by Dixie Davis
Inn Dire Straits
DUSKY COVE BOOKS
© 2018 Dixie Davis
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
OTHER BOOKS BY DIXIE DAVIS
Inn Over Her Head
Inn Trouble
Inn Vain
Coming Soon in the Dusky Cove B&B Cozy Mystery Series
Inn Danger
Be sure to join Dixie’s mailing list to be the first to know about her new releases! Also get fun bonuses including recipes from this book, a tourist’s guide to Dusky Cove, book recommendations and more!
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For Hazel,
My sunshine
Inn Dire Straits
Cover
Front Matter
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Thank you for reading!
More from Dixie Davis
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Lori Keyes arranged the last slices of lemon poppy seed cake on the platter and willed herself not to check the time. Again. Doug still had at least fifteen minutes before he arrived with his girlfriend, assuming they’d eaten lunch in their car on the way.
Lori tried not to be jealous. She’d been so excited and nervous about seeing her older son for the first time in two years that she had hardly been able to touch a bite of food all day.
Her guests at the Mayweather House bed and breakfast, on the other hand, were ravenous. She quickly chopped an apple into slices and tossed it with citric acid to keep them from browning.
Where was Serena? The girl had only started as part-time housekeeper last week, but she’d already been late to work three times, and not much help when she’d been there.
Lori grabbed the plate of apples and another of cheese and carried them into the parlor, to the antique sideboard that held the crumbs left from the last round of guest snacks. Not for the first time, Lori considered hanging a small “Guests only, please” sign to the spread, but vetoed the idea. For all she knew, her guests really had eaten all this in the last two hours. With ten adults and five children staying in her inn, the free refreshments didn’t last long.
She set down the plate of apples. With her free hand, she stacked the empty dishes before arranging the cheese plate on the sideboard. A second trip switched the dirty dishes for the platter of cake. Lori arranged the cheesecloth over the selections to keep the flies away.
Now she could check the time. She pulled out her phone. Still ten minutes until Doug and Annie might arrive. And an hour and fifteen minutes since Serena was supposed to have started work.
Lori checked her tousled, silver-blonde curls in the mirror. She was ready. The snacks were ready. The parlor was ready.
So why didn’t she feel ready?
Lori walked out to check the double-decker porch. Normally, she found her peace sitting on this porch, gazing out at the Cape Fear River lazily flowing past her dream home.
Instead, she found herself pacing. She ran a hand over the white siding, as if to steady her nerves. She’d just had the siding pressure washed two months ago, in preparation for the tourist season.
And in preparation to meet the girl her son wanted to marry.
They hadn’t set a date — he hadn’t even proposed — but Doug had already told her that Annie was the one.
So Lori really needed to love her.
Fortunately, Lori would be able to give them her full attention. Lori’s other guests were mostly out and about right now — she was so booked for the town festival that she’d had to put Doug and Annie in the half-finished basement rooms.
She hoped they wouldn’t mind sleeping on air mattresses in her mostly-finished basement rooms for a few nights. With tourist season in full swing and the inn full for the town festival, she didn’t have any other space or any time to finish the new basement suite. Hopefully it would be good enough for Annie.
The gravel in the driveway at the side of the house crunched. Serena, or Doug and Annie? Lori resisted the urge to run to the end of the porch and peek to see who was pulling around her house under the shade of the live oaks.
It could be any of her guests returning from lunch or whatever outing they had planned today.
No reason to get her hopes up.
And yet her heart rate was skyrocketing. Lori flipped her hair back and hoped her loose curls looked all right.
The car finally pulled around the porch. She didn’t recognize the car itself — a rental — but she knew the driver. Doug now wore wire-rimmed glasses, but his dark hair and his warm smile were both the same as they’d been since he was six years old.
He was seeing the inn for the first time.
And Lori was about to meet Annie for the first time.
She could scarcely breathe. She just tried not to bounce on her feet and look too eager. Or stupid. Or crazy.
Any of those would generally be a bad impression to make on your future daughter-in-law.
Doug parked in the last space along their gravel drive and hopped out to help his girlfriend. Annie was almost as tall as he was, with long blonde hair that reached the middle of her back, straight as a pin. She was young and trim and athletic, and she moved with the confidence of someone who usually got their way — not out of any manipulation or effort, but just because everyone was happy to try to please her.
Lori felt like she might shrink into her shoes. Growing up, she’d always been the happy, bubbly, goofy friend, not the goddess of her friend groups. This was stirring up all her high school insecurities.
She thought better of that first impulse. She was a grown woman — Annie’s future mother-in-law, hopefully — and she was fun and bright, not to mention the mother of two successful sons and owner of a thriving business. She didn’t have anything to prove to this young lady.
But she really hoped Annie liked her.
Doug and Annie walked up the wide steps to the porch. “Wow, Mom, you look . . . amazing.” Doug held out his arms. She beamed and caught him in a hug while he was on the stair below her, so they’d be on more even footing.
It felt so good to have her son’s arms around her again. She’d forgotten how incredible it was to be hugged by someone you could see was a grown man, capable of taking care of himself — while at the same time, he was still the tiny boy you’d raised from an infant. Lori held him at arms’ length as if she were trying to memorize his face.
Memorize, no. But remember that he was a grown up and not the six-year-old who materialized in her memories most days? Yes.
“I missed you, sweetie,” she finally said.
“I missed you, too, Mom.” He shifted to the side and held out his hand for Annie. She stepped up next to him, holding a paperboard box. “Mom, this is my girlfriend, Annie Allbright. Annie, this is my mom, Lori Keyes.”
“Nice to meet
you,” Lori said.
“Nice to meet you, too.” Annie smiled and offered her parcel to Lori. “Key lime pie?”
“Oh, thank you!” Lori accepted the brown paperboard box and admired the pale yellow pie with bright green curls of candied lime zest through the plastic window in the lid for a moment. A real Floridian treat. She could almost taste the sweet, tangy citrus goodness now. “Should I put it in the refrigerator?”
“Probably the freezer.” Annie grinned. “We got our favorite bakery to blast freeze it for us this morning, so it should be fine.”
“Okay, great. Come on inside and let me show you around,” Lori said. It felt strange to not help a guest with their bags, but said guest had just filled her hands with a present, so she wasn’t quite sure how to handle that situation.
Doug and Annie picked up their suitcases, ready to follow her in. Lori held the door for them — and held her breath for the first reaction to the interior of her house, the one room she’d put the most work into.
“Wow, Mom. This place looks . . . like a real inn.”
Lori swatted her son’s shoulder. “I was going to run a fake one, but I thought the guests might like it if it had, you know, rooms and things inside.”
Doug rolled his eyes. Before Lori could call him on it, Annie cleared her throat and gave him a capital-l Look. “Sorry,” Doug said, as thoroughly cowed as if Lori had censured him herself.
“That’s all right.” Lori tried to shove aside the weird feeling in her middle, focusing on the parlor instead. “Last year, we ‘excavated’ the wall coverings and found out the original was something like this replica.” She gestured around at the white wallpaper with large, scrolling oak leaves in yellow — and she tried not to think about the man who’d uncovered the original wall, ordered the wallpaper, hung it with her.
That whole adventure had ended a few months ago, when Mitch admitted he wasn’t ready for a relationship. Lori tried to cover up the pang she still felt when she thought about him.
“This is beautiful,” Annie said. “I love how the fabrics coordinate with it.” She pointed at the blue couches with their yellow, cream and blue pillows. “You have an eye.”
Lori tried to hold back a blush at that compliment. “I don’t know about that, but I like it.” She held up the pie box. “I’d better stick this in the kitchen. Would you like to take a look?”
Doug and Annie both nodded and left their suitcases in the parlor to follow her. She led them through the official part of the inn, the dining room where she served her guests breakfast, and then to the private part of the inn, specifically the kitchen. Doug admired her stainless steel counters and appliances, while Annie fawned over the professional stove, fridge and freezer. “So much storage,” she murmured, peeking inside the freezer.
Lori laughed. “You don’t know how much I lose in there, though.”
Annie joined in the laughter. “I bet.”
“But it does come in handy quite a bit — especially freezing leftovers.”
“I can’t wait for breakfast in the morning.” Annie clasped her hands.
Lori set the pie in the freezer and gave them a quick look at the office and her apartment before leading them back out to the parlor.
It was time to show them to their rooms. Though Lori had already warned Doug their accommodations weren’t a hundred percent, she couldn’t help bracing herself for the big reveal.
“I have you two staying in our basement rooms. They’re not quite finished yet, but I do have air mattresses down there for each of you.”
“That’s great, thank you so much,” Annie said.
“We wouldn’t want to take a spot from a paying customer,” Doug agreed. He hefted his suitcase down the stairs, following Lori’s lead into the rooms she was almost done making over into a suite.
“The upstairs rooms are named after local towns and beaches — Ocean Isle, Carolina, Bald Head,” Lori told them. “I was thinking of naming this one Kure.”
Annie tsked. “But then you’d have to explain to everyone how to pronounce it, or they’ll all ask for the ‘Cure’ Room.”
“Good point.” The pronunciation of CURE-ay definitely wasn’t intuitive. Lori wasn’t sure where the name came from, but it was just one of many places in North Carolina with a tricky pronunciation.
They reached the bottom step and Lori gripped the doorknob a heartbeat longer than necessary. The rooms were just barely finished enough to put family in — the walls installed and painted, the flooring in. The bathroom still needed to be finished, so they’d have to come upstairs to use hers, but she hoped that was okay.
Home improvements were awkward when your handyman was also your not-really ex-boyfriend. She hadn’t gone without repairs since their “break up,” but they hadn’t had anything more than a business conversation since then, either. Planning the rest of her renovation hadn’t been a priority once tourist season hit and everyone was just trying to survive.
Especially this week, the summer’s busiest with the town festival.
Once Doug and Annie had set their bags in their rooms, they all headed back upstairs.
“The inn really is nice, Mom,” Doug said. “I can see why you love it.”
Lori smiled her thanks and squeezed his elbow.
“I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to Dusky Cove,” Annie said. “I haven’t been back to North Carolina in almost ten years.”
That was right — Lori thought she remembered this story. Annie was from here in Brunswick County, but her family had moved to Florida just after she graduated. After college, she ended up working with Doug, and they bonded over their love of their home state before they started dating.
“Should I show you around town?” Lori offered.
“That’d be great.” Annie beamed.
For someone who seemed like she got her way all the time, Annie was very good at making you forget or just not mind giving in, simply by being her.
Lori led them back out the front door, pausing only a moment to take in her view of the river before heading around the house to the street. The Mayweathers who’d built the house two hundred years ago had picked the site for its views, not because of a road that wasn’t even there yet, but it was still a little hard to explain that her house had its back to the street.
Behind the Mayweather House, directly across Front Street, was Dusky Card & Gift. While their picturesque neighborhood wasn’t as busy as the cute historic brick buildings downtown, they were thriving, too. Lori looked at the crowd around the town festival merchandise Ray had had made up and displayed on the front porch. He was a good businessman, and he knew how to take full advantage of the high season for them. Heaven knew that the off-season was lean enough.
With that much foot traffic, Lori opted to skip Dusky Card & Gift, even though it was one of her favorite places. That honor was probably mostly due to kindly old Ray himself, though his collection of ever-changing treasures often had something that she needed for a room at the inn. They walked down the street to the shop next door: Salt Water Bakes.
Lori introduced Doug and Annie to Val, the owner of Salt Water Bakes, who promptly gave them both a free cake ball, in between serving up orders of cake and mini tarts to the crowd.
Lori was really glad she wasn’t a tourist in town today. She thought it was probably best to slip out quietly. Before she could, however, Val did a double take, then called them back. “Wait, Annie Allbright?”
All three of them turned back to look at Val.
Val pointed at herself. “It’s me! Val Cromley!”
Annie sucked in a breath. “Brett’s mom?”
Val beamed. “How have you been, honey? It’s been, what, ten years?”
Lori glanced at Annie to see her reaction, but Annie’s smile had frozen in place. She groped for Doug’s hand before answering Val. “Yep, a long time.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to tell Brett.”
Annie nodded slowly. “Yeah. Awesome.”
“
We’ll have to get you two together. Are you staying at Lori’s place?”
Annie nodded again, her smile growing more and more forced. Was Val’s son an ex-boyfriend?
“I’ll let him know when he gets back from deliveries. So nice to have another helping hand!” She waved to them and turned back to the ever-growing line.
Lori led them in weaving through the crowd and back out the door to the converted historic home.
“Man, is it always this busy here?” Annie asked.
Lori let Annie change the subject, opting not to push the obvious topic. “Not quite. You two chose our busiest week — the town festival starts tonight.” Lori mentally crossed her fingers the lightning bugs would show up. Chances were looking good — she’d seen them out herself over the weekend — but last year, they weren’t certain until the last minute that the guests of honor were even going to be there.
“Just our luck.” Annie’s laugh was weak, and Lori couldn’t help but notice how tightly she gripped Doug’s hand.
Did he know about whatever was making her this uncomfortable? Doug kept his face impassive.
Ugh, that had always driven Lori nuts when he was a teenager.
Lori passed the next historic home-turned-shop, a travel agent that for once was actually open and doing booming business. Hopefully people wanting to return to Dusky Cove when they might have the place to themselves.
The log cabin on the corner, now The Book Cove, was much less busy than Salt Water Bakes, so Lori led them inside. Although this was the busiest Lori had ever seen the bookstore, it was still a nice, quiet change of pace from the bustle of the bakery.
Doug started searching in the used books on accounting, though Lori found it hard to believe anything among the used books wouldn’t be completely out of date to him. Annie meandered over to Lori’s favorite section: the cookbooks.
“Here, let me show you the best shelf,” Lori said. She motioned for Annie to come with her to a small bookcase almost tucked in a corner: the family heirloom cookbooks, handmade, heavily annotated, loose-leaf binders, church recipe collections. Most of them weren’t for sale — not that many other people thought these things were worth money. But to Lori they were the most charming part of the whole bookstore.
