Innkeeper's Daughter

by Marie Ferrarella

  Alex had the impression that in this little drama that was unfolding, he thought that she was playing the part of the lowly servant.

  And so did she.

  What was it about this man that always made her feel inadequate and lacking and desperately needing to compensate?

  Alex let the door close behind her just in time to hear Wyatt ask, “Now, which way do I go to reach your room, Ms. Carlyle?”

  Given the woman’s previous comment about men in her bedroom, Alex fully expected to hear her tell Wyatt she could very well take it from here.

  Instead, she heard the woman laugh. Nervously. “It’s right down that corridor, Wyatt. Next to the dining hall.”

  He was good, Alex thought grudgingly, she had to give him that. But there was absolutely no way she would ever tell him so, not without a great deal of torture first.

  Alex left them and headed over to the reception desk to relieve poor Dorothy.

  “Thanks for minding the store. Anything happen I should know about?”

  Dorothy shook her head. “I think almost everyone staying at the inn is still at the reception. Oh, except for your friend, Tracy.”

  “Stacy,” Alex corrected her. “What about her?”

  “I saw her come in and then go out again. She was all dressed up. Glittery, even,” Dorothy tacked on.

  Alex smiled, nodding. “She was probably going out on a date. She likes to cram as much living as she can into any given amount of time. According to her, it makes up for working like a driven person the rest of the time.” Alex said the last part more to herself than to the woman who had just vacated the desk. “Nothing else?” Alex asked.

  The housekeeper shook her head. “Nope. It’s been as quiet as a church on Monday morning,” she reported dutifully.

  “Sounds good. Thanks again—and I’d turn in early tonight if I were you. Half the guests will be checking out tomorrow morning. There’ll be lots of rooms to straighten up.”

  “Best feeling in the world, being busy.”

  Dorothy had left her alone less than ninety seconds before she saw Wyatt walking over to her desk.

  Now what? she wondered.

  “Something I can help you with?” she asked, thinking it best to take the offensive when it came to Wyatt.

  He didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no. What he did say was, “You do continue to surprise me, Alex,” making her wonder what he meant by that and if he was being sarcastic, or if his comment was actually genuine.

  “Not that a woman doesn’t like to hear that she’s keeping a man on his toes, but why’s that?”

  “Because you’ve been acting so nice to me these past three days.”

  And you’re making me regret it. You really are. “At the risk of stating the obvious—your father died. Kicking you down a well doesn’t really seem appropriate at a time like this. Maybe next week,” she added.

  Wyatt wasn’t ready to let the matter go just yet. “That explains why you were being nice to me before the funeral and maybe it even explains why you were being nice to me during the reception. But talking Ms. Carlyle into interview sessions has nothing to do with my father dying.”

  She lifted one shoulder in a careless half shrug. “Well, not his dying, but this book you’re going to be finishing up is really his book if you think about it, so I’m really just being nice to Uncle Dan—not you.”

  His eyes held hers. “I think there’s more to it than that.”

  It was true what they said. No good deed ever went unpunished.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” Wyatt answered, his tone soft but unwavering. “I think despite everything you say, deep down inside you really like me.”

  His conclusion, said out loud and out of the blue that way, left her speechless. Not exactly a routine occurrence for her.

  It took her more than a second to find her tongue and longer than that to find her wits.

  “Well...then...it must be really deep down, because I’m not aware of it.... Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got the inn’s monthly accounts to go over.”

  And with that, she proceeded to completely ignore him.

  Or at least to act as if she did.

  It was a little, she thought when Wyatt finally walked away, like trying to ignore air. It wasn’t exactly possible.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE RECEPTION LASTED as long as it lasted.

  After all, Alex reasoned, it was a gathering of Uncle Dan’s friends, paying tribute and their last respects to a man they had all held in high regard. A man who, from the bits and pieces of the conversations she’d picked up after the funeral, had enriched every life he came in contact with, every life he ever touched.

  How could you hope to contain that within an hour, or two or three?

  By the time everyone had finally left, the sky had grown dark and the day was gone. Even the crashing of the ocean’s waves seemed to have died down to a gentle lapping.

  Cris and Rosemary and a few others had cleared away all the leftovers.

  There was a great deal still to be done.

  And there was no one around but her.

  She’d told Dorothy that she was free for the evening and her sisters had scattered. Cris had taken Ricky to bed and, Alex had no doubt, had taken herself there, as well. Between her regular meals and the food for the reception, Cris had put in an extraordinarily long day and was justifiably wiped out.

  As for Stevi and Andy, heaven only knew where they’d gone after the reception.

  That left her.

  Alex surveyed the grounds, feeling a little overwhelmed. She supposed she could always just call it a night, go back inside and tackle all this in the morning. Heaven knew it would all still be here in the morning.

  But Alex had never been the type to put anything off. She liked getting things out of the way when she had the chance, since “later” might come packed with its own set of problems.

  Squaring her shoulders, Alex pulled out a large garbage bag from the box she’d brought with her. Time to get started.

  She had only filled the bag a third of the way when her father came up behind her.

  Considering how he had to feel right now, he didn’t look that bad, she consoled herself as she breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Can I help you with something, Dad?” she asked, doing her best to sound upbeat.

  It didn’t seem to be helping because he replied, “I feel bad.”

  Letting the plastic bag drop, she slipped her arm around his back. “Well, we know it’s going to take a long while before—”

  Richard stopped his daughter before she could get any further. “No, I mean about today, about what you wound up having to do. I feel bad that I just put this all on your shoulders—the arrangements, the reception, coordinating the guests, the music, the minister—”

  It was her turn to interrupt him. “Dad, you did take care of some of it, and so did the girls. And Wyatt, too. It’s not like I’m some superhero, doing everything at once. That being said, I wanted to take the burden off you as much as I possibly could. Uncle Dan’s passing was a huge shock to all of us, but most of all to you—”

  Her father laughed softly. “I think Wyatt might have a difference of opinion on that.” Bending over the box on the ground, he extracted another garbage bag, then shook it open.

  Alex deliberately took the bag out of his hands, giving him a reproving look.

  “Okay,” she responded, referring to his last statement, “but I’ve got a feeling Wyatt will bounce back just fine. And so will you,” she added quickly.

  Richard hugged her to him, a sad smile curving his mouth. “Tell me, how did you get to be so wise?”

  Her eyes crinkled at the corners as she smiled up at him. “I had a great teacher.” She brushed a kiss against his cheek. “Now do me a really big favor? Go to bed and get some rest. You’ve had a long, heart-wrenching day and I have a feeling you didn’t get much sleep last night—or the night before that.”

  “
Still, I hate leaving all this to you.”

  “I’m just going to make a small dent,” she assured him. “Besides, I’m the compulsive one, remember?” she asked, tossing his own words back at him.

  Richard laughed, shaking his head. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”

  Alex pretended to consider his question seriously, then gave him half a shrug.

  “Maybe someday,” she quipped. “Now go, before I call Dorothy down and sic her on you. The woman is strong enough to carry you to your room.”

  “She might be, at that,” he conceded. “But you forget—Dorothy’s loyal to me.”

  “Exactly,” she said pointedly. Her grin was wide and confident. “And she wouldn’t want you tiring yourself out.”

  Richard shook his head again, amused as he gave up the fight. “You’re just like your mother, you know that? Stubborn to a fault.”

  Alex all but beamed at the comparison before she went back to gathering the trash. “I consider that a great compliment.”

  “I meant it to be.” Richard took a few steps toward the inn, then stopped to caution her, “Don’t stay out here too long.”

  “Yes, Dad,” Alex agreed dutifully.

  Having sent her father on his way, Alex continued gathering the used utensils and plates discarded on any flat surface that was handy. She’d deliberately gotten heavy-duty plastic utensils and plates so that they could be thrown away, but she’d assumed that they would have all made it into the receptacles that had been scattered around the grounds.

  So much for assumptions, Alex thought philosophically.

  Having gotten a second—or more accurately, a third wind—Alex decided that she’d just keep at it until she ran out of energy—or trash, although the former was far more likely than the latter.

  That would leave less for the others to clean up tomorrow.

  She supposed her father was right. She was obsessive. But at least it was for a good cause.

  Hearing a noise behind her, Alex frowned. Did she have to physically escort her father to his room before she could finally make him get the rest he so badly needed?

  “What did I tell you about going to bed?” she asked, pushing an armload of paper plates into a new garbage bag. “What does it take to get you to go? Am I going to have to sing you a lullaby?”

  “Might be interesting.”

  Alex swallowed a startled gasp as her brain registered the fact that the voice was too deep to belong to her father. She swung around.

  Wyatt.

  She took in a deep breath, trying to steady her nerves.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Crossing the rest of the distance to her, Wyatt bent to pick up the trash she’d dropped. He remained crouched, stuffing it into the garbage bag.

  And then he looked up at her, the face of innocence. “I’m staying at the inn.”

  Alex closed her eyes for a second, searching for patience as well as strength. Wyatt had a way of completely evaporating both just by opening his mouth.

  “I know that,” she enunciated slowly, “but I thought you had gone to bed. It’s late,” she pointed out needlessly.

  “I haven’t had a curfew for fifteen years.”

  “Everyone else has gone to bed, so I just thought—”

  She stopped abruptly. Why was she even bothering to explain? He was trying to bait her, the way he always had. Some things, no matter what, never changed. In an odd sort of way, she supposed that was comforting.

  Or maybe she was just overtired, she amended.

  “Never mind. Forget I said anything.” Yanking the garbage bag out of his hand, she turned her back on him and got back to work.

  Wyatt looked around. “Nobody else out here to help you?”

  Why was he still here? She’d been nice to him for most of three days. Didn’t that earn her a little payback?

  “I already said that everyone else has gone to bed.” She looked at him over her shoulder. “I could reenact that with hand puppets if it would help you understand.”

  Wyatt looked amused. “Might be entertaining, at that,” he replied. “Maybe later,” he told her, as if the idea was worth considering.

  Was he just going to stand there all night watching her? She pressed her lips together. Maybe he’d get bored and leave.

  And this odd shiver that was dancing up and down her spine would fade away.

  Alex worked her way back toward the rental tent. Unfortunately, she was getting herself worked up faster than she was collecting trash.

  She felt his eyes boring into her as he watched her work.

  Unable to stand it any longer, she swung around to give Wyatt a piece of her mind.

  The hot words on her tongue vanished as she realized he wasn’t standing idly by, watching her. He wasn’t standing at all. Wyatt had taken one of the bags she’d brought out and was picking up debris on the far side of the tent.

  “What are you doing?” she called out sharply. Alex held everything that Wyatt did suspect, always assuming that he had to have some sort of hidden agenda.

  If he noticed her less-than-friendly tone, he gave no indication. “You looked like you were having so much fun, I thought I’d join in.”

  A retort hovered on her lips, but Wyatt actually looked as if he meant it—not the part about it being fun, but that he wanted to help her clean up. She supposed it wouldn’t hurt to give him the benefit of the doubt this one time.

  “You don’t have to,” she told him primly. Wyatt being sarcastic or cynical, she knew how to handle. Wyatt behaving thoughtfully threw her for a loop.

  “Yeah, I know. But then, neither did you.”

  “It’s my inn,” she pointed out, then waited for him to get picayune and point out that, technically, it wasn’t hers but her father’s. That was the sort of thing that Wyatt did.

  Except that he didn’t this time.

  “It was my father.” That said a great deal without really saying a word directly.

  The silence between them, even after only a minute, felt far too pregnant for her to allow it to continue.

  “It was a nice service.”

  But even as she said it, there was a part of her that was braced for some sort of a challenge from Wyatt. After having been subjected to years of contradictions, the anticipation wasn’t something that would go away easily.

  “Yeah, it was,” Wyatt agreed, then, with a touch of wistfulness and more than a little contained sorrow. “Dad would have liked it. It had just the right tone to it.”

  Wyatt added, “You found the right man to preside over the service.”

  The minister and Dan had known each other fairly well. The two men had gotten along, finding shared philosophies.

  Alex smiled, remembering being privy for some of the conversations that had involved the two men and her father.

  “Uncle Dan didn’t wear his religion on his sleeve, didn’t really talk about it at all, but I got the sense that deep down, he believed in something outside of himself.”

  “He did.” Wyatt worked his way closer to Alex. “When I was a kid, he once told my mother that the meaning of Christmas had gotten lost in the commercialism. I extrapolated a lot from that.”

  That fit with the studious bookworm she remembered. She’d been the tomboy, he’d been the student. “How old were you?”

  “Old enough not to believe in Santa Claus anymore.”

  She laughed shortly. “I thought you were born that way.”

  He wasn’t sure just what she meant by that. He would have thought that for once, they had gotten past hard feelings.

  “What way?” he asked cautiously.

  “Cynical,” she said. “Not believing in things.”

  He paused. He was close enough to her to be able to see every nuance of her features.

  Close enough to appreciate the way the moonlight highlighted her hair and the contours of her face.

  Close enough to detect the light fragrance she always wore.
>
  For a moment there was only the sound of crickets. They seemed to be spread out all through the grounds, hidden from view and calling out to their potential mates. Their sound seemed to imitate the beat of his pulse.

  “I believe in a lot of things,” he told her quietly, his eyes on hers. “Just not in portly old men sliding down chimneys, dragging down sacks of toys in their wake, or in rabbits hopping around with baskets filled with foil-wrapped chocolate eggs and candy corn.”

  “You left out the Tooth Fairy,” she said wryly.

  “You mean, she’s not real?”

  And then she began to laugh. Really laugh.

  It blended rather harmoniously with the sound of his laughter.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A FEW SECONDS LATER, their laughter faded, slowly disappearing into the night.

  The tidal wave in the pit of Alex’s stomach did not.

  She found it difficult to take a deep breath. Difficult to think of anything except for how the distance between them seemed to have evaporated and how close Wyatt was to her.

  It was difficult for her to think at all.

  And then, for one long frozen moment in time, she was certain Wyatt was going to kiss her.

  Alex upbraided herself for not moving, for not doing something to prevent it—and upbraided herself even more for wanting it to happen.

  When it didn’t—when Wyatt didn’t kiss her—she no longer knew how to feel. All she knew was that she’d lost her crutch, lost having something she could blame for this shift within her. If Wyatt had kissed her, then she could have blamed the rise in her body temperature on embarrassment, not longing.

  Now there was only embarrassment because for that single moment in time, she’d longed to have him kiss her.

  He wanted to kiss her.

  Wyatt struggled to tamp down the urge.

  Again.

  Because he sensed that, just as he had the last time, if he did kiss Alex, things would not go down well between them. He knew her. She’d say something flippant and cutting, or turn her head, presenting him with a mouthful of blond hair at the last moment.

  Or worse, she could show displeasure and disdain after.