As panicked as he’d felt when he saw her go through the door, he could’ve railed at her. But seeing the slight quiver of her knees and her pale features, he swallowed his fury. “You’re soaked.”
“You, too,” she noted. “I’ll go upstairs and wash off.”
He grabbed her by the hand. “You’re not going anywhere without me.” Now that he knew he had to keep a close eye on her, there was no arguing the fact. “I’m going with you.”
She began to refuse him then caught his eye. Seeming to read him and his impenetrable stance, she sighed and led the way up the stairs.
They stopped by his room. He made her wait in the hall while he grabbed the hurricane lantern on his nightstand and the portable fan he’d been using. He pulled the spread off the bed, as well, and folded it over the banister to retrieve on their way back down to the first floor. Taking her hand, he led the rest of the way up to her rooms.
Briar went into her bedroom alone. He waited in her kitchen. The storm seemed far louder up here. He stared at the boarded-up window above the nook table. He couldn’t see out, but the vicious animal sounds coming from the other side chilled him to the bone.
How had she stayed up here alone listening to this?
She emerged in long pajama pants and a short-sleeved T-shirt. The new clothes made her look smaller, more vulnerable.
Why the hell had he left her alone? “You need anything else?”
“Cole, I can stay here,” she said, gesturing to the dark room.
“No,” he said firmly. “We’ll both be safer together downstairs.”
A bar appeared between her eyes, but she nodded her acquiescence. He took her hand, squeezed it reassuringly and led her away from the upper floor.
Once downstairs, he put himself to work tossing the quilt over the sofa and setting up the fan and placing the lantern on the coffee table. “We should be comfortable enough here.”
She hesitated, as if she were unable to advance forward. Maybe, as with him, the idea of lying, or even sitting, on the same surface would awaken too much in her.
“Or...I could sleep in the chair,” he offered.
Before she could answer, another ominous clatter broke through the silence. Her face fell, stricken. “The porch.”
He reached for her. “Here, sit.” Gently, he ushered her down next to him on the sofa. “Just sit. There’s nothing we can do until morning.”
“Right,” she said, swallowing. “You’re right.” Another crash. “God.”
His arm wrapped around her shoulders. Comforting, he told himself. Strictly comforting.
But his need to protect, to enfold, overwhelmed him. He leaned back with her hugged close at his side. Tension loosened from his chest when her head fell to his shoulder and she didn’t hesitate to curl into him.
They lay in the stillness, listening to the chaos outside. Their breaths eventually slackened into relaxed, deep pulls. After a while, he realized he’d unknowingly matched his to hers—or vice versa. Though she didn’t move, he knew she lay awake, alert.
Desperate to fill the lull between them, he broached the subject of the day’s events. He’d have to stick to the fine points...but she deserved an explanation.
“I don’t want you to think I abandoned my son,” he told her. “I wanted—want—him with everything in me. When my ex, Tiffany, came to me for a divorce, I made it clear that I would see her in court for joint custody. That’s when she began throwing accusations around. She told everyone that I’d been beating her for years. I think only her family believed her at first, but then she brought Gavin into it.”
Her mouth dropped open in horror. “Your son?”
“She made him testify against me. That’s all it took for the jury to grant her full custody. Since then, I feel like I’ve been everywhere and nowhere. I don’t know where I’ll end up or if I can ever try to put down roots of any kind again. Tiffany cut me off at the stump—without him, starting over feels impossible.”
“How old is he?”
He swallowed. “He’s six. He hates math, loves to draw and plays soccer in the spring and fall.”
“You’re a soccer dad.”
Though the ache in him swelled, he smiled. “I never missed a game.”
“You wouldn’t.” Her hand draped warm over his. “What she did...what I’m guessing she’s still doing is too terrible for words. Why do people act out against the people who love them?”
“We’d been slipping into the cracks for a few years,” he admitted. “At first, we both did our best to shield Gavin. But then she started seeing other people.”
“Oh, Cole.”
“I fell out of love with her a long time ago,” he explained. “It’s funny how you think you know someone. But then you live with them, start to peel away the layers beneath the surface that you didn’t notice before—or maybe chose to ignore. I knew all along she could be selfish, but I was so determined to make it work that I convinced myself I could live with it. Until things changed.”
“I wish I could meet Gavin.”
He laughed. “Your cinnamon rolls would win him over in a heartbeat.”
“He looks so much like you. She has to live with that every day.”
“I hope she doesn’t use it against him.”
“You should’ve told me all this before,” she told him. “I’m sorry I acted the way I did earlier. I was just so shocked.”
“I wish I had told you sooner,” he said. He realized he meant it.
“Will you ever try to get him back?”
“Yes. I’d do anything to have him back.”
“You’re a good father.”
A part of him had needed that reassurance. Coming from her, he knew it was absolutely pure. Another part of him, a greater part, churned with renewed guilt. What would Briar do if she knew he’d chosen Gavin over her already?
“I understand,” she said quietly. “I may not be a parent, but I do understand, more than anything, what it’s like to lose something...to be willing to go to the moon and back to retrieve it.”
“I know you do,” he murmured. His hand tightened around her, refusing to loosen his grip even as he contemplated how hurt she would be by the end of all this if he got Tiffany what she needed. Torn, he turned his face into her hair and breathed her in.
She smelled like home.
Her brow creased as she looked down at her hands. “For a long time, I’ve thought my life would be different than this.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, trying to read her face.
“Up until I began applying for college, I wanted to be just like my mother. I wanted to run the family business, take care of guests, plant a garden, start a family. But my father wanted me to follow in his footsteps and I didn’t know how to say no. So I went off to law school. I was six weeks away from graduating when I decided to take a sabbatical and follow a group of friends to Paris.”
The creases in her brow deepened and she reached up to rub the furrows with her fingertips. “I knew enough French to get a job, and I was able to extend my stay. That’s when I fell in love with cooking. For the first time, I knew what it was I wanted for myself. So I applied for cooking school.”
Cole thought of the man who had come to visit Briar not too long ago and the dismal mood he’d left behind. “I can’t imagine your father was pleased.”
She let out a mirthless laugh. “That’s putting it mildly. He flew to France to drag me back home, but there was nothing he or anyone else could do at that point to stop me from pursuing my dreams. I’d stopped living off his means and was making my own way for once. I lived in a tiny flat with hardly any hot water. The walls were mostly windows so it was hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. But I loved every moment. I was in my second semester of culinary school when I met Jean-Luc
.”
He frowned. “A man.”
The corner of her lip quirked up as she glanced at him. “This is Paris we’re talking about. It was spring. Falling in love was only natural. Is it so surprising that I would?”
“No,” he said, realizing how selfish it was to think that he was the only man who had ever been in her life. Especially when he pictured Briar—a younger, dreamier version of her—in Paris, a smile on her face as well as her heart. No, it wasn’t at all surprising that she’d found love in that romantic place where so many people had found it before her. He had no reason to be bitter toward the man so he asked, “What was he like?”
She let out a small sigh, wistful and a bit foretelling. “He was extremely charming. All my American friends and family thought he was too old for me. I never really knew how old he was. His hairline wasn’t receding, but there were sprits of gray at the temples, and there always seemed to be laughter in his eyes. He made me feel for the first time in my life like I didn’t have a care in the world. Up until then, I’d been afraid of the world—of living, even—but with him I began to see it in a different light. And I thought we would forge our way into that bright, sweet light together.”
On the last few words, all the hope and bright prospects of the young woman she had been then seemed to crinkle and fade from her expression like leaves at the brink of winter. Perhaps there was a reason to hate the man who’d stolen Briar’s heart.... “What happened?”
She stared at the floor, expression wiped clean of emotion. Clearly, she had relived the experience enough times in her mind over the years that the memories didn’t have the bite they once had. She spoke from an objective slant. “One morning I woke up and all my valuables and what little money I had saved was gone. If not for the missing items, I might’ve been able to convince myself that he’d never been there. It was ridiculous of me not to question how quickly our relationship progressed, but I was so caught up in the glorious swing of things. The best I can say about him now is that he was an incredible actor...or at least I hope he was.”
Snorting out a laugh, she lifted her hands and shoulders in a helpless shrug. “I have to believe that because if I don’t the alternative is that I was just blind and stupid. L’amour est aveugle, I suppose.” At his lifted brow, she translated, “Love is blind.”
The bitterness he had initially felt toward Jean-Luc had been right on target. However, it tasted too much like the bitterness he felt toward himself. Hadn’t he conned Briar into believing that he was just a guest here at Hanna’s? And hadn’t he used the attraction he felt between them to his advantage?
“You weren’t stupid,” Cole told her. “You were hopeful. In life, most people start out that way. Until someone comes along and makes you believe the world’s a lot dirtier and edgier than you thought it was.” He squeezed her shoulder.
“Anyway, my love-spun dreams of French life and becoming this century’s Julia Child were pretty well dashed,” she admitted. “I no longer had the tuition money for culinary school, and I was hardly scholarship material. So I limped back home. My father made sure I realized how deeply I’d let him down. I still haven’t lived down my so-called failures in Paris as far as he’s concerned. But my mother took a stand. She offered to give me the tuition money for another culinary school in Atlanta, but my father was determined to see me back in law school. I’d never seen them so divided before. And by choosing to go to Georgia and continue pursuit of my dreams, I drove the final rift between them that lasted until the day she died.”
“Your father sounds like a stubborn ass. That’s what drove the rift between your parents, not you.”
“Whatever it was, her cancer might not have progressed as quickly if I’d been here to share the load of the inn.”
“I bet you made her happy by doing what you wanted to do.” He thought about Gavin—that was what he hoped for him one day.
Her smile was short but true. “I hope so. It was what she wanted at the time. As soon as I heard that she was sick, though, I dropped out and came back home. I did my best to make her comfortable—that was all there was left to do at that point. And I could see what a relief it was to her that I was capable of taking Hanna’s as my own. That was her dream, for me to take over from her one day.” Briar hesitated, frowning over her next words, then said what had obviously been weighing on her for some time. “I still think of it all as hers—not mine. As much as I had wanted Hanna’s Inn, I don’t know if I still do.”
Cole nodded. “If you had the choice...” He felt her brace and rubbed her arm to ease her. “Put aside your parents’ expectations, your mom’s legacy... Would you go back to culinary school or stay here?”
She shook her head, lifting an empty hand. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want anymore.” Glancing at him, she asked, “What about you? If you had your son, and your ex-wife was out of the picture, where would you go? What would you do?”
He hadn’t thought that far ahead. Her question opened up a world of possibilities that seemed too risky to explore.
Mostly because one of those possibilities was staring him right in the face in the form of Briar Browning herself.
Who was he kidding? After all this was said and done, even if Tiffany kept her word and let him have time with Gavin, Briar wouldn’t be part of the picture. The light of hope still shined in her eyes, despite all she had been through. It was faded—perhaps a bit jaded—but there. It took everything in him not to reach out and grasp it...because he would be the one to destroy that light. He had already set things in motion to ensure that what dreams Briar had would be dashed all over again.
“I...” He cleared his throat, looked away from her. “I don’t know.”
The words hung heavy between them in the thick, humid air until the sound of hail and a gust of wind made the aged walls of the inn emit a pained groan. “It’s coming ashore,” she whispered.
He shifted carefully. “We should try and get some sleep.”
Briar wrapped her arm over his waist as her head fell against his shoulder. Their legs tangled together as the silence drifted once again and the storm rattled the walls around them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BY MORNING, Brett hobbled north, drenching the Eastern Shore in ten inches of salty rain.
Briar walked out to gauge the destruction in a hooded coat and rain boots. The vegetables were gone. She’d known they were doomed the night before when she’d discovered the heavy arm of the tree that had toppled over the garden patch and clawed its way through the porch roof. Damp leaves covered the lawn in a dying carpet. The jasmine and annuals had suffered, but other than that, damage to the inn and the shops was minimal.
Just after noon, the last of the rain bands gave way to blue sky and hot sun. Without power and climate control, the day became oppressive.
An eerie calm always followed hurricanes. The system inhaled every breeze within hundreds of miles around its tunneling ranks, dragging them along for the ride. Though the pressure of the air lifted, without a stir, misery became the order of the day.
As soon as the gray shroud lifted, though, all four ladies of Hanna’s, Flora, Tavern of the Graces and Belle Brides went to work, with Cole helping take down the storm shutters. Sweat trickled down Cole’s bare back as he sawed fallen limbs into transferable pieces then hauled or rolled each of them to the street for pickup.
Briar swept the porch and gathered the leaves into garbage bags. She trimmed back the jasmine and pulled up drowned petunias. Thankfully, she managed to harvest all the daffodil bulbs—they could be replanted in dryer conditions.
The vegetables, on the other hand, were ruined. Everything had crumbled and lay flattened under the tarp Cole and his chainsaw finally uncovered. She mourned the squash, peppers and the big round tomatoes she and her mother had planted together. Digging up dead stalks and vines, she stuffed them, too, in garbage
bags and took them to the street.
Afterward, she went into the muggy inn, putting the portable fans to work in the kitchen as she squeezed lemons and tried to take her mind off the loss. She was lucky—they were all lucky. It could have been worse. No use mourning and brooding when there was so much more to be done.
Through the open windows and the screen door, she heard the thwack of a hammer high above. After finding an extension ladder, Cole had offered to check for structural damage and replace the shingles that had been blown off.
She prayed there was no roof damage. Already, she had to get the porch to rights. She’d have to hire someone, of course. Construction was about as good for business as tropical storms.
A porch could be fixed quickly, though. An entire roof? She’d have to shut the inn down for a couple of weeks at least.
By the time she finished making lemonade, Cole was climbing down the ladder, hammer hooked through his belt loop. She carried out a tray full of finger sandwiches and the lemonade jug with two ice-filled glasses. A fine sheen of sweat coated every inch of his skin. His hair was slicked back from his beaded brow. His shorts were dirty. Specks of mud and dirt dotted his chest and shoulders.
She set the tray on the porch rail and filled him a glass, trying hard not to stare. “Starving?”
“Hot,” he muttered, tipping the glass back and gulping its contents all but for the cubes of ice. He pressed the cool surface to the side of his face and closed his eyes. “No damage as far as I can tell.”
She sighed. “That’s a relief.”
“Thanks,” he said when she handed him a sandwich.
“You should sit,” she said, gesturing to one of the porch rockers. “You’ve been working for hours.”
Without argument, he dropped onto the nearest cushion and downed his sandwich in three bites. Sitting next to him, she gave him a few more and shoveled down one herself. Brushing crumbs from her shirt, she said, “I hope you don’t mind. I invited the girls over for dinner. Kyle, too—Adrian’s son.”
A Place with Briar (Harlequin Superromance) Page 16
