The Orphans' Blessing
Page 19
Laura watched as a flock of sandpipers ran across the wet sand down by the waves. “What’s the big deal about Carberry Hotels?”
Her mother gasped. “Don’t you read the paper, darling? Carberry Hotels is one of the top luxury hotel brands in the world. This isn’t a measly million or two we’re talking about. This offer promises to be significant. The least you can do is show the man the kind of hospitality The Sea Glass Inn is known for.”
Laura shook her head in disbelief, although she knew her mother couldn’t see her. Until Gram’s funeral last week, Eleanor hadn’t visited The Sea Glass Inn once since she’d deposited Laura on the steps of her boarding school and hopped on a plane to Hong Kong eleven years earlier. She had no idea what kind of hospitality was on offer at the inn these days.
“Why aren’t you here to entertain him?” Laura demanded.
“Oh,” her mother said flippantly, “I’m staying at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston for a few days to catch up with some old friends. You can handle it, can’t you, darling? Just show him around a little, and let him know what a fantastic deal Carberry Hotels would be getting if they decide to move forward with the inn.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell her mother that no, she wouldn’t handle it, she didn’t want to sell the inn to anyone, let alone a luxury hotel chain that would be sure to bulldoze it, when she realized that if her mother wanted to sell, it meant she’d have to stay for the summer. Which would give Laura a lot more time to convince the woman to let her take over the inn.
“Okay, Mom,” she said. “I’ll handle it.”
“Good girl, darling. Good girl.”
The wind gusted, and the long grass waved wildly on the dunes. Laura remembered playing hide-and-seek on this beach with her sisters when they were little, waiting to hear the tinny music of the ice-cream truck as it rolled into the parking lot at the top of the rickety wooden boardwalk. She remembered catching sand crabs and carrying them around in buckets. She remembered sifting through seaweed to collect sea glass, and daring her sisters to touch the remains of washed-up horseshoe crabs.
She turned away from the beach and surveyed the outside of the building. After her divorce, she and Emma had moved in to help her grandmother with some of the more physically and mentally taxing aspects of running the inn.
At twenty rooms, it was bigger than a bed-and-breakfast, but it had the same kind of appeal. Clean and cozy rooms, a sunny dining room, where guests enjoyed their continental breakfast, and a spacious parlor where guests shared stories after a day spent exploring the dunes, walking out on the jetty or lolling around on Sand Street Beach.
The inn did good business during the summer, but it was open only three and a half months out of the year. Even if they had an extremely profitable summer, Laura doubted they’d make enough money to pay for all the repairs that were necessary since last year’s nor’easter—especially the repairs to the roof.
Trying to figure out how to keep the inn from falling apart without going bankrupt in the process was keeping her up at night. But the thought of losing it altogether, which she hadn’t even considered a possibility until she and her mother had met with the executor of her grandmother’s estate last week, was the stuff of nightmares.
She went inside to the dining room, which featured a wood-beamed ceiling and framed nautical posters on the walls, and found her friend Chloe sitting at the end of one of the long communal tables, eating pizza with Emma.
“He still out there?” Laura asked, gesturing to the filmy white curtains covering the windows that faced the street. Last she’d checked, Jonathan Masters’s car—a black BMW—had been parked out front, and he’d been pacing up and down the street, phone at his ear.
Chloe nodded. “Still there.”
Laura sighed. “Great. That’s just great.”
“What’d your mom say?”
“Apparently Carberry Hotels wants the inn, and they’re prepared to make us a ‘significant’ offer.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Chloe asked, responding to Laura’s less-than-enthusiastic tone. “At least then you’d get some money out of the whole thing, right? If your mom leaves and the inn goes to the church, you get nothing.”
“I don’t want money,” Laura insisted. “I want to keep Gram’s legacy alive. I want Emma to be able to stay in the only home she’s ever known. I want to do something with my life, build something for our future.”
Emma finished her pizza and, for the umpteenth time that day, started singing her favorite song. “Yankee Doodle went to town, riding on a pony...”
Laura used a baby wipe to clean tomato sauce off her daughter’s face and added a surprise ending. “Stuck a feather in his cap and called it spaghetti!”
Emma giggled helplessly, shaking her head. “No, Mom! Not spaghetti!”
“Oh, lasagna, right? Stuck a feather in his cap and called it lasagna!”
Emma let her head roll back so she was looking at the ceiling. “No, no, no, Mom! You’re so silly! Not lasagna! Macaroni! He called it macaroni!”
“I’m silly? You’re silly!” She tickled Emma and made her squeal in delight. “Come on, honey, do you want to watch a cartoon?”
“Yeah!”
Laura took her into the parlor and cued up a kids’ show on the TV. She propped the swinging door open and went back into the dining room with Chloe.
“She told me the lawyer looks like her dad,” Chloe said.
Laura snorted. “Well, it’s not like she has the best idea of what the man looks like anyway. Five minutes of video chatting on Christmas and her birthday is hardly enough for a four-year-old to have a clear mental picture of her father.”
Chloe scrunched her nose in disgust. “I’m sorry, but I never liked him.”
“Sadly, that makes one of us.”
Chloe leaned forward and placed her hand on Laura’s forearm. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I knew he wasn’t that committed to church. I knew he was very ambitious. I should have realized that our priorities weren’t aligned. I shouldn’t have let him talk me into getting married so fast.”
She’d heard that women gravitated to men who were like their fathers, and that had definitely been true in her case. Her father was the managing director of the Hong Kong division of a global management consulting firm. All through her childhood, he’d worked at least eighty hours a week and rarely taken time off. The fact that Conrad had been similarly driven should have been a huge red flag, and yet she’d been smitten almost from the moment they met, and had married him a mere six months later.
“Hindsight, right?” Chloe asked.
Laura shrugged. “I learned my lesson. I’m never getting involved with a guy like that again.”
“Okay, but are you going to get involved with any guy again? It’s been almost five years, Laura. You know your grandmother would be doing cartwheels up there if you found someone nice...”
“I have more important things to think about than dating, Chlo.”
“I know, but you’re not going to meet anyone if you don’t put yourself out there. Let me set up a profile for you on that Christian dating site—”
Laura arched a brow. “Because you’ve had such stunning success with it?”
Chloe laughed. She’d been on more bad dates than anyone they knew. “At least I’m trying.”
“If it was just me, maybe,” Laura said, shrugging. “But I’ve got Emma to think about...”
“So no to dating apps. But I could set you up with one of Brett’s friends—”
Laura shook her head. “I already know all your brother’s friends, and I’m just not ready right now. My heart wouldn’t be in it.”
Chloe gave a long-suffering sigh. “Fine.” She narrowed her eyes and shook her finger at Laura. “But don’t think I’m going to drop the subject forever. You’re too young to give
up on love. And Emma needs a good male role model in her life.”
As if on cue, her daughter called out, “Mom! The show’s over!” At the same time, there was a knock at the door.
“You mind getting Emma ready for bed?” Laura asked.
“Of course not,” Chloe answered.
Chloe took Emma upstairs, and Laura opened the door for Jonathan Masters.
This time, he was carrying a suitcase.
He was probably six or seven years older than she was and five or six inches taller, with dark hair, dark eyes and a runner’s build. He had gel in his hair—just enough to keep it in place—and cuff links in his sleeves. His black suit, like the black car parked at the curb, looked expensive, and his red tie, which was slightly askew, highlighted two spots of high color on his cheeks.
It was late in the day, so he had a bit of a five o’clock shadow going on, and just the very faintest hint of a cleft in his chin. He was very good-looking, if you liked that clean-cut, corporate kind of look.
Which Laura did. A lot.
Much to her chagrin.
“So, hello again,” she said, not sure if she sounded awkward or sarcastic. In light of his kind eyes and easy smile, she wasn’t sure which she’d prefer. “We’re not normally open for guests this time of year, but please, by all means, come in.”
She’d expected him to look smug when she let him back in, but he didn’t. Instead, he looked almost...relieved.
He stepped into the parlor and glanced around. “Where’s your mini me?”
“Emma? She’s getting ready for bed.”
He looked at his watch, not his phone, and Laura’s estimation of him crept up a notch. She liked people who weren’t always glued to their cell phones. “It’s seven thirty.”
She raised an eyebrow. “She’s four.”
“So, not a night owl?”
She laughed at his wry tone. He grinned. She wished he wasn’t quite such a good-looking man. It was distracting, and she didn’t need any distractions in her life right now. Not when she had to figure out how to convince her mother to stay for the summer without signing the inn over to Carberry Hotels.
Remembering her manners—which she actually did have, despite the fact that barely an hour ago she’d literally pushed this guy out the door—she asked, “Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee? Leftover pizza?”
His eyes lit up. “You have pizza?”
“Sure.” She nodded for him to sit on one of the light blue couches in the parlor. “We have cheese or—wait for it—cheese.”
He laughed. “I guess I’ll take cheese.”
She retrieved a few slices for him from one of the inn’s three fridges and microwaved them. She gave him his pizza, Chloe came down and said her goodbyes, then Laura went upstairs to say good-night to Emma. From the second floor, she could overhear the sounds of Chloe and Jonathan talking, although she couldn’t make out any of the words.
When she came back to the parlor, Chloe was gone and Jonathan was standing up, examining a newspaper clipping that was framed and propped up on the mantel.
“My grandfather,” she said. “He was a Korean War vet.”
He inclined his head. “Respect.”
She nodded and sat on the couch opposite from his, wondering how he saw the space. She loved this room. She’d helped her grandmother remodel and redecorate it shortly after Emma was born.
They’d knocked out the back wall and replaced it with huge plate glass windows on either side of a sliding glass door that opened onto a wraparound porch, where guests could sit and watch the sunset over the ocean. Then they’d painted the remaining walls a creamy blue, fixed a seascape over the fireplace and found a battered treasure chest that they filled with sea glass, which the children staying at the inn could add to or take from as they pleased.
She and her grandmother had made the sea glass chandelier in the entryway themselves, painstakingly hand wiring hundreds of pieces collected over Laura’s lifetime. It had taken them two years to finish it. The only thing she took more pride in than that chandelier was her daughter.
Jonathan sat, took his last bite of pizza and nodded to the TV, where Emma’s cartoon was paused, a sea of smiling animal superheroes staring out at them. “What are we watching? The animal channel?”
Laura laughed. “Yeah, their new animated programming.”
His lips quirked into an easy smile.
“You don’t have kids, do you?”
He held up his left hand and wiggled his bare ring finger. “Nope. Not married, either.” Then he glanced at her ring finger. “I take it there’s no Mr. Laura hiding under the eaves?”
“Lessoway,” she said. “And no, I went back to my maiden name after the divorce.”
“You look too young to be divorced.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “And you look too old not to be married.”
He laughed and held a hand to his heart as though he’d been shot. “Oh, walked right into that one, didn’t I? Sorry. None of my business.”
She shrugged, but she was smiling. “It’s fine. I’m not offended.”
“So, this cartoon your daughter was watching. Let me guess. Animal superheroes trying to convince kids to save the environment?”
She shook her head. “Actually, it’s a Bible-based show.”
“Ah,” he said. “Interesting.”
There was something in his tone that gave her pause. She slanted a glance at him. “You’re not a Christian?”
He laughed. “I am on Christmas and Easter.”
“Oh.” She felt a twinge of disappointment, although she wasn’t sure why. “Right.”
“I take it you are? A Christian, I mean.”
She nodded. “My grandmother’s influence.”
He blinked, the relaxed, teasing manner gone. “Ah, well, that’s...nice.”
In Laura’s experience, young professionals tended to shy away from any mention of faith, as though spirituality might be contagious. Laura knew the truth, though. Before she’d found her faith as a teenager, she’d been a mess: a good girl who’d been abandoned by her own family, a good girl who hadn’t been good enough. She thanked God every day that her grandmother’s church community had embraced her and helped her see the truth of her identity as a child of God.
She looked at the man sitting across from her and smiled gently. “Nice doesn’t even begin to describe it.”
When she saw that he was at a loss for how to reply, she took pity on him, gave her hands a brisk clap, stood up and said, “Let me show you to your room.”
Copyright © 2020 by Meghann Whistler
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ISBN-13: 9781488060359
The Orphans’ Blessing
Copyright © 2020 by Lorraine Beatty
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events o
r locales is entirely coincidental.
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