“Like what?”
“Fall front desk, flame mahogany, unmarked. Probably early nineteenth century.”
Gabe stared at her and she gestured to the notepad. He realized that she was talking about the furniture in front of them and quickly scribbled the information down.
“Basically, I got taken in by a good fake, spent way too much, and it was my boss who saved me from putting it in a client’s home. He called it a very expensive learning experience. We later used it in another project, where the homeowner didn’t care so much about provenance or authenticity, but at a much-reduced cost.” Kendall cringed at the memory. She was lucky that Joseph Kramer had been a kind man and hadn’t fired her for her mistake, given that she’d made it on the company dime, but he’d also impressed on her the need to thoroughly research every piece before she shelled out any money and especially before she placed it in a client’s home. She’d never made the same error again.
Partly because she’d gotten cynical and partly because she’d expanded her wealth of knowledge to the point she could tell an antique from a fake within the first twenty seconds. And so far, every piece in this house had been real.
“Now the rugs.” She took a photo of the Persian rug and then flipped up the back to expose the knotwork. “Wool over cotton, Kashan in cream, red, and gold. 1920 or later, but I’m going to guess 1960s.”
“How can you tell?”
“Instinct.” Kendall smiled at him. “And wear. The cream fields didn’t exist before the 1920s, when Persian weavers started responding to Western demand for more subdued colors. There’s a bit of color fading and some wear, typical of a rug that’s sixty years old or so. But I might be able to track down the exact pattern to get a better date. Close enough to know it’s vintage.” She paused. “Connie had good taste.”
“Looks like it runs in the family.”
Kendall cleared her throat and looked away. The only way she’d make it through this was by hiding behind a veneer of professionalism. She didn’t need to be reminded of her personal connection. “Let’s go to the library next.”
“Kendall, I don’t want to push, but this might be an opportunity. To learn a little about your grandmother. To put your past behind you.”
She paused in the doorway of the library and inhaled deeply, suppressing her instinct to fire back angry words. His tone was kind and she had no doubt that he meant well, but even considering his experience with his own parents, he couldn’t understand. Yes, he had been lied to, but his father had cared enough to be in his life, even under the guise of a family friend. There was no way he could grasp the depth of her anger and hurt.
She leveled her voice, but she didn’t turn. “My only family abandoned me, Gabe. A few pieces of furniture will never change that.”
Gabe immediately knew he had made a misstep with Kendall, because the easy camaraderie they’d established evaporated. It wasn’t that she became rude or even stopped joking with him. She simply erected an invisible barrier between them that he couldn’t pinpoint but could feel nonetheless. By even suggesting there might be a way to understand her birth family, he’d unintentionally put himself on their side, not hers. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Still, as they moved through the remaining rooms downstairs, there was no getting back those early moments of connection or that fragile, fleeting trust they’d established the night before at the lookout.
Why does it matter so much to you? You’ve known her less than two days. Two days wasn’t enough to feel betrayed or like he’d betrayed her. They were virtual strangers. She had a life in another state, and he was merely a means to an end for her.
And yet he already cared about her. Maybe it was the part of him that rooted for the underdog—the same part that had led him to take a job with a nonprofit instead of a slightly more lucrative city planner position—that wanted to see things turn out for her. And maybe it was his ridiculous impulse to be a do-gooder that made him want to be part of making that happen.
Or maybe it was just the way she unconsciously pushed a blonde wave away from her face and tucked it behind her ear while she was thinking, looking so appealing that he wanted to reach out and do it for her.
It was definitely not the way her tight jeans hugged every curve and made his mouth dry in unguarded moments.
Probably.
His responsibility here was to the town. Their interests just happened to align at the moment. But if that changed, he knew full well what he’d have to choose. No matter how much he disliked it.
Once the clock started to edge past five and the light outside changed from warm sunset to the bluish hint of falling twilight, Kendall crawled out from under the dining room table and stretched her arms overhead with a crack. “I don’t know about you, but I think I’m done here. All this crawling and contorting has got my back in knots. I don’t suppose there’s a massage therapist in town?”
“Unfortunately not. And the nearest chiropractor is in Georgetown.” He offered a hand to help her up, which after a moment of reluctance, she took. “What do you say we go grab something to eat?”
Her expression shuttered suddenly. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll do dinner on my own tonight. I’ve got some work to do, so I’ll probably just pick something up from the sandwich shop and eat in front of my computer.”
“Sure. I understand.” He was right: he had ruined things between them. She didn’t want to spend any more time with him than she had to. “I have plenty of things to catch up on myself.”
Now her expression turned unsure. “I’m sorry. I forgot you were playing hooky from your real job to help me. If you don’t have time to come over here tomorrow, I totally understand.”
“No, it’s fine,” he said, even though he still had hours in front of the computer ahead, overlaying details onto wireframes for his animation. And that was just one of the townscapes he had to put together. He was definitely going to need to enlist Luke’s help to get this done any time this century.
“I don’t think it is, but thank you.” She paused, her expression softening. “This would have been much more difficult to do alone.”
“It’s my pleasure. You ready to go?”
“Sure.” She turned off the heater and lugged it into the front entry, then followed him out onto the stoop, where she locked the door.
Knowing full well she was trying to race him to his truck so he couldn’t open the door for her, Gabe still got there first and yanked it open. “My lady.”
She shot him a knowing grin before climbing in.
The impulse to say something stupid was strong enough that he opted for silence on the way back to town. Only when he stopped in front of the B and B did he finally look at her. “Meet you at the house tomorrow? Say, ten o’clock?”
“Perfect. I’ll see you there.” She hopped out of the cab and gave him a wave before slamming the door. She didn’t look back.
Gabe pulled away from the curb and immediately voice-dialed Luke.
His friend picked up on the first ring. “So. How’d your antiques date go?”
Gabe rolled his eyes. “I managed to tick her off within the first two hours, and now she’s gone polite on me. Besides, it wasn’t a date.”
“Sure it wasn’t. You always cut out on work to ‘help a stranger.’” Even over the phone, Gabe could hear the air quotes.
He chuckled. “Well, I’m paying for it now, and I could use some help. I don’t suppose you’d like to sacrifice your evening to do some really boring graphic design work?”
Luke paused like he was thinking. “What are you offering?”
“Pizza and beer?”
“The good kind?”
“The good kind of pizza or the good kind of beer?”
“Both. My help doesn’t come cheap.”
“Both then.”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
Gabe grinned and hung up the phone. He had just enough time to stop by the market that served as both t
he town pizza parlor and its only convenience store. Fortunately, D’Angelo’s had the best pizza in Clear Creek County; the owner was a transplanted New Yorker who used to own a small chain of Brooklyn pizza parlors. A couple of times a year, he imported New York City municipal water to make his dough, not a small feat considering the winter weather conditions on both ends of that supply chain.
Forty-five minutes later, Gabe was walking through his front door, balancing a six-pack of a locally bottled microbrew on top of a large pepperoni and sausage pizza, the steam from the pie making the cardboard box soft and flimsy. As soon as he heard the telltale scrabble of nails against the hardwood floor, he off-loaded the pizza before he ended up beneath it and 120 pounds of dog at the same time.
“Hey, Fitz. How you doing, boy?” Gabe took a couple of minutes to scratch the dog’s head and belly, Fitz’s tongue lolling out in happiness, and then went to open the kitchen door. The poor canine made a beeline for it, no doubt having eagerly awaited his potty break. Gabe felt momentarily guilty. He usually came home on his lunch hour to walk his dog, but he’d been across the lake the whole day. Now that he thought about it, they hadn’t even stopped for lunch. He’d gotten caught up in the juggernaut of Kendall’s determination to finish the downstairs today.
When Fitz had done his business, Gabe let him back in, transferred two big scoops of food into his bowl, and gave him one more affectionate pat. He’d just managed to wash his hands and get out paper plates when a knock sounded at his front door. Luke.
“It’s open!” he yelled, and a second later came the scrape of the wooden doorframe.
“I would have expected Detroit to give you a little more caution.” Luke’s deep voice came from the other room, and he rounded the corner, looking like a Norwegian lumberjack in a plaid flannel shirt and work boots. As if the guy did anything more physical during his workday than lift his laptop. Gabe liked to tell him as much.
“Why bother?” Gabe pulled a beer from the cardboard carrier and offered it to Luke, who opened it without comment.
He took a drink and then twisted the bottle around to look at the label. “Nice. Didn’t cheap out on me.”
“Not tonight. You’re doing me a favor. Take the pizza to the dining room?”
Luke complied, and Gabe followed with the plates and a roll of paper towels. They were halfway through their second pieces before Luke finally asked, “So. Kendall Green?”
“What about her?”
“What’s the deal?”
“Just trying to convince her not to sell. Thought I could get her to feel some connection to the place, but she’s still way too angry at her birth family.”
Luke shrugged. “Can’t blame her, really. Who abandons their kid like that?”
“Yeah, I know.” Gabe took a bite of his pizza, once again regretting letting his mouth get ahead of him. He’d only wanted to help, but the truth was, nothing in his experience prepared him to understand that level of hurt.
After a few moments passed, Luke asked, “Exactly how convincing are you being?”
“Not convincing enough.” Too late, he caught the half smile his friend hid behind his pizza. “It’s not like that.”
“Why not? She’s gorgeous. In fact, if you’re not interested, I thought I might . . .” Luke broke off when Gabe shot him a look. “What? So you are interested?”
Yeah, he was interested all right, but . . . “It’s complicated.”
“Not so complicated. She was flirting with you yesterday. She’s interested, you’re interested . . .” Luke shrugged. “Seems like a compelling reason to stick around to me.”
And that was exactly why he couldn’t make a move. Kendall would think he was trying to manipulate her into doing what was best for the town, and she was already suspicious of everyone’s motivations here. There was no good way to navigate that minefield.
They ate pizza silently until Luke pushed away the remnants of the enormous pie and pulled his laptop from his satchel. “So. Tell me what we need to do here.”
Gabe ran down what he’d accomplished with his current project. “Now the trick is to pull images from the town website and map them to the buildings in the model.”
“Oh, that’s no problem.” Luke connected to Gabe’s wireless internet and his fingers flew over the keyboard as he logged in to the back end of the website. A couple of seconds later, he’d downloaded the entire image folder and uploaded it to a handoff site. “What now?”
Gabe had known this was the right play. Luke’s back-end access beat having to save every image individually. “I need to come up with a rendering to represent the hotel and resort. All I have is the bare minimum that Burton submitted to the city council.”
“Well, didn’t you say that he’s a Park City developer and all his resorts look the same? Shouldn’t be too hard to find images and drawings from his other sites and add them to your rendering. In fact, I bet if we search . . .”
It didn’t turn out to be quite as easy as Luke was making it out to be, but after three hours, they had a decent representation of the resort loaded and half the images of the town put in. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was, it actually looked good. Burton was a well-known developer with a talented staff. The resort blended into the natural environment, about as well as a thirty-thousand-foot behemoth could, and he’d thought about ways to maximize both the views and the lake access. The building itself would no doubt be a resounding success. But that wasn’t their objection. The objection was the extra traffic and the environmental and economic impact, not to mention the changes to the intangible character of the town. Gabe started rendering four-lane divided highways with their encroachment on the surroundings and then, using his imagination, began working in the strip malls that would inevitably spring up on the side of the newly refurbished highway. He’d seen it before, and good as it might be for the tax base, it was the beginning of the end for the mountain-town character.
Finally Luke yawned and glanced at his watch. “It’s almost eleven. I’ve got some projects to finish, and I have to be up early tomorrow. I’m going to bail.”
“Thanks, man. You have no idea how much you helped.”
“Yeah, I do.” Luke gathered up his laptop and peripherals and shoved them back in his case. “Basketball Saturday?”
When Gabe hesitated, he laughed. “Point taken. You’ll be with Kendall. Or at least you hope you will be.”
Gabe couldn’t even deny it.
Chapter Fifteen
KENDALL AWOKE EARLY, DISORIENTED. Where was she? Why was there something hard and wet poking into her cheek?
Groggily, she lifted her head and the details of her room in the B and B filtered in. One look at herself answered the second question. She was still in her clothes from the night before, and the hard thing was the edge of her laptop, now covered in soggy lettuce from the abandoned sandwich wrapper beside it on the bed.
She groaned, remembering. She’d been up late researching the provenance of the pieces they’d cataloged from Connie Green’s house, and somewhere along the line, she must have collapsed in an exhausted stupor. Her eyes felt gritty and her mouth tasted like stale onions. She glanced at her watch. Six a.m. That explained why it was still dark out.
Of course, Gabe wouldn’t be over at Lakeshore until later, so there would be no one to know if she caught another couple hours of sleep. But she had way too much work for that. So far she’d managed to avoid going through anything personal in the house beyond a very eclectic CD collection, but as they moved to the upper rooms, she knew that would come to an end. Clothes and other personal belongings, maybe memorabilia. She wasn’t sure if she wanted Gabe there for support or if she wanted to be alone in case it turned out to be too much for her.
That brought her back to the memory of last night and how abruptly she had shut Gabe out. Guilt tightened her chest. He had only been trying to help, and she’d practically turned on him.
Except there was no reason to let him in
. He was helping her because their interests aligned. However kind and understanding he might be, he had a job to do and so did she. There was no room for personal feelings.
She groaned and levered herself off the bed. First a shower. Then coffee. Then she could worry about the rest.
By the time she was showered and dressed, the sun had just started to peek over the horizon. She packed her laptop and her personal items into her tote, pulled on her jacket, and carefully made her way down the B and B’s staircase. She’d told Mr. Brandt that she wouldn’t be needing breakfast while she was here—her waistband was already starting to feel a bit tight—but the smell of fresh coffee drew her into the kitchen anyway.
“Good morning,” he said when Kendall entered, not at all surprised to see her. “Sleep well?”
Kendall touched her cheek to check if the outline of her laptop was still pressed into it. “Reasonably well.”
“You can’t work on an empty stomach. Coffee is not breakfast, no matter what my grandson says. Here.” Mr. Brandt stacked sausage and eggs on what looked to be a freshly made English muffin and wrapped it in foil. “You can take it with you to Delia’s. She won’t mind.”
She’d only been here for a few days, and already her routine was that well-known? Or maybe it was just that everyone headed over to Main Street Mocha first thing in the morning.
“Thanks,” Kendall said with a smile, tucking the sandwich into an outer pocket of her bag. “I’ll enjoy it.”
Mr. Brandt waved off her words with his usual brusqueness. “How’s the work going over there?”
Kendall hardened herself, but the rush of emotions still surprised her. “Slowly. Gabe has been a big help.”
“You know, Gabe was pretty close to Connie.”
Kendall frowned. He’d never said anything about that. “Oh yeah? How?”
“She was his Sunday school teacher. Helped straighten out a bit of what had gotten twisted from the situation with his mom.” He looked at her significantly. “I expect he’s already told you about that.”
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