“If you’re saying you’re not enough—just stop. Ellery Hart, stop this very second.”
Stop what? Falling head over heels for Bing Whitmore? Stop hurting that he left? That he chose another over her? Stop wishing she hadn’t let herself open up to him so much that he’d climbed right inside and made a stall inside her heart, that she’d strawed just for him?
“He will come back.”
He wouldn’t. He had enormous responsibility in a town nine hours’ drive from where Ellery had her own list of enormous responsibilities. His grandfather’s stable, her grandfather’s hotel. Geography didn’t just fold itself to bring distances like that closer.
“I’ll be fine either way.” Sort of. Eventually, just like she was fine a couple of years down the road from Greg’s rejection. Except—this had felt so much more real than it ever had with Greg. Bing filled the empty little places inside her that she’d never even noticed were there.
Which was probably why his going away was such a scooping out of her inner self.
“Ellery, he’s really into you. I just know he will come back.” Kit pulled out her phone. “Let’s just look him up online. He’s kind of well-known.” She tapped the screen while Ellery folded in on herself. “See? Look. Bing Whitmore.” She held up the screen for Ellery to see. “Owner of Snow White, owner of Rose Red, dating female jockey—”
Smooth. Really smooth, Kit. “See? He won’t come back.”
“No, Ellery! This is old news. Top female jockey Shayla Sharp and thoroughbred stables owner Bing Whitmore …” Kit started mumbling as she scrolled the article.
This wasn’t helping. “Thank you for the cocoa.” She slid back, her knee bumping the table’s leg and sloshing brown liquid over the rim and onto the white cloth, making a stain spread as the liquid wicked outward. “I’ll wash that. Don’t worry.”
“You didn’t even have a sip.” Kit scrambled to her feet. “And this isn’t something to worry about, Ellery.”
She hadn’t been—until Kit brought it up.
Why did it smell like Mom was burning an empty teapot on a stove somewhere nearby?
Lenny flew through the french doors. “Ellery! There you are.” He was breathing hard. “I was looking everywhere.”
“What’s wrong?” Any other problem would have been preferable to talking about Bing’s abandonment. “Is someone at the front desk? I’ll come right away.”
“Good! But it’s not a guest.” Lenny strode beside her. “It’s that banker. Allard Allman.”
Ellery took it back. Almost any other problem would be preferable. “Did he say what he wanted?”
“He says your payment is due right this second.”
∞∞∞
“Miss Hart.” Allard Allman’s eyes sat too close together. His fingernails were dirty from all the coins he counted in his counting house all day. He probably had a blood type that predisposed him to greed, too. “Thank you for accompanying me on this sleigh ride.”
“You booked it for the rest of the afternoon, but we do need to be considerate of the horses.” Ellery shot a glance at Reggie in the carriage-driver’s seat. Maybe he’d catch the hint and shorten this joyride. Er, joyless ride. “You said you wanted to talk business with me?”
“Business, yes.” Allard slid closer on the tufted seat, his shoulder bumping Ellery’s. “But it doesn’t have to be all business. It could evolve.”
Uh, no. It could not. “I realize that my loan is due. I have partial payment available now, and the promise of the remainder by the end of January. We have plenty of bookings.”
“Partial?”
“Yes.” She detailed the amounts she could scrape together, if she didn’t pay herself back for the money she’d invested in Donner and Blitzen from the last of her personal savings account. “It’s not all there now, but it will be. I guarantee it.”
“Your signature on the loan agreement should have been the guarantee, you know.”
True. True enough. “Eighteen months ago, I was operating under the full expectation that the hotel would bounce back into solvency within six months. It has taken longer, but now we definitely have a game plan and are seeing astounding results. I’m sure you noticed the remodeling work in the lobby—as well as the rebranding we did.”
“All on the bank’s dime.”
No, none of it on the bank’s dime. Not directly. “I had a lot of volunteer workers, as well as donations. Everyone pulled together to save the hotel—because everyone loved my grandpa.”
Allard Allman’s breath steamed, and it smelled like sausages and gravy. “I think you know that a contract is a contract. It’s binding.”
“I do, but—” Why was he being difficult? “Doesn’t the bank want its money? I can let you see all the hotel’s financials from the past couple of weeks. There’s no doubt in my mind you’ll see that your investment will be returned.”
“Investment? It was a loan.”
Weren’t they the same thing, when it came to banks? “Please, Mr. Allman.”
“Call me Allard.” He turned an oily leer on her and ran a dry, bumpy, lizard-like tongue across his upper lip. “I do see a possible way around this difficulty, Miss Hart, if you’re willing to think creatively.”
Oh, no. No-no-no-no-no. “Mr. Allard, I’d like to discuss extending my loan’s due date by several weeks, if possible, based on solid expectations.”
“If they’re expectations that align with my own, we can definitely talk.” Allard sniffed. “How does this sound, Ellery? I’d be honored to call you Ellery, rather than Miss Hart.”
Miss Hart would continue to be fine. “If you need to ratchet up the interest rate for the final weeks, I can see the business purpose in that.”
“These will not be monetary negotiations, Ellery.” The way he said her name sent ants crawling up her neck. He slid his arm around her shoulders. “I’ve noticed you for years. Even when you were dumped so unceremoniously by that pinhead Greg Maxwell, I was keeping an eye on you.”
Stalker much? “Mr. Allman—”
He didn’t let her interrupt. “I bided my time, waiting until you were sure to be healed from that humiliation, and now I’m ready to strike a bargain with you. It will be mutually beneficial, I have no doubt.”
The back of Ellery’s throat collapsed, and she had to swallow to force it open. She was already flush against the side of the carriage, and there was no way to scoot farther away from his tentacles. “Mr. Allman!”
“With a few minor concessions on your part—that I’ll detail in private”—he shot a look at Reggie—“the loan can be forgiven. In its entirety. The hotel will be yours, free and clear.”
She clenched her teeth. “And if not?”
“Then I begin foreclosure proceedings. As soon as the court deems, the Sleigh Bells Chalet, your grandfather’s legacy, will belong to the bank.”
“But what about the staff?” Where would Kit go? And Lenny? Mom! She’d practically grown up at the Bells Chalet.
“That will be up to the new owner, of course. Your staff will be let go just in time for Christmas. I’m sure you’re beginning to see things my way. My way is a good way, Ellery, for you—and for me.” He leaned his face into hers, his hot breath brushing her cheek.
The carriage jerked wildly to the right, throwing Allard Allman away from Ellery, who was gripping the side of the carriage.
“Stop the horses,” she called. “I need to get out.” She leaped from the door, swinging it shut and leaving Mr. Allman and his unpleasant suggestions on the pretty upholstery.
“Sleep on it, Ellery. Dream of me. I’m sure you’ll see things my way by morning. I’ll be in touch.”
Bing
Massey Falls was blanketed in snow, and more was coming down. The Whitmore Stables stable hands were up on the roofs shoveling the two feet of white stuff away to the ground to prevent collapse. The sounds of the world were muffled, even the whinnies and grunts from the stables.
But Rose Red’s voice was f
orever muffled.
And Bing was completely done.
“It’s not just a horse to you. I know that.” Dr. Harrison put an arm around Bing’s shoulders. “They’re never just a horse. People who haven’t loved them won’t understand.”
Bing couldn’t feel his face, and it wasn’t just from the cold.
“You really loved her,” Freya said. “We all did, but you most of all.”
“I wish the surgery could have prolonged her life more.” Dr. Wilson’s voice sounded strangled. He’d been the surgeon, in the long shot procedure a few weeks ago. “If I’d had an operating table, or better setting skills …” His voice got a little strangled. “I’m so sorry.”
The illness wasn’t a complication of the surgery. It just … was.
“It’s not your fault.” It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Horses died. That was the lesson to be taken from this. Loved ones left this life. Abandoned the living. “I appreciate what you all did to try to save her over the past week. Pneumonia is no joke.”
Bing’s own lungs were filling up with fluid. His heart was sloshing in it, and drawing breath grew more and more difficult.
“Let’s get you inside,” Freya said. “You’re shaking.”
Shaking? Yeah, he was shaking, all right. He was more than shaking—he was shaken. He stumped toward the house on the far side of the stable grounds, the place he’d spent the past eight years of his life—since Grandpa Whitmore passed away and the running of the thoroughbred operation became Bing’s full time world.
The door of the house opened and a wall of heat came at him, but it wouldn’t penetrate him. Not for a long time.
Freya pulled out a painted-white wooden armchair for him at the kitchen table. He sat down, and its spindles ground against his back, even through his parka.
“Maybe we can see if the Torrey Stakes Racetrack will let Snow White and Rose Red share a burial site.”
Rose Red hadn’t even run in the local stakes. Not once. She’d fallen even before her debut run. “Who of the cousins do you think would buy me out?”
Freya dragged a chair across the tile and sat down beside him. “We’re back to that discussion, are we?”
“It’s not even that, actually. It’s not about Rose Red, or Snow White. Not anymore.” The idea solidified in his head as he spoke the words. “It’s been a while since my heart was in racing.”
“You love the horses, but not the business.” Freya picked up a salt shaker from the middle of the table and set it back down. “I think I get it. That’s what you were trying to say before.”
Whether he’d known it or not. Yeah.
“As a trained professional, I should have listened better. Sorry, Bing.”
“I don’t want to close Whitmore Stables, not if someone else wants to run it.”
Slowly, Freya nodded. “The things you did for the business—it won’t be easy to replace your work. Your devotion.”
Plenty of guys loved horses. That shouldn’t be a problem. “But you’re saying the family might eventually understand that I need out?”
She set her phone on the table. “There’s been a cousin group text.”
“I didn’t get any texts.”
“You were excluded from these. Sorry.”
So the thread was about him. “Some kind of intervention plot?” Got it. “They all think I’m wimping out.”
“They all think you’re as big of a champion as Snow White ever could have been for keeping Grandpa’s dream alive this long. No one else is ready to step up to the plate. They all are like me. They have lives. Families that need their attention.”
The horses and stable hands had been Bing’s life and family, absorbing all his attention and time. “Unlike me.”
“Yet, Bing. You haven’t got that yet.” She tipped back and balanced on her chair. “Remember that word? You’ve used it before.”
He exhaled heavily. Hope didn’t float, it fled—in his universe.
“Actually, even I think I’d like to make a life-changing move. Follow your lead and get away from the constant pressure of clients’ needs and start thinking about making a difference in a more personal manner.”
Was she talking about moving, literally? As in, to Wilder River? “You really like that school teacher, don’t you?”
“Let’s just say that our vacation may have shifted the trajectory of more than one life.”
For real? She met a guy tending the bar in a hot cocoa shop, and—“Well, that’s great. I knew you were spending time with him, but I hadn’t realized it was serious.”
“It’s getting there. Which means, I’m not exactly the top candidate for taking over Whitmore Stables and the day-to-day running of the business, let alone the horse needs.”
“There’s no one in the family who can step up to the plate.” Bing was in a trap, and the clamp of its metal jaws gouged into his limb, keeping him captive. “I need to sell, but there’s no one to sell to.” Much as he was desperate to walk away, there was no one to make this possible.
Not for him. Bing’s head throbbed, in concert with his heart. Rose Red. I’m so sorry.
“I’ll tell you what was said in the group text.” Freya took out her phone, but then pulled it back. “But first, I want to know a few things.”
“From me?”
“Yeah. First, what have you lost?”
“You mean besides Snow White and Rose Red? And everyone’s investment in them?” And, temporarily, his solid footing? “I mean, yeah. There’s more loss. For instance, my drive to do this job.”
“Okay, but that was waning before.”
Long before. If he were honest, it was waning long before Snow White’s accident as well. It might sound not-so-macho of him, but he didn’t like seeing the horses pushed to their extremity. He’d rather see a good trail horse bear a rider up a gentle slope to a ridge’s vista or a draft team like Donner and Blitzen pull a carriage.
Donner and Blitzen. He’d grown too fond of them in too short a time.
And of their owner.
“Yeah. Waning. To emptiness.”
“Let me put on my professional psychologist’s hat again, then.”
“Not this again.” Please. As if he could stop her.
“The word empty has come up several times in the past day—while we traveled back to Massey Falls, and over and over since then. It’s a theme, if I’m right.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“I take it from your silence you agree. So, tell me, Bing. What would fill you?”
Besides getting away from this soul-sucking responsibility of Grandpa’s stables and keeping a dream alive that wasn’t his own? “I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
Fine. He knew. “But I left her. While we were on death-watch for Rose Red, Ellery Hart texted me and wished me good luck in all my endeavors.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Them’s dumping words.”
No kidding. “I left her, even when I knew she’d been left before. Even when I knew that was her Achilles’ heel.”
Freya almost visibly took off her professional hat. “You are a jerk.”
“I know.” And now what was done was done, and Ellery wasn’t going to trust him ever again. “I guess it bites the most because for a while I’d been telling myself I could be what she needed.”
“And what was that?” Freya put all four legs of the chair back on the ground. “Did you know?”
“Actually, yeah. She told me. Explicitly.” Which made it easy. “Security.”
Again, Freya gave her slow nod. Maybe that was something they trained for in her profession. “Most women do. That’s a deep-seated, inherent craving of a woman’s soul.”
“And I blasted any hope of being a safe place for her to smithereens.” Kaboom.
“By coming to check on Rose Red?”
“By not letting her know I choose her first. Over everything else.” Which—he had. Or at least he realized it now, even th
ough he had failed to prove it to her. And which he now ached to prove to her. Oh! But why on earth would she trust him now?
Freya sighed. “Sounds to me like you have your work cut out for you.”
“Work?”
“Proving that you’re a better risk than you seem.”
Was it even possible to prove such a thing—especially when he was as broken as he was? “Tell me what the group text said.”
And please let it be a way out.
Ellery
“Just sign on the line, please, Miss Hart.”
They were back to formal titles again, thank heavens. But along with those formal titles came the Molotov cocktail to burn down Grandpa Bell’s legacy.
“Don’t do it, Ellery!” Lenny hollered, bounding through the lobby, toting a huge water jug decorated like a reindeer’s head on his shoulder. It clinked and jingled. “I have my savings right here. It’s all yours, like I told you. And they’s ten more just like this. It’ll be more than five thousand dollars, if I’m guessing right.”
Oh, Lenny. You have the best heart in a hundred-mile radius.
“Too little too late,” Allard Allman chortled. “Though I do admire your friends’ devotion to you. I could have been your friend, may I remind you?”
No, he may not.
“Friends don’t foreclose on friends,” Kit said, shaking her jingle bell necklace at him like a curse from a witch’s talisman. “She forked over more than half of the debt to you and was going to have the full amount to you in a month. You couldn’t wait that long? I know what you are, Allman, Ebenezer Scrooge himself. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come will have you in his sights. Watch out for that scythe, pal.”
“Kit!” Ellery signed her legal name on the line. “It’s my decision. I borrowed the money, and I was responsible to pay it back. This is a natural consequence to the choices I made.”
“Yeah, I gave her a way out. She chose not to take it.” Allard’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “But now I’m glad—especially since I already have a buyer on the hook for this place.”
A buyer! Already? Ellery clutched at her heart. “Oh!” Until that second, it hadn’t seemed real. It had seemed like a terrible dream, but one she could wake up from. Or like a movie with alternate endings in the bonus features, one she could rewind and see the other version, the real one, where she didn’t lose the hotel, where she didn’t squander her grandfather’s dream.
The Sleigh Bells Chalet: A Small Town Romance (Christmas House Romances Book 2) Page 10
