by Karina Bliss
“It’ll be private in my office,” Don added pointedly.
Kezia shot a suspicious look at Christian. He shrugged. “No idea. But let’s get this over with. It’s time I left.”
She needed no further convincing. “Okay.” Besides, pretty soon she’d need to cry. He had to be gone before that.
DON DIDN’T BEAT AROUND the bush. He pulverized it.
Mentally, Kezia collected all the pieces and tried to fit them together. “The hotel is verging on bankruptcy because Nana’s had a bad run on the horses?”
“It appears Muriel remortgaged some years ago but most of the capital was spent on meeting running costs, interest payments and, later, medical bills. When her health started deteriorating she obviously panicked and bet on the track to try to recoup that money.” Don shuffled papers on his battered desk. “Which is exactly the sort of harebrained scheme Muriel would adopt rather than admit she needed help. I’m sorry, Kezia.”
“There’s nothing for you to be sorry about,” she said perfunctorily, still trying to take in the enormity of his disclosure. “No wonder she retained bookkeeping when I took over two months ago.” Swallowing her terror, she asked, “Can I trade out of this?”
“Maybe. If you can come up with a good enough business plan to satisfy the bank and follow it up with solid results.”
“I’ll give you the money you need.” She’d forgotten Christian was there, half hidden by the side wings of an old green leather chair.
“No.” Her response was instinctive; her brain caught up and approved it seconds later.
Christian looked at Don. “How much is it? I’ll write a check now.”
“I said no, Christian. I don’t want your money.”
“I’m not doing this for you, Kezia. I’m doing it for Muriel.”
“Muriel won’t take your money, either,” said Don. “It’s specified in the will.” He put on his glasses and read, “‘Christian Kelly is prohibited from paying off the hotel’s debts.’ This, I think, is where I give you her letter.”
Christian looked at Muriel’s familiar flourish and swallowed a lump in his throat. She’d written to him weekly for fourteen years. This would be the last letter he ever received from her.
My darling, you’re wondering why I won’t let you pay off my debt. Too bad, I’m not going to tell you! I ask instead that you stay in town—yes, I know you hate it but it’s just a few weeks—and help Kezia come up with a plan to reverse the hotel’s fortunes. The place needs an entrepreneur’s skill if it’s to survive another hundred years. Tell Kezia I’m sorry I’ve left things in such a mess but it seemed necessary. God bless you both, my darlings, Muriel.
Christian handed it to Kezia without a word. It seemed necessary? What was Muriel playing at? Had she forgotten he had a multimillion-dollar business to run? Okay, his two partners could carry him for a couple of weeks, but to come back here—a place haunted by memories, most of them bad… He shuddered. Immediately he began thinking of ways to circumvent the will. Hell, if a hotel and tourism magnate couldn’t outwit an old lady, he deserved this penance.
With grim amusement he watched Kezia’s face as she read the letter, before she became aware of his scrutiny and turned away. When she turned back, her expression reflected his resolve. Implacable resistance. “You’re off the hook. I refuse your help.”
Just what Christian wanted to hear. Still, he was inexplicably annoyed. “I don’t want to be involved any more than you want me to be, but it would be respectful to at least consider her last wishes.” He ignored the fact that he had been doing no such thing.
Kezia thrust out the letter, waited until he took it. “I can manage on my own.” It had always been her mantra—more than that, the truth. Now the words rang hollow, but she couldn’t allow Christian back into her life. And she wouldn’t cry in front of him, though she wanted to, very badly. Worse than the prospect of losing her heritage was realizing her grandmother hadn’t trusted her enough to confide her troubles. She lifted her hand to her heart and pressed against the almost physical surge of pain.
“Don, more whiskey.” Christian guided her to a couch with gentle hands, while the older man hurried from the room in search of the bottle. “Relax.” His breath was warm on the nape of her neck. “I have no intention of coming back.”
“Thank God!” He looked startled at her vehemence and Kezia added impatiently, “Surely you realize she’s trying to force us together to salvage a happy-ever-after out of this mess. Why else would she have that curious clause refusing your money?”
He stared at her and she saw with relief they were in perfect accord on this one.
“It must be nice to die with some illusions intact,” he commented.
She frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shook his head as though to clear it. “Nothing. Look, let me find a way to give you the money, Kez, then I can leave with a clear conscience.”
She resisted the urge to ask when a clear conscience had become necessary to him; the scars had been picked at enough. “Okay, but it’s a bridging loan. Once the hotel is back on its feet, I’ll arrange a repayment schedule that will include backdated interest pegged at today’s rate.”
He looked amused. “Whatever.”
“I’m serious, Christian.”
“Look—” he raked a hand through his hair “—don’t tie yourself into unnecessary debt, take the money as a gift. You must know I won’t miss it.”
She did know, but it made no difference. Favors were something she did for other people. Accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from Christian, the man who’d deserted her, was unthinkable. Simple as that.
Less simple was when she’d be able to pay it back. But that was tomorrow’s problem. At least she’d have her home, her heritage, intact.
“I want a business arrangement but…thanks for the offer.” She wished he’d move. The scent of him—crisp linen overlaying healthy male heat, a hint of cedarwood—was making her dizzy.
Don came back with a silver tray bearing their drinks. Reluctantly, Kezia took a sip for medicinal purposes, trying to remember when she’d last eaten. She had no taste for whiskey, but the association with her grandmother was comforting. She took another, inhaling the smoky sharpness like smelling salts.
Christian declined his drink. “I’m driving,” he said. “Don, you should know I intend to find a way to lend Kezia the money.”
“Muriel thought you would,” said Don calmly, and reached for another envelope on his desk. “Here.”
Irritated, Christian pulled out a scrap of paper. “What is this, Give Us A Clue?” He glanced down at it and the color drained from his face. “Damn.”
Foreboding hit Kezia like a rolling winter fog. “What?”
Still he gazed down at the note, his expression remote yet curiously softened. “Damn,” he said again, and shoved it into his pocket.
She knew what he was going to say, could see it in his eyes, could feel the prickle of tears in her own. It seemed she would cry in front of Christian Kelly, after all.
“Hi, honey,” he said grimly. “I’m home.”
Kezia began to laugh. She laughed until she cried.
CHAPTER TWO
ONE SHUDDERING SOB led to another and then another until her body convulsed under the force of them and she curled up on the couch like a lost child, her arms wrapped around her knees. Christian reached for her, but with shaking hands she pushed him away, did the same to Don.
“Let me get someone—a friend,” Christian offered.
Terror strafed through her grief. “No! I don’t want to be seen like this.” A fresh paroxysm racked her body. “Please, both of you go away,” she sobbed, then laid her head on her knees and gave herself over to the anguish.
Dimly she heard a murmur of voices, the door open and close again, the scrape of a chair. And Christian was sitting next to her. “I…don’t…want…anyone…here!” she said between sobs, but took the handkerchief he offered.
“I know,” he said soothingly. “I’m temporary.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“I won’t,” he promised. “I’ll just sit here.”
And he did, watching the shadows lengthen in the room, listening to her sobs until they abated and, emotionally exhausted, she slept. And all the while he suffered, resisting grief, resisting Kezia. He sat stiff and unyielding in his chair. He would not be moved by her beyond common pity.
When he stirred at last, his muscles ached like a prizefighter’s. But he’d won. He stretched as he turned on a lamp against the encroaching dusk, found a throw and covered Kezia.
His opponent looked worse, her face blotchy, her closed lids swollen. In the circle of light her disheveled hair gleamed with velvet browns and sparks of amber. Just as her eyes did, he remembered, and because she looked so vulnerable, so un-Kezia, he smoothed her knotted brow.
An unexpected blow to the heart made him step back, shove his hands into his pockets. His fingers brushed the crumpled ball of paper and, swearing softly, he pulled it out of his pocket, smoothed the creases and glared at it.
Nothing complicated about it, just a scrap of a page torn from an exercise book. The IOU had been dated and signed, the letters sprawling loose and untidy across the page. His signature hadn’t changed much in sixteen years.
You conniving, brilliant old woman. You got me good.
With a sigh he opened the door, saw Don and Bernice May and a host of other anxious people—many familiar—staring at him. He fought back a sense of claustrophobia and nodded acknowledgments. “She’s sleeping, but I doubt she’ll want a welcoming party when she wakes. Perhaps just you, Don?”
He drew the older man away, ostensibly to talk privately, but moving closer to the pub’s exit. He was in no mood to renew old acquaintances. Plenty of time for that in the following weeks, he thought bleakly. “I’ll be back when I’ve reorganized my affairs. I’m sure Muriel’s bank will allow us a few weeks’grace.”
“A phone call from you will get it,” Don said dryly.
“Tell Kez I’ll need a bed at the hotel. Ask her to courier me the books so I can start formulating strategies.”
Don looked doubtful. “I can’t promise anything. She hasn’t exactly warmed to the idea of you coming back.”
“Then here’s the carrot. Tell her I’ve set myself a deadline. I’ll turn the hotel around in a month.”
“You don’t know how bad things are….”
“A month,” said Christian grimly. “If it kills me.”
KEZIA RACKED HER BRAIN FOR another way to tell Christian no. Spats of rain against the pane heralded a summer squall. But the storm building indoors was of more concern than racing to bring in the white tablecloths snapping on the line in the easterly below.
“Probably not,” she ventured.
They sat on spindle-legged antique chairs in the private sitting room on the hotel’s first floor. Much of the threadbare blue carpet was covered by piles of paper, as neat and precisely spaced as soldiers at attention, testament to Kezia’s methodical sifting over the previous week.
Christian had roared back into town thirty minutes earlier in old jeans and a new Enzo Ferrari he called Consolation. If asked, Kezia would recall it as red and showy. And—like its charismatic, self-indulgent owner—not to her mature taste.
“You mean no.” Christian began pacing while Kezia watched her tidy piles of paper anxiously. “I thought we agreed to cooperate—get me out of here as quickly as possible.”
“It’s not that I think your ideas lack merit.” Kezia had spent the intervening days practicing her responses to this intrusion and had resolved on diplomacy, civility and detachment. She frowned as his foot knocked a pile askew. “I just think we need to quantify the problem to qualify the solution.”
Christian grabbed an invoice from the top of one stack and her eyes followed the tug of taut muscle under tightened denim. “‘Nineteen twenty-six. Two bags of chicken mash and five pounds of head cheese.’”
“That’s not indicative of what I’m sorting,” Kezia said stiffly. Okay, maybe she had become a little distracted by cutesy historical data, mainly because she could sleep after reading it, unlike some of the more recent accounts she’d uncovered.
“I know you want to do this properly.” Christian forced a smile and Kezia’s mood lightened. She, at least, had relaxed her jaw. “But we don’t have the luxury of time.”
For once she couldn’t disagree with him. The bank had abruptly withdrawn its forbearance when the manager discovered wealthy Christian Kelly couldn’t act as a guarantor. Kezia had won a further ten days’ grace based solely on her own banking history. “But cutting staff…” she protested.
“Short term. Ultimately the plan will generate jobs.”
“But my people depend on those jobs now. In a rural community, employment is hard to come by.”
“Even harder if the hotel closes down,” Christian said bluntly. “And what’s this complicated system with a dozen part-timers?”
“I work the roster to suit mothers’ hours.”
“Get full-time staff. The taxes and health insurances for all these people adds ten percent to your costs.”
“The benefits offset that,” argued Kezia. “My workforce is highly motivated because they’re so delighted to be out of the house for a few hours. By definition mothers are skilled multitaskers, and adept at handling troublemakers.”
“They have to go, Kez.”
“No, Christian, they don’t. We’ll save money elsewhere.” One thing Kezia had resolved after a week of receiving his brusque e-mails—Send this. Find that. What the hell does this mean?—was to clarify who was boss.
“Listen.” She squared her shoulders. “I’m happy to consider any ideas you have with an open mind, but—”
“Starting when? You’ve knocked down every suggestion I’ve made.”
“You’ve been here half an hour!” Kezia paused to drag her tone back to civility. “You haven’t seen your room yet, let alone toured the property and met staff. Do you really think I’ll take your recommendations seriously until you do?”
“No, which is the underlying problem. This hotel is in such dire straits because Muriel let emotion overrule good business practice.”
Kezia saw red. “Don’t you dare attack Nana’s judgment. Never criticize her, do you hear me?”
“I’m sorry,” he said simply.
She realized she was standing and sat again, too shaken to censor her words. “I think I would cope with my grief better if I wasn’t so angry with her.”
He nodded, neither in pity nor judgment, and Kezia felt strangely absolved. All week she’d vacillated between tears and guilt-stricken fury. For the first time it seemed forgivable. “You’ve had time to assess the mess. How do you rate our chances of success?”
“If we keep emotion out of it?” Their shared past flickered like a ghost between them. “Fifty/fifty.”
“Better than the odds I came up with.” She hesitated. “As long as you understand that I’m John Wayne in this picture.”
“You’re going to need his balls,” he replied dryly.
The door swung open before Kezia could think of a suitable retort. A trolley appeared first, lurched left across the doorway, then right, then surged into the room and rode roughshod over one of Kezia’s neat piles.
“Your horse needs breaking in,” remarked Christian.
The small woman pushing it raised her head. Marion Morgan looked like a benign witch, mainly because of her wild blond hair—closer to mist than curls—but also because of the perpetual myopic bewilderment in her big blue eyes.
A bewilderment that had intensified since her alcoholic husband had abandoned his family three months earlier. Kezia saw with relief that Marion’s preschooler was nowhere in sight.
Christian was the one who needed breaking in.
He hated being here already, she could tell by his inability to sit still. It reassured Kezia that the
ties that meant everything to her were binds on him; he wouldn’t outstay his welcome. There was also a curious relief in having the decision she’d made all those years ago reinforced as the right one. Restless and mercurial, he would never have stuck by her.
“Well, this is a surprise.” Christian crossed the room to give Marion a hand. The trolley rattled to a rest, slopped coffee shivering to stillness in the saucers.
Marion flung her arms around him and kissed him. “You’re a lifesaver for rescuing us like this.”
Over her head Christian stared unnerved at Kezia who shrugged, half exasperated, half amused. The man was only here because of some IOU he refused to explain, but bless Marion, she always suspected the best in people. Especially bad boys.
Christian changed the subject. “You work here?”
Marion released him to search through her jeans for a handkerchief. “Most evenings. The job’s a godsend as well as my little bit of sanity.” She dabbed at her eyes. “I guess Kezia has told you of my troubles.”
“All we’ve done so far is argue,” said Kezia, hoping to deflect her. One litany of woes at a time.
“About the past, I expect.” Marion recovered enough to hand out cups of coffee, and Kezia wished she’d kept her mouth shut. The things her youthful self had once done and said to Christian’s boy-man had haunted her all week.
“No. About the hotel.”
“It must be so awkward,” said Marion sympathetically, “deciding what to talk about, what not to talk about.” Kezia frowned at her; they’d already had this chat.
“We’re opting for the not,” replied Christian. “Is that shortbread?”
Marion offered him a slice. “Very wise,” she approved. “First loves are so embarrassing years later. All that overwrought intensity, the passion and the promises. You haven’t learned it’s safer to hold something back.”
“Marion!” Kezia caught her friend’s eye, sent a desperate message. “We’re not talking about any of it.”
“And I’ll make sure everyone knows that,” Marion soothed.