Room at the Inn (Novella): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Ruthie Knox

  Room at the Inn is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Loveswept eBook Edition

  Room at the Inn copyright © 2012 by Ruth Homrighaus

  Excerpt from Along Came Trouble by Ruthie Knox copyright © 2012 by Ruth Homrighaus

  All Rights Reserved.

  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-54435-3

  www.ReadLoveSwept.com

  Cover design: Susan Schultz

  Cover photograph: © Asia Images

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from Along Came Trouble

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Carson Vance lifted a bale of twine-tied newspaper to his shoulder and heaved it onto the burn pile. It displaced a plume of fresh snow that winked and sparkled in the morning sun before settling again just as he tossed a second bale on top of it.

  He dusted off his gloves and shoved both hands deep in his pockets, heading back toward his father’s house. The thermometer outside the kitchen window read five degrees, and he’d been carrying bundles of newspapers and magazines from the carport since before the sun came up. Long enough that his thighs and ass had gone numb.

  Best get inside before he froze something off he might need one day.

  He left his boots on the cold porch and shouldered the door into the kitchen open as gently as he could. Dad had been up late. He didn’t want to wake him. But when he padded into the room, there was Martin, bent over a Sudoku book, the last cup of coffee steaming away on the table.

  Carson started a second pot. The hand that reached out to press the button fascinated him. So rough already, after eight days’ hard work and cold. Two of his fingers were cracked, the pads seamed with grime even though he washed them with Lava soap.

  He’d been getting soft.

  The songbird clock on the wall ticked over nine o’clock with a warble. Outside, his parents’ feeders sat empty. The birds were in South America. They, at least, knew better than to winter in Potter Falls, New York.

  “You want toast?” he asked.

  “Ate already.”

  “What did you eat?”

  His father glanced at him from over the rim of his mug. “Little Debbies.”

  When Carson’s lip curled, his father chuckled. Score one for the old man.

  He’d set the whole thing up beautifully, stage-managing a decline so precipitous, Julie had been forced to send an e-mail. Your father’s going feral. He needs looking after, and I’m not up to it.

  Carson had suggested a housekeeper.

  He needs you, she’d said. Just you.

  Two days out from breaking ground on a new embassy building in the Netherlands, he hadn’t been able to travel right away, but he promised to come as soon as he could.

  A week later, he got another call. The old man had slipped on the icy front porch and banged up his leg, and the hospital social worker echoed Julie’s opinion. Lengthy recovery for a man his age … I think he’d benefit … No family in town capable …

  Carson came home.

  It was so much worse than Julie had said.

  The house looked like a badger was living in it. Random junk spilled over every available surface, and his childhood bedroom housed a floor-to-ceiling assortment of discarded furniture and old copies of Life magazine. Dad kept the thermostat too low, survived on convenience-store food, and smelled stale.

  Less than six months since Carson’s mother had died, and Martin Vance had turned himself into a shambling, grumbling, Sudoku-obsessed cry for help.

  “Just about got the front room cleared out,” Carson said. He opened the bread bag and grabbed two pieces of bread to slot into the toaster. “I’m going to tackle the spare room next.”

  Work, don’t think.

  That was the motto.

  No glancing at his backpack where it leaned beside the front door. No speculating about when he’d be released from small-town bondage and allowed to return to the real world again. Speculation got him nowhere, and there was so much to do.

  “What do you mean, you’re going to tackle it?” Martin asked.

  “I’m going to clean it out.”

  “You’re not touching my collectibles.”

  “Collectibles?”

  “In the spare room. That stuff is worth money. I’m going to sell it on eBay.”

  “You haven’t got anything worth a dime up there.” You don’t have an Internet connection, either. Or the first fucking clue how eBay works.

  What’s your game here, old man?

  Because his father was definitely up to something. At first, Carson had been so shocked by the rapidity of the downward slide, he hadn’t noticed the incongruities. Like the fact that there was dirt ground into the living-room carpet, but the bathroom still sparkled, and so did the interior of the microwave.

  Like the way he’d heard Dad whistling as he got dressed two mornings in a row.

  Like how when he wasn’t watching, the random, strewn-about junk started rearranging itself into more orderly piles. As if somebody couldn’t keep himself from tidying it up.

  Carson knew a bluff when he saw one. He’d played enough poker with his father as a kid. It was the only thing they knew how to do together without arguing.

  “All that furniture’s going to appreciate in value,” Martin said.

  “All that furniture’s trash, and it’s going to the dump.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  Carson had never much liked poker—all that speculating about what the opponent was going to do, figuring out bets and odds when he just wanted to act and be done with it. But what could he do but play the game? Even if he cleaned up the house, forced his father to eat vegetables and shower and take his vitamins, there was a damn good possibility that once he finished and left, he would get called back six weeks or six months from now to effect another rescue.

  If he folded now, laid down his cards, and walked out of the house … well, then he was an asshole.

  He didn’t want to be an asshole. He just didn’t want to be here. And his father knew it.

  Stymied, Carson wiped his hand over his mouth and muttered, “Jesus Christ.”

  “Keep taking the Lord’s name in vain, and you won’t have a roof over your head.”

  “I barely have a roof over my head now, Dad. I’m sleeping on the goddamn couch.”

  “Last warning.”

  He raised his hands in a gesture of peacemaking.

  His father made a gravelly noise in his throat and took another sip of coffee, setting the mug back onto the table with a defiant thump that matched the pure stubbornness in his eyes.

  The toast popped.

&n
bsp; There was no point to the argument. It was just a symptom of a problem that wasn’t ever going away—he and his father couldn’t find any ease with each other. Mom had made their relationship work, and without her around, they fell into the same old ruts and wore them deeper.

  Part of him wanted to confront his father with the truth. You brought me back here on purpose because you want me to move home. I’m not going to do that. We don’t even like each other. I know you’re lonely, and I’m sorry you’re depressed, but I can’t help you. You have to get on with it.

  But Martin Vance wasn’t the kind of guy you said that to. He was a stiff, principled man who’d been a curmudgeon even before he got old. If Carson said those words, he and his father would have it out, then they’d never speak to each other again.

  He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  The second hand swept around the bird clock. He slathered margarine on his toast and set to eating it.

  Martin worked out a possibility in the margin of his puzzle book. He dropped the pen and looked out the window with an abstracted expression. “I’m sure Julie’s got a room at the inn.”

  The statement hung in the air, suspended. Its subtext swelled and filled the space between them.

  I’ll see your ten and raise you fifty.

  “She’s fixed the place up real nice,” Martin added.

  He sounded so casual, so damned neutral, the hair on the back of Carson’s neck stood up.

  Overplaying his hand.

  Martin wanted this—wanted him to go stay at Julie’s bed-and-breakfast so badly that he’d filled the upstairs bedroom with crap and refused to let Carson remove it.

  Carson shoved the last corner of toast in his mouth and closed his eyes as a wave of unwelcome emotion crashed through him. Anger and unwillingness blended together in a kind of needy desperation that he remembered from adolescence, when it had beat in his bones every day he didn’t manage to get out of Potter Falls.

  He took a deep breath and dismissed the feeling. Unimportant. Irrelevant.

  A bed was a bed, and he needed one. It didn’t matter what his father hoped would happen after that.

  Julie Long hadn’t been enough to keep him here sixteen years ago. She sure as hell couldn’t keep him now.

  Chapter Two

  It was something about the way he planted his feet.

  Julie considered the problem as she traversed the hall from the kitchen to the lofty entryway. Her visitor stood next to the check-in desk, his body turned three-quarters away from her, arms crossed, two fingers tapping against his bicep. He had his shoes a bit more than shoulder-distance apart, his backbone perfectly vertical, but even so, everything about him seemed to have this tilt to it, a slight pitch forward as if any moment he might shift his weight to the balls of his feet and just … go.

  Like he was made of pure energy, and it went against his nature to rest.

  “Carson,” she said.

  He turned toward her, pushing off his knit hat. His dark hair was all mashed down, the tip of his nose red from walking over here in the cold.

  The bastard wasn’t even aging.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Glory would’ve fussed over him. The instant he crossed the threshold, his mother would have taken his coat and poured him coffee and set him down in the warmest corner of the front room. For anybody else, Julie would do the same. But he wasn’t anybody else.

  She straightened her spine and located the bottomless reserve of poise she’d developed as a girl. The trick was not to care, not to let him throw her, and not to let him stay.

  He studied her, brows drawing in over hazel eyes that seemed capable of reading all the thoughts and feelings she’d banished from her face. But he can’t, Julie reminded herself. That’s the whole point of the face.

  Then came that lopsided smile that made her stomach flip over, and instead of answering her question, he closed the careful gap she’d left between them with two strides and extended his hand. “Jules. It’s been a while.”

  She pressed her warm palm against his and wished fervently that someone had told her before she gave Carson Vance her virginity that she’d never again be able to shake his hand without having dangerous, carnal thoughts.

  Mother of God, he had great hands.

  “Three years,” she said.

  He hadn’t come home for the funeral. Everyone in town talked about it for weeks afterward, but Julie wasn’t surprised. Carson coped with strong emotion by putting it at a distance. He’d loved his mother, so he’d weathered her death on the other side of the world.

  Appropriate, if you were Carson. Ungrateful and disloyal for anybody else.

  He frowned. “Surely not that long.”

  “Last time you came home wasn’t too long after I bought this place. That makes it about three.”

  In Potter Falls, every season had its own familiar cadence. Here, a year felt like a year. Three years felt like three. Only four hours north of Manhattan, where the landscape barely registered the weather, Potter Falls was a world apart.

  She’d spent the sixteen years since he left living in his hometown, and they’d felt like sixteen. Sometimes, she wondered if time passed differently for Carson, out there carousing around the world, building embassies for the Foreign Service, never staying anyplace for more than a few seasons.

  He flicked his eyes over her. “You look good.”

  He said it with such sincerity, she actually looked down, expecting to find herself dressed in a sundress or an elegant business suit. But no. She’d been standing on a ladder, trying to strip a hundred years’ worth of dirt and paint off the pressed-tin ceiling of the kitchen with baking-soda paste. She looked it.

  “So do you.”

  In the large, open front room, he stood a good head taller than her usual guests. He wore jeans and an ordinary wool herringbone coat that she recognized from his father’s wardrobe, but there was nothing ordinary about him.

  It was definitely something to do with his feet. Or else in the set of his shoulders. Julie couldn’t put her finger on it, but the fact was, all he was doing was standing there, and yet he managed to look like a character in a Hemingway story. Like he ought to have a shotgun and a pith helmet, and he should speak in short, urgent sentences and shoot elephants for sport.

  But maybe she was projecting. Maybe he wasn’t really conveying as much testosterone-laden intensity as she imagined.

  Maybe she thought he only looked like a territory-conquering slab of rough-and-tumble male charisma because he’d conquered her territory, tumbled her rough, and left her behind a long time ago.

  Now he just stopped by every so often to replant his flag.

  “You know, I’ve never been in here before?” He backed up a few steps to the center of the room and dropped his head back to look straight up.

  With its curved central staircase and tall ceiling, the entryway was her pride and joy. She’d started her restoration work here, focusing on making everything as grand as it must once have been—the banister gleaming, the chandelier brought back to its former glory, the wallpaper period-appropriate and covered with an elaborate fleur-de-lis pattern. “What a great house,” he murmured.

  “Thank you.”

  The compliment warmed her. How distressing.

  “Custom doors,” he said to himself. “What are they, white ash?”

  He was meandering around the room now, testing surfaces with his fingertips and gazing appreciatively at the moldings.

  “Yes.”

  “And you kept the radiators in. Or did you have to buy them?”

  “No, the radiators were fine. I found a plumber who knew how to tune them up and get them going again.”

  “That’s good. More efficient than forced air.”

  Such a male thing to say. His father and uncle Bruce had been similarly enamored of the radiators. But it felt different to hear Carson appreciating her house.

  He’d been the one to show it to her to begin with. H
er first summer in Potter Falls, he took her for a walk and pointed to the mansion with its peeling paint. That’s the Comstock place. I used to ice-skate on the pond when I was a kid.

  She had longed for it even then—longed not just to fix up the mansion and live in it, to bring it alive again, but to live here with him. To marry him and fill the rooms with dark-haired babies and laughter and life. She’d thought that by showing her the house, he was hinting—in an inarticulate, male sort of way—that he wanted it, too.

  More fool her. Carson had never been anything but perfectly honest about his desires. The day she met him, he’d told her his plan: college, then a stint in the army to pay his ROTC dues, then he would travel all over the world and build things. Make his mark.

  All Julie had ever wanted was to make a home. She’d yearned for the kind of community she missed out on growing up on the Upper East Side, raised by a succession of nannies and instructed by her parents in the art of being sophisticated and wry and terribly lonely.

  “You’ve done pretty good for yourself, Jules.” He finished his tour and fetched up beside her.

  “What do you want?”

  A rude question. She strove to be civil with Carson—placid and calm and flawlessly polite. But he got to her.

  “I need a room.”

  “I don’t have any rooms.”

  “Sure you do. The lot’s empty.”

  “I’m closed right now. I only open in the winter for a few weeks around Christmas. Right now, I’m just cleaning and decorating.”

  “How can you make a living if you’re only open in the winter?”

  “Isn’t that kind of a personal question?”

  Carson’s mouth quirked. “We don’t do personal questions anymore?”

  “We don’t have a personal relationship. We’re not friends. We’re not—”

  She shouldn’t even say the word lovers. Too many memories attached to it. And not just ancient, sixteen-year-old, buried-deep-beneath-the-earth memories. It was only five or six years since the last time she slept with him. Before that, for about a decade, they’d hooked up practically every time he blew through town—on his initiative and hers. Her place, his car. Anywhere.