The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge (262 page)

Sandwiches, of course. Burgers were a necessity, but if she could buy crab locally she could do crab cakes as well. BLTs made from garden lettuce, applewood-smoked bacon from that farm over in Ballard, and heirloom tomatoes from Clay. Maybe a grilled or roasted vegetable wrap. Chicken salad from that recipe her aunt Libby gave her.

Desserts would be as simple as Shelby had suggested: brownies, and cupcakes from Brooke’s shop, plus a dessert of the day, like that lemon meringue pie Violet mentioned, and a pound cake from Gramma Rose’s recipe, and something from Lilly Cavanaugh. Ellie had promised she’d drop off a bunch of recipes. Sophie knew she’d find something that she could make ahead of time.

And that would be it for the menu, other than beverages. Coffee, tea, sparkling water, iced tea. Maybe a few sodas, though she didn’t drink them herself and wasn’t sure they fit in with her plan to serve mostly local and natural. There wasn’t much natural about any soda she’d ever had, but she’d think about that.

She sketched out an ad she’d place in the
St. Dennis Gazette
on the Thursday before she opened. How big an ad could she afford? She’d have to talk to Grace to see what she suggested.

She heard tires on the gravel out front and raised her head hopefully, but it was just a Jeep that was using her parking lot to turn around. A few minutes
later, a red truck stopped in front of the mulch yard and an older man hopped out, opened the gate, then drove through. How long before she stopped looking up every time she heard a noise outside?

Until Jason found his way over to apologize.

Would that happen? She sighed, realizing that she didn’t know him well enough to know if his sense of fairness was stronger than his ego. And it
was
a matter of fairness, she insisted. She had every right to pursue this property, as much right as he did. Still, she understood that he was disappointed—wouldn’t she have been, if somehow he’d beaten her to the punch and purchased the restaurant while she was back in Ohio?

Of course she would. The real question was whether or not she’d have thrown a tantrum over it. All right, perhaps
tantrum
was too strong a word. And whether or not she’d have done something that would impact the success of his business. She’d planned on alfresco dining this summer, but how could she seat patrons outside to dine with that gross smell drifting over the fence? How appetizing was that?

The exterminator, Ed Sellers, came out of the kitchen.

“Is there a key to the second floor?” he asked.

She took it from her bag and handed it to him. “What’s the bad news?”

“You got ants. Mice, a’course, and a boatload of stink bugs. Little bastards are everywhere this year.” He took the key and went upstairs.

It could be worse, she told herself, and it didn’t sound like anything that couldn’t be taken care of.
She crossed her fingers and waited until Ed reappeared.

“Same visitors upstairs as down. Basement?”

She shook her head—no, the building didn’t have one.

“Okay, then, here’s what I can do.” For the next fifteen minutes, Ed outlined his plan for ridding the building of every living thing. “Now, you’re going to want to keep the place closed up for a night, but after that, you’ll be good to go.”

“I can live with that.”

“Good. How ’bout I come in first thing on Friday morning? You’ll have the place back on Saturday afternoon.”

“Perfect. I’ll see you on Friday.”

He handed her his estimate and she folded it to put aside for later review. After he left, she took a peek. The number circled at the bottom wasn’t nearly as much as she’d feared, and she breathed a sigh of relief. So far, so good, as far as the expenditures were concerned.

Jesse had agreed to give her the afternoon off, since she’d done so much to organize his office in his absence. She’d been amused to find that it made no difference to her brother if he had to search his floor for a file or if he found it neatly filed away.

“As long as I know where to find it when I need it, what difference does it make where you put it?” he’d asked after she showed him the new file room she’d set up.

“Sometimes someone other than you might need the case.” She fought back a smile. The remark was so typical of his haphazard, devil-may-care attitude.
But in the end, he’d admitted that he was impressed with the work she’d done, and offered her the afternoon to take care of her business.

“But I expect you here tomorrow at two
P.M
.,” he’d told her.

“I’ll be here,” she promised, and she would be. Hopefully by then her head would have stopped spinning. Her brain was threatening to go on overdrive with all she had to do, now that she owned the building she’d coveted. What was the saying about being careful what you wished for?

She made a list of all she had to do, in order of priority. When everything had been written down, she felt a rare migraine coming on. She decided to break the list down into sections—the dining room, the kitchen, the restrooms, the exterior. It looked more manageable to her once those lists were on separate pieces of paper. A mind game, to be sure, but right then, her mind was a churning mess.

Today she could wipe down all the tables and chairs, clean the dining room floor, and wash the windows. The kitchen would remain off-limits until the appliances had been dealt with and Ed had finished doing his thing. Satisfied she had a workable plan, she locked the door and drove home to pick up some cleaning supplies. She grabbed a quick take-out lunch from The Checkered Cloth and took it back to River Road.

The black pickup was in the middle of the lot when she returned. She slowed as she drove by, and took her sweet time gathering her things and getting out of the car and unlocking the front door, giving Jason ample opportunity to see her, but he was nowhere in
sight. She went inside, carrying her lunch and a bucket filled with cloths and bottles of heavy-duty cleaners. She went back out to the car once for the vacuum, but there was still no sign of Jason.

Annoyed that she couldn’t have annoyed him by her presence, she plugged in the vacuum and went to work. When she was finished, she scrubbed every table and chair. Several were a bit wobbly; those she set aside for repair while she finished the task of cleaning the big room. When she was done, the place smelled like Lysol, but the dust and cobwebs were gone and she could see out the windows. Her arms and her back ached and she was exhausted, but it was one day down and counting, and she felt pretty damned good about that. She locked up for the day and took her take-out lunch, which, in her cleaning frenzy, she’d forgotten to eat.

She was dead on her feet when she arrived at her house and barely could stand in the shower. She’d discovered muscles she’d forgotten that she had, and none of them were happy about having been reawakened. She dried her hair, pulled a long T-shirt over her head, and collapsed onto her bed. Tomorrow would be her first day of double duty—restaurant in the morning, the law office at two. She fell asleep wondering if perhaps she’d been a tad cocky about her ability to balance both.

On Wednesday morning, Jason drove through the gates of his yard slowly, his eyes fixed on the old stone building on the other side of the fence. Sophie’s car was parked by the door, the lights were on, and rock music was drifting across the lot. He could see a form
moving about behind the front window. If things were different between them, he’d park next to her and go inside, help her out with anything she might be doing.

Funny how things can go from zero to sixty in the blink of an eye. One minute you’re at the start of something big; the next, you’re chopped meat. He was still trying to figure out how that conversation had escalated so damned quickly.

Sophie bossing around the guy who’d been trying to deliver mulch was probably a good place to start. Jason accusing her of buying the property out from under him would probably be right up there on the list. As if he had any right to it in the first place. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted the accusatory tone, but there was no taking it back. She’d been on a verbal tear, and there’d been no way to stop her at that point.

He’d wanted to explain that he’d had the mulch piles dumped near the fence because his heavy equipment was parked on the other side of the lot. Until recently, he’d had no reason to expect that someone else—least of all Sophie—had bought the building next door. It never occurred to him that anyone else would be interested. He’d just assumed that the building would, in time, belong to him.

He reminded himself of what happened when one assumed.

He did, in fact, feel like an ass.

All of which did nothing to resolve the situation. If he hadn’t been so pissed off, he would have told her that moving those tons of soil and mulch wasn’t as easy as picking up a shovel. He’d paid to have them
dumped there, and he’d have to pay someone to move them. If he’d had time to cool off—and if she hadn’t stomped away—he’d have explained that sooner or later those piles would be gone, because he’d have sold and delivered it to his clients. Hell, some of that mulch would be spread around her grandfather’s garden by the end of the week.

That she had actually purchased that place was still gnawing at him. Yes, she’d told him that she bought a restaurant, but it had never occurred to him that she meant the place next door. He didn’t think of it as a restaurant. To him, it was a stone building that would make a great retail shop. All along, he thought she’d been talking about some other place, some other place that he didn’t know about. There was still a lot about St. Dennis that he didn’t know.

He parked the pickup and got out, the day’s work schedule in his hands. His crews were already there, waiting for their assignments. He tried to put the argument with Sophie behind him while he walked across the lot.

“Hey, boss, did you see someone’s in that place next door?” Kevin, one of his foremen, asked.

Jason nodded and started to go over the assignments.

“What do you suppose is going in there?”

“It used to be a restaurant,” someone said. “Nice place. We used to go there when I was a kid.”

“Be nice if it was a restaurant again. We could stop in, pick up lunch. Convenient,” another of the guys chimed in.

“Wonder who bought it?”

“If you girls are finished gossiping, I have the schedule
for today.” Jason held up the clipboard. The last thing he wanted to hear was how great it would be to have a restaurant right next door. As if that were a good idea.

Fifteen minutes later, he was back in the cab of his truck, his work crews settled and the scope of each job reviewed. He’d turned the key in the ignition, but he was having a hard time driving away when he could see Sophie through the glass. He wanted to talk to her, but what would he say? He was sorry that she was upset over the mulch piles, but he couldn’t just wave a magic wand and have them disappear. He couldn’t apologize for being upset that she beat him to the property, because he’d be lying. What good was an insincere apology? He hadn’t been exaggerating when he told her that he’d planned his business expansion around that property.

Besides, didn’t she owe him an apology as well? How was anyone supposed to have known that she was opening a restaurant there? Lennie the delivery guy hadn’t known, but she’d yelled at the man as if he should have. For that matter, she’d yelled at Jason as if somehow he’d known and had made the decision to store the mulches and soils in that particular spot just to irritate her.

He was having a real hard time reconciling the crazy woman who’d been yelling like a banshee in his yard just the day before with the woman who’d brought him into her bed just a few days earlier. That woman,
that
was a woman he was starting to think of as the one who could be worth staying with. The unreasonable harpy? Not so much. Which one, he wondered,
was the real Sophie? How to get through to the former without reawakening the latter?

And how was he supposed to go about making things right when he really hadn’t done anything wrong?

Chapter 21

Sophie hit the ground running at six
A.M
. By seven she was in the hardware store picking out the paint for the chairs and tables and carrying her newly purchased supplies to her car. She’d slept so soundly that when the alarm sounded that morning, she’d bolted upright as if she’d been shot. Aching and tired, she’d dragged herself downstairs for coffee and drank her first cup hanging over the railing on the small back porch, telling herself that by the time she finished the work at the restaurant, she’d be in shape and feeling fine. Somehow her back and her arms weren’t getting the message.

The sun had already warmed the dining area when she arrived on River Road and she carried the boxes of paint, rollers, and brushes into the building. She wished she could leave the door and windows open, but the smell from next door was still too strong. She wondered if there was something that could be sprayed on those piles, like the stuff she saw advertised on TV that refreshed fabrics.

She moved all of the furniture to the perimeter of the room before spreading a newly purchased drop
cloth on the floor. She lined up the chairs, opened the first can of black paint, and went to work. She painted the first chair, then stood back to assess the completed job. The paint she’d chosen was a semigloss, and even as it was drying, she knew she’d made the right choice. Sophie liked the way the paint accentuated the lines of the chair. She moved on to the next chair, and the one after that. Her arm was getting a little tired, but determined to stick to her schedule, she kept going.