Innkeeper's Daughter

by Marie Ferrarella

  Because it annoyed her—and he desperately needed the diversion—he smiled. “I still have that gift,” he confirmed. Seeing the trail of tears on her cheek for the first time, Wyatt reached into his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief and held it out to her. “Here.”

  She hesitated for a moment, then took the handkerchief gingerly and critically looked over the small, white square.

  “Don’t worry,” Wyatt said, “I only wiped down one bathroom sink with it.”

  She raised her eyes to his. Oh, come on. She had to know he was being sarcastic. Or, at least he assumed she had to know that. Still, she folded the handkerchief so that it was tiny, then used the surface she’d left exposed to slide quickly along her cheeks, drying them.

  “Thanks,” Alex said, holding the handkerchief out to him again.

  “Keep it,” he told her, pushing her hand back. “You might need it again.”

  “No, I won’t,” she told him firmly. He still made no move to take the handkerchief back. Finally, Alex placed it on the counter and slid it along until it was directly in front of him. She never could let him have the final word.

  “So, you figure you’ve used up your allotted amount of tears and won’t be needing that anymore?” he asked, unable to clamp down on his sarcasm.

  “No tears,” she contradicted him, “just perspiration. And no, I won’t be needing it again.”

  “Suit yourself.” Reaching into his inside pocket, Wyatt pulled out the handwritten list he’d put together and placed it in front of her. “These are the people I notified about the funeral service. And it’s okay to cry, you know,” he added out of the blue. “It doesn’t make you any less of a person. It might even make you stronger.”

  Alex laughed dismissively. “That sounds like something you got out of a fortune cookie. You sure you’re Uncle Dan’s son? He had a fantastic way with words, with creating pictures out of them and getting right to the heart of matters. He put a person right into the thick of the action.”

  “We have—had...” Wyatt corrected himself, still struggling to think of his father in anything but the present tense. “We had completely different styles.”

  Because his father hadn’t been around much of the time he’d been growing up, it seemed natural not to see him. Natural to expect to encounter him sometime down the road, but not necessarily right now. Even before the divorce, his father would be gone for weeks, sometimes even a couple of months, at a time. And after the divorce, there were only summers with occasional quick visits in between.

  And now, there would be no more visits at all. It wasn’t an easy thing to accept. He could feel his heart start to ache all over again. He struggled to rein himself in.

  “Dad went to the heart of the action as it was happening. I prefer to study the history of the action and take it apart. Analyze it and find out what led to it. That’s why his last project really took me by surprise.”

  There was that word again. Project. It occurred to Alex that she had no idea what Dan had been working on when he died. She just assumed—incorrectly it seemed—that it was another piece of war journalism.

  “His last project?” she asked Wyatt now, waiting to be enlightened.

  Wyatt nodded. “The one he was working on when...when he stopped working.”

  It was a nice, antiseptic way to say it, wrapping the finality of death in words that implied a temporary break.

  It wasn’t until Wyatt had said it that way that she realized that was the way she would prefer to deal with Uncle Dan’s passing, too. Antiseptically. The other word, the D-word, was far too raw and final for her to utter right now.

  Pushing ahead, Alex focused on what Wyatt had begun to say. “What was he working on?”

  Wyatt’s smile made her feel a little uneasy, although she couldn’t have explained why.

  “My father was writing a history of the inn.”

  That wasn’t the kind of story Dan usually worked on, she couldn’t help thinking. He wrote things that wound up on the front page, or of late, in a blog and sometimes in front of a camera. This sounded as if he was working on a book.

  “What inn?” she asked, confused.

  Was she serious? Wyatt wondered. So, she hadn’t known, either. That seemed rather strange. But then, his father had only told him last week—just before he’d extracted that promise from him.

  “This inn.”

  Alex stared at him. “This isn’t some practical joke, is it? Uncle Dan was just here a few weeks ago. He never mentioned this to me.... You’re serious?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because I didn’t know anything about it,” she snapped.

  Ah, he thought. So that’s it. She’s upset because she knew everything that was going on at the inn at any given time.

  And she hadn’t known about this.

  Of course that would bother her almost as much as his surprising her with a funeral here without any advance warning. No matter what he did and for what reason, he upset her. Always had, and he didn’t see a way around it.

  “He got all sorts of notes from your father when he got started,” Wyatt said, proving just how committed his father had been to the project. “Letters, files, photographs, copies of old ledgers...”

  Her jaw dropped.

  He hesitated before adding, “If you didn’t know about it, maybe it was supposed to be a surprise.” All he knew was that his father had asked him to finish it for him, and he’d said the publisher had given him a deadline, which he was to try to keep to.

  “A surprise? For whom?” she asked incredulously.

  Wyatt said the first thing that occurred to him. “For the rest of you. You and your sisters. I think he envisioned it as a sort of commemorative book on the bed-and-breakfast’s 120th anniversary next year.”

  The exact date was at the end of April. April 27th was the date that Ruth Roman first opened the doors of her home to the public.

  Still, Alex thought, there could have been another reason for undertaking the commemorative book.

  “Well, I guess we’ll never know now,” she said with a sigh.

  Wyatt looked at her quizzically. “Why not?”

  She looked at him for a long moment. Was he seriously asking her that? No, he was just yanking her chain. But then, she fully expected him to. That was the way Wyatt behaved and right now, it was very important for both of them—not just him but her, as well—to keep normal in sight.

  “Well,” she began slowly, “I’d say that the obvious reason is because Uncle Dan isn’t here to write it anymore.”

  “He’s not,” Wyatt agreed, fixing her with his steely gaze, clearly refusing to give in to his emotions, “but I am.”

  Her eyebrows pulled together as she studied him. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought I’d have to spell it out for you. But...this has been an...a traumatic day. What it means is that my dad asked me to finish it for him and I said yes.”

  “You’re going to write a book about the inn?” Alex asked even more incredulously.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have to. I gave my father my word that I would.”

  “But you write movie scripts and fiction nobody reads.” Alex threw in the last part to cover up the fact that she not only knew about his books, she secretly read them, as well. And when she did, she could hear his voice on every page. That was something else she wouldn’t admit, along with the fact that she found him to be a good writer, as good a writer in his own way as his father.

  But telling Wyatt that would only enlarge his ego and, in her opinion, it was large enough as it was.

  “Maybe they’ll read this one,” he speculated. “Besides, I’m committed.” He watched her carefully, anticipating her reaction—and his own amusement to that reaction. “I made the arrangements with Dad’s publisher and in order to work within the deadline he’d initially agreed to, I’m going to have to focus exclusively on the book.”

  He waited for her to say s
omething. When she didn’t, he added what he knew would be the salt to her wound.

  “I thought it might be easier for me if I just stayed here at the inn while I write it. That way, if there are any questions that come to mind, I can ask one of you about it.”

  “They’ve got this great, newfangled invention called the telephone. It lets you call people whenever you want and ask them all the questions in the world,” Alex pointed out.

  “Not quite the same thing as talking to someone face-to-face.”

  She couldn’t begin to imagine how long it would take him to write a book. The thought of having him around for an extended period of time was incomprehensible to her—not to mention unacceptable.

  “How about Skype?” she suggested. “That let’s you talk face-to-face.”

  “More like screen-to-face.” he said with obvious relish. He was enjoying this a little too much. Shouldn’t he be too deep in his grief to enjoy tormenting her so much? “Besides, staying at the inn might inspire me. It’ll talk to me.”

  “We don’t have ghosts here,” Alex informed him darkly.

  “Maybe not.” The smile on his lips was maddening. It was the one he wore when he triumphed over her in anything. “But we do have your dad and your sisters. And you,” he added as if it was an afterthought.

  “That’s because we all work here,” she said through gritted teeth. “And our busy season is about to start.”

  “I promise I won’t bother you.” He even crossed his heart like a ten-year-old girl, which she had to bite her tongue not to tell him. “It’ll be as if I was invisible.”

  Pointing out that he was already bothering her, that the thought of him being here, twenty-four hours a day for who knew how long, really bothered her, was something she wasn’t prepared to admit. It was hard enough to admit that to herself. She knew him, knew that he’d take that information, turn it inside out and find a way to use it against her in some fashion.

  And then, after turning their lives upside down, Wyatt would finish his book, go back to his home in Hollywood, surround himself with women whose IQs probably came in low double digits and laugh about his stay at the quaint inn.

  She could feel herself getting annoyed in response even just thinking about it.

  “Not invisible enough for me,” she explained.

  He looked at her for a long moment, wondering exactly when she had transformed from a gangly girl who was all arms and legs—and sharp tongue—into an extremely attractive, nicely proportioned young woman. Although her tongue could still slice through concrete with absolutely no effort at all.

  “Well, you look busy so I’ll leave you to your work. Let me know if you need anything else from me.” He began to back away.

  A postcard from the other side of the world comes to mind, she thought, but, in the interest of peace, she kept that to herself.

  As Cris had pointed out, the man had just lost his father so she needed to cut him some slack. Later, she promised herself she would take that slack, wrap it around Wyatt’s neck and hang him with it. Or at least pull it tight. Very tight.

  She found the scenario somewhat comforting.

  Dwelling on it took her mind off both Uncle Dan’s sudden passing and the fact that despite efforts to the contrary, she found herself oddly attracted to a man she wanted desperately to dismiss and wipe from her memory.

  Alex pressed her lips together and looked at the list of names. She had work to do now, no time for anything else.

  They were going to need verbal confirmations, and quickly, from all these people so she could tell Cris how much food she needed to order for the reception they were going to hold right after the funeral service.

  Exhaling a breath, Alex threw herself into her work.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ALEX FELT LIKE the last air-traffic controller left in the tower with a dozen planes circling the field in a holding pattern. She was almost too busy to breathe.

  The funeral was less than two days away, but from all the phone calls she’d made, she gleaned that people would begin arriving tomorrow morning and continue arriving throughout the day. For most, their first stop would be the inn, to touch base with Wyatt and to decide just where they would be staying until after the funeral.

  Every available room she had left was quickly booked. That was the easy part. The hard part was going to be deciding which hotel in the area would be the most suitable as well as the most affordable for the rest of the mourners who were coming. She didn’t want to just toss out hotel names and addresses at them. That seemed grossly insensitive to her. Alex wanted to be able to make proper recommendations to these people who were coming to pay their last respects to the man she and her family had loved so dearly.

  Which was why she was still up way past her usual eleven o’clock bedtime, going over the particulars she’d gathered from all the phone calls she’d made.

  “But why go through all that trouble?” Andy asked, looking at all the work she was putting in.

  Alex had just busted her baby sister as the latter was attempting to sneak into the inn and up to her room without being seen.

  While Andy was twenty years old, their father liked her in relatively early on a weeknight. And that so-called curfew was long past. Andy had just promised to become her personal slave if she didn’t tell on her. It wasn’t that Andy was afraid of any sort of punishment from their father, she just didn’t want to see the disappointed look in his eyes, and especially not when he was trying to deal with the loss of his best friend.

  “Why bother? Because I’m not giving my seal of approval, Andy, the inn is. That’s how the people attending Uncle Dan’s funeral will remember it, especially if they’re overcharged or unhappy with the service they get at the hotel I told them to go to. I don’t want the inn getting a black mark because I just assumed all the hotels around here take as much care to keep their guests happy as we do.”

  Andy leaned against the reception desk, shaking her head. “Alex, do you ever go off duty and just think of you, not the inn?”

  “Sure I do. Lots of times,” Alex answered a bit too quickly, then waved her sister off. “Now go upstairs before Dad comes down for a midnight snack and finds you trying to sneak in.”

  Andy nodded, beginning to leave. She stopped and looked over her shoulder. “You do know he’s being way overprotective, right?”

  Alex laughed softly. Andy wasn’t experiencing anything that the rest of them hadn’t gone through at her age. But this time around, she supposed that her father was being slightly more intense because after Andy, there were no more daughters to fuss over.

  “You’re his little girl, Andy, the last of the bunch.” She grinned. “Knowing Dad, he’ll probably go with you on your honeymoon, just to make sure your new husband’s treating you right.”

  Andy rolled her eyes. A noise coming from the rear of the inn made her jump, curtailing any further discussion. “Gotta go!” she declared in a hoarse whisper.

  And then Andy made good her getaway, hurrying up the stairs before she was caught.

  Probably just the cat, Alex thought as she went back to searching through several websites she’d discovered that listed people’s reactions to their stays at one or another of the local hotels. Some had even extensively cited their likes and dislikes. Alex made a few notes to herself on the pad she kept by the computer.

  “Don’t you ever go to bed?”

  Startled, Alex felt her heart slam against her rib cage.

  Obviously, it wasn’t the cat rattling around, making noise.

  She really wished it had been.

  She forced herself to look up slowly, giving herself a second to bank down any telltale sign that he’d startled her.

  “On occasion,” Alex replied. “Most of the time I just hang upside down in a cave.” She guessed that Wyatt was probably thinking something along those lines.

  He laughed shortly. “You’ll have to let me watch sometime.” He rounded the desk and dropped into the chair besid
e it.

  “Sometime,” she echoed, deliberately making her answer vague.

  He saw the computer. It was on the shelf beneath the counter. Alex had obviously gone out of her way to keep the iconic symbol of progress out of the immediate line of sight because it simply did not go with the Victorian décor.

  Curious to see what she was searching at this hour—it never occurred to him that she might be doing something strictly for pleasure—Wyatt moved his chair closer so that he could get a better look at the monitor.

  Since when did she concern herself with other hotels? he wondered.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, nodding at the computer screen.

  Her answer wasn’t really enlightening. “I’m checking out nearby hotel accommodations.”

  Getting information out of her had never been easy—unless she was taunting him with it, he recalled, thinking back to one particularly miserable summer when he was thirteen and she was almost twelve—and temporarily taller than he was.

  “Thinking of running away?” he asked mildly. “Or are you suddenly changing allegiance?”

  “Neither,” she informed him crisply. “I’m anticipating that the people coming for the funeral will need a place to stay and if they ask, I need to have something concrete and worthwhile to recommend.”

  She noticed the somewhat bemused expression on his face. Now what was that supposed to mean? The man was so hard to read. Not for the first time, she thought that he should have come with some sort of a “how-to” instruction manual. Or, at the very least, a booklet with informative pictures, like for a piece of furniture that had to be put together.

  Alex took a guess as to what was on his mind. In this case, it wasn’t exactly difficult. “What, you thought we’d put them all up here? In case it slipped your mind with all those parties you’re always attending with your Hollywood friends, the inn only has twenty-three rooms and half of those are filled right now. I wound up booking the first few people I called on your list so there’re no longer any vacancies here. There’s no way we could take in all the mourners, even if they were willing to double up. They certainly wouldn’t want to quadruple up or even more.” When Wyatt didn’t say anything to agree with her or comment on what she’d said, she continued. “I’m assuming that these aren’t all college freshmen coming to the service.”