entitled to judge you, or hurt you, or kiss you.” He slanted her a meaningful look. “Or so I’ve been informed. And if I break your heart, Mrs. Miller is going have my guts for garters.”

“She didn’t say that.”

“You think I came up with it myself?”

“Oh, God.” Julie polished off her water, smiling into the glass. Guts for garters. How disgusting.

“I should eat some real food,” Carson said. “You have lunch already?”

Lunch. It sounded innocent enough, but the possibility zinged through her in an entirely not-innocent way.

There were ground rules, even if he didn’t know what they were. Guidelines for getting through the day with minimal contact and even less conversation.

Right now, she was too excited—too wired to have any kind of safe conversation with him. She’d ask him questions. She’d smile at him. She’d somersault backward into all these feelings, and if she didn’t watch it, she’d keep tumbling until she loved him all over again.

“I ate earlier,” she said. Too late, she remembered that he knew she hadn’t. She’d been home all morning.

When his face fell, she felt a pang of guilt, but she quashed it. He’d asked her to help him. She was doing them both a favor.

“Have a good one,” someone called, as Carson pushed his way out onto the walk.

“You, too.”

The bell over the door of the diner jingled behind him. He turned left, bracing himself against the wind as he walked up the block, then left again to climb the hill that took him away from downtown, toward home.

Though he wasn’t going home. This time of day, when he’d worked all he could at Julie’s and he still had energy to burn, he’d taken to just walking. Up and down the pitched streets of Potter Falls, some of them so steep that as a kid on his bike he’d imagined flying downhill and coming unmoored from gravity. Drifting off into space, no longer bound by the laws of physics.

He’d wanted to fly even before he wanted to leave.

Along the river. Through the cemetery on the hill, where he’d found his mother’s headstone his first day out. He stood in front of it, wondering what the point of the stone was. His mother survived in his head, and she would die when nobody remembered her. This undulating patch of land covered in granite—who was it for, when nobody alive knew what most of these people had looked like or the sound of their voices?

You couldn’t hold on to the people you loved by planting slabs of rock in the earth. They died. Everyone died. It was the single unshakable fact of the human condition, and yet nobody ever seemed to get it. People thought love was a foundation they could build their lives on. When you did that, and you lost your foundation, the whole house of cards collapsed.

Carson had seen it happen. That summer, when he was twenty-one years old, and his mother spent hour after hour hooked up to a dialysis machine that couldn’t keep her going anymore, he’d become resigned to losing her, and his father had gone slack and helpless with despair.

Julie’s kidney gave Martin the reprieve he’d prayed for, but it couldn’t give him forever. There
was
no forever. All you got was sixty or eighty or a hundred years, and you had to do something with them. You had to change the world, push it in the right direction as far as you could manage.

He’d tried to explain it to his mother once, but she’d only looked sorry for him, which he couldn’t understand.

Carson walked.

They were long, cold walks, but he dressed for them. Two towns over, they made long underwear at the Duofold factory, and he’d taken to wearing the waffle-weave shirts under flannel. Beneath his jeans, a second layer kept his ass from freezing off. Thick wool socks and lined gloves. A watchman’s cap. His father’s wool coat. The uniform of the Upstate workingman.

He liked looking at the steep rooflines most of the houses had, thinking about how people’s dwellings adapted to their environments. He studied his hometown like the outsider he was. A man who’d built things all over the world—utilitarian structures for the army when he was in the engineering corps, grander buildings for the Foreign Service that echoed the architecture of the nations where they were built.

A man who spoke four languages fluently and could get by in eight or nine but couldn’t talk to his own father.

A man who felt his feet getting mired a little deeper every hour he spent in Julie Long’s house.

He’d finished buffing the ceiling while she was out getting groceries, then caught himself waiting for her to get home so he could show her how it looked, anticipating the pleasure on her face as if it would be his own.

Not what he was supposed to be doing. He kicked himself out of the house to go drink coffee and eat a cinnamon roll at the diner.

Now he walked, and as his boots crunched over the frozen gravel path of the cemetery, he imagined the mud falling off them. The trap opening. The chains dropping away.

Nothing kept him here. Just his conscience, and he could be a remorseless bastard if he had to.

He ended up at the shoe factory on the river, as he often did. A sprawling, monstrous beast constructed of weathered limestone blocks, it had humble origins as a tannery. The first Potter in Potter Falls had turned it into a felt mill, an enterprise that required wool lint and a lot of water. This was back in the era when everybody who aspired to genteel status owned a piano with insides full of felt. Eventually, a Potter descendant moved into felt slippers, then ladies’ shoes, sold under the Emery Potter brand. The town grew up with the enterprise, and the factory
became a testament to the booming business.

Until people stopped wearing felt slippers. The information age arrived and sucked all the jobs and productivity out of this part of the world. If the shoe factory stood testament to anything now, it was Potter Falls’s decline.

Carson couldn’t stop looking at it. Wall after wall of broken, darkened windows. The high ceilings. The way it perched over the river, looming if you approached from the pebbled banks, but from the road above it seemed to float over the water.

Car keys jingled, and he turned his head. Leo Potter leaned against a black Mercedes, his camel-hair coat and wingtips so incongruous that Carson could have recognized him even if his face were unfamiliar.