With This Kiss (10 page)

“Couldn’t have done that without you,” his father said when they’d completely cleared out the room. “I’ve been meaning to refinish these floors for a long time. Figured since work was a little slow this year, it would give me a chance to finally get your mother off my back. You know how she’s been wanting me to redo these floors since you were in high school.”

Sean was about to suggest they head down to the kitchen to discuss Stu’s possible whereabouts when Sean’s mother called up the stairs.

“Sean? Bill? Are either of you up there?”

Sean thought he saw his father’s shoulders tense and his mouth tighten at the corners.

That made two of them.

Elizabeth was standing in front of them before either man could reply. “Oh good, I’m glad you’re here, honey,” she said to him, and then to his father, “I hope
you didn’t scratch any of the walls getting that bed frame out.”

“We were careful, Elizabeth,” Bill replied in a flat, borderline irritated voice.

Odd. Sean had never heard his father actually respond to his mother like that. He’d always just silently taken her jabs before.

What the hell was going on here?

First Stu had disappeared. And now his father was practically standing up to his mother. If Sean added in the way Rebecca kept getting under his skin, it was starting to feel like the earth was shifting on its axis.

His mother raised her eyebrows at Bill’s curt reply before saying, “These floors have certainly waited long enough to be fixed up, haven’t they, Sean?”

She’d asked him the question in a light voice with a smile, but Sean could feel the tension between his mother and father from where he was standing. Besides, didn’t she know he had always been able to see past the smile and hear past the lightness?

“I’m sure they’re going to look great,” was his only possible response.

She reached out and put a hand on his arm. “When I saw your car, I was hoping you were here to tell us that you’ve heard from Stu.”

Regardless of how he felt about his mother, the hopefulness in her eyes was difficult to see. Especially when he didn’t have any good news for her.

“He did send me a letter. Similar to the one he left you.” He ran a hand through his hair, using the movement as an excuse to shift away from his mother’s touch. “Unfortunately, he didn’t say where he was going or for how long.”

Elizabeth’s face fell. “How could he just leave us all like that? It isn’t like Stu to do something like that.”

Not having an answer for his clearly distraught mother, Sean continued to relay the information he did have. “I’ve spoken with several of Stu’s friends and none of them have heard from him.”

“I can’t help but think that none of this would have happened if Rebecca hadn’t come here. She’s very sweet, but obviously things weren’t good between her and Stu. Perhaps that’s why he felt like he had to leave.”

An instinctive urge to defend Rebecca rose up inside Sean. But before he could say a word, his normally mild-mannered, quiet father said, “That’s ridiculous, Elizabeth. He adored Rebecca. Just like the rest of us do.”

“Ridiculous? Adored?” His mother’s color was high. “He was fine before they got engaged. Everything was just fine.”

“No,” his father said, “everything was not just fine. Instead of blaming Rebecca for hurting your son, you need to open your eyes and give her credit for single-handedly holding things together at the inn.”

Blinking rapidly in surprise, Elizabeth finally turned to Sean for support. “Now that you’re here, you can take over the inn for a while, can’t you, honey?”

“I spent the morning working with her and can tell you firsthand that Rebecca is an excellent innkeeper. I have no intention of taking over for her.”

Deciding to end the conversation—the whole poorly thought out visit, actually—Sean turned to head for the stairs. His father followed him, putting a hand on his arm before he could walk away.

“Thanks for the help, Sean. I’ll be by the inn soon to
see if you need me to return the favor and to catch up on what you’ve been up to.” In a lower voice that kept the conversation between the two of them, he added, “I know this might sound strange, but unlike your mother, I’m not too worried about Stu. It’s occurred to me since he’s left that sometimes you need some distance to see things more clearly. Perhaps that’s all this is for him, a chance to finally see things for what they really are.”

Too quickly, his mother was there again, following them down the stairs to the front door.

“Don’t go yet, Sean. I’ve barely had a chance to talk to you since you’ve been back.”

Bill’s voice was firm. “Rebecca needs his help at the inn.”

His father was right. Rebecca’s workload was tremendous, especially after she’d spent the whole morning cleaning rooms with him instead of attending to her usual business.

He didn’t want to take up any more of her day than he already had. At the same time, it was his inn. He was familiar with the finances—he wouldn’t have bought the business blind, not even to help his brother—but there was a lot to be learned from going through a company’s files. He’d spend the rest of the afternoon familiarizing himself with the back-end of the business—the high and low periods, the number of staff and their salaries, and the growth potential.

“I’m sure your mother is sorry about her outburst. Please don’t say anything to Rebecca about it, Sean.”

“Of course, I won’t.”

Hopefully an afternoon filled with facts and figures would help loosen the tight knot that five minutes with his parents had put into his gut.

“How dare you apologize for me!”

Elizabeth had never been so mad… or ashamed. She was allowed to have feelings, wasn’t she? She should be able to speak her mind to her family, especially when she was a mother worried about her son.

Anyone would understand that. Except for her husband, evidently.

“Someone needed to apologize, Elizabeth. You were completely out of line.”

She was too stunned by what felt like Bill’s continued attack to say anything for a moment. Finally, in a softer voice, she asked, “Why are you speaking to me like this? I’m not the one who hurt Stu so badly that he felt he had no choice but to leave town.”

But instead of helping to make Bill understand where she was coming from, she watched his normally cheerful, relaxed expression settle more firmly into disgust. At her.

“Whatever drove him away, it wasn’t Rebecca. Couldn’t you see how upset she was when she gave us the news that they’d called off their engagement—and that they never should have made the mistake of getting engaged at all? She has never been anything but honest with us—and everyone else in this town. She’s barely holding it together without his help. He should have stayed to face the music with her.”

Not understanding how he could possibly talk that way about their son, Elizabeth went back on the attack. “You should be worried about Stu, not some girl we barely know. What if all along she was seducing him into giving her control of the inn?”

Bill’s bark of laughter at the word
seduce
shocked her.
How dare he laugh in the face of her fear. Her anger. Her worries.

“Seduce him? Are you kidding? There wasn’t an ounce of spark between Rebecca and Stu. You had to see that. If you ask me, not getting married was the best thing for the both of them.”

God, how she hated his talk of sparks. Way back when, the sparks had burned so brightly for her and Bill. Where had those sparks gone? For so long, she’d held out hope that they would come back.

But now that Stu was gone, sniping and fighting had replaced the heavy silences between them.

Leaving her almost all out of hope.

T
he next morning, Rebecca woke up shivering. The heat was on and she hadn’t kicked off the covers, but her bedroom was strangely cold. In fact, ever since Stu had disappeared, the room had gotten colder and colder each night. She’d taken to wearing her long underwear and thick socks to bed.

She half expected to see her breath in the air as she reluctantly pushed back the covers and sprinted to the bathroom. Although the tiled floor should have felt like ice against her bare feet, it was much warmer in the bathroom than it had been in her bedroom. While she waited for the shower to heat up, she went back out and made a quick tour of the rest of her suite. The only cold room was the bedroom. All the others felt just fine.

She’d left the doors open to the living room when she went to sleep. The heat should have come into her bedroom. Instead, it was as if there was some kind of invisible barrier there keeping the warmth out… and holding the icy cold in.

Over the past nine months, she’d heard many stories
about the inn being haunted, but she’d discounted them all as small-town folklore. The thing was, ever since moving in to the newly redone attic suite, she’d started to wonder if they might possibly be true.

Of course, once she stepped into the shower and let the water warm her up the rest of the way, she had to laugh at herself.

The inn wasn’t haunted. She was just tired from staying up and working on details for the Tapping of the Maples Festival long after everyone at the inn was asleep. With another big day ahead of her—one that was very likely to include more time training Sean—she forcefully brushed the remaining suspicions from her mind.

The past few weeks had been nuts. Between Andi and Nate’s wedding and Sean’s appearance, she felt like she’d been juggling half a dozen slick and slippery pins while balancing a plate on the tip of her nose.

Today was going to be better.

No, not just better. Great.

It was going to be a fantastic day. She’d make sure of it. Any challenges that came her way, she’d face head-on with a smile and courage. No matter what.

Sean knew he’d kept Rebecca from getting through her full workload the previous day. Deciding to finish going through all of the inn’s paperwork before approaching her in the morning, he’d been working for a couple of hours in the small office behind the check-in desk where he had easy access to the inn’s main files.

He’d heard Rebecca moving between the front desk and the dining room to oversee their guests’ breakfasts for the past hour. She hadn’t stepped into the office yet,
and he hadn’t gone out of his way to alert her of his presence, partly because he enjoyed listening to her chat with people as they passed through the inn’s front room.

She was cheerful, but not annoying. Interested without being intrusive. All in all, the perfect innkeeper.

He had to hand it to Stu; his brother had done a great job hiring Rebecca to manage the inn. What she might have lacked in initial experience nine months ago, she’d certainly made up for in raw energy and sheer willingness to learn.

All night, he’d gone over the half a dozen reasons for him to keep his distance from her. Foremost among them was that it was a small town, she was his brother’s ex-fiancée, and he didn’t mix business and pleasure. But Sean knew better than to think that any of those were strong enough reasons to keep their attraction at bay. It all came down to the fact that he despised secrets of any kind. Yes, Rebecca’s concern—and love—for his little brother shone through so clearly that Sean didn’t doubt she was keeping the secret because she loved Stu and not because it particularly served her. If anything, he could see the way his brother’s confidence weighed her down.

But she’d kept it anyway, even though Sean had told her over and over that he needed to know. And in the end, that was what Sean couldn’t allow himself to forget.

“Rebecca.” A man’s low voice sounded through to the back office. “You don’t know how much I’ve missed seeing your pretty face.”

Sean put the file he’d been reading down on the desk. The man speaking to Rebecca obviously knew her as more than an innkeeper.

“Mark?” She sounded surprised. But not in a good way. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you think? I came to see you, baby. It wasn’t easy to find this little town after a snowstorm, but you’re worth it.”

Sean barely held back a growl. First at the “baby” and then at the reference to Emerald Lake as a “little town.”

“How is your wife?” Rebecca’s voice held a sharp edge Sean hadn’t heard before. But as she said, “And your children?” he realized the edges were dulled with pain.

He didn’t know who the man was yet. But the sure knowledge that he’d hurt Rebecca had Sean’s hands curling into fists, even though she’d certainly never asked him to be her protector.

“That’s what I came here to tell you, Rebecca. My wife and I are getting a divorce. Now that it’s almost final and I’ve been missing you so much, I couldn’t wait any longer to come find you.”

Sean reeled from the implications of what the man was saying.

Had Rebecca been seeing this man while he was married?

“You should have called first, Mark. I can’t talk to you right now. Can’t you see I’m working?”

“I know you’re probably still a little mad at me,” the man said in a cajoling voice. “But you’ve got to understand, I needed time to deal with my wife, with my family. And the truth is, I didn’t realize until you were gone just how good you were for me. No one has ever taken care of me like you do.”