Yours, Mine...or Ours?

Like most of Mulligan Falls’s residents, Bets already knew about Rudy being the inn’s new owner. If you wanted to keep your business private, hiring Linda Fairweather as your Realtor was a bad idea. That’s how Violet knew about Rudy’s paying cash for the inn. And that he’d bought it sight unseen. Nice guy, but definitely certifiable.

Wriggling out of her coat, Violet sat on the edge of Joey’s recliner, trying not to touch the upholstery with actual skin. Betsy wasn’t a horrible housekeeper, but the chair had weathered the five kids in Betsy’s family as well as her three. Not that Violet’s were neat freaks, God knew, but her friend’s boys truly saw the world as their canvas.

“Rudy offered me my old job,” she said, trying to finger comb her tangled curls. “When the inn’s ready to open again, I mean. Apparently he’s going to completely refurbish it. Until then, if I want, I could help with the rehab.” Intent on catching the end of her program, Betsy was only half listening. “He also said the apartment over the garage is ours, if I want it.”

At that, her friend’s head whipped around, plucked eyebrows arching up underneath spidery bangs. “You gonna take it?”

“I told him I’d think about it.” After several seconds of the Golden-Eyed Stare for which her friend was famous, Violet said, “You’ll have your house back in a couple of days.”

“Did I say anything?” Betsy said, one hand pressed to a chest that had once provoked envy in every girl in junior high and wistful lust in every boy. “Have I ever complained about you guys being here, even once? And if this doesn’t work out, you know you’re welcome to come back, anytime. For as long as you need.”

Translation: Betsy was going to miss the hundred fifty bucks a month Violet had been giving her toward the utilities and “wear-and-tear,” as she put it.

But Violet only reached over and squeezed her friend’s hand. “Really, I don’t know how I would have made it through these last six months without you.” Because, if nothing else, Bets had given them a roof over their heads and something at least remotely resembling stability. Nothing to be sneezed at.

The credits came on, scrolling lickety-split over the promo for the next program. Noting that Trey had at last conked out, too, Betsy stabbed the remote, then shifted on the sofa, the baby’s head on her lap. A wicked grin stole across a living advertisement for twelve-hour lip gloss. Really, you could shellac floors with that stuff.

“I got a glimpse of that Rudy fella out the window,” Betsy said in a low voice. “He as good-looking up close as he is from a distance?”

Yeah, she’d known this was coming. Joey, God bless him, was more the teddy bear type—long armed, pudgy and slightly shaggy. Violet shrugged, thoughts of Rudy’s distinct lack of pudge setting off a few all-too-familiar tingles in several far-too-neglected places. “I s’pose. He’s no pretty boy, though. Everything’s where it should be, but nothing out of the ordinary.” Except the eyes, she thought, their laser brilliance burned into her brain. Betcha those eyes could get some women to do just about anything. “A big guy. Useta be a cop. In Springfield.”

“Mass?”

“Yeah.”

“A flatlander, huh?” Bets said, head propped in palm, still grinning, her other hand absently stroking little Trey’s damp hair back from his forehead as he slept. “So what made him chuck it all to move up here to Boonieville?”

“I have no idea,” Violet said, wobbling a little when she got to her feet. “But I’ll betcha dollars to doughnuts, he doesn’t stay.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because they never do,” Violet said simply.

“You did what?” Stacey shrilled a scant yard from Rudy’s ear two days later, on their first drive to her new school. And yeah, she’d definitely been pissed when she’d found out it started today, until Rudy pointed out that at least going to school got her out of wallpaper stripping detail.

Although bitterly cold, the morning was nothing short of spectacular. Cloudless, picture-puzzle blue sky. Sun streaming through bare-branched trees. Glittering patches of snow. Perfect. The juice was back on, heating oil was being delivered that afternoon, the phone people were promising tomorrow between one and five, and the Dumpster—delivered yesterday—was rapidly filling up with shreds of linoleum and dreary carpet and basically anything receiving at least two “Gross!” votes.

Violet hadn’t contacted him—yet—but she’d said not before today, anyway, so he was hopeful on that front.

Okay, maybe hopeful wasn’t exactly the right word. Anxious, maybe.

What the hell, he wasn’t some freaking dictionary. All he knew was, those big gray-green eyes and that pale skin and the way she smelled and her obviously bruised emotions were doing a real number on his head. If she said “yes” things were liable to get a lot more complicated than he needed right now.

Because, frankly, after sitting with her in his car the other night…well, Rudy wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to be able to forgo female companionship. The kind of female companionship that some people—his eyes cut to his glowering daughter—might take exception to. But you know what? He’d cross that bridge when—and if—he came to it. For the first time since he could remember, more things were going his way than not, leaving him pretty much in a “bring it on” kind of mood.

Which is why, since he figured his daughter would appreciate a heads-up, he’d finally told Stace about his offering Violet the job. And the apartment. If she didn’t accept, it was no big deal. Right?

“Unknot your panties, Stace,” Rudy said mildly, his breath catching at the flash of red out of the corner of his eye, a cardinal and his wife out for breakfast. “This has nothing to do with your life.”

“How can you say that?” she said, appalled, and Rudy belatedly remembered that the life-impact Richter scale for teenagers (which his daughter was, in spirit if not yet in years) was a hundred times more sensitive than it was for other humans. “I mean, it’s bad enough we had to move here in the middle of the freaking winter—”

“Okay, first off, you don’t get to say freaking. Because I said so,” he added, and she clamped her mouth shut. “And we’ve been over this. We need to start fixing up the place now so I can start taking spring and summer bookings. Which might, if I’m lucky, tide me over long enough to replace the windows and the heating system. I didn’t really have a choice, Stace—”

“Of course you had a choice, Dad! Nobody forced you to buy the inn! Or leave Springfield! Or invite this woman we don’t even know to live with us—!”

“Dammit, Stace, that’s enough!”

Rudy flinched at the anger in his voice. He rarely yelled at his daughter. Had never lifted his hand. But judging from the stunned look on her face, at least he’d gotten her attention.

He took a deep breath. Then another. Then finally said, steadily, “I know this is a huge change for you. That from where you’re sitting, it seems like I turned your world upside down for no apparent reason.” His gaze touched the side of her face, all set jaw and flared nostrils. “But, honey, from the minute you were born, your life became mine. And in many ways, it still is. Sometimes, though, an opportunity comes along…”

His hand flexed on the wheel. “Look, I hadn’t planned on buying this or any other inn now, because I didn’t think there was any way I could swing it. But suddenly, there it was, within my reach, and I knew if I let fear or doubt make me second-guess myself, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.”

“So what I think doesn’t matter?”

“I didn’t say that. Of course what you think matters. But you gotta give this a chance, Stace. Give me a chance. Longer than two days.”

Silence. “How long?”

“A year.”

“A year? Are you serious?”

“That’s right. And if it doesn’t work out,” Rudy said, mentally crossing his fingers, “I’ll sell up and we’ll move back to Springfield.”

The sun played peekaboo through the tree branches for several seconds as they drove. One of Stacey’s booted feet found its way onto the dash. “You promise?”

“I swear. And put your foot back where it belongs.” When, accompanied by a weighty sigh, the foot dropped, Rudy said, “So. We have a deal?”

“Yeah,” she said on another exhalation, “I guess.”

“Good. Now about Violet,” Rudy said, and Stacey’s head fell back against the headrest. “She’s not gonna be sharing your closet, for God’s sake. And I’ll need a cook.” He glanced over. “Unless you wanna get up at six and make breakfast for the guests?” Her horrified gaze shot to his. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“But she has kids, Dad,” Stacey said, as though the problem with this was self-evident.

“Yeah, she has kids. So?” She rolled her eyes. Boy, was she using everything in her arsenal today or what? “Okay, Stace. For one thing, she hasn’t said yes yet, I’m only telling ya as a courtesy at this point. And for another…since when don’t you like kids?”

That got a what-planet-are-you-from? look. “Whatever gave you the idea I did?”

Rudy told his good mood to hang on, be patient, another ten, fifteen minutes and it could come out of hiding again. “You always seemed to get along with your cousins okay.”

“Yeah, well, they’re my cousins. I have to like them.”

“Don’t give me that—you love the twerps and you know it. And you were crazy about little Haley when you met her at Thanksgiving.” Not that everyone else in the family wasn’t, too, when his sister Mia brought the little girl who was now about to become her stepdaughter— as well as the man who became her fiancé—home for the holiday. The four-year-old was bona fide wrap-around-your-little-finger adorable. Like Stace used to be, in fact, before the hormones from hell plundered her body. “In fact, you played with her most of the day.”

“That was different,” Stacey said, pushing her shiny, just-washed hair (amazing what a determined female can accomplish with a wood-burning stove, water and a kettle) behind her ear. A red-rimmed, undoubtedly freezing ear with a brand-new, dangly pierced earring—a Christmas present from the aforementioned Mia. When Rudy suggested Stace might want to wear a hat because, you know, it was ten degrees outside, she’d looked at him like he’d proposed snake charming as a career. “Haley’s a girl.”

“What’s her being a girl got to do with it?”

“Little girls are cute. Little boys…” She shuddered.

“I didn’t see anybody exactly twisting your arm to take Zeke to the bathroom the other night, when we were at the diner.”

“That doesn’t mean I want to live with him! And anyway, in case you missed it, Violet’s got serious issues.”

“Most of which probably stem from the fact that she thought she was going to inherit the house.”

A school bus in front of them turned off the road, heading for a large, squat, sixties-vintage redbrick building surrounded by fifty-foot conifers. “Right,” Stacey said, her eyes narrowed as she scouted out this part of her new world. “So how exactly is offering her a job in the house she thought was going to be hers going to work? Uh, Dad?” she said as Rudy thought, This kid is too damn smart.

“Yeah?”

“This can’t possibly be the right school. Look at all the little kids!”

Rudy berthed the Bronco in a visitor parking space, cut the engine. “It’s not the wrong school,” he said quietly. “It goes from kindergarten through eighth grade.”

Again, her eyes arrowed to his. “I have to go to school with the babies?”

Please God, Rudy thought as he opened his door. If you could just see your way clear to fast forward us both through the next six years or so…

Desperately trying to tune out Stacey’s mutterings about how half her new schoolmates probably weren’t even potty-trained yet, Rudy herded her toward the office. Not until they’d gotten inside, however, and the secretary—a seemingly normal human being, Rudy noted—had traded him registration forms for Stacey’s shot record and birth certificate and records from her old school, did his daughter’s comment about Violet finally sink in.

Because, well, Stacey had a point—how was Violet’s working for him, living in a house that she’d once believed would be hers, going to make her happy? Yeah, okay, she’d said she’d only intended to sell it, then use the proceeds to start over somewhere else, but…

“Here you go,” the secretary—Johnnie, according to her desk plaque—said with a smile as she handed him back the shot record and birth certificate. Rudy checked over the forms to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, then gave them to her. He tossed a smile over at Stacey, slumped in a molded plastic chair by the door, gnawing on a hangnail and looking like she’d just been told iPods had been declared illegal. “No family physician?” the secretary asked.

“We literally just moved here,” Rudy said. “So, no. Not yet.”

The gray-haired lady smiled up at him, eyes crinkling. No horns or antennae or anything that he could tell. “I can give you a list of doctors and dentists in the area, if you like.”

“Thanks, that would be very helpful—”

“Oh!” she said, looking up. “You’re the guy who bought the Hicks Inn?”

“That’s me.”

Johnnie straightened, folding her arms across a boxy plaid jumper, a sappy expression crossing her face. “That used to be such a nice place. Back when both of them were still alive, I mean. It went downhill after Creighton—Doris’s husband—got sick. Doris just couldn’t keep it up by herself. Time was, though, people had to make reservations a year in advance. I know we’re a bit off the beaten track, but there’s lots to do around here, the battlefields and museums, and that arts festival in the summer. You have to go up north for the skiing, of course, but there’s cross-country trails all over the place…”

She laughed. “Listen to me, I sound like a one-woman chamber of commerce. But it would certainly be wonderful to see it come back from the ashes. Like the phoenix.”

“Gonna give it my best shot,” Rudy said, smiling.

“Okay, Stacey,” Johnnie said, gesturing for her to stand, “let’s go see the assistant principal. She’ll get you all set up.”

Stace struggled to her feet, the picture of the condemned woman, and Rudy thought, I sheltered this kid way too much. In hindsight, he should’ve made much more of an effort to expose his daughter to new experiences, new people, before she’d become so…so ossified. Still, when her eyes swung to his, begging him not to embarrass her by giving her a hug, he knew her pain was real.

A pain that, no matter what kind of spin he put on it, he’d caused.

“I’ll be back at—” He looked at the secretary.

“Three,” she supplied, holding one arm out to guide Stace to the inner sanctum. His daughter took two steps toward the secretary, and Rudy took one step—backward—toward the office door, and Stacey spun and wrapped herself around his waist, barely long enough for him to react, then darted off again.

How did they do that?

Back outside, feeling like The Hulk as he wove his way back to the parking lot through a sea of winterized little kids, he had to ask himself…what if it didn’t take, with Stace? How long did he dare wait out the normal pangs of homesickness, her resentment at his having, as she’d reminded him no less than a dozen times since their arrival hours, ruined her life?

And what if he couldn’t turn the inn around, make a go of it? Enthusiasm was all well and good, but the fact remained that he’d gone into this more or less blind. Oh, he’d taken a few courses and read everything he could get his hands on about running a bed-and-breakfast, but—

“Rudy?”

He blinked, then looked down into Violet’s round, flushed face, freckled in the unforgiving daylight, framed by a zillion coppery coils that skated and slid across the shoulders of that shapeless down coat. In the sunshine, she was…incredible, a Technicolor marvel of pale cream and deep pink and underside-of-the-leaf-green and a thousand shades of fire, and he had to literally order his hand not to lift to her face. Just long enough to ground him again, to remind him what it was like, to touch a woman. To yearn.

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