Alex laughed, shaking her head. She knew the offer came from the woman’s very large heart, but it was still better not to allow that sort of one-on-one “meeting” to take place.
“That’s four and a half minutes more than he could have handled, Dorothy,” Alex told her with a wink.
Though polite, Dorothy was clearly angry. “He had no right to talk to you like that. He deserved to be put in his place,” she said with feeling.
Alex flashed a smile at the older woman. This time there was absolutely nothing forced about it. Dorothy was one of the good ones. Like her father. “I appreciate you standing by me.”
Dorothy laughed softly, shrugging off the thanks. “Not that you needed it. You fight your own battles well enough. You always have.” Seemingly without realizing it, as she spoke she fisted her hands at her sides. “It’s just that seeing him trying to put you down made me so angry—that fool isn’t good enough to lick your boots.” Dorothy glanced down at her feet. “Or high heels, as the case might be. So he’s gone for good, right?” she asked, just to be certain that there was no need for her to hang around.
“Right,” Alex confirmed. “Seems Clarke had a totally different vision for where the inn should be going than what was established by the family years ago.”
Ladera-by-the-Sea Inn had begun as a modest little five-bedroom home, converted into an inn as an attempt by Ruth Roman, the original owner, to keep a roof over her children’s heads after her husband was brought down by a stray bullet fired during a heated dispute between two other men.
Over the years, as different generations came to helm the inn, more rooms were added. Slowly, more rooms turned into wings, then modest guest houses until the inn seemed to become its own miniature village, but always with a single, distinguished Victorian motif. A motif that Clarke was obviously determined to change, turning the inn into a hodgepodge of old and modern, that would have resembled nothing specific and been part fish, part fowl and all very off-putting.
Clarke had seen it as making a statement. And who knows? Maybe he might even have convinced her father, who didn’t have a strong sense of design. That would have been criminal. Of course, Alex would have been able to convince her dad of that. In her emotional reaction to seeing Clarke’s plans first, she’d just skipped that step.
As far as Alex was concerned, her statement said, “Your services are no longer needed,” in a loud, clear voice.
“That kind always think they know best,” Dorothy sniffed, shaking her head as she looked off in the direction that Clarke had taken. “You can do much better than the likes of him.” She sighed. “Your father’s just too kindhearted, giving anyone work who shows up on his doorstep with a sad story.”
The woman pressed her lips together. She had to know how that sounded. But Alex knew Dorothy hadn’t meant to be critical of her dad, the man she looked up to and respected more than anyone else. “Of course, I shouldn’t talk. If it wasn’t for that wonderful man, heaven only knows where I’d be right now.”
Alex didn’t want Dorothy to dwell on the past, or what had initially brought her, destitute and desperate, to the inn.
“Well, all I know is we’d be lost without you, so there’s no use in speculating about a state of affairs that mercifully never came about.” She squeezed the woman’s hand. “We all love you, Dorothy. You mean the world to us.”
The other woman blushed.
Dorothea O’Hara had been a guest at the inn some twelve years ago. Down on her luck, abandoned by the man she’d given her heart—and her savings—to, she had checked into the inn, wanting to spend one final night somewhere warm and inviting. Before she ended her emotional suffering by taking sleeping pills. After the fact, Dorothy had been quite frank about her intentions, much to the upset of the Romans.
Years later Richard told his daughters he must have subconsciously sensed how unhappy Dorothy had been because something had prompted him to knock on her door that evening and engage her in a conversation that went on for hours.
Newly widowed, he’d talked about his four daughters, about the adjustments all five of them had had to make because of his wife’s sudden passing, about how strange life had seemed to him at first without the woman he loved by his side.
He’d talked about everything and anything until the first rays of the morning sun came into Dorothy’s room.
For Dorothy, dawn had brought with it a realization that she was still alive—and still without options. She confessed to the man she’d been talking to all night that she wasn’t going to be able to pay for her stay.
Embarrassed, she’d offered to work off her tab.
It hadn’t taken long for her to work off the debt. Once she had, Richard told her that if she didn’t have anywhere else to go, he would consider it a personal favor if she stayed on at the inn.
She’d quickly become family. As had some of the other guests at the inn who were initially only passing through.
The inn, Alex firmly believed, was the richer for it.
But there were times, few and far between, when her father made a mistake, a bad judgment call. This latest contractor had been one of those calls.
Christina Roman MacDonald walked in, munching on an apple. Alex knew her sister would have preferred a breakfast pastry—one of her specialties as the inn’s resident chef and one of the most requested items on the breakfast menu. But she was trying to instill healthy eating habits in Ricky, her four-year-old son, and that meant apples rather than pastries.
Swallowing what she’d been chewing, she said, “Hey, I just saw J.D. and his motley crew climbing into that beat-up truck of his. The guy almost ran right over me to get to it.” It wasn’t a complaint, just an observation. “Fastest I’ve seen the lot of them moving since they got here last week.” Cris nodded in the direction of the rear of the inn. “What’s up?”
“Miss Alex’s temper,” Dorothy told her. There was no small note of pride in the woman’s voice. “She finally got fed up with that so-called contractor’s grand plans.”
Leaning forward, the heavyset woman confided in as close to a whisper as she could manage, which meant it could undoubtedly be heard in the center of the closest San Diego shopping center, “No disrespect intended, Miss Alex, but it certainly took you long enough. The man was charging you for breathing—times five, since he was also padding the bill to pay for those five ‘helpers’ of his.”
“Now,” Cris pointed out, “they did work sometimes.”
“Yeah,” Dorothy snorted, “every time your father walked by.”
“Well, the main thing is that they’re gone and we won’t have to put up with them any longer,” Alex said, trying to put an end to the matter. Of course, they still had to deal with the contract her father had signed, but in it her father had outlined specific things he’d wanted done. Clarke’s plans strayed dramatically from the contract. The fact that he’d backed down so easily—without first speaking to her father—clearly told her that she was right.
“Yeah.” Cris nodded, regarding what was left of her apple as if she was seeking the answers to the mysteries of the universe. “Now all you have to do is explain all this to Dad.”
Dorothy waved her hand at the problem, dismissing it. “Mr. Roman’s a saint,” she proclaimed with feeling. “He’ll understand that you were just looking out for him, Miss Alex.”
“Or overriding him,” Cris chimed in with a barely suppressed grin.
“It’s not like that,” Alex protested. “I wasn’t overriding him. If Dad was just a little bit tougher, I wouldn’t have to be so vigilant.” It wasn’t that her father was a pushover or easily hoodwinked, it was just that he saw the best in everyone, even in those who didn’t seem to have a decent bone in their bodies. “There are times when I think that he could just give the inn away if it wasn’t for us.”
“For you,” Cris corrected her pointedly. They all knew that Alex was the fighter, the one who led the cavalry charge if a charge needed to be led. “The rest of
us would just let Dad be Dad. I guess what I’m saying is, thanks for handling all that so we don’t have to.” And then she nodded. “He really is just too darn nice for his own good.”
“Who is?” Richard inquired, walking into the reception area and crossing over to join his two eldest daughters. He nodded at the housekeeper. “Morning, Dorothy.”
She could have tried to bury it in rhetoric, but what was the point? Alex thought. She believed in being honest.
“You,” Alex told her father without any hesitation.
He knew that look. For a moment he allowed himself to be sidetracked. What he’d come in to tell his daughters could wait a few minutes. It didn’t change anything, but keeping the news from them even a moment longer was a moment they were spared from dealing with what he had to tell them.
“Why do I get the feeling that my eldest daughter is about to sit me down for a lecture?” he asked with a smile.
Alex shook her head. “No, no lecture, Dad.”
“But she does have some news to pass on,” Cris informed their father when Alex said nothing to follow up her simple denial.
“Oh?” Richard turned to his eldest child. There were times she was so much like her mother, it gave him both pleasure and pain to look at her. Pleasure to remember all the good times they had shared together and pain because the time he had to remember was so very short in comparison to the rest of his life.
He spared Dorothy a glance as he waited for Alex to enlighten him. The housekeeper’s face was an open book and if there was something he really needed to know, he would be able to see it in her expression.
When the woman who never failed to let him know that he had saved her life that night they’d talked until dawn averted her face so he couldn’t look into it, Richard knew the news couldn’t be good.
Did they already know?
No, Richard decided. What he saw in his daughters’ faces was discomfort, not sorrow or despair.
Looking at Alex, he said, “I’m listening.”
CHAPTER TWO
ALEX COULD FEEL three pairs of eyes on her, waiting expectantly. Dorothy and Cris obviously already knew what she had to say and were there to hear her father’s reaction. Her father didn’t know what was coming, although, she now noticed, he seemed really sad.
Maybe she shouldn’t have jumped the gun this way, firing Clarke like she had. In all her twenty-eight years, Alex couldn’t remember a single instance when her father made her doubt herself, or gave her reason to believe he was disappointed in her. She had a degree in accounting, as well as one in hotel management. There was no reason in the world for her to even hesitate answering his question for a moment.
And yet, she did.
Her eyes never leaving his, she took a deep breath, released it slowly and said, “I fired J. D. Clarke, Dad.”
Richard seemed only mildly surprised by the news.
He was a little taken aback. He’d been consumed by his grief, but even if he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have expected his daughter to override his decisions. Ordinarily, Alex would have consulted him before taking any sort of final action like this.
At least, he would have assumed that she would consult with him since, now that he thought about it, Alex had never fired anyone before. Oh, there had been times when she had complained at length about one person or another currently working at the inn, but those matters were always ultimately dealt with and straightened out. Most of the time, a simple one-on-one conversation resolved the problem. No one had ever been fired. The high employee turnaround was a result of their needs being seasonal. Most of the extra people who worked at the inn were there because they were down on their luck and he had taken them on until they were back on their feet again.
While all his daughters worked at the inn in some capacity, Alex was his second in charge and she took running the inn very seriously.
In fact, sometimes, he felt that she took her job too seriously. That was a real source of guilt for him because those were the times when he felt that he had stolen a very important part of his daughter’s life from her.
The part where she got to enjoy herself without all these responsibilities hemming her in and making demands on her. It was his fault that things had arranged themselves this way. His health hadn’t always been the best. After Amy had died, it was all he could do to pull himself together and do what needed to be done to take care of the girls.
Alex had been all of sixteen when—his health poor at the time—she appointed herself acting head of the family.
The problem was, she never really unappointed herself acting head of the family and had just continued in that position from then on. She had even given up plans to attend an out-of-state college, electing, instead, to attend U.C. San Diego, living at home and juggling her studies with her duties on the home front.
There were times during this hectic interlude in her life that Richard had doubted his eldest daughter even slept. But she’d managed to do it all, help run the inn and graduate with honors despite all the demands on her time, which, among other things, included a double major.
These days, Alex’s life was no less hectic. She continued to concern herself with the hundred and one minute, day-to-day details that went with running the inn. There was very little time for Alex to concern herself with just being Alex.
And that’s why he had to hope that his friend Dan’s little plan might stand a chance.
Richard studied her now, wondering what had set her off enough to make her actually fire someone. Whatever it was, he knew without being told that it was justified. But while he had tremendous faith in his daughter, he still needed to know the circumstances. And why she hadn’t included him in the decision.
So, for a moment longer, he put off being the bearer of sad news and asked Alex, “Is there a particular reason why you fired him?”
Alex nodded her head, possibly a bit too emphatically.
“A very particular reason,” she told him. There wasn’t a sliver of uncertainty in her tone. He knew there were times she’d find herself second-guessing a situation, but not in this case. In this case, she was absolutely certain she’d done the right thing.
“Clarke was going to butcher the inn,” Alex replied.
The general contractor had come to him with several letters of referral as well as half-a-dozen photographs of his work. All in all, the man had come across as a competent general contractor. Not to mention that Clarke had talked about being a family man, something Richard found to be rather important.
A family man who needed to provide for that family. For Richard, it had been a very important deciding factor in hiring the man.
He remembered as a boy listening to his own father tell him stories about his great-great-grandmother, Ruth, and how she’d converted her home into an inn to keep from losing it, as well as a way to provide for her five children.
Keeping those stories foremost in his mind was what had kept Richard from ever turning away a single person who needed a place to stay.
“And just how did J.D. intend to ‘butcher’ the inn?” he asked Alex.
“He didn’t intend to do it,” Alex corrected her father. “But that would have been the end result of what he was going to do to the inn.”
Richard glanced at his other daughter and then at Dorothy, but there was no enlightenment from either quarter. “I don’t think I understand.”
To Alex, the inn was like a living, breathing entity. Something to watch over and protect so that it would be here, just as her ancestor had intended, for many, many years to come. J. D. Clarke, she was certain, had ideas that would’ve dramatically changed the direction the inn had been going for more than a hundred years. And his staff sure hadn’t given her any confidence that they could do good work that would stand the test of time.
“You’d hired him to make additions to the inn. He took it upon himself to go in a whole different direction. He showed me these really awful sketches he planned on ‘bringing to life,’ as h
e put it. When I said they would clash with what was already here, he told me I’d change my mind once they were completed. I think he felt I was challenging his judgment and he wouldn’t budge. So I fired him. He left me no choice.”
Alex took the folded piece of paper she’d slipped under the sign-in ledger she kept on the desk and placed it in front of her father as exhibit A. It was the only one of Clarke’s sketches he had left behind.
“It looked more like a growth than an addition,” she said indignantly, stabbing a finger at the drawing. “And it’s modern.” Alex all but spat the word out, as if it was a new strain of a fatal disease.
She watched her father glance over the sketch. By his expression, she could tell that he couldn’t quite understand the problem.
“Dad, you can’t just slap something that looks like it vacationed in the Museum of Modern Art onto a Victorian house. The two décors clash horribly and at the very least it would make us look...indecisive,” she finally declared for lack of a better word, “to our guests.”
“Indecisive?” Cris asked, puzzled. She pulled over the sketch to look at it herself.
Alex wanted support from her sister, not a challenge. “Shouldn’t you be back in the kitchen, getting ready for the guests coming in for lunch?” she prompted.
“Got it covered,” Cris told her cheerfully. “Go on, you were saying?” It was obvious that she wanted to see how far Alex was going to go with this.
Alex turned her attention back to her father, stating the rest of her case. “All the other additions over the years always retained that original Victorian flavor. It’s what the guests who come here expect. Not to mention he was intending to knock down that wall. That wall,” she emphasized, pointing to it. “That’s load-bearing, isn’t it? And if it isn’t and I’m wrong about that, well, he sure didn’t argue. Because he didn’t know better. The guy didn’t have a clue what he was doing. Besides,” she added in a quieter but no less firm voice, “Clarke acted as if he thought he knew what was best for the inn.”
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