Beauty's Kiss

by Jane Porter

  He’d been quite the gentleman. She owed him the truth.

  “I’m not a black-tie formal event kind of girl,” she said. “And I’m happy serving on the Wedding Giveaway committee, and selling tickets, but I never wanted to go to the Ball. Unfortunately, Jane can be stubborn and doesn’t really listen.” Taylor’s voice dropped, deepening. “I’m sorry if I’m leaving you in the lurch, but honestly, there are so many women who’d probably love to go to the Ball with you, and now... one of them can.”

  Troy drove to the hotel bemused.

  The little mouse had just rejected him.

  She didn’t want to go to the Ball, and she definitely didn’t want to go with him.

  Troy wasn’t sure how to react. He was so used to women chasing him, pursuing him, wanting him, that it was a bit... surprising... and intriguing... to meet a woman who didn’t seem to want him.

  The next morning an exhausted Taylor drank two cups of coffee with a piece of toast before bundling up and setting off to walk to work, hoping the frigid morning and exercise would help her clear her head.

  She hadn’t slept well. And when she did sleep, she dreamed she was wearing this fancy pink prom gown with sparkly bits and little puffed sleeves and she was at the Graff Hotel for the Valentine Ball, only it wasn’t really the Graff Hotel’s 1914 ballroom, but an 1814 ballroom in London. Taylor was there with her brother and Jane and feeling very uncomfortable, very much a wallflower, and Jane kept whispering to Taylor about Lord Sheenan, and how handsome he was. Then suddenly somehow Lord Sheenan was asking Taylor to dance and they were twirling and waltzing around the dance floor...

  It had all been so vivid, too.

  Too vivid.

  The ballroom, the gowns, the self-conscious feeling as she stood against a wall, wishing she were home instead of corseted into the ball gown.

  And then the waltz, and the way Troy held her, and the feel of him against her.

  She’d liked it.

  She’d liked it so much she wasn’t even sure who had initiated the kiss. Him, or her.

  That’s when she’d woken up. At the kiss.

  The minute she’d woken she wanted to be asleep again, dreaming again. The dream was gone.

  She told herself she was glad.

  She wasn’t.

  And so baffled, and grouchy from lack of sleep, she trudged off to the library in her winter boots and heavy coat, with her striped scarf wrapped around her neck, walking the ten blocks to the library, down Bramble Lane, the sidewalk mostly shoveled clean and salted.

  She did not want to go to the Valentine Ball. And she most definitely did not want to go with Troy Sheenan.

  On break mid-morning at the library, Taylor made calls, filed reports and begged the Bozeman insurance adjustor to go see her car as soon as it was towed to Marietta’s body shop, instead of waiting until the next available opening, which was next week.

  Then during her lunch, Kara picked up Taylor from in front of the library and drove her to Marietta’s only car dealer to pick up a loaner car for the next week.

  The loaner car was an older four-wheel drive Jeep, and sketchy at best, but it was a car and it ran, so it was something.

  Taylor had hoped to grab a sandwich on her way back to the library but time ran out and she ended up back at work without eating anything. By the time the Tuesday night book club arrived at five thirty for their meeting, Taylor was dragging.

  She needed food, and coffee, or just a big cup of coffee.

  But there was no time to get anything before the book club discussion began and after an hour and a half Taylor’s energy and patience was running low.

  She loved her job here in Marietta. She loved this library, too.

  Although to be quite honest, right now, Taylor wanted to be anywhere but sequestered in the upstairs conference room with the Tuesday Night Book Group. Her stomach was growling and she still had the Wedding Giveaway meeting to attend. And Taylor couldn’t make it to tonight’s Wedding committee meeting until she emptied and secured the second floor meeting room for the night. Emptying the room was never easy, but tonight it was starting to appear impossible since three of the founding members of the Tuesday Night Book Club did not like new chamber director, Jane Weiss, and did not approve of the Wedding Giveaway in the first place.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Taylor said, raising her voice to be heard over the fifteen women, and one man, that made up the group. “But we really do need to wrap up. As I mentioned at the beginning of tonight’s discussion, I must get to the committee meeting downstairs—”

  Maureen continued talking as if Taylor had not spoken.

  Taylor pursed her lips, keeping her temper in check. Maureen was one of the ladies that had made Jane’s life miserable last November and December and it was difficult for Taylor to be in the same room with Maureen, but it was also Taylor’s job to sit in on the book group meetings and run the meeting. She cleared her throat and rose from her chair. “It’s time to wrap up,” she said firmly. “Unfortunately, we can’t go late tonight—”

  “Why not?” Maureen demanded, interrupting Taylor tartly, asking a question she already knew the answer to. “We always go late.”

  “We’ve always been allowed to go as long as we want,” Virginia chimed in. Virginia was Maureen’s best friend and minion. “I can’t remember the last time we had to end at seven thirty.”

  “You know why,” Taylor said crisply, “and I can’t join the committee meeting until this room is locked for the night, so let’s wrap up, and you can continue at the Java Café, as you usually do on Tuesday nights.”

  “So how are those tickets selling?” Maureen asked, leaning back in her chair and folded her arms across her stout chest.

  “I think the committee said they are at two thirds of their goal,” Taylor answered, stacking her book and notepad together before sliding them into her leather satchel. “It would have been nice to sell out, but we’ve almost one hundred and fifty people attending, and that’s fantastic.”

  “Apparently half of those attending have been given tickets to make the event appear successful,” Maureen sniffed. “But I’m not surprised you’d have to do that. Who around here can afford to attend a party that costs two hundred dollars?”

  Taylor breathed in, and out, her pleasant smile never once faltering. She didn’t understand why Maureen enjoyed being petty but she wasn’t going to let the nastiness get to her. “I don’t believe that’s true, Maureen. Yes, big donors and underwriters have been given tickets in exchange for sponsoring the Ball, but the committee has sold the majority of the tickets, and it’s not two hundred per person, it’s two hundred per couple, and that covers dinner, dancing, wine at dinner, and pictures.”

  Maureen grimaced. “You’d have to pay me to attend a black-tie ball that’s being held to launch a wedding contest. Only a Californian would come up with an idea as ridiculous as that.”

  Taylor opened her mouth to protest, wanting to remind them that the Wedding Contest was the 100 year anniversary of Marietta’s 1914 Great Wedding Giveaway, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

  Instead she quickly checked her phone as she stashed her book and notepad in her leather satchel. A missed call from Jane. Nothing from Doug. Good.

  Taylor went around the room, pushing in chairs, picking up scraps of paper left behind before turning off the lights, locking the door and heading downstairs to the main floor.

  “Off to the Wedding committee meeting?” Louise, the Children’s librarian, asked, passing the foot of the stairs with three children in tow.

  “On my way now,” Taylor answered, smiling as the little preschool boy chased two little girls around the plant in the lobby corner.

  “Apparently Troy Sheenan will be at the meeting, too,” Louise said. “Don’t know if you’ve met him, but he’s quite something. Marietta’s most eligible bachelor and all that.”

  Taylor furrowed her brow. Did everyone have a thing for him? “Hadn’t heard,” she sai
d, trying very hard not to remember her dream last night... and the kiss.

  “Jane sent me a text saying she hadn’t been able to reach you, but she wanted me to know, which is why I’ve been hovering a bit in the lobby. I was hoping to give him a hug. I like the Sheenan boys. They’ve done well for themselves. Very successful young men. Well, all but Trey. Trey’s in and out of trouble, but he’s not a bad person. He’s a sweetheart, he is. He was always my favorite Sheenan.” She nodded at the four year old boy who was still chasing the little girls around the potted plant. “See that little guy there? That’s TJ, Trey’s boy, and the spitting image of him, too.”

  Taylor caught a glimpse of black hair, blue eyes and dimples before the three children veered off in the opposite direction, and now headed towards the Children’s section. “Who is his mom?”

  “McKenna Douglas.”

  “McKenna? Our McKenna... our photographer on the Wedding committee?”

  “The one and only,” Louise said, before chasing down the corridor after the children.

  Dillon found Troy in the big Sheenan barn feeding the horses. “You’re going to be late,” Dillon said, closing the barn door behind him. “Doesn’t the meeting start at seven thirty?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s after seven now.”

  “I know.” Troy brushed feed off his hands, and then wiped his hands on the back of his butt, feeling the stiff denim. “I don’t want to do this. Dreading this meeting.”

  “It was your idea,” Dillon said.

  “The Ball wasn’t.”

  “But saving the hotel was.”

  True, Troy thought, adding water to the trough inside one stall.

  And what a terrible mistake that had been.

  But Troy wouldn’t say that out loud, not even to his brother. It’d kill him to admit that restoring the Graff Hotel to its former splendor was on its way to bankrupting him. Everything he had—over twelve million--was tied up in the hotel. He should have never invested so much of his own money in one project. He should have pulled back from the renovation when he realized it was a money pit. But he’d been too proud, too stupid, to do the smart thing when he could.

  But he was a fighter and nowhere ready to give up on the hotel.

  The hotel had only been reopened for six months, after the two and a half year restoration. It’d been a huge job restoring the hotel because it’d been abandoned, boarded up, for over forty years before that. But you wouldn’t know it looking at the hotel today. The Graff’s grand lobby glowed with rich paneled wood, marble, and gleaming light fixtures, while the grand ballroom and smaller reception rooms sparkled with glittering chandeliers.

  And yes, the hotel had virtually zero occupancy since early January, but December had been a good month, with the introduction of festive afternoon tea and company holiday parties on the weekends. But what they needed to do was fill the rooms all the time, because even empty, there were still salaries and bills to pay.

  But the hotel was special. She was one of a kind. And while he regretted that restoring her might cost him his company and financial security, he was glad he’d saved her.

  Someone had to.

  Now he just needed to turn things around, and he could. It was a matter of increasing tourism to Marietta, and getting some publicity for the hotel, the kind of publicity that would make the Graff appealing to meeting planners and wedding planners, making the Graff the destination of choice for conferences and special events.

  “You’re in pretty deep, aren’t you?” Dillon said, as Troy left the stall and latched the door closed behind him.

  “Yeah.”

  Dillon sat down on a stack of hay bales against the wall, extending his legs. “So just how deep?”

  Troy reached for his coat hanging on a peg about Dillon’s head. “Deep enough that if things go south, I’d be the one living here, working the ranch, leaving you free to return to Austin.”

  “That’d be a relief for me, but hell for you.” Dillon folded his arms across his chest. “You hate the ranch.”

  Troy’s lips compressed. He wasn’t going to even dignify that with a response because yes, he did hate the ranch. He hated everything about it, and always had, which is why whenever he came home he stayed in town at a hotel.

  “But then, you don’t like Marietta, either,” Dillon continued, watching Troy button his heavy sheepskin coat. “Which is why none of us can figure out why you’d hitch yourself, and your future, to that damn hotel. You’re the smart, successful Sheenan—”

  “You and Cormac haven’t done too badly for yourselves.”

  “Because you invested in us.”

  “I believe in you.”

  “And the hotel?”

  “Not ready to throw in the towel. I’ve spent ten years investing in startups. I believe we can still turn things around.”

  “But why The Graff, when you know it kills you to come back to this town?”

  Troy had started walking to the barn door, but he stopped and turned to look back at his brother, and then somehow, just like that, his mother was there. Her ghost. He could feel her at the ranch... in the house, the barn... and her sadness haunted him.

  She should have had daughters.

  She should have had girls for company. Girls who’d bake with her or sew with her. Girls who’d laugh and giggle and talk to her. Listen to her.

  Men weren’t good at listening.

  He shook his head once, chasing away the past, and the memory of his mother who had loved The Graff. He hadn’t restored the hotel for her. That would be idiotic because she was gone. But she had been the one to make him understand that beauty was transformative, and there was value in beautiful things. “Sometimes we do things because we think it’s the right thing to do... even when everyone else tells you you’re wrong.”

  Dillon’s eyes, a tawny gold, narrowed. He studied his older brother a long moment. “Mom would want you to be smart.”

  “Too late,” Troy answered. “Looks like I’ve inherited her crazy.”

  Dillon’s eyes narrowed another fraction of an inch. “Mom wasn’t crazy.” He hesitated. “She wasn’t happy. But that’s different from crazy.”

  Troy said nothing. This was not a subject he liked discussing.

  “Mom and Dad had problems. But we were too young to sort out their marriage, and now it’s too late to do anything about it,” Dillon added. “But even if we had been older, it wasn’t our job to fix things—”

  “But if we had, maybe she’d still be here.”

  Dillon sighed. “I’m sorry you had to be the one that found her.”

  Troy shook his head. “Let’s not go there.”

  “But you do. Constantly.” Dillon’s voice hardened. “It’s time you let it go. There’s no point in torturing yourself, or ruining your future, over something that’s in the past.”

  “Are you talking about Mom or the hotel?”

  “Maybe both.”

  Chapter Four

  Taylor was rattled by Louise’s news that Troy would be attending the Wedding Giveaway meeting tonight. She opened the heavy door to the masculine Crawford Room, the private board room off the library’s main reading room, wondering why Jane hadn’t bothered to tell her that Troy would be coming.

  Jane was supposed to be her friend. Her best friend in Marietta. And friends did not set friends up, much less with one’s gorgeous, popular, ridiculously successful ex.

  Most of the committee had already taken a seat at the board room table. Taylor’s gaze swept the room, seeing all the usual committee members: Paige Joffee from Main Street Diner, Sage Carrigan from Copper Mountain Chocolates, Risa Grant from SweetPeas florist, Tricia Thorpe from Marietta Travel, Jenny Thorpe, Tricia’s new sister-in-law, and McKenna Douglas from Big Sky Photography.

  McKenna lifted a hand, gesturing to Taylor.

  Taylor moved towards her, seeing McKenna in a new light. Taylor had known that beautiful McKenna Douglas was a single mom, and a talented photographe
r specializing in wedding photography, but until tonight Taylor had not known that the father of her little boy was Trey Sheenan, Troy’s twin. McKenna had never said anything, nor had anyone else. Maybe everyone else just knew. Or maybe folks here didn’t think it was important to share.

  Probably the latter.

  Just as no one else had ever mentioned to Taylor about the massacre on the Douglas Ranch seventeen years ago. McKenna’s parents and three of her brothers and sisters died in the home invasion.

  Taylor only found this out by chance, reading through old newspapers and magazines saved in the library’s vault. Taylor, a history buff, had been the one to discover that back in 1914 Marietta had sponsored a big Wedding Giveaway to draw attention to the re-opening of the Graff Hotel following the 1912 fire. She’d shared the news with Jane, who then came up with the idea of a one hundred year anniversary Wedding Giveaway, again highlighting the beautifully restored Graff, and all the merchants in town.

  The 1914 Wedding Giveaway had been a fun surprise. The discovery of the Douglas home invasion had been the exact opposite.

  Horrified, Taylor had gone to Louise with the news. Louise told her the crime had never been solved, and for years locals were jumpy and fearful. Folks wondered if maybe the assault had been by one of the Douglas’ hired hands. Lots of people felt it had to have been someone who knew the property, the layout of the house, and were familiar to the family, because wouldn’t the Douglas’ dogs have barked up a storm and alerted the family so they would have had a chance to defend themselves?

  Taylor shook her head, chasing away grim memories, and approached McKenna. “Hi.”

  “Did you see my wild child with Louise?” McKenna asked.

  Taylor smiled. “I did. He’s found two little girls to chase which is making him very happy.”

  “And Louise? She’s managing okay?”

  “She’s great. She loves kids.”

  “She always has. It’s going to be awful when she retires. She’s been part of the library since I was born.”