“Well, maybe the people who buy it will be interested in opening it back up again,” Harper suggested. She pulled her wallet out of her purse, fishing out more than enough cash to cover the bill.
“What about you?”
Harper eyed the older woman. “What about me?”
“Why don’t you start it back up? That place was as much your baby as it was theirs, even as young as you were. I remember you running around, getting this and that, doing all you could for the guests. That B&B is in your blood. Who better to take the reins?”
“I hate to break it to you, but I wouldn’t know the first thing about starting a business like that.”
Byrdie put her hands on her hips. “You think I knew what I was doing when I started? Or your momma and daddy? Hell no, but we worked hard, and we learned as we went along. You could do the same thing. And don’t forget, you’ve got a whole town ready to back you up if you need it.”
Harper gaped. Byrdie was actually serious. She thought Harper could just decide to open up her parents’ old bed and breakfast, as simple as that. Without knowing what to say, Harper handed over her money. Byrdie tried to give her back her change, but she just shook her head.
Byrdie sighed, a sad smile on her face. “Just think about it, that’s all I’m asking. There was a time I thought you wanted nothing more than to take up the family business. Sure, it could be risky. But it could also be the best decision of your life.”
Chapter Seven
Harper stood in front of the old, white antebellum home she hadn’t been inside in three years.
She hadn’t meant to come here. When she left Byrdie’s she’d had every intention of returning to her Jeep and going home. But the second she’d stepped out the door, instead of turning right toward her car parked on the side of the street, she’d turned left.
The B&B was less than half a mile from the town’s only stoplight, and just around the corner from all the little shops and boutiques downtown. That had been one of the major benefits to staying at the B&B, at least according to the guests who’d come from the big city. All of Willow Creek’s small-town charm within walking distance. Everything except for the bar, that is.
Harper walked up the long drive, gravel crunching beneath her sandaled feet with each step. The lawn had seen better days, making the long-abandoned building look almost scary.
It had looked even scarier at night.
She’d had no idea Cowboy intended to bring her here when they left Darren and Carly’s wedding, and she’d nearly refused to go inside despite his dare when she saw the eerie shadows of the twenty-foot columns crawling up the front of the house as the truck’s headlights drew closer.
Yet something about having Cowboy with her had made her brave that night. She couldn’t bring herself to succumb to the fear rising inside her. And then when she’d made it inside, her fear was gone, replaced by something much stronger and much more painful.
Now, in the early afternoon light, the house didn’t look scary at all to her. It just looked sad. What once had been her home, awake and full of life, was now empty and quiet. It was hard to believe this was the setting of some of her fondest childhood memories. Hard to believe this was the place she and her parents had loved with all their hearts.
Harper climbed the porch steps slowly, amazed by how sturdy they were even after all these years of neglect. The porch wrapped around the house on all four sides; Harper remembered sitting out here on cool summer nights, reading a book or listening to the guests tell stories of where they were from, where they’d been, and where they were going. She’d loved to hear them talk about places outside of Willow Creek even though she herself couldn’t imagine being anywhere but home back then.
Harper tried the knob on the wide front door, unsurprised to find it locked. Just like the last time she was here and she and Cowboy had resorted to crawling through a window on the left side of the house. This time Harper simply reached into her bag and pulled out the ring of keys she’d found among the old papers in one of Grams’s many, many boxes.
The air inside was as hot and stifling as she’d expect it to be in the middle of September, and she could already feel the beads of perspiration from the walk over doubling in size along her forehead and neck. The foyer was lit only by the light pouring through the front windows that framed the door. The rest of the curtains in the house appeared to be drawn closed.
The foyer she stood in stretched out in one long hallway before her, leading straight to the back door. Halfway down the hall stood a wide set of wooden stairs that went up to the six different bedrooms on the upper level.
She ignored the stairs that called her up to the small bedroom that had once been her mom and dad’s. Grams had cleaned out most of their personal items long ago and moved them to the upstairs office of her house. Instead, Harper turned to the left and into the main sitting room at the front of the house. One of the curtains was drawn aside in front of the very window she and Cowboy had crawled through three summers ago, letting some of the midday light vivify the room around her.
Just like that night, the chairs and couches and other pieces of furniture were covered in white sheets to protect them from thirteen years’ worth of dust. The light blue, floral wallpaper, though faded and outdated, gave the large room a cozy, comforting feel that invited you to sit by the open window in the summer or curl up with a book and a blanket by the fire in the winter.
Harper walked around the room, taking in the white wood of the fireplace mantel where she’d held the picture of her smiling family until the pain and anger had overwhelmed her. She turned and found the spots where frame after frame shattered against the drywall and fell to the floor before Cowboy had reached her. He’d cleaned up what he could of the glass that night, but they’d left the broken frames in a pile on the ground when she asked him to take her home.
It looked like most of the frames themselves had survived the impacts, and only the glass and wall were truly damaged, while the pictures in them were still fully intact. Harper stooped to pick them up from the neat stack on the ground before setting each frame back in its place on the mantel.
She toured the rest of the bottom level of the house, something she hadn’t had the nerve to do when she’d been here with Cowboy. She recalled memories of watching her mother cook and clean and her dad oiling squeaky hinges and tinkering with the pipes and air-conditioning. Byrdie had been right about one thing. Harper had loved this house. It was hard to remember anything before her parents’ deaths and her new dream to go into medicine, but there had been a time when Harper dreamed of running her own B&B. Of inviting travelers into a warm, loving home. Her home.
As she continued to look around, her thoughts drifted from memories of the past into ideas for the future. Ideas of fresh paint colors and updated appliances and fixtures. She tried to imagine the kitchen with new cabinets and countertops.
Not that she’d have any clue what colors and styles complemented each other. But Sadie was good at that kind of thing. She’d be a natural when it came to the interior design. Harper remembered a few things from watching her mom manage the house and keep the records straight. There were some technicalities she’d have to learn, some of the business particulars. But she was smart; she could figure it out with a little help.
Harper stopped in the hallway. Was she really considering this? She, a med school dropout, running her own B&B? It had been so long since she wanted that life, she wasn’t even sure she had what it took. And even if this was what she wanted, she couldn’t just jump into it. She needed a plan, a strategy. She wasn’t the kind of girl who did things on a whim. She’d thought she was, three summers ago, but she hadn’t seen that girl since she went to Boston. Harper missed that version of herself, the one who took risks and lived fearlessly. The one who felt free to be and feel whatever she wanted.
Maybe this was her chance to find that girl again.
Harper pulled out her phone before her fear could talk her out of it. She fo
und the number she wanted and dialed, waiting out the rings until she got an automated message telling her to leave a voice mail.
“Hey, Burt. This is Harper Maddox. You just did the inspection of my grams’s house for me last week. Listen, give me a call when you get a chance.” She looked around the house, her mind racing. This was the first time she felt truly excited about something in three years. “I’ve got another property I want you to take a look at.”
DAY 28
“Thanks again for coming to Atlanta with me to get the rest of my stuff.”
Harper was sitting in the passenger seat of Cowboy’s truck in shorts and a T-shirt, her Converse shoes up on the dashboard, completely unaware that he’d been struggling for the last hour not to stare at her legs. She’d driven home with a Jeep-load of things from her dorm room the night before, but apparently there hadn’t been enough space in her trunk to haul even half of it.
When she told him her plan to spend her Saturday driving back and forth to get the rest, he’d insisted on taking her in his truck. Then he’d set himself hard at work getting all the heavy boxes out to the truck at a gruesome pace. Because he was a gentleman, of course, and not at all because he was trying to distract himself from how ridiculously adorable she looked struggling to carry even the lightest of boxes.
She smiled at him from across the cab. “You’re a really good friend.”
Friend. He didn’t know when it had happened exactly. They’d talked and texted a good bit since Carly and Darren’s wedding. And he’d insisted on treating her to a nice dinner one of the weekends she was home to help make up for that disaster of a dare that left her crying in his arms for half an hour.
He’d even surprised himself when he showed up at her dorm in Atlanta twice in the last two weeks. He’d been in the area—well, if an hour away counted as “in the area”—and he just couldn’t pass up the chance to see Harper in her element at school.
He would have thought her breakdown after the wedding would be the very thing to send him running in the other direction. But it ended up bringing them closer, which was something he never thought he’d be, with Harper Maddox of all people. They’d talked—mostly about her—and laughed so much together in the last two weeks that it was starting to feel like they were old friends.
He’d never really had female friends, seeing as he was only ever interested in what they could do between the sheets. In high school, probably the only attractive girl Cowboy hadn’t slept with, or tried to at least, was Logan Kase. And that was only because she’d become like a sister to him over the years more than anything else.
“Of course, we could have gotten done a lot faster if you hadn’t dared me to join that Nerf war.”
He grinned to himself. They had just finished taking the last load down to the truck and gone back to check her dorm room one last time before leaving when they came across a group of five guys from her hall shooting at each other with Nerf guns.
Despite sharing a residence hall with them, Harper admitted she hardly knew any of these guys other than in passing. Not that he was surprised by that news. She was clearly the type to keep to herself at Georgia Tech, which was exactly the kind of thing he was helping her to change. So when the guys invited Harper and Cowboy to join in the game, it felt like the perfect opportunity to get her out of her comfortable little shell. And when she’d voiced concerns about traffic and the long drive, he’d made it into a dare he knew she’d be too stubborn to say no to.
Cowboy stopped at a red light, and he took the opportunity to study her from across the cab, remembering how easily she’d forgotten her worries and lost herself in the game. Diving behind sofas and aiming sneak attacks while hidden around corners and doorways. Just thinking of the way that smile lit up her eyes…
“What are you grinning about?”
He blinked, forcing his attention back on the road as he shook his head minutely. “I’m just impressed. You’re already so much more vibrant and free than you were a few weeks ago.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” She said nothing else, and he chanced a glance her way just in time to catch the light shade of pink flooding her cheeks.
“I do. You couldn’t see the way you were beaming running around that hall, but I could. You loved it.”
“It was surprisingly fun. Not that I should have been surprised. I always seem to have fun around you.”
“I know what you mean,” he muttered.
The song on the radio changed to a well-known Elvis song. Harper reached for the dial and turned the volume up.
“You like Elvis?”
She nodded. “I was obsessed with the King when I was little. Every Saturday morning I would play one of his CDs while my mom and I would clean the house. It drove her and my dad crazy, but they never made me change it. I remember whenever I was sick Mom would make me a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich and play a song or pop in one of his movies. And then she’d just lay in bed with me. Blue Hawaii was always my favorite.”
“That sounds nice.”
The truck cab grew quiet, and Cowboy could practically feel her stare boring into the side of his face.
“Yes, Midge? Would you like to say something?”
She turned in her seat to face him. “What’s your mom like? And before you try to dodge and change the subject, this is my official question.”
Cowboy sighed. Honestly, he was sort of amazed he’d managed to go this long without this topic coming up. “My and Cam’s dad was in the Army. He died overseas when we were young, before I was even born. So growing up, our mom was the typical single mother. She had three different jobs to keep us fed and clothed. She worked a lot, all hours of the day, but we never felt neglected. She always found ways to show us how much she loved us. She’d put notes in our lunchboxes every day, always got us that extra scoop of ice cream we asked for. She even took off work and kept us out of school on our birthdays every year. She’d take us to the zoo or to the park and just be there with us for an entire day.”
“She sounds great.”
He shrugged. “She had her flaws, too. She was always working, so she wasn’t the most involved when it came to school. And I can’t tell you how many nights Cam and I had to fend for ourselves while Mom was working one shift or another. She had a different boyfriend every few weeks, never anything too serious, and she had no problems introducing us to them.”
“Are you two close?”
The smile he’d felt curve his lips fell away, and he gritted his teeth. Sure, he could lie, but he was a man of his word if nothing else. “Once, but not anymore. I haven’t spoken to my mom in four years.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated,” he said. “And last I remember, you’re only supposed to get to ask one question.”
He’d made his voice light and teasing, but there was a new rigidity in his shoulders. His hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, his knuckles turning white.
Harper unbuckled her seat belt, lifted the center console between them, and scooted herself to the middle seat until her arm brushed against his. She crossed her legs and tucked them underneath her before resting her head lightly on his shoulder. Almost instantly, his shoulders released some of their tension.
“I’m sorry for whatever happened.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I know. But I also know how hard it can be without your mom and dad. You don’t have to tell me what happened, but I really hope it’s something you two can get past one day.”
Cowboy was quiet as he took his right hand from the steering wheel and reached for Harper’s, lacing his fingers through hers. Her skin was cool where it met his. “Maybe,” he muttered. Then, as if by pure instinct he didn’t understand, he bent his head and brushed his lips over the top of her head. “And thanks.”
They held hands in companionable silence while she leaned against him for the rest of the ride and, not for the first time, Cowboy started to wonder what it was about this girl that
made him feel so comfortable around her. Not that he had much experience in this realm, but he was fairly certain this kind of closeness didn’t count as normal friend behavior. It should freak him out, but at the moment he couldn’t bring himself to care. Not when just being around her had the power to warm his chest and put a smile on his face.
They pulled up to park in the street in front of a large, white colonial house just over an hour later. In seconds, an older woman with short, gray hair he recognized as her grandmother from the photos at the B&B flew out of the front door and down the porch steps with a wide grin.
“I was hoping you’d be back soon. Me and Sadie have supper going on the stove, and it should be ready any minute,” she told Harper, standing only a few inches taller than her.
Her eyes lit up behind her glasses as she took in his large frame.
“Grams,” Harper said, “this is my friend I told you about.”
“Henrietta Maddox,” she said, holding her thin, white hand out to him.
Cowboy took off his UGA cap and stuck his hand out to shake hers. “Russell Hart, ma’am, though just about everybody calls me Cowboy. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”
“Ooh, such nice manners. I think I like you,” she said. “We’ve got an awful lot of food for just the three of us ladies. Would you like to come in and help us eat some of it?”
He gave the older woman that look that usually won over his numerous conquests. “Well, Mrs. Maddox, I don’t think I’ve ever turned down a good meal in my life, and I certainly don’t plan on starting now.”
She grinned. “Oh, I think you and I will get along just fine.” She wrapped her arm around his and started leading him to the front door. He almost missed the subtle wink she gave Harper as they passed. “And please, call me Grams.”
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