A Place with Briar (Harlequin Superromance) (9 page)

He looked away quickly. “This isn’t about me.”

“No, you’re right,” she snapped. “Because we don’t talk about you, do we? At least I’m honest with the people around me. You have some nerve jumping on my case when it’s obvious that you’re hiding something from me.”

He shook his head, pivoting toward the stairs. “I’m going to bed.”

With a scoff, she gestured him out. “Of course you are. Good night, Mr. Savitt.”

He stopped, planted a hand on the archway leading into the sitting room and pushed himself around to face her again, eyes hot with pain. They pierced her straight through the heart. “You want the truth, Briar? I’m a thirty-five-year-old man who floats around on a Harley with no clear destination. And yeah, I’m running from the past miserable three years of my life. Years, I spent in divorce court watching the woman I was married to for nearly a decade lie to a judge and strip me of everything that ever mattered to me. For the past few months, I’ve had no set address, no home and no idea what I’m supposed to do with myself because the life I lived—the man I made myself into and counted on being for the rest of my life—doesn’t exist anymore.”

As she stared, dismayed, he lifted his shoulders in a terse shrug. “Not only am I going up to an empty bed that belongs to me for the next few days,
I
am empty. Now tell me...who wants to live with that?” Before her mouth could do more than fumble open, he answered, “Nobody.”

A breath shuddered out of her and she shook her head, ashamed now that she knew, that she’d galled him into telling her. “Cole...I’m...”

He held up a silencing hand, lowering his head. “Don’t. I don’t want your apology. I won’t pity you so long as you don’t pity me. You know, you’ve got something here, Briar. Permanency. People willing to stick by you through it all. A purpose. You have everything to live for.”

The grim silence hung between them. Her vision blurred with tears and her breath hitched on a quiet sob.

Cole cleared his throat and looked directly at her. “I’ve decided not to stay any longer than the two weeks. I’ll be checking out Friday.”

“Cole,” she whispered. Oh, God, what should she say to him? With all her might, she wanted to beg him to stay. With her, now—after the two weeks were up. It hurt to think of herself alone again after he was gone.

To think of
him
alone again.

“Good night,” he said and turned away to return to his room.

CHAPTER EIGHT

H
E
MISSED
BREAKFAST
, which gave Briar pause. Cole rarely missed breakfast. When she finished serving the Josefstines, she went to the entryway windows. Her heart sank—there was no Harley parked under the shade of the magnolia.

An ache had carved out a home for itself in her chest since they parted the previous evening. She caught herself rubbing it as she opened the door to Cole’s suite and the scent of him all but slapped her in the face.

It took her a moment to step into the room and go about her chores. He hadn’t requested she freshen the room, but she did so, anyway, stunned by how neat he was.

If not for the clothes in the armoire and the toothbrush and razor in the bathroom, he might have never dwelled there.

She stripped the bed, tossing the lived-in sheets into the waiting basket before carefully—with far more care than usual—covering the mattress in fresh linens. The flowers in vases around the room were drooping. She threw them out and added fresh buds she’d clipped that morning, arranging them carefully and adding a sprig of jasmine to each.

After some hesitation, she gathered his dirty clothes and added them to her laundry basket. She loaded everything into the machine downstairs before rushing back up to dust and polish the suite’s furniture.

She dared not think about the fact that she would have to do it all again soon. Only the next time, she’d be washing every trace of him away for the next guest.

Fighting the ache, she scrubbed his bathroom until every corner gleamed. Then she locked herself out of the suite and went down to finish his laundry.

She was sorting it, folding it piece by piece when Mrs. Josefstine peered into the laundry room. “I’m sorry to bother you, dear, but there’s a man in your kitchen. Says he has an appointment.”

“Oh?” she asked, mouth firming into a frown. She set the last shirt on top of Cole’s pile and made her way to the back of the house. As she swung through the kitchen door and caught sight of the reedy man towering over the table, her pulse careened to a halt. “Daddy?”

It shocked her how old he looked. Even though his thick brown hair had thinned and grayed years ago, it still caught her off guard. His once-solid shoulders slumped slightly forward. His eyes were creased. They matched the permanent, somber line his mouth was firmly tucked into.

There was no flicker of affection in his eyes. They regarded her gravely. Nothing warmed inside him—she imagined nothing so much as stirred. “Briar.”

She pressed a hand to her stomach, suddenly feeling sick. And words he’d spoken after her mother’s passing came floating back to her like an ill wind....

“It’s unimaginable—you running the business by yourself.... You won’t succeed.”

“I know full well there’s a possibility that I could fail. But I won’t let that happen, Daddy,” Briar rebuked. “She didn’t let it happen—neither will I. We owe it to Mom to keep it in the family. That’s what she would have wanted.”

“You want to live with ghosts,” her father tossed back. “Well, I won’t be here to help you. Are you prepared for that? You’ve made your bed, Briar, but I can guarantee that you’ll never be happy here....”

Chilled, she caught herself brushing her hands over her arms. Lowering them, she searched for something—anything—to say. “I—I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I need an excuse to see you?” Hudson asked. His voice was deep and patchy. Familiar, except for the stoic tone he wielded like a blade. She didn’t think she would ever grow accustomed to that.

She pulled in a careful breath. “No, of course not.”

“You have several guests.”

“Yes. The Josefstine family checked into the garden suite yesterday. For the past week and a half, Mr. Savitt has been staying in the bay view.”

“But business isn’t well.”

She opened her mouth and locked her hands together. “I’m fine.”

He shook his head, eyes censorious. “Don’t lie to me, Briar.”

She lifted her hands then clasped them again. “I’m handling it.”

Hudson scowled then gestured to the figure in the corner. As her eyes darted to him, she saw it was a man in his thirties dressed in a gray suit and blue tie. She blinked at him, seeing him for the first time. It was as if he’d tried to melt into the wallpaper as the tension between father and daughter mounted into an acerbic air of foreboding. Now she wondered how a man so big could have escaped her attention. “This is an associate of mine,” Hudson told her.

“Byron Strong,” she said with a nod in his direction. “We’ve met.”

“In law school,” Byron explained to Hudson. “It’s good to see you, Briar.”

“And you,” she said, though she didn’t feel it. Not that Byron hadn’t been perfectly nice in law school. He’d actually been quite the campus catch. Frankly, she was surprised he remembered her at all. But what was he doing here with her father?

“Sorry to barge in like this,” he said when her father offered no such apology.

She lifted a shoulder and fought not to grit her teeth. “Any friend of my father’s has always been welcome here at Hanna’s.”

“Byron’s my new partner,” Hudson told her.

Her brow furrowed. “I see.” Yes, she saw perfectly. Her father had finally given up on his dreams of making her a distinguished lawyer and had installed Byron Strong in the office he’d no doubt been reserving for her all these years.

It didn’t upset her that he had replaced her with Byron. What galled was that he’d brought the man here to tell her he’d found the son he never had.

“He also has some experience as an accountant,” Hudson went on.

“Is that so?” she asked, looking from one to the other. Though there wasn’t a trace of emotion in her father’s eyes, Byron looked almost embarrassed. He, too, knew
exactly
what was happening here.

“Sit,” Hudson said. He motioned them both to the table. It wasn’t a welcoming gesture. It was more routine—businessman to potential client.

She was nothing more than that now. Despite the fact that the inn was in her name and that he’d made sure nothing of himself remained here, her father commanded authority like he would in his office, a classroom or courtroom.

“I got a call from a friend of mine the other day. Jack Fields.”

Briar’s stomach went from tight to slippery as she settled into the chair. “Did you?”

“He says that you’re late on your property taxes, that he has extended the deadline for the last time and he’ll be forced to seize Hanna’s, the tavern, the shops and surrounding land if you don’t pay by the end of the month.”

She couldn’t look at him. Not when he laid it all out like an accusation. “I told you I’m handling it.”

“Jack says this isn’t the first year you’ve had trouble paying. He says you’ve been under close watch by real-estate companies. Briar, they’ve always had their eyes on this place and they’ll be closing in now, breathing down your neck. You’re going to lose the inn eventually. The best thing to do is to try and sell before the banks get hold of it and you can no longer avoid foreclosure.”

Her eyes came up to his, swift and indignant. “You act like I’ve already lost Hanna’s. I
will
pay by the deadline. I won’t abandon it like you did.”

Hudson moved past the insult without so much as a flinch. “If you hang on too long, you could bury yourself in a hole. And I won’t be there to scrape you out of it.”

“I won’t need you to,” she replied, finding strength within that she hadn’t known was there. “I’ve never needed you to help me, have I? Whatever stake you think you have here is gone—you took it away a year ago. And you made sure I knew your faith in me was lost, that it was my loss. Well, I’ve cut
my
losses and I’ve moved on. Maybe you should, too.”

“I’m not the one who ever had difficulty moving on,” Hudson said, voice tightening. “You’ve buried your head in the inn, Briar. It’ll take you down with it.”

“We’ll see.”

“What exactly do you plan to do? You do have a plan?”

“Of course I have a plan,” she said, voice rising with each word. “There are people who would be more than happy to invest in a business like this, especially considering its location.”

“You have investors?”

“I’m still ironing out the details—”

“Which means you don’t have a single one.”

“I think it’s time that you leave. I have guests to tend to.”

He stood, his chair scraping loudly across the floor. “Don’t delude yourself into thinking I’m wrong like you did a year ago. When it’s all said and done, think of what you’ll have left. Absolutely nothing. Less so than you have now, which I’m sorry to say isn’t much.”

“Ah...” Byron Strong rose to his feet, too. “Maybe I should give you two a moment alone.”

“No, Byron,” she protested. “Please stay right where you are. You’ve come a long way—there must be a reason my father brought you here.”

“I brought him for your sake,” Hudson told her as Byron hesitantly settled back into the chair behind him. “He’s here to act as an accountant for you. I want you to use him for whatever needs to be done to get the inn’s affairs in order. We’ll get as much out of this sinking ship as we can manage at this point.”

“You...hired him as an accountant,” she said slowly. Fury frothed from a live, foaming pit inside her. Her blood boiled with it. Her ears rang with it.

It was the final straw. “I want you to leave,” she said in a quiet voice that shook with rage.

“I won’t leave until you agree to—”

“You will leave,” she demanded. “And you won’t come back. You are no longer welcome here.”

Face hardening, Hudson slowly picked up his briefcase. “After all I’ve tried to do for you...this is how you end it?”

“You ended it,” she reminded him. “Remember, Daddy? When I needed you most, you walked out on me and
this.
” She lifted her hands to encompass the inn. “You walked out on
her.
”

“Don’t you dare accuse me of abandoning your mother!”

“You were ready to throw all her hard work, every dream she ever had, in the dirt because you were too damn busy to grieve. To feel. You got as far away from her, from me, from everything that reminded you of our lives together as you possibly could because you were too much of a coward to face it. I said it once, I’ll say it again—I’m not like you. I can’t snap my fingers and pretend like she never existed, like this life never existed. And I loved her too much to give up on her dreams.”

His eyes boiled, but he was perfectly calm, as always. She’d never seen him yell or lose his temper—how she wished he would. Maybe then she could believe that his life with her and her mom had meant something to him. Maybe then she could believe that he remembered what it was like to be happy. “I loved your mother very much, Briar.”

“But you refuse to honor her by preserving her legacy,” Briar reminded him. “This is all that’s left of her, and I won’t throw it away.”

“You already have,” he said, turning toward the door. “Trust me, you have.”

She gripped the edge of the table as the screen door slapped shut at his retreating back. There were so many live wires loose inside her, she could hardly contain herself. Taking a deep breath in, she turned to Byron Strong, who’d been quietly observing the scene. “I’m sorry you had to see that, Byron.”

“Not at all, Briar,” he said quietly. “Think nothing of it, please.”

“I wish I could,” she told him. “I’m also sorry you had to come all this way for nothing. I won’t be needing your services—not at this time.”

“I’m sorry we couldn’t have met again under better circumstances,” he replied.

She saw genuine sincerity in his eyes and sighed. “You can leave your card, if you like. My father’s right. This is a sinking ship. And if for any reason...in the end...”

He shook his head before she could go on. “Your father was wrong. Family should stand by family, especially in situations like this.” Reluctantly, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a card. “But if you need anything...”

She nodded, taking the glossy rectangle with his business name and address. “Thank you.”

He dipped his head again in apology before he, too, made his exit.

She shrank back into her chair. No sooner had she settled than she was up again, pacing from one end of the kitchen to the other. Before long, she trudged through the swinging door, up the stairs to her rooms.

No time to dwell on her father’s words or her own—nor the implications behind them. Work, she thought. There was work to be done and she would damn well do it.

* * *

N
O
SOONER
HAD
Cole returned from his afternoon drive than he saw Olivia crossing the parking lot from Flora. She waved, shoes crunching across the gravel toward him. “Hey there, good-looking,” she greeted when he shut the Harley’s engine off. “Where’ve you been?”

He pulled off his helmet, offering a short smile as he slipped off the bike. “Nowhere in particular. Thought I’d ride before it got too hot to enjoy it.”

“Yeah, it’s heating up fast,” she warned. “Thanks to that system in the Gulf. You’re about to get real acquainted with the breath of hell. Wednesday’s supposed to be a hundred and one.”

He whistled low. “I’m already sweating.”

She smirked, raised a brow and eyed the dampness on the bare skin of his neck and the front of his T-shirt. “I can see that. You decide to stay on another week?”

His smile melted fast. “No, I leave Friday. Pretty sure I’ve overstayed my welcome.”

“I seriously doubt that,” she said. “This place will miss you.”

It was his turn to smirk. “You say that to everyone who passes through?”

“No, just the hot, single, male variety. And they’re few and far between.”

He chuckled. “Well, I’m flattered. I think.” Glancing over his shoulder, he lifted his hand to the Josefstines as they walked out of the inn.

Olivia frowned. “Howdy, folks. You going for a ride, too?”

The family matron, topped off by a bright pink straw hat, ambled forward, all smiles. “We thought we’d drive down to the Gulf and eat out. It’s about time we gave our pretty innkeeper a breather.”