Innkeeper's Daughter

by Marie Ferrarella

  He looked around at the gathering and smiled. “Today just goes to prove that I’m right. Didn’t matter if they didn’t see one another for years at a time, my dad kept friends for life.”

  Wyatt blew out a breath. He was struggling to keep his composure.

  “And now he’s off making new friends.” Wyatt glanced up toward the cloudless sky. “But your friends down here are going to miss you, Dad. And none of them even begins to miss you as much as I do.”

  Wyatt pressed his lips together, trying to compose himself, then said, “See you soon.” It was the last thing his father always said when he left for work.

  Alex gave up wiping away her tears and just let them flow.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LEAVING THE PODIUM, Wyatt returned to the first row and took his place between Alex and her father. As he passed Alex, he kept his eyes forward but wordlessly he took out his handkerchief and handed it to her.

  Accepting it from him, Alex murmured, “Allergies.”

  Facing front now, Wyatt didn’t spare her a glance. “Bad, this time of year.”

  Saying a few more words to the gathering, Reverend Edwards ended the service. People began filing out of the rows, their next stop the private cemetery where Dan Taylor’s casket was to be interred.

  Since it was a relatively short distance from the ocean to the cemetery, rather than transport the casket by the dark limousine that had initially brought it from the funeral home, Wyatt, her father and six other pallbearers from among Uncle Dan’s friends carried it to the grave site.

  The mourners, led by the minister, followed directly behind them.

  Because there were so many mourners, it took a while for them to file by the casket one last time, leaving their long-stemmed red roses as a token of their sorrow.

  Finally the casket was slowly lowered into the ground.

  The solemnity of the act burned itself into Alex’s heart. She felt her eyes stinging again.

  After her father and Stevi had led the guests away to the reception, Wyatt remained standing over the gaping hole that was to be his father’s final resting place. It was several seconds before he became aware that Alex was still there with him, standing on the other side of the grave.

  Watching him.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured her, “I’m not going to do anything stupid. You don’t need to hover over me.”

  Alex lifted her shoulders in a careless shrug. “No place else I have to be.”

  He studied her, becoming slowly aware of his surroundings. And her. From what he’d seen, Alex’s every moment was accounted for from when she got out of bed in the morning to when she fell back into it. His father used to marvel at how tirelessly she worked.

  “Since when?”

  “I make my own schedule,” she said, moving around to his side of the grave.

  He couldn’t help smiling, just a little. “And exactly what is this listed under, ‘hovering over bereft friend’?”

  “No,” Alex denied firmly in a slow, measured cadence. “For one thing, I wouldn’t have cited you as being a friend. For another, I don’t ‘hover.’ That description makes me sound like some deranged hummingbird searching for a place to land.”

  He laughed. “You don’t fall into the hummingbird category.” Before Alex could take offense at what might have sounded like a putdown to her, he pointed out, “Black Hawk helicopters hover.”

  “Better,” she acknowledged loftily. “But for the record, I am not hovering. I’m just waiting to escort a guest of the inn to the reception.”

  A guest of the inn.

  The formal title made him sound like a stranger.

  “It’s not like I don’t know my way,” he said dismissively. He was trying to make her back off. Trying to get a few more moments alone with his father one last time.

  But Alex wouldn’t leave.

  She inclined her head. “Maybe today you don’t.” When he looked at her sharply, she went on to explain, “Today, your emotions are all over the place and you could be excused for not knowing that your fingers are at the end of your hand.”

  Frustration bit into him. “So you’re hanging around to show me where my fingers are?”

  The corners of her mouth curved slightly. “Something like that.”

  He felt himself growing unreasonably angry. “I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “No one said you did,” Alex countered genially.

  He blew out a breath. The woman was infuriatingly unmovable. “You’re just going to keep standing there no matter what I say, until I’m ready to leave, aren’t you?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He sighed again, surrendering. “How is it no one’s ever strangled you yet?”

  She had an answer for that, too. “Well, for one thing, I know tai chi. I’m also a fast runner.”

  Squaring his shoulders, he moved back from the grave and gave every indication that he was ready to go. “That must be it.”

  She didn’t want to rush him. “We can stay longer if you like.”

  But Wyatt shook his head as he started walking toward the inn and the reception that had been set up outside. “That’s okay. Dad’s not really here anymore, anyway.”

  Alex fell into place beside him.

  About to say something about the service, it suddenly occurred to her that Wyatt was walking rather slowly. She doubted that the occasion had anything to do with it. He was doing it for her benefit.

  “You don’t have to walk slowly on my account, Wyatt,” she told him. “You can pick up the pace.”

  He looked down at her shoes. As usual, she was in heels. “You’re wearing...what, three-inch heels?”

  “Four,” she corrected. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “We’re on grass.”

  Alex curtailed the impulse to say that she could see what they were walking on and instead picked up her pace, passing him.

  “Race you!” she declared with a laugh. The next second, she was moving across the grass as if it had suddenly turned to concrete.

  He reacted without thinking.

  With a laugh that echoed hers, Wyatt took her up on the challenge and picked up his own pace. Part of him was waiting for her to take a spill. The other part knew he was waiting in vain.

  As they jogged toward the reception, he saw Andy, holding Ricky’s hand, turn and watch their speedy approach. She looked concerned and then Ricky suddenly jerked free of her hold. The four-year-old pumped his little legs hard as he ran toward Wyatt, his arms opened wide.

  “Wy!” he yelled.

  Stooping down, Wyatt scooped the boy up in his arms and whirled him around twice. Ricky dissolved into giggles.

  “Hi there, Ricky. How’s my favorite guy?”

  Now that he was no longer being whirled around, Ricky drew himself up in Wyatt’s arms, as if that would make him seem taller, like a “big boy,” which was what, according to the boy himself, he aspired to be more than anything else in the world.

  “Oh-kay,” he announced with enthusiasm. “How you?” he asked, doing his best to sound like the grown-ups who comprised most of his world.

  “How are you,” Alex corrected her nephew.

  The boy looked at her, perplexed. “Oh-kay. How you?”

  Wyatt laughed, the tension that had ridden roughshod over him all morning lessening. He hugged the small boy to him, affectionately ruffling his hair. “Give up,” he told Alex.

  Her eyes met Wyatt’s and she looked at him for a long moment. And then she said in a very firm voice, “I never give up.”

  And, though he wouldn’t have admitted it to her for the world because it would give Alex something to hold over his head, most likely until the end of time, today—for him—her not giving up had been a good thing.

  Alex, he’d thought more than once—and said more than once in less-than-flattering terms when he’d been younger—was like a pit bull. She’d latch on to something with jaws of steel and she wouldn’t let go until she got w
hatever it was that she was after.

  She had him putting one foot in front of the other, making his way through this difficult day.

  “What do you say we get ourselves something to eat?” Wyatt suggested to the boy in his arms. “I hear your mom’s been working all morning, making some pretty terrific stuff.”

  “Yeah. Eat,” Ricky cried excitedly. Twisting around in Wyatt’s arms until he could see the long buffet tables that had been set up earlier this morning, the four-year-old pointed to them. “There!”

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Andy said. She reached for her nephew.

  But Ricky shrank back, grasping the front of Wyatt’s shirt.

  “No,” Ricky cried. “Wy!”

  “It’s okay,” he told Andy with a reassuring smile. Ricky forced him to think about something other than his loss and the pain that went along with it. “I can hold on to him for a while. We’re bonding, aren’t we, Ricky?”

  “Yes!” Ricky declared happily, despite the fact that Wyatt was fairly certain the boy had no idea what “bonding” meant.

  Alex was secretly rather impressed with the way Wyatt was handling her nephew and really glad that he had this distraction to keep him busy.

  “Good man,” Wyatt said to the boy. And then he turned to Andy and suggested, “Why don’t you and the Iron Maiden here—” he nodded in Alex’s direction “—go get something to eat while you still can? The line looks like it’s about to get huge any minute now.”

  Alex shook her head at the title he’d just bestowed on her. “Well, I can certainly see why they pay you the big bucks for those screenplays of yours. You obviously have such a witty way with words.”

  “Alex,” Andy stressed reprovingly, tugging on her sister’s sleeve as she indicated Wyatt with her eyes.

  Alex pulled her arm free. “Excuse us,” she said to Wyatt rather formally. With that, she pulled her sister aside.

  Andy spoke up before she could. “Alex, how can you be so insensitive to Wyatt? This isn’t just another day for him—”

  Alex was surprised that Andy couldn’t see what she was actually doing.

  She hustled Andy over to the buffet line beneath the canopy she’d rented and picked up a couple of plates. “That’s exactly the point, Andy. If I act all soft and sweet toward Wyatt, then it’s not just another day. It’s the day he buried his father, and letting him focus on nothing except that will be really terrible for him to put up with.”

  Déjà vu. She felt like she had to keep having this conversation with her family. If only they’d have a little more faith in her.

  Setting the plates on the edge of the table in front of her, Alex slowly moved along the line, making choices and splitting them between the two plates.

  “But if I bait him the way I always have, well, that’s a little bit of normalcy he has to hang on to.”

  She spared Andy a glance and saw that her sister was filling her own plate.

  Andy shrugged, clearly bemused. “I’ve never really understood what goes on between you and Wyatt.”

  “I do,” Stevi interjected as she got in between her two sisters. She didn’t have a plate with her, but was checking out the array of food Cris had set up. “Wyatt and our big sister seem to like to act like two adolescents—it’s a feeble attempt on both their parts to deny that they’re attracted to each other.”

  “For an artist, you’re not very observant,” Alex told her, picking up a couple of croissants and dividing them between the two plates. “As to your less-than-astute deduction—you’re wrong. I wouldn’t be attracted to him even if this was an island in the middle of the Pacific and Wyatt was the only other living male around besides Dad and Ricky.”

  “If he was, I’d fight you for him,” Stevi assured Alex. Glancing over her shoulder in Wyatt’s direction, her sister added, “I still might fight you for him just because.”

  Her curiosity aroused, Alex finally had to ask, “Because, what?”

  Stevi stole another look and sighed soulfully. “Because he just keeps getting better looking every time I see him. He was already a ten-plus in my book.”

  Alex laughed dryly. “What you need, dear sister, is a new book.”

  Stevi’s eyes narrowed. “Are you honestly going to stand there and tell me that you don’t think he’s good-looking?”

  “I didn’t say that I didn’t think he was good-looking,” Alex pointed out.

  “Oh, so you do think he’s good-looking.” Stevi grinned as if she’d just won a victory.

  Alex rolled her eyes as she deposited several crab cakes on one of the plates. “Stevi, looks have nothing to do with anything.”

  “His looks have everything to do with it,” Stevi insisted.

  Alex stared at Stevi for a long moment, caught off guard by her sister’s reaction to someone who was like a brother to them all.

  A thought suddenly occurred to her. She felt her stomach lurch.

  “Have you and Wyatt...?” She let the question trail off and held her breath, waiting.

  “Have he and I what, Alex?” Stevi asked, deadpan.

  “Did you share...?” She still couldn’t get herself to form the question, to define the wavering image that kept popping into her head.

  “Did we share what?” Stevi asked innocently. “A joke? A sandwich? A kiss?”

  “Yes, yes, and did you?”

  Stevi apparently decided she’d had enough fun and let her off the hook. “Nope. I think of him more in the big-brother light, and besides, if a kiss was going to happen, I figure that it would involve the two of you, not me.”

  Why was everyone so eager to see them as a couple? They weren’t anything of the kind.

  “How long have you suffered from this delusion?” Alex intoned, deliberately keeping her eyes on the two plates she was filling as she worked her way down the buffet table.

  Stevi appeared to be thinking about her answer. “Pretty much ever since you and Wyatt were sophomores in high school.”

  “Long time to be wrong,” Alex observed as she came to the end of the buffet. The two plates were fully loaded.

  Stevi looked at the heaping platters in surprise. “Since when did you start eating that much?”

  “Since I started making up a plate for Dad.” She nodded over to where he stood chatting in the distance. “By the time he realizes he’s hungry, there won’t be anything left.”

  “And the second plate’s yours?”

  Alex didn’t answer her. “Why don’t you take this to Dad for me?” Not waiting for an answer, she all but shoved one of the plates into Stevi’s hands.

  With that, she turned on her heel and walked away.

  “Hey, where’re you going?” Stevi called after her.

  “Somewhere else,” was all Alex said as she kept on walking.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MAKING HER WAY across the grass, Alex found Wyatt still holding Ricky, perching the boy against his hip. He seemed so comfortable about it, it made her wonder if there might have been a girlfriend or two in his life who’d had a small child or children of her own.

  Alex doubted he was acting on pure instinct alone. She knew for a fact he was an only child and as far as she’d gathered over the years, Wyatt had no uncles or aunts to afford him an extended family. That meant that there’d been no small children for him to babysit or play with.

  Even so, Ricky had taken to him instantly. Granted, the boy was the living antithesis of shy, but the way he lit up around Wyatt was definitely a cut above even his normal behavior.

  She took Ricky’s reaction to Wyatt to be a testament to the latter’s decent character.

  Not that she would ever willingly tell him that.

  “Trade you,” she declared as she came up behind the pair.

  When Wyatt turned and saw her, she took the boy from him with her free arm while, with her other hand, she handed Wyatt the plate she’d prepared for him.

  Wyatt looked first at the teeming plate, then at her, clearly bem
used and puzzled. “You’re feeding me now?”

  Alex took a better hold on Ricky, shifting him to her right side. She shrugged absently. Somehow, Wyatt had made it sound much too personal. “I loaded up the plate with food. What you do with it is up to you.”

  He popped a cherry tomato into his mouth. “Should I be listening for hoofbeats?”

  Sometimes Alex thought that he was determined to talk over her head—and it never failed to annoy her when he did.

  “Hoofbeats?”

  Wyatt nodded. “With the approach of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.”

  “Horsies!” Ricky exclaimed gleefully, latching on to the only word that held any importance to him. “Where are horsies?”

  “No, honey. There’re no horsies, no hoofbeats.” She looked at Wyatt pointedly. “And no apocalypse. I just don’t want you keeling over from hunger near the inn. People will talk.”

  Wyatt was sampling the black bean salad and waited until he swallowed before commenting. “People might talk even more now if they see you actually being nice to me like this.” He punctuated his statement by using his fork as an extension of his hand and pointing it at her.

  Alex sniffed and tossed her head. “I’m always nice,” she informed him, then looked to her nephew for backup. “Aren’t I, Ricky?”

  “Yes! You’re nice,” Ricky echoed, bobbing his head up and down. His silky, straight blond hair swayed back and forth as he did so.

  Alex inclined her head, her triumph displayed as she nodded toward her nephew. “See, out of the mouths of babes.”

  Ricky took instant offense. “I’m not a baby,” he protested.

  “Of course you’re not,” she quickly agreed. “Out of the mouths of big boys. Better?” she asked, giving him a quick squeeze.

  “Better,” he responded with a wide smile, nodding again. When he turned his head toward Wyatt, he looked intently at the still overloaded plate his hero was holding in his hand.