Innkeeper's Daughter

She’d quickly become family. As had some of the other guests at the inn who were initially only passing through.

The inn, Alex firmly believed, was the richer for it.

But there were times, few and far between, when her father made a mistake, a bad judgment call. This latest contractor had been one of those calls.

Christina Roman MacDonald walked in, munching on an apple. Alex knew her sister would have preferred a breakfast pastry—one of her specialties as the inn’s resident chef and one of the most requested items on the breakfast menu. But she was trying to instill healthy eating habits in Ricky, her four-year-old son, and that meant apples rather than pastries.

Swallowing what she’d been chewing, she said, “Hey, I just saw J.D. and his motley crew climbing into that beat-up truck of his. The guy almost ran right over me to get to it.” It wasn’t a complaint, just an observation. “Fastest I’ve seen the lot of them moving since they got here last week.” Cris nodded in the direction of the rear of the inn. “What’s up?”

“Miss Alex’s temper,” Dorothy told her. There was no small note of pride in the woman’s voice. “She finally got fed up with that so-called contractor’s grand plans.”

Leaning forward, the heavyset woman confided in as close to a whisper as she could manage, which meant it could undoubtedly be heard in the center of the closest San Diego shopping center, “No disrespect intended, Miss Alex, but it certainly took you long enough. The man was charging you for breathing—times five, since he was also padding the bill to pay for those five ‘helpers’ of his.”

“Now,” Cris pointed out, “they did work sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Dorothy snorted, “every time your father walked by.”

“Well, the main thing is that they’re gone and we won’t have to put up with them any longer,” Alex said, trying to put an end to the matter. Of course, they still had to deal with the contract her father had signed, but in it her father had outlined specific things he’d wanted done. Clarke’s plans strayed dramatically from the contract. The fact that he’d backed down so easily—without first speaking to her father—clearly told her that she was right.

“Yeah.” Cris nodded, regarding what was left of her apple as if she was seeking the answers to the mysteries of the universe. “Now all you have to do is explain all this to Dad.”

Dorothy waved her hand at the problem, dismissing it. “Mr. Roman’s a saint,” she proclaimed with feeling. “He’ll understand that you were just looking out for him, Miss Alex.”

“Or overriding him,” Cris chimed in with a barely suppressed grin.

“It’s not like that,” Alex protested. “I wasn’t overriding him. If Dad was just a little bit tougher, I wouldn’t have to be so vigilant.” It wasn’t that her father was a pushover or easily hoodwinked, it was just that he saw the best in everyone, even in those who didn’t seem to have a decent bone in their bodies. “There are times when I think that he could just give the inn away if it wasn’t for us.”

“For you,” Cris corrected her pointedly. They all knew that Alex was the fighter, the one who led the cavalry charge if a charge needed to be led. “The rest of us would just let Dad be Dad. I guess what I’m saying is, thanks for handling all that so we don’t have to.” And then she nodded. “He really is just too darn nice for his own good.”

“Who is?” Richard inquired, walking into the reception area and crossing over to join his two eldest daughters. He nodded at the housekeeper. “Morning, Dorothy.”

She could have tried to bury it in rhetoric, but what was the point? Alex thought. She believed in being honest.

“You,” Alex told her father without any hesitation.

He knew that look. For a moment he allowed himself to be sidetracked. What he’d come in to tell his daughters could wait a few minutes. It didn’t change anything, but keeping the news from them even a moment longer was a moment they were spared from dealing with what he had to tell them.

“Why do I get the feeling that my eldest daughter is about to sit me down for a lecture?” he asked with a smile.

Alex shook her head. “No, no lecture, Dad.”

“But she does have some news to pass on,” Cris informed their father when Alex said nothing to follow up her simple denial.

“Oh?” Richard turned to his eldest child. There were times she was so much like her mother, it gave him both pleasure and pain to look at her. Pleasure to remember all the good times they had shared together and pain because the time he had to remember was so very short in comparison to the rest of his life.

He spared Dorothy a glance as he waited for Alex to enlighten him. The housekeeper’s face was an open book and if there was something he really needed to know, he would be able to see it in her expression.

When the woman who never failed to let him know that he had saved her life that night they’d talked until dawn averted her face so he couldn’t look into it, Richard knew the news couldn’t be good.

Did they already know?

No, Richard decided. What he saw in his daughters’ faces was discomfort, not sorrow or despair.

Looking at Alex, he said, “I’m listening.”

CHAPTER TWO

ALEX COULD FEEL three pairs of eyes on her, waiting expectantly. Dorothy and Cris obviously already knew what she had to say and were there to hear her father’s reaction. Her father didn’t know what was coming, although, she now noticed, he seemed really sad.

Maybe she shouldn’t have jumped the gun this way, firing Clarke like she had. In all her twenty-eight years, Alex couldn’t remember a single instance when her father made her doubt herself, or gave her reason to believe he was disappointed in her. She had a degree in accounting, as well as one in hotel management. There was no reason in the world for her to even hesitate answering his question for a moment.

And yet, she did.

Her eyes never leaving his, she took a deep breath, released it slowly and said, “I fired J. D. Clarke, Dad.”

Richard seemed only mildly surprised by the news.

He was a little taken aback. He’d been consumed by his grief, but even if he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have expected his daughter to override his decisions. Ordinarily, Alex would have consulted him before taking any sort of final action like this.

At least, he would have assumed that she would consult with him since, now that he thought about it, Alex had never fired anyone before. Oh, there had been times when she had complained at length about one person or another currently working at the inn, but those matters were always ultimately dealt with and straightened out. Most of the time, a simple one-on-one conversation resolved the problem. No one had ever been fired. The high employee turnaround was a result of their needs being seasonal. Most of the extra people who worked at the inn were there because they were down on their luck and he had taken them on until they were back on their feet again.

While all his daughters worked at the inn in some capacity, Alex was his second in charge and she took running the inn very seriously.

In fact, sometimes, he felt that she took her job too seriously. That was a real source of guilt for him because those were the times when he felt that he had stolen a very important part of his daughter’s life from her.

The part where she got to enjoy herself without all these responsibilities hemming her in and making demands on her. It was his fault that things had arranged themselves this way. His health hadn’t always been the best. After Amy had died, it was all he could do to pull himself together and do what needed to be done to take care of the girls.

Alex had been all of sixteen when—his health poor at the time—she appointed herself acting head of the family.

The problem was, she never really unappointed herself acting head of the family and had just continued in that position from then on. She had even given up plans to attend an out-of-state college, electing, instead, to attend U.C. San Diego, living at home and juggling her studies with her duties on the home front.

There were times during this hectic interlude in her life that Richard had doubted his eldest daughter even slept. But she’d managed to do it all, help run the inn and graduate with honors despite all the demands on her time, which, among other things, included a double major.

These days, Alex’s life was no less hectic. She continued to concern herself with the hundred and one minute, day-to-day details that went with running the inn. There was very little time for Alex to concern herself with just being Alex.

And that’s why he had to hope that his friend Dan’s little plan might stand a chance.

Richard studied her now, wondering what had set her off enough to make her actually fire someone. Whatever it was, he knew without being told that it was justified. But while he had tremendous faith in his daughter, he still needed to know the circumstances. And why she hadn’t included him in the decision.

So, for a moment longer, he put off being the bearer of sad news and asked Alex, “Is there a particular reason why you fired him?”

Alex nodded her head, possibly a bit too emphatically.

“A very particular reason,” she told him. There wasn’t a sliver of uncertainty in her tone. He knew there were times she’d find herself second-guessing a situation, but not in this case. In this case, she was absolutely certain she’d done the right thing.

“Clarke was going to butcher the inn,” Alex replied.

The general contractor had come to him with several letters of referral as well as half-a-dozen photographs of his work. All in all, the man had come across as a competent general contractor. Not to mention that Clarke had talked about being a family man, something Richard found to be rather important.

A family man who needed to provide for that family. For Richard, it had been a very important deciding factor in hiring the man.

He remembered as a boy listening to his own father tell him stories about his great-great-grandmother, Ruth, and how she’d converted her home into an inn to keep from losing it, as well as a way to provide for her five children.

Keeping those stories foremost in his mind was what had kept Richard from ever turning away a single person who needed a place to stay.

“And just how did J.D. intend to ‘butcher’ the inn?” he asked Alex.

“He didn’t intend to do it,” Alex corrected her father. “But that would have been the end result of what he was going to do to the inn.”

Richard glanced at his other daughter and then at Dorothy, but there was no enlightenment from either quarter. “I don’t think I understand.”

To Alex, the inn was like a living, breathing entity. Something to watch over and protect so that it would be here, just as her ancestor had intended, for many, many years to come. J. D. Clarke, she was certain, had ideas that would’ve dramatically changed the direction the inn had been going for more than a hundred years. And his staff sure hadn’t given her any confidence that they could do good work that would stand the test of time.

“You’d hired him to make additions to the inn. He took it upon himself to go in a whole different direction. He showed me these really awful sketches he planned on ‘bringing to life,’ as he put it. When I said they would clash with what was already here, he told me I’d change my mind once they were completed. I think he felt I was challenging his judgment and he wouldn’t budge. So I fired him. He left me no choice.”

Alex took the folded piece of paper she’d slipped under the sign-in ledger she kept on the desk and placed it in front of her father as exhibit A. It was the only one of Clarke’s sketches he had left behind.

“It looked more like a growth than an addition,” she said indignantly, stabbing a finger at the drawing. “And it’s modern.” Alex all but spat the word out, as if it was a new strain of a fatal disease.

She watched her father glance over the sketch. By his expression, she could tell that he couldn’t quite understand the problem.

“Dad, you can’t just slap something that looks like it vacationed in the Museum of Modern Art onto a Victorian house. The two décors clash horribly and at the very least it would make us look...indecisive,” she finally declared for lack of a better word, “to our guests.”

“Indecisive?” Cris asked, puzzled. She pulled over the sketch to look at it herself.

Alex wanted support from her sister, not a challenge. “Shouldn’t you be back in the kitchen, getting ready for the guests coming in for lunch?” she prompted.

“Got it covered,” Cris told her cheerfully. “Go on, you were saying?” It was obvious that she wanted to see how far Alex was going to go with this.

Alex turned her attention back to her father, stating the rest of her case. “All the other additions over the years always retained that original Victorian flavor. It’s what the guests who come here expect. Not to mention he was intending to knock down that wall. That wall,” she emphasized, pointing to it. “That’s load-bearing, isn’t it? And if it isn’t and I’m wrong about that, well, he sure didn’t argue. Because he didn’t know better. The guy didn’t have a clue what he was doing. Besides,” she added in a quieter but no less firm voice, “Clarke acted as if he thought he knew what was best for the inn.”

“When we all know that you are the one who knows what’s best for the inn,” Cris declared solemnly, suppressing a grin.

Richard looked from one daughter to the other. He had devoted his life to raising his girls and was experienced enough to know that there was a confrontation in the making. His daughters loved one another, but that didn’t keep them from going at it heatedly.

He headed the confrontation off before it could get under way.

Kissing Alex’s forehead, he told her, “I trust you to make the right decisions. Of course, this means we’re going to have to find another general contractor.” He sighed, reminding her that the contractor had originally been called in to make some much needed repairs. Repairs that as of yet hadn’t happened. “If we don’t, then with the first big rain of the season we’ll have an indoor pool in the kitchen, thanks to the fact that the roof has seen much better days.”

“Why don’t we use the one we had the last time?” Cris proposed. “Mr. Phelps was really nice,” she added.

Alex looked at her. “Do you remember when the last time was?”

Thinking for a moment, Cris shrugged. Richard was only too aware that a great deal of life had happened to Cris since then so she couldn’t really be expected to know the answer to that question. “Five, seven years ago?”

Alex shook her head. “Try ten.”

“Okay, ten,” Cris acknowledged. “So? What’s the problem?”

Alex looked at her sister for a long moment. Didn’t Cris think she would have gone back to the other man if that had actually been an option? “Other than the fact that he’s dead, nothing.”

“Dead?” Cris echoed in surprise. “When did that happen?”

“Around the same time he stopped breathing, I imagine. Give or take,” Alex replied in the calm voice she used when she was trying to remove herself from a situation. Situations that usually only involved her sisters and came from being one of four kids. Growing up fighting to get an edge over the other three.

She expected her father to say something to rein her in, but he didn’t. She found that a little odd.

“Very funny,” Cris retorted, her expression indicating that was exactly what she didn’t think it was.

Alex ignored her. “Don’t worry, Dad, I’ll find us another general contractor. One who listens to what the inn is trying to say.”

Richard laughed shortly, but there was no humor in the sound. Alex picked up on it instantly.

“I’d settle for a contractor who doesn’t charge an arm and a leg,” her father said.

“No body limbs, just reasonable rates. Got it,” Alex promised with a wink.

Cris glanced at the oversize watch on her wrist. It was large and bulky and made her seem even smaller and more fragile than she was. The only time she ever took it off was when she showered.

The watch chastened Alex and she regretted what she’d said to Cris. The watch had belonged to Mike. It was the last thing he’d given her before he’d left, saying that every time she looked at it, she should think of him and know that he was that much closer to coming home.

Except that he wasn’t and he didn’t.

Mike’s unit had been called up and, just like that, he had been deployed to Iraq. He’d been there less than a week when a roadside bomb took him away from her permanently.

He’d died before he’d ever been able to hold his newborn son in his arms.

“Looks like I’m out of time,” Cris murmured. She raised her deep blue eyes to look at Alex. “Looks like you get your wish, big sister. I’m out of here.”

“No, wait.” Richard held up his hand like an old-fashioned policeman charged with directing the flow of traffic.

“Sure,” Cris answered after exchanging a look with Alex. Alex saw by her sister’s expression that Cris had no more of a clue what was going on than she did. “Carlos can watch Ricky a few more minutes,” she said, referring to the busboy who also helped out in the kitchen when things got a little too hectic at the inn. “What’s up, Dad?”

“I came in to tell you girls that...” Richard hesitated and Alex could see that whatever was on his mind was not a subject he found easy to talk about.

“Well, I’ve got beds to make,” Dorothy said to no one in particular, turning to leave the reception area. She clearly assumed that whatever their dad had to say was intended only for his family.

But she’d assumed wrong.

“Stay, please, Dorothy,” Richard requested. “This concerns you, too.”

“Of course, sir,” Dorothy said politely, staying where she was.

An uneasy feeling feathered through Alex. “Okay, now you’re scaring me, Dad,” she told him.

This was the way she’d discovered her father was ill all those years ago. Fortunately his lung cancer was still in the early stages when it had been detected and she had done the research to find an excellent physician who was able to halt the progression of the disease and eventually get her father back on his feet.

“What’s wrong?” Alex pressed, wanting him to get the information out now.

“Are you ill, Mr. Roman?” Dorothy asked, in concern and compassion.

“Dad?” Cris only uttered the single word, obviously too fearful to say any more. Probably, thought Alex, too afraid that if she said anything more out loud, it would come into being.

Apparently realizing how his request for their attention must have sounded to them, Richard was quick to set their minds at ease, at least about this one point.

“Oh, no, this doesn’t have anything to do with me. At least, not in the way you might think. Although...”

As long as her father’s cancer hadn’t returned, she could handle anything else, Alex thought. Rolling her eyes dramatically, she said, “Dad, you are really, really bad at breaking news to people, you know that?” She shook her head. “C’mon, out with it.”

He suddenly turned to Cris and asked, “Are Stephanie and Andrea around? If it’s all the same with you, I’d really rather only have to say this once.”

“Okay, back to being scared,” Alex announced, trying to keep the situation light even though she was filled with a sense of foreboding and dread.

“I’ll go find them,” Dorothy volunteered.

But Alex was already on the inn’s conference line, calling both her younger sisters’ cell phones—something neither girl was ever without except, possibly, in the shower and not always then. She was convinced that Andy was hermetically sealed to hers.

“Stevi, Andy, Dad wants to see us at the reception desk. Now.” It wasn’t a request, it was an order, issued with an undercurrent of fear.

“Anyone ever tell you you make a great dictator?” Cris asked mildly.

Ordinarily that might have sparked an exchange that bordered on the lively, but right now, Alex paid no attention to her sister. She was focused on her father, to the exclusion of everything else.

“Do we get a hint, Dad? A glimmer of a coming attraction while we’re waiting for the two divas to show up?” she prompted.

“It’s not about me, I promise,” Richard told her with what she assumed was his attempt at a reassuring smile. It didn’t work.

“Or the inn?” Alex asked, watching her father’s face. Family was exceedingly important to her, but the inn was a close second.

The next moment she told herself that it couldn’t be about the inn. She handled all the accounts as well as the never-ending piles of paperwork that went along with running the place. She would have known if there was a lean on it or a second mortgage taken out—

Wouldn’t she?

She looked uncertainly at her father.

“Or the inn,” he assured her. Again, he qualified his answer a moment later. “At least, not in the way you mean it.”

“All right, just how does it concern the inn?” Cris demanded, clearly not able to take another moment of suspense.

Without meaning to, Richard sighed. He’d left Wyatt sitting in his office. The young man had arrived quietly just a few minutes ago, entering through the gardens and the back door that was always unlocked during daylight hours. Guests hardly ever made use of that entrance, but friends did. And Wyatt was a friend. More like a son, actually. He’d known him since the day the boy had been born.

“Wyatt has come to see me. He’s just arrived.”

“Wyatt?” Alex echoed.

The name brought with it a legion of memories that ran the expanse of two decades and more. Theirs was an ongoing, antagonistic relationship that seemed to be the very embodiment of the war between the sexes—even though he got on well enough with her sisters and they with him. Complicating this was the fact that her heart never failed to skip a couple of beats the first time she saw him each year. Her physical reaction never changed. It was only when her mind kicked in that her behavior returned to normal. Wyatt Taylor was an extremely handsome example of the male gender and it was her misfortune to be attracted to a man she was constantly at odds with the rest of the time he was at the inn.

“When?” Alex wanted to know. “I didn’t see him come in.”

She’d never seen her father’s smile look so incredibly sad. “He came in through the back.”

“Why?” Alex asked. Whatever was bothering her father was tied to Wyatt, she thought. It figured.

Her sisters got along with Wyatt. For the most part, he was like their big brother. The son her dad never got to have.... She refused to dwell on that.

Wyatt had been coming to the inn every summer with his father for years. She and the others all fondly thought of Wyatt’s father as Uncle Dan, even though Dan Taylor was no relation to either of their parents. He and their father had been best friends since elementary school.

Daniel Taylor was an independent journalist who’d traveled the world over, hunting down stories that proved to be too challenging, too elusive for the new breed of reporter. His erratic lifestyle had put a very real strain on his marriage until one summer, Dan found himself divorced and much too far away from the son he adored. So every summer, when he was granted a month’s precious custody, he would bring his son with him to the inn. He came here because his best friend was a single father, too, and was blessed with insight. He came because he wanted Wyatt to have fun with kids his own age, and she and her sisters qualified.

And above all else, he came to the inn because he practically lived out of his suitcase and had no real place to call home. So for four weeks each summer, Ladera-by-the-Sea Inn became home to Dan and his son. And, by extension, she and her sisters, as well as her father, became Dan’s missing family.

During the rest of the year, whenever he could, Dan would come to visit and stay a few days or a week—until another assignment would whisk him away. When they were younger, Dan brought gifts from the places he’d visited. As they grew older, Alex realized that the greatest gift the man had brought them was himself.