The Daddy Makeover

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “I have no doubts you will. Excuse me. I’ve got to return to work.”

  At his abrupt tone, the warmth slid away from her features. “Right. Your empire-building awaits.”

  He almost preferred her light mockery to that momentary flicker of warmth. It certainly made it easier for him to keep his inappropriate responses under control.

  “I’ll be back for Chloe at four.”

  He started to walk away, then paused, feeling churlish and ungrateful. She was doing him a huge favor and he couldn’t return that favor with curt rudeness.

  “Uh, thank you again for finding space for her. I appreciate it.”

  Her smile was much cooler this time. “I have no doubts you do,” she murmured.

  He studied her for a moment, then matched the temperature of his own smile to hers and walked to the nature center’s parking lot where his rented Jaguar waited.

  His mind was still on Sage Benedetto as he drove through town, stopping at a crosswalk for a trio of gray-haired shoppers to make their slow way across the road, then two mothers pushing strollers.

  He forced himself to curb his impatience as he waited. Even though it was early June, the tourist season on the Oregon Coast seemed to be in full swing, something that boded favorably for someone in the hotel business.

  He had learned that the season never really ended here, unlike some other resort areas. There was certainly a high season and a low season but people came to the coast year-round.

  In the summer, families came to play in the sand and enjoy the natural beauty; winter brought storm watchers and beachcombers to the wide public beaches.

  Though his ultimate destination was his temporary quarters, he automatically slowed as he approached The Sea Urchin. He could see it set back among Sitka spruce and pine: the graceful, elegant architecture, the weathered gray-stone facade, the extravagant flower gardens already blooming with vibrant color.

  He wanted it, as he hadn’t coveted anything in a long, long time. In the four months since he had first seen the hotel on a trip down the coast to scout possible property locations, he had become obsessed with owning it.

  His original plan had been to build a new hotel somewhere along the coast, possibly farther south in the Newport area.

  But the moment he caught sight of The Sea Urchin—and Cannon Beach—the place called to him in a way he couldn’t begin to explain.

  He had no idea why it affected him so strongly. He wasn’t one for capricious business moves, heaven knows. In the dozen years since he’d taken over his family company at the ripe age of twenty-four, he had tried to make each decision with a cool head and a sharp eye for the bottom line.

  Building a new property made better business sense—everything was custom designed and there were more modern amenities. That would have been a far more lucrative choice for Spencer Hotels and was the option his people had been pushing.

  But when he saw The Sea Urchin, with its clean lines and incredible views of the coast, his much-vaunted business acumen seemed to drift away with the tide.

  It had been rainy and dismal that February day, a cold, dank wind whistling off the Pacific. He had been calling himself all kinds of fool for coming here in the first place, for packing his schedule so tightly when he was supposed to be leaving for the United Kingdom in only a few days.

  But on the recommendation of a local woman, he had driven past The Sea Urchin and seen it silhouetted against the sea, warm, welcoming lights in all the windows, and he had wanted it.

  He had never known this sense of rightness before, but somehow he couldn’t shake the odd sense that he could make this small hotel with its twenty guest rooms the glimmering crown jewel of Spencer Hotels.

  He sighed and forced himself to drive past the hotel. He might be certain his destiny and The Sea Urchin’s were somehow intertwined, but Stanley and Jade Wu were proving a little harder to convince.

  Renewed frustration simmered through him. A week ago, this sale was supposed to be a done deal. All the parties involved had finally agreed on an asking price—a quarter million dollars more than Eben had planned to pay when he and the Wus first discussed the sale in February.

  He thought all the legalities had been worked out with his advance team before he flew to Portland. The only thing left was for Stanley and Jade to sign the papers, but they had been putting him off for two days.

  He could feel the property slipping through his fingers and for the first time in his business life, he didn’t know how the hell to grab hold of something he wanted.

  He understood their ambivalence. They had run The Sea Urchin for thirty-five years, had built it through skill and hard work and shrewd business sense into a stylishly beautiful hotel. Surrendering the family business to a stranger—seeing it folded into the empire Sage Benedetto had mocked with such disdain—could only be difficult for them.

  He understood all that, Eben thought again as he pulled into the driveway and climbed out of the car, but his patience was trickling away rapidly.

  He fiercely wanted The Sea Urchin and he wasn’t sure how he would cope with his disappointment if the deal fell through. And in the meantime, he still had a company of a hundred hotels to run.

  Oh, she was tired.

  Right now the idea of sliding into a hot bath with a good book sounded like a slice of heaven. In the gathering twilight, Sage pedaled home with a steady drizzle soaking her to the skin.

  So much for the weather forecasters’ prediction of sunshine for the next three days. Having lived in Oregon for five years now, she ought to know better. The weather was fickle and erratic. She had learned to live with it and even enjoyed it for the most part.

  She tried to always be prepared for any eventuality. Of course, this was the day she had forgotten to pack her rain slicker in her bike basket.

  She blamed her negligence on her distraction that morning with Eben and Chloe Spencer, though maybe that was only because she was approaching their beach house.

  She wiped rain out of her eyes as she passed it. A sleek silver Jaguar was sprawled arrogantly in the driveway.

  Of course. What else would she expect?

  Against her will, her eyes were drawn to the wide bay window in front. The blinds were open and she thought she saw a dark shadow move around inside before she quickly jerked her attention back to the road.

  Wouldn’t it be just like her to have a wipeout right in front of his house, with him watching out the window?

  She stubbornly worked to put them both out of her head as she rode the half mile to Brambleberry House. The house came into view as she rounded the last corner and some of her exhaustion faded away in the sweet, welcome comfort of coming home.

  She loved this old place with its turrets and gables and graceful old personality, though some of the usual joy she felt returning to it had been missing since Abigail’s death.

  As she pedaled into the driveway, Conan barked a halfhearted greeting from the front porch.

  Stubborn thing. He should be waiting inside where it was warm and dry. Instead, he insisted on waiting on the front porch—for her or for Anna or for Abigail, she didn’t know. She got the sense Conan kept expecting Abigail to drive her big Buick home any moment now.

  Conan loped out into the rain to greet her by the fence and she ached at the sadness in his big eyes. “Let me put my bike away, okay? Then you can tell me about your day while I change into dry clothes.”

  She opened the garage door and as she parked her bike, she heard Conan bark again and the sound of a vehicle outside. She glanced out the wide garage door to see Will Garrett’s pickup truck pulling into the driveway.

  Rats. She’d forgotten all about their conversation that morning. So much for her dreams of a long soak.

  He climbed out into the rain—though he was at least smart enough to wear a Gore-Tex jacket.

  “Hi Will. Anna’s not here yet.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be here soon. I’m a little early.”

  “I nev
er told her you were coming. I’m sorry, Will. I knew there was something I forgot to do today. I honestly don’t have any idea when she’ll be home.”

  The man she had met five years ago when she first moved here would have grinned and teased her about her bubbleheaded moment. But the solemn stranger he had become since the death of his wife and baby girl only nodded. “I can come back later. Not a problem.”

  Guilt was a miserable companion on a rainy night. “No. Come in. You’re here, you might as well get started, at least in the empty apartment. Without Anna here, I don’t feel right about taking you into Abigail’s apartment to see what to do there, since it’s her territory now. But I have a key to the second floor. I just need to run up and get it.”

  “Better change into something dry while you’re up there. Wouldn’t do for you to catch pneumonia.”

  His solemn concern absurdly made her want to cry. She hadn’t had anybody to fuss over her since Abigail’s death.

  “I’ll hurry,” she assured him, and dripped her way up the stairs, leaving him behind with Conan.

  She returned five minutes later in dry jeans, a sweatshirt and toweled-dry hair. She hurried down the stairs to the second-floor landing, where Will must have climbed with Conan. The two of them sat on the top step and the dog had his chin on Will’s knee.

  “Sorry to leave you waiting.” She pulled out a key and fitted it in the keyhole.

  Will rose. “Not a problem. Conan’s been telling me about his day.”

  “He’s quite the uncanny conversationalist, isn’t he?”

  He managed half a smile and followed her into the apartment.

  The rooms here, their furnishings blanketed in dust covers, had a vaguely forlorn feeling to them. Unlike the rest of the house, the air was stale and close. Whenever she came in here, Sage thought the apartment seemed to be waiting for something, silly as that seemed.

  Abigail had rented the second floor only twice in the five years Sage had lived at Brambleberry House. Each time had been on a temporary basis, the apartment becoming a transitional home for Abigail’s strays for just a few months at a time.

  The place should be lived in. It was comfortable and roomy, with three bedrooms, a huge living room and a fairly good-sized kitchen.

  The plumbing was in terrible shape and the vinyl tiles in the kitchen and bathroom was peeling and outdated, in definite need of replacement. The appliances and cabinets in the kitchen were ancient, too, and the whole place could use new paint and some repairs to the crumbling lathe and plaster walls.

  Despite the battle scars, the apartment had big windows all around that let light throughout the rooms and the living room enjoyed a particularly breathtaking view of the sea. Not as nice as the one from her third-floor apartment, but lovely still.

  She wandered to the window now and realized she had a perfect view of Eben and Chloe Spencer’s place, the lights still beating back the darkness.

  “Hey Sage, can you come hold the end of the tape measure?”

  She jerked out of her reverie and followed his voice to the bathroom. For the next few minutes she assisted while Will studied, measured, measured again and finally jotted figures on his clipboard.

  They were in the kitchen when through the open doorway she saw Conan suddenly lift his head from his morose study of the peeling wallpaper. A moment later, she heard the squeak of the front door and reminded herself to add WD-40 to her shopping list.

  Conan scrambled up, nosed open the door and galloped for the stairs. A moment later he was back, with Anna not far behind him.

  “Hey, Will. I saw your van out front. I didn’t realize you were coming tonight.”

  Sage fought down her guilt. She wasn’t the one in the wrong here. Anna had no business arranging all this without talking to her.

  “I meant to call you but the day slipped away from me,” she said. “I bumped into Will this morning on the way to work and he told me he was coming out tonight to give us a bid on the work we apparently want him to do.”

  Anna didn’t miss her tight tone. Sage thought she saw color creep over her dusky cheekbones. “I figured there was no harm having him come out to take a look. Information is always a good thing. We need to know what our initial capital outlay might be to renovate the apartment so we can accurately determine whether it’s cost-effective to rent it out.”

  Sage really hated that prim, businessy tone. Did any personality at all lurk under Anna’s stiff facade? It had to. She knew it must. Abigail had cared about her, had respected her enough to sell her the gift shop and to leave her half of Brambleberry House.

  Sage had seen little sign of it, though. She figured Anna probably fell asleep at night dreaming of her portfolio allocation.

  She didn’t want to battle this out tonight. She was too darn tired after wrestling thirteen energetic kids all day.

  Instead, she reached into her pocket for the dog treat she had grabbed upstairs when she had changed her clothes. She palmed it and held it casually at thigh level.

  Conan was a sucker for the bacon treats. Just as she intended, the dog instantly left Anna’s side and sidled over to her. Anna tried to hide her quick flicker of hurt but she wasn’t quite quick enough.

  “Dirty trick,” Will murmured from behind her.

  Having a witness to her sneakiness made her feel petty and small. She wasn’t fit company for anyone tonight. She let out a breath and resolved to try harder to be kind.

  “I think we’re done up here,” Will said. “Should I take a look at the first floor now?”

  Anna nodded and led the way down the stairs. Sage thought about escaping to her apartment and indulging in that warm bath that had been calling her name all evening, but she knew it would be cowardly, especially after Will had witnessed her subversive bribery of Conan.

  She followed them down the stairs to Abigail’s apartment. With some trepidation, Sage stood in the doorway. She hadn’t been here since Anna moved her things in two weeks ago. She couldn’t help expecting to see Abigail bustle out of the kitchen with her tea tray and a plateful of Pepperidge Farm Raspberry Milanos.

  All three of them—four, counting Conan—paused inside the living room. Shared grief for the woman they had all loved twisted around them like thorny vines.

  Anna was the first to break the charged moment as she briskly moved into the room. “Sorry about the mess. If I’d had warning, I might have had time to straighten up a little.”

  Sage couldn’t see much mess, just a newspaper spread out on the coffee table and a blanket jumbled in a heap on the couch, but she figured those few items slightly out of place probably affected Anna as much as if a hurricane had blown through.

  “What I would like to do is knock down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room to make the kitchen bigger. And then I was wondering about the feasibility of taking out the wall between the two smaller bedrooms to make that a big master.”

  Abigail’s presence was so strong here. While Will and Anna were busy in the kitchen, Sage stood in the middle of the living room and closed her eyes, her throat tight. She could still smell her here, that soft scent of freesia.

  Abigail wouldn’t have wanted her to wallow in this wrenching grief, she knew, but she couldn’t seem to fight it back.

  For one odd second, the scent of freesia seemed stronger and she could swear she felt a soft, papery hand on her cheek.

  To distract herself from the weird sensation, she glanced around the rooms and through the open doorway to one of the bedrooms and suddenly caught sight of Abigail’s vast doll collection.

  Collecting dolls had always seemed too ordinary a hobby for Abigail, given her friend’s other eccentricities, but Abigail had loved each piece in the room.

  She moved to the doorway and flipped on the light switch, enjoying as always that first burst of amazement at the floor-to-ceiling display cases crammed full of thousands of dolls. There was her favorite, a mischievous-looking senior citizen wearing a tie-dyed shirt and a peace meda
llion. Golden Flower Child. She was certain the artist had handcrafted it specifically for Abigail.

  “You should take some of them up to your apartment.”

  Sage quickly dropped her hand from the doll’s familiar smile to find Anna watching her.

  “They’re part of the contents of the house, which she left jointly to both of us,” Anna went on. “Half of them are yours.”

  She glanced at the aging hippie doll with longing, then shook her head. “They belong together. I’m not sure we should split up the collection.”

  After a long pause, Anna’s expression turned serious. “Why don’t you take them all upstairs with you, then?”

  She had a feeling the offer had not been an easy one for Anna to make. It touched her somewhere deep inside. The lump in her throat swelled and she felt even more guilty for the dog-treat trick.

  “We don’t have to decide anything like that today. For now, we can leave them where they are, as long as you don’t mind.”

  Before Anna could voice the arguments Sage could see brewing in her dark eyes, Will joined them. “You want the good news or the bad?”

  “Good news,” Anna said instantly. Sage would have saved the best for last. Good news after bad always made the worst seem a little more palatable.

  “None of the walls you want to take out are weight-bearing, so we should be okay that way.”

  “What’s the bad?” Anna asked.

  “We’re going to have to reroute some plumbing. It’s going to cost you.”

  He gave a figure that staggered Sage, though Anna didn’t seem at all surprised.

  “Well, there’s no rush on this floor. What about the work upstairs?”

  Those figures were no less stunning. “That’s more than reasonable,” Anna said. “Are you positive that will cover your entire overhead? I don’t want you skimping your profit.”

  “It’s fair.”

  Anna gave him a careful look, then smiled. “It will be fair when we tack back on the twenty percent you cut off the labor costs.”