Seaview Inn

by Sherryl Woods

  Now most of the guests were in their rooms and everyone from here in town had left. Gran had gone upstairs for the evening, her mom and Luke had gone for a walk, and she was on the porch with her feet propped up and a glass of lemonade at her side, trying not to obsess about what tomorrow might bring. Would she feel a letdown now that her initial mission had been accomplished? Would the fun of running this place start to wear thin after the novelty wore off? She didn’t think so, but the only way to tell would be to see how it went next week, next month or even next year. Right now she simply felt the contentment of a job well done.

  She heard the screen door slap shut and glanced in that direction. Jeff was heading her way with a tray of sandwiches—real ones thick with ham and cheese, lettuce and tomato, not the fancy little tea sandwiches they’d served to their guests.

  “Don’t argue with me,” he said before she could protest. “I know you never ate a bite during the party. You have to take care of yourself. And once you’ve eaten something, you should go to bed and get some rest.”

  “You’re probably right,” she admitted with a yawn. “I’m beat.”

  He stared at her with an astonished expression. “Say that again.”

  “I’m beat,” she repeated.

  “No, the part before that, when you said I was right.”

  She laughed. “Well, you are. This time, anyway.” She met his gaze. “Maybe a lot of other times, too.”

  He put his hand on his chest in a dramatic gesture. “Be still my heart.”

  She laughed at his antics. “Stop it! I know I probably haven’t said it enough, but I really am glad you’re here. You’ve been a huge help getting this place ready to reopen. And the perks of having you around weren’t bad, either.”

  “I knew it,” he said with an exaggerated sigh. “It’s always been about my body.”

  “Your body is pretty amazing,” she conceded. “But it’s more than that, and you know it. I love how you care about me.”

  “I love you,” he corrected.

  She gave him an impatient look. “Will you just listen? I’m trying to tell you something important.”

  “Sorry,” he said contritely.

  “The past few weeks have been eye-opening for me. I think I’ve found what I was meant to do. I love this place. I love being close to Gran. I loved getting it ready to open, and coming up with new ideas, and helping Merilee with the menus. I can’t wait to get to know the guests better.” She leveled a look into his eyes, trying to gauge his reaction. “It’s exactly what I want to do with my life, Jeff.”

  “You’re not telling me anything I haven’t figured out for myself,” he said.

  “But do you know what one of the best parts of this has been?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Doing it with you. We make a good team.”

  He studied her closely. “So…what? You want us to work together?”

  “No, I’m trying to tell you that I think maybe we can make this thing work between us, after all. You came here with a mission, but you didn’t try to shove anything down my throat. You let me find my own way. And I think maybe you actually approve of the new me that I’ve found here.”

  “It’s not a question of me approving of anything. You’re happy doing this. That’s all I care about, all I’ve ever cared about.”

  “I know that now, and I am more grateful than I can begin to tell you.”

  “Kelsey, is this your roundabout way of saying that you’re ready to reconsider marrying me?”

  That was exactly what she’d been trying to do, but now that the words were out there, she froze for an instant. Then she thought about all the strength she’d discovered within herself since coming to Seaview. She would never lose who she was if she married Jeff, not now or ten years from now. Partly because she wouldn’t allow it, and partly because he would never ask that of her.

  “I suppose what I’m saying is that if someone were to actually ask the question again, I might have a different answer this time,” she said.

  He frowned at her. “Don’t tease me.”

  “Don’t make me be the one to get down on one knee,” she countered. “I’m a traditional girl.”

  He raised a brow at that.

  “Okay, maybe not so traditional, but some traditions shouldn’t be tampered with.”

  A smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “Then you’re going to have to wait,” he said.

  She stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You want tradition, you’ll get tradition. That means I get to pick the time and the place to do any asking that’s going to be done.”

  “Jeff!” she protested.

  His smile spread. “Waiting’s hell, isn’t it? Just giving you a taste of your own medicine.”

  “You’re a rat.”

  “That’s not what you were saying five minutes ago.”

  “Five minutes ago I loved you.”

  He stood up, scooped her into his arms, then settled back down on the wicker love seat with her on his lap. “Trust me, you’ll love me even more if I do this up right.”

  “I don’t need an elaborate production.”

  “No, just tradition,” he said. “I get it.”

  “Now would be better than later,” she said.

  “This will be worth waiting for,” he promised. “You were.”

  Kelsey sighed and rested her head on his shoulder. “Just keep in mind that the baby’s due in seven months. I’d like to still be able to waddle down the aisle.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  She yawned and let her eyes drift shut. Today had been one of the most perfect days of her life, even without the proposal she’d been counting on. And the best thing was, she still had that to look forward to.

  Several days after the inn’s reopening, Luke sat on a stool at The Fish Tale sipping a beer and waiting for Doc. It was time to figure out if he really could take over the clinic, as several people had urged him to do. Though plenty of people thought Doc was ready to retire, Luke hadn’t heard him express any desire to do that in the immediate future.

  “Those stools are hell on my back,” Doc announced when he joined Luke. “Let’s get a booth.”

  “Fine with me.”

  When they were settled in a secluded corner with their drinks and fish platters, Doc gazed at him speculatively. “I’m pretty sure you didn’t invite me here just for the company, so what’s this about?”

  “I keep hearing a rumor that you might be thinking about retiring or at least cutting back,” Luke said. “Is that true?”

  “I’m seventy-four and have a lot of fishing I’d like to do. What do you think?”

  “What’s stopping you then?”

  “No one’s come along I thought would fit in here. Seaview Key’s not a big town, but you know that. I’ve spoken to a couple of young doctors who are fresh out of their residencies, but they’re so wet behind the ears I wouldn’t trust my patients with ’em.”

  “There’s a lot to be said for someone young and eager to establish a practice,” Luke suggested. “For one thing, they’re up on all the latest treatment options and medicines. For another, they’re energetic.”

  “They also have a mile-high stack of bills from medical school,” Doc said. “They’re not going to make the kind of money here they’d make in a big city. Trust me, none of them would stick around more than a year or two. Then where would this town be?”

  “Good point,” Luke said. “What about me? How would you feel about me taking over for you at some point down the road?”

  Doc’s expression brightened. “You serious? This is the first you’ve brought it up.”

  Luke nodded slowly. “I had a lot of thinking to do when I first got here, but I think I’m ready for this. I like being back here. And my orthopedic practice was too limiting. I think I’d like to expand my knowledge, brush up on family medicine and get recertified.”

  “Working with me would give you a crash c
ourse in what you need to know in no time,” Doc said.

  “You willing to stay on while I go through the recertification process, show me the ropes and maybe phase into full retirement a couple of years down the road?”

  “That would suit me fine. I’ve done this for so long that I’m not sure I’d know what to do with myself if I made a clean break from the clinic. I’d like keeping my hand in, so to speak, for as long as you’d have me. Maybe hang around a few hours a day or a day or two a week eventually, until even that gets to be too much for me. You sure having me underfoot wouldn’t cramp your style?”

  Luke laughed. “I’m not sure I have a style. I do think I could benefit tremendously from your wisdom and experience.”

  “You don’t have to flatter me to win me over. I’m already sold. I’ve had a dozen people or more ask me why I wasn’t begging you to do this. Seems to me you’re an answer to a prayer, for me and for Seaview.”

  For the first time in years, Luke was starting to feel excited about medicine again. He shook his head. “No, Doc. I think it’s the other way around.”

  “How do you want to do this? Should we call Tim Morrow and ask him to draw up some paperwork to make it official?”

  “Why don’t we sit down again in a few days and hammer out the agreement we want, then we can get Tim to make it all nice and legal?” Luke suggested. “I need to get an attorney in Atlanta to dissolve the partnership I’m in there and I have to look into all the certification I’ll need down here. That could take a few weeks, maybe even months if I need to take some classes.”

  “That’s no problem. You do what you need to do. Call me when you settle things in Atlanta and want to schedule that meeting to work out our arrangement.” He hesitated, then asked, “How does Hannah fit into this plan of yours to make Seaview your home again? You two seemed pretty close the day we went fishing and you have been staying at the inn for a while now. Rumor has it that there’s something going on between you two.”

  “The rumor mill in Seaview is not known for its reliability, but in this case there might be some truth there,” Luke admitted. “Only problem is that Hannah still has some issues about coming back here.”

  “Because of her mom, I imagine. That wasn’t an easy time for any of them. And those two always did have their differences. I’m not sure they ever got past Hannah’s dad leaving. She blamed her mom for that, irrationally, as it happens. I know why Clayton left. He got tangled up with a waitress on the mainland and she wound up pregnant. She was threatening to go after him and the inn.”

  “Blackmail?” Luke asked, stunned.

  “That’s exactly what it was,” Doc confirmed. “Clayton divorced Hannah’s mom and married the little tramp to shut her up in a totally misguided attempt to save the inn. There was more to it, of course. There always is in a situation like that. He made a pact with the devil, in my opinion, but he told me it was the only thing he could think of to do. The inn would have folded or they’d have had to sell it to pay the bills if there had been a costly legal battle. Add in his concern about the child the woman was expecting and he felt he had no choice. I think he realized too late that the woman wasn’t all that stable, and he feared what would happen to the baby if he weren’t around to protect it.”

  “Did Grandma Jenny or Hannah’s mom know that?” Luke asked. “Certainly no one’s ever said anything about Hannah having a half brother or sister somewhere.”

  “Well, Jenny may have put two and two together, especially after a few locals spread rumors that they’d seen Clayton around Clearwater or St. Petersburg with another woman and a child. But Hannah’s mom, she knew, because she started staying close to home. Maggie said something to me once about how humiliating it was to have people talking about her husband that way. Said she couldn’t bear it, so she hardly left the inn.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Luke said. “She was always great with any of us who were hanging around there.”

  “Probably because you’d all been too young to hear the stories or to understand them if you had,” Doc said. “I think Hannah was protected from all that talk. She was young, for one thing, and folks tend to want to leave kids with their innocence as long as possible. And everyone knew how she’d idolized Clayton. They weren’t going to say a bad word about her daddy right in front of her.”

  “Hannah should know about this,” Luke said. “For one thing, the man she adored may be living no more than an hour or two away from here. Aside from that and the fact that she has a half brother or sister, it might also change her view that the inn was this huge albatross that drove her dad away. He obviously loved it and her mother enough to do what he thought he had to in order to protect her and the inn that had been in her family for so long.”

  Doc looked skeptical. “Luke, I don’t know that this is something you should share with Hannah. It all happened a long time ago.”

  “And it changed everything for her. Knowing the truth could give her peace.”

  “And change the way she views Seaview and the inn,” Doc concluded. “Is that what you’re hoping?”

  “Probably,” Luke conceded.

  “It’s your decision, and you know Hannah better than I do these days. In the end, I know you’ll do what you think is right,” Doc said with confidence. “Just think it through first, that’s all I ask. Maybe talk it over with Jenny. She might have an opinion about the truth coming out after all these years. There could be a reason she and Maggie kept Hannah in the dark.”

  “I’ll do that,” Luke promised.

  And maybe he’d do a little investigating on the mainland before he went up to Atlanta at the end of the week for another visit with the kids. Perhaps he could locate Clayton and see how his life had turned out and whether or not he was someone Hannah would want back in her life after all these years.

  20

  Hannah stood outside the door to her mother’s suite of rooms and tried to work up the courage to go inside. Now, while Luke was in Atlanta, was the perfect time to confront one of her biggest demons. She needed to go in there and face the fact that her mom was dead. She had to face all those awful memories of her final days and somehow make herself believe that she wasn’t going to share the same fate.

  It was also time to put to rest the years of pent-up resentment she’d felt toward her mom, first for the breakup of her marriage that had sent Hannah’s father away and then for settling for life here in Seaview. Though she’d been here during her mother’s final illness, it had been out of duty and obligation. They’d never fully reconciled, because Hannah could hold a grudge with the best of them, even when she understood that it was time to let it all go and move on.

  As she stood there immobilized, her hand on the doorknob, she felt Kelsey slip up beside her.

  “Mom, you don’t have to do this,” she said. “I can clean out Grandma’s room. I just haven’t had time to get to it yet.”

  Hannah shook her head. This was about more than throwing away some old clothes or going through her mother’s personal papers. “No, sweetie, I need to do this myself. I think that’s why Gran hasn’t done it. She knew I needed to make peace with the past.”

  “At least let me help,” Kelsey pleaded.

  “No, I really do think this is something I have to do alone,” Hannah insisted. She gave Kelsey a hug. “Thanks for offering, though.”

  “You’ll call me if you need me, though, promise?”

  “I will,” she assured her daughter. “Don’t you have things you need to be doing? Now that there are guests on the premises, there’s almost always a crisis of one kind or another. I remember that much from living here. Our time was never our own.”

  “Everything’s under control,” Kelsey assured her, ignoring the bitterness Hannah hadn’t been able to keep out of her voice. “Jeff’s been handling a lot of it. And he’s the only one who seems to be able to persuade Grandma Jenny to sit down and rest.” She grinned. “He’s really sneaky about it, too. Right now he has her studying t
his huge pile of motel brochures he got from a travel agent. He says he needs her input before he can design our brochure. Next he swears he’s going to get her online to look at Web sites.”

  “Your great-grandmother in front of a computer,” Hannah said in amazement. “Now, that’s a sight I can’t wait to see.”

  “Me, too,” Kelsey said. “But Jeff will pull it off. Not even Gran seems to be able to resist his charm.” Once again, she regarded Hannah worriedly. “You’re sure you’re okay? This can wait.”

  “I’m fine. Now, go and do whatever you need to do.”

  After Kelsey had run down the stairs, Hannah grasped the doorknob once again and forced herself to turn it. Expecting to find the suite musty from being closed up, she was surprised to find the curtains billowing and a sea breeze filling the rooms with fresh air. Grandma Jenny’s work, no doubt. She should have known her grandmother wouldn’t avoid the suite as Hannah had, even if she had left everything in place for the day Hannah would be ready to face her demons.

  Stepping inside the sitting room with its cozy, chintz-covered chairs, she quietly shut the door behind her, then closed her eyes against the tide of memories flooding her. Some of them went back to childhood, when she’d run in here to share her sorrows or to get a hug. She tried to cling to those, the good memories of sitting on the edge of the bed in the attached bedroom watching her mother brush her long hair, of jumping onto the bed between her parents on a lazy Sunday morning, while her grandparents were downstairs dealing with the guests.

  But those memories faded too quickly and all that was left behind were the recent memories of her mother lying propped up against pillows, her face gaunt, her hair thin and limp, her skin so pale and dry that Hannah had feared it would crumble at a touch like dried leaves. That image was seared in her mind.

  “Oh, Mama,” she whispered, tears stinging her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”