Homecoming Reunion

by Carolyne Aarsen

  Garret reached over, and opened her menu to the entrée section. “You know what? In all the time we were dating I never had a chance to take you anywhere but Mug Shots. Let me at least make up for that by treating you to a nice dinner here.”

  Larissa tilted her head, as if trying to see him from a new angle, her gaze holding his, a quizzical expression on her face.

  “I’ve got paint spatters on my face.”

  “I probably do too,” he said easing out a smile, surprised at the emotions wavering between them. “But I always wanted to do this for you. To let you know how special you were to me.” The words slipped out before he could stop them.

  “Was I special to you?”

  He recognized the hesitantly spoken question for what it was. They were slipping into a new and different place, one still tinged with the past.

  “Yes. You...were.” He wanted to tell her that she still was but he wasn’t sure that was a place they should go right away. Emotions were still unsteady between them, but at the same time, he felt his own feelings shifting.

  She looked down at the menu, running her thumb along the edge of it. “When we were talking, a few days back, about...about my father and what happened in the past, you seemed to think I had certain expectations of you when we were dating.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Larissa fingered a strand of hair away from her face and even in the dim light of the restaurant he saw the paint spatters she was so concerned about still decorating her forehead. He thought of the one he had smoothed off her face and how surprised he’d been at his own reaction to touching her.

  “You made it sound as if I thought you should keep me in the manner to which I was accustomed.”

  He released a quiet sigh, trying to figure out where to go from here. “I did feel that way and like I said before, I felt pretty inadequate when I saw your house and how you had grown up. I didn’t think I deserved to take care of you.”

  Larissa’s smile grew melancholy. “Part of me understands that,” she said quietly. Then she looked up at him, holding his gaze, her own surprisingly intent. “I guess I would have liked to have been given a chance to prove that idea wrong.”

  Garret heard the disappointment in her tone and let it settle. For the first time since he walked away from Hartley Creek, he realized how unfair his assumptions about her had been. He reached over and covered her hand with his. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have presumed money was so important to you. But I also want you to know that I didn’t want to take the chance that it might have caused a problem for us later on.”

  Larissa twisted her hand so that her fingers twined with his and she tightened her grip. “Was that check really only for a thousand dollars?”

  Garret stifled a note of impatience at the return to this touchy subject but at the same time grasped that this needed to be dealt with. The check was a stumbling block for her and had instigated a chain of events that had pushed them apart. Looking at the situation through her eyes he realized that she had equated the check with her own value.

  “That day in Mug Shots, your father wrote out a check to me for a thousand dollars. That was all. He told me it was my severance pay.” He squeezed back. “If he was trying to pay me to leave, and if I thought I could have taken care of you the way I wanted to, then no check could have been big enough.”

  Larissa’s smile wavered a moment and as their eyes held it was as if everything around them, all the years between them fell away.

  “I wish—”

  Garret reached over and touched his finger to her lips, silencing her regrets.

  “What’s done is done,” he said quietly, tracing the shape of her mouth and then letting his hand do what his heart wanted and cupped her chin. His fingers caressed her cheek and it was as if time wheeled backward and paused, waiting for what would happen next.

  She reached up and covered his hand with hers, and old connections and emotions were rekindled and brought into this moment.

  “When I told you I never stopped thinking about you, I want you to know that I meant it,” he said, his voice surprisingly husky with emotion. “I thought about you all the time I was away. I measured every woman I met by your standard.”

  Her smile softened and he caught a faint glistening in her eyes. “I shouldn’t have let you go,” she said quietly.

  “So have you decided what you wanted?”

  Their waitress’s overly cheerful voice grated into the moment.

  Garret stifled a sharp retort at the unwelcome interruption. The girl was just doing her job. She didn’t know how she had broken the mood.

  So he withdrew his hand, and dragged his attention back to the huge menu.

  He made a random selection, not bothering to look at the price or even what it was. Larissa took a little more time, holding up the menu between her and Garret as if she needed the space to decide what to think.

  She gave her order. The waitress smiled and took their menus, asked if they needed anything else, then finally left.

  Garret waited until she was gone, then folded his hands on the table, and leaned forward feeling a sudden need to take charge. “We may as well get right to it,” he said. “I think we’ve wasted enough of our time. I think we both know something’s happening between us. I don’t want to ignore it, and act as if nothing is going on. I can’t do that.”

  “You really haven’t changed,” Larissa said with a gentle laugh.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were always such a no-nonsense guy.” Then Larissa reached across the table, and pulled his hand toward hers, turning it over and tracing her finger over his palm. “I always liked that about you. In many ways you reminded me of my father.”

  Garret wanted to pull his hands back at the mention of Jack. The man who, it seemed had created so many problems between them by firing Garret and lying to Larissa.

  He knew how Larissa adored her father and looked up to him. She sincerely thought she was giving him a compliment. So he let it slide.

  Focus on the now, he reminded himself. Jack Weir doesn’t have the power over you that he used to.

  And right now it’s all about you and Larissa.

  “Your hands look like they’ve done lots of hard work,” Larissa was saying as she traced a scar on his thumb. She turned his hand over and ran her finger across another one across the back. “Did the work you did when you left Hartley Creek put these there?”

  Garret recognized this opportunity for what it was. A chance to catch up and fill in the intervening years. To connect their present with their past.

  “I worked an oil field for the summer, just to get some money together. It was hard, rough work. Then in the fall I went to school and kept working as a roughneck over the summer to pay my way.”

  “What made you choose engineering?”

  “I was good in math,” he said with a shrug. “And a friend of mine told me it was a good job that made good money.”

  “That was important to you?” Her question held a tinge of old doubts. That stupid check again.

  “Yes, but I want you to know why,” Garrett said quietly as he took her other hand in his, her gentle touch easing away the loneliness of all these past years. “When my mother found out she was pregnant with twins, my father said he couldn’t afford to take care of three people and bailed on her. She never heard from him again, so when she was about eight months pregnant, she moved back to my nana and grandpa’s ranch. After we were born, she got a job. She was determined to support herself. She worked her way up and ended up finally able to support us on her own. Then, when I was about nine, I found my mother in the kitchen, crying, sitting at the table, holding a piece of paper. A letter telling her that she was fired.” Garret stopped there. He couldn’t tell her the letter was signed by her father.

  Larissa’s fingers continued to trace gentle circles around his hand but a troubled expression flitted across her face.

  “Wasn’t your mother working at the sawm
ill?” she asked, drawing her own conclusions.

  “Yeah. She was.”

  Larisa caught one corner of her lip between her teeth, as if thinking. “Was it my father who fired her?”

  Garrett only nodded.

  “When did she die?”

  Garrett sensed where she was going with this. “My mother died of cancer. It had nothing to do with your dad firing her.”

  Larissa looked down, as if ashamed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your mother, and I’m sorry that my father had to do that to her.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Garrett said tightening his grip on her hands. “You had nothing to do with your father’s decisions. It mattered at one time to me. It doesn’t anymore.” And as he spoke those words, he felt as if a burden he’d grown so accustomed to carrying slid off his shoulders. The past few weeks he’d been involved in something that gave him a surprising amount of pleasure. And it had less to do with trying to find a way to best Jack Weir and more to do with building a business that was a part of a community.

  A business that had a future that he could see himself sharing with Larissa.

  “Maybe not, but I spent a lot of time defending him. Thinking that everything he did was right.” Larissa tried to pull her hand back, but Garrett wouldn’t let her. “I feel like the last few weeks have made me look at my father differently. Something you said really underlined that for me. When you told me I had a choice. That I had some power in making decisions.” She looked up at him then, her eyes shining with a light of conviction. “No one’s ever told me that before. No one’s ever given me control.” Her voice held authority and confidence that he’d never heard before. “I know, to some degree you had been saying it before, but it’s like it all came together since I started working with you. When we were in the store just now, I almost called my father to ask him what he thought. Then I remembered what you said and realized I didn’t need to. That if you and I agreed on this, we could go ahead. I didn’t need his approval.”

  Garret wasn’t sure what to say. He knew some of the things he had told her had been spoken out of anger and exasperation when it seemed to him that Larissa hadn’t changed. That she was still determined to be her father’s daughter and try to please him.

  But the certainty in her voice underlined her words and removed another barrier between them. Smoothed out another rough patch.

  “You are your own person,” he told her. “You always were. I’m glad you’re able to see yourself for who you really are.”

  Larissa’s smile grew. “I’m glad you were able to help me get there.”

  He was about to say more when their waitress arrived with their food. They sat back, letting her lay steaming plates of food in front of them, refill their glasses of water, ask if they needed anything else and then, thankfully, leave.

  Garret picked up his fork and poked at the mound of pasta on his plate, frowning. “What is this?”

  “What you ordered.” Larissa grinned. “You don’t remember?”

  Garret shrugged as he unfolded the thick cloth napkin and laid it on his lap. “Doesn’t matter. My mom always told me I had to eat what was put in front of me so I guess I’ll find out.”

  “Speaking of your mother, we never did finish talking about how you got to where you are now,” Larissa said, unfolding her own napkin. “What made you finally decide to come back home?”

  The wistfulness in her voice pierced him with guilt. He forestalled his answer by pushing a pasta noodle around his dish. “My nana had a heart attack. I wasn’t here when it happened. No one was except my cousin Shannon. When I heard that, I knew I had to figure out a way to come back home but I was stuck in the middle of an important job in Dubai and there was no way I could get out of it. So I made a quick trip back when she was out of the hospital, then left again.”

  “You came back for Emma and Carter’s wedding.”

  He nodded, finally stabbing the elusive noodle and looking up at her. “That was another quick back and forth trip. At that time I had another big job going.”

  “Which also made you good money.”

  Garret heard the faint censure in her voice.

  “Yes. It did.” He finally put his fork down sensing they had this to get out of the way as well. “You need to know that neither my mother nor my grandparents had much money. My mother was a single parent trying to raise us on minimum wage jobs. My grandfather’s ranch did okay, but he had to struggle through some horrible cattle prices and some bad drought years. When my mother got the job at the mill we thought things were turning around. Then she got...lost that job. When I saw what my mother and my grandfather went through I promised myself that wouldn’t happen to me. I was going to be in charge of my life and I figured the only way to do that was to have money. Then I met you and my plans changed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean,” he said, smiling at the coy inflection in her voice.

  She shrugged, her smile creating a dimple in one cheek. “I kind of do, but I want to create a timeline.”

  “When I met you I realized I wanted to settle down. I wanted to make a home and I wanted to support you properly.”

  Her smile faded at that. “And you thought you could until you saw the inside of my house. A house, you may as well know, my mother inherited from her father along with the inn.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It was still your home. How well-off you were never completely sunk in until I came inside it. Then I knew I was fooling myself to think money didn’t matter. Especially when I saw what your father was able to do to me.” In spite of her desire to establish a timeline, he wished they didn’t have to talk about this. He didn’t want to delve into the past. Yet he had a sense that if they could resolve the past, they stood a chance at having a future.

  “So I became determined to show myself and anyone else that I was in charge of my own life,” he continued. “That money was going to make the difference for me. When I invested in a small mining IPO that exploded, I made even better money. Which made me able to buy a share in the inn when I finally decided to come back. And here I am. Partners with you.”

  Larissa cut up a piece of veal and stabbed it with her fork. “Except it was really the sawmill you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  Garret nodded. “Yeah. It was. The reality was the mill makes more money.”

  “Which is important to you.”

  “Was important to me.” As he spoke those words Garret realized he meant them. He didn’t have to say them just to please her. “I love working at the inn more than I thought possible. I enjoy seeing people coming and going and especially now that we’re making all these changes, I’m pretty excited to see the end result.”

  Larissa’s smile grew at that.

  “And I like being partners with you,” he added. “I like working with you. Making plans with you.”

  “I’m not really a partner,” she corrected.

  “Yes you are. You do know you hold the balance of power,” he teased, taking a quick bite of his rapidly cooling food. “If your father and I disagree on something, you can determine which way the business should go.”

  “You said that before.”

  “Which is why I’m taking you out to dinner tonight. To bribe you to take my side.” He spoke the words lightly, trying to inject a more humorous tone, but deep down a part of him wondered what Larissa would do if he and her father couldn’t agree.

  “You didn’t need to do that.” She spoke the words quietly but with assurance. “For the first time since I took over the inn I feel like I’m working with someone who has direction and a plan for the inn. The inn means so much to me and I really want to see it return to the days when it was making money. I know it can. It’s been hard to...well, to portray that to my father and get him on board with my ideas. I’m so glad you as enthusiastic about the inn as I am.”

  Her sincerity and muted passion resurrected a sense of guilt. His initial purpose for the success of the inn had been
different than hers.

  As he held her sincere gaze he recognized that over the past couple of weeks his priorities had shifted. Yes he still wanted the inn to succeed, but if he really delved into his motivation for that he knew he would find different reasons.

  The main one being the woman sitting across the table from him. When he started working with her he had been determined to protect himself by keeping her at arm’s length.

  However, in the past few weeks, that had not only been more difficult, it had begun to matter less. Especially once he found out about the misinformation her father had fed her. A lie that had kept her away from him.

  He suppressed a burst of anger at what Jack had done to them. The years they had wasted.

  He couldn’t indulge in that now. For now he was with Larissa and for the first time in years, he felt a measure of peace and belonging. He dared allow himself to think about a future that extended beyond the next paycheck. The next job.

  And in the muted light of the restaurant as he looked into Larissa’s eyes, he wondered if she might be part of that future.

  “I want the inn to succeed,” he said quietly, pushing his unfinished food aside. He wasn’t hungry after all. “And I’m sure with enough work and dedication, it will.”

  Larissa’s smile reinforced his opinion.

  “So what do you think we need to do yet before Pete comes?” she asked, bringing the conversation back to business.

  “Get the rooms ready. I’m excited to see everything come together, the spreads, the pillows with the colors we’ve painted the rooms.”

  “I understand you got Scrap Happy to move their mini-scrapbooking and card-making conference from The Pines here.”

  “They’re still a tentative. I think Rene is waiting to see if Pete books with us before she makes her decision.”

  Garret hardly dared to think Pete might not book. Though he and Larissa had a fun and successful shopping trip, the reality was they were rapidly reaching the end of the operating loan. If Pete said no—

  He stopped that thought. Didn’t dare even let it enter the edges of his mind.

  “He’ll do it,” Larissa said quietly. “I know he will.” She squeezed his hand and he returned her smile. “I’m praying he will.”