Room at the Inn (Novella): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (6 page)

Which it was, actually. Leo had shifted and softened with age, his sharp chin and cheekbones lost in a fuller, more florid countenance that resembled his father’s.

The crown prince of Potter Falls had become its ruler.

“Want to look inside?” he asked. “I’ve got a key.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“You’ve been looking at it all week.” Leo glanced down the road toward his office building. “I can see from my window.”

Carson turned away, unsure how to respond. The wind cut across his cheek, across his exposed need and the longing for something he couldn’t name that dogged him every time he made the mistake of coming back to this town.

He stuffed down the urge to snap at Leo, even though Leo was doing this all wrong. You weren’t supposed to walk up to the enemy without even saying hello and offer him something he craved. It wasn’t seemly.

They were no longer friends, and Carson didn’t want anything Leo had to offer him. But he wanted inside that factory.

“Yes,” he said.

And Leo gave him the key. Simple as that.

Carson suspended the shovel from its hanger in the carport and let himself back into the house. His dad sat at the table with his Sudoku, just where Carson had left him half an hour ago. He pulled out a deck of cards and the gold tin that held their poker chips while Carson made sandwiches and poured two tall glasses of milk.

Just as he had yesterday and the day before that.

They had a routine. In the morning, after Julie fed him, Carson dressed and walked up to the house to harass his father in the guise of making him breakfast.

What are you up to today, Dad? The doctor says you need to be working that leg a little. Want me to drive you by the PT center so you can walk on the treadmill?

His father refused, ate the food Carson cooked him while complaining about it, took his vitamins while Carson watched. Carson cleaned the kitchen, started the laundry, and did whatever work was next on his to-do list for the house: moving the wood back into the carport where it belonged, chopping kindling, filling the bird feeders. Sometimes, Dad told him what needed doing. Most of the time, Carson just figured it out.

Then lunch while they played a few hands of poker, and Carson checked that Dad had a plan for dinner before he headed back to Julie’s to work on her ceiling. He was doing the lacquer now, a fussy job that needed a small brush and more delicacy than Carson had patience for.

He found the patience. If he hadn’t, the sealant would settle in every seam and crack, clogging up the detailed medallion pattern with gunk that would darken and age badly.

She came in to talk to him sometimes. Never for more than a few minutes. Always about the work. But Carson liked the work. He was happy to talk with her about it.

Dad, work, walk, dinner at the diner. He watched TV or read a book alone, he went to sleep. After almost three weeks in Potter Falls—ten days at Julie’s—the routine was easy. Comfortable, even. But it wasn’t helping anything. His dad moped around, and every day that went by, Carson felt more restless and caught.

He carried in the food and sat down at his father’s right hand.

“Supposed to get more snow tonight,” Martin said.

“I heard that. They’re talking about a record December.”

Martin grunted, shuffled the cards, and dealt. “Five-card stud. Nothing wild.”

Carson threw a chip into the middle of the table and stared at his cards without seeing them. He played by rote while he ate, not really trying to beat his father, not really wanting to lose. It just didn’t matter very much. Poker was Dad’s game, a ritual Carson participated in because it gave them something to do together.

“I walked through the shoe factory the other day.”

His father’s eyes drifted upward from the cards. “Who let you in?”

“Leo.”

“No shit.”

Leo had given him the key and left.
Drop it by the office when you’re done
, he’d said, but Carson had pocketed it. He wanted to go back. Leo knew where to find him if he needed to.

The shoe factory was amazing. Filthy, of course, the floor covered with shards of glass and ancient grease, strange collections of machinery and crumpled paper. But the main rooms were vast and reverberant, surprisingly bright.

Something young and long neglected inside Carson came alive inside those walls. Something that
wanted
.

“You ever been in there?” he asked.

“Sure. I worked in the warehouse.”

“When?”

“High school. After school, and one summer.”

“What’d you do?”

“Loaded shoe boxes on trucks, mostly.”

Carson mulled that over. It didn’t surprise him that his father had worked at the factory, though he never spoke of it. The building was part of the town, its beating pulse, long muffled.

“Julie wants to fix it up, you know,” Martin said.

“How’s that?”

“Wants to turn it into an arts and crafts place, some kind of cooperative to bring up the tourists from the city.”

“It would cost a fortune.”

“I know. She tried to get the Chamber interested a few years back, but they stonewalled her.”

Carson wondered if she’d talked to Leo about it. If Leo liked the idea, planned to invest in it? Maybe that explained why Julie was attracted to him—all that money a form of potential she couldn’t resist.

But he didn’t believe it. She’d never been interested in money. Other currencies moved Julie.

Community. Belonging.

“You taking a card or not?” his father asked.

Carson returned his attention to the game. Tried to, anyway. Part of his head kept running off on him, thinking about what it would take to fix up that factory. What contractors he’d have to hire. How much it would cost, how many months it would take. He could preserve most of the limestone, keep the window openings but replace all those small panes with larger expanses of glass. Knock down some of the walls that darkened the smaller wing.

Leo would mess it up. He didn’t have the imagination for this kind of project, and Julie had the vision but not the knowledge.

“It’d be a good job for you,” Martin said.

Carson’s head snapped up. “What would?”

A lame question. His father didn’t bother to answer it.

“If you weren’t goin’,” he added.

“But I am going.” For the first time, something inside him stumbled over the declaration. He ignored it. “You need to get ready for when I do. I called a woman to come over tomorrow and steam clean the carpet. If you like her, I think you should keep her on. She can stop by three,
four times a week and do laundry. She cooks, too.”

“What woman?”

“Danya Marvelle.”

“She’s a busybody.”

“And you’re not? Bruce told me you two were gossiping about Julie and Leo over at the hardware store.”

“Wasn’t gossiping.”

“Whatever you call it.”

“I don’t want that woman in your mother’s house. Your mother never liked her.”

“Mom is dead,” Carson said firmly. “And you need to get on with it.”

He looked down at his cards, pushing back against the rush of feeling his own words had unleashed. They needed to have this talk. His father had to hear the plain truth.

Martin threw a chip onto the pile. His hand trembled. “Raise you ten.”

“Call.”

Instead of laying his cards down on the table, his father met his eyes. “What if I don’t want to get on with it?”

Carson thought he had nothing to say to that. But he fanned his cards out on the table and said to his hands, “I’ll help you.”

Martin grunted. They left it at that. The closest thing they’d managed to a moment of real communication—and a far cry from good enough.

Chapter Six

He’d gotten accustomed to the view out the kitchen window—a clear shot down the slope of the broad lawn to the pond, where dried reeds bent under the weight of the snow. It was a clean, empty view, and he liked to rest his eyes on it when he’d been focusing on the ceiling too long.

So when he saw her out there skating on the pond late one afternoon, it took him longer than it should have to process what he was looking at.

A bird, skimming over the water. No, ice.

A person.

Julie
.

She moved in elegant figure eights, fast across the middle with her hands tucked behind her and her legs scissoring out, then slower as she leaned in and took each turn in a broad, graceful swoop.

He had his coat on before he’d made any kind of conscious decision, and by the time he got around to second-guessing himself, he was halfway down to the pond, and there wasn’t any point.

She spotted him as she rounded a turn and came to a neat stop directly in front of him, smiling across the six-foot gap between them.

Not smiling—beaming. At him.

“You want to skate?” she asked. “I’ve got a bunch of pairs in the house. I was pulling them out for the Christmas guests, and I couldn’t resist.”

“No, thanks.” Carson shoved his hands in his pockets. It was cold, and she had on only a heavy white sweater and leggings, plus a scarf and a hat. Not enough layers to keep warm unless she kept moving.

“Is it safe?” he asked. “Did you test it?”

“I was careful to look it all over before I got on, and Norm Baker gave it the thumbs-up last time he was over. He volunteered to be my ice certifier when I moved in.”

Norm did a lot of ice fishing. If he said it was safe, Carson was inclined to trust his judgment.

Which left him no reason to be here, talking to her. No reason whatsoever to have rushed out of the house like a fool at the sight of Julie on the pond.

No reason except he wanted to be around her.

“All right. Carry on.”

“Wait,” she called as he turned to go. “You want some cocoa later? I always have cocoa after I skate.”

Carson faced her but kept walking backward. “I’m not really a big cocoa guy.”

“I put a lot of peppermint schnapps in it.”

“That sounds better.”

“We could get a pizza, maybe. Watch a movie upstairs.
Elf
is on tonight.”

Her cheeks were bright pink. She wore a blue scarf that made her eyes look unreal. She wanted to watch a movie with him.

His smile felt too big. Goofy. “Are you sure we should? Is that what ‘old acquaintances’ do in a situation like this?”

She fidgeted on her skates, sliding them forward and backward, cutting thin lines in the ice. “Maybe it’s what old acquaintances do when they’re starting to be friends.”

“Just so they know where to draw the line.”

She glanced at him, more tentative than he was used to seeing her. “They know. I mean, they have a lot of practice, right?”

He had years of practice not touching her. It made no difference. Right now, he could think of ten different ways to get her naked in the guise of warming her up.

“They do.”

“So we should be fine.”

“Yeah. Okay. Well, don’t stay out here too long. You’re going to get cold.”

“I know my limits, Vance.”

She skated away, and he went back to the kitchen to watch her, just in case she fell in.

And because she looked beautiful.

Julie knelt at his feet, rummaging around on the floor of an attic storage closet.

“You know, I’m not even sure what you
do
?” she said. “I don’t know what you’re going to run on back to once you blow town. Your mom used to keep me up to speed.”

“I’m a construction engineer for the State Department.”

“I know
that
.” She knee-walked deeper into the closet. The seat of her jeans was dusty, and she had that awful bandana on her hair again, and he wanted to knock her onto her back and peel off every frustrating layer of clothing that kept her naked skin from his sight.

Pretty much par for the course.

“Here, take this,” she said.

He stooped down to accept the box she handed him. When he’d offered to help her carry the decorations downstairs, he hadn’t anticipated there would be so many. But with the lacquer drying in the kitchen, he had nothing better to do.

And he found her so interesting.

She wasn’t quite the Julie he remembered from college. Or maybe she was, only more so. It fascinated him to watch the way she lived, the way she
was
, inhabiting her life. He’d never stayed long enough to get a full picture of Potter Falls Julie, so he hadn’t understood what she had become. Mature, creative, ambitious. Her house was a central place, the hub of frequent drop-in visits and phone calls made to gauge what Julie thought about some matter of concern or to enlist her help in making something happen.

It had struck him the other day that she’d lived Upstate exactly as long as she’d lived in Manhattan. No wonder she wasn’t the same person anymore. She’d picked up the local way of talking. She’d made herself indispensable. Julie knew what she wanted, knew how to make people work for her. He listened to her on the phone with her parents, still a little stiff but more relaxed than she used to be talking to them. He eavesdropped while she served tea and scones and courted potential library donors.

She joked with people. Laughed. Flirted with old men.

She was happy.

Christ, it was sexy.

He hadn’t seen any sign of Leo.

“So what’s it all about, being a construction engineer? What do you actually do all day?”

“Yell at people. In a number of languages.”

She rolled her eyes.

“It’s true. Basically, I boss around local contractors to get embassies constructed—and other stuff the Foreign Service wants built, too. I’m in charge of the schedule, making sure materials get delivered. I make sure the government gets its money’s worth.”

“This must be so emasculating for you—working on my ceiling and saying ‘How high?’ when your dad says, ‘Jump.’ ”

Carson flicked his eyes down to the box in his hands. “I don’t mind it when I’m working. If I sit around thinking about it, I get antsy.”

She smiled. She’d been smiling more the past few days. The ice princess had departed. “Do you like it?”

He had liked it, back when he started out. Now it was just his job. Three weeks and change in Potter Falls, and he’d barely thought about it.