The Boyfriend Contract

by Victoria James

  She wasn’t sure how much she should reveal about her plans or her history. She should get in touch with her lawyer and see how the zoning and permit applications were going. Then again, the contractor would have to know, and they would also be taking out their own permits. “Uh, no, this is my company. And I have experience running inns.”

  He held her stare for a second, probably thinking she was way too young and in over her head—but he never said it. “Okay. Well, we’ll get moving on permits for you. We work with the guys at county all the time, so they’re usually pretty quick for us.”

  She nodded. That was another good thing about small towns. Everybody had connections to one another. “I’m fairly familiar with that, so just tell me what you need.”

  They started walking down the stairs together. “Right, so our full crew will be here by seven a.m. tomorrow morning. Do you have a place to go tonight?”

  She shrugged. “I’m just going to stay here.”

  He didn’t say anything for a second and then ran his hand over his jaw in a gesture she was beginning to find familiar. His jaw was pretty great, too. He was great. But not very warm and fuzzy. “You’re staying here?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay…”

  She followed him to the door, trying not to let her own trepidation over staying here show. “Is there a Walmart or anything around here? I should probably get…a blanket or something.”

  “About twenty minutes from here. The next town over is about a fifteen-minute drive, but it’s bigger and has a few big-box stores.”

  “Perfect,” she said. She could pick up a sleeping bag and pillows and maybe some dinner. Maybe Cheetos. Maybe Diet Coke. It was way too ambitious to try and tackle both addictions while moving to a new town and tackling a renovation. What had she been thinking? How bad would it be to have some Cheetos tonight? She’d knock off Diet Coke. “Oh, and what about internet and all that?”

  His eyes twinkled. “There’s one company in town but don’t expect miracles…or anything remotely comparable to what you’d find in the city.”

  Her stomach dropped. “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s bad, I can’t lie.”

  “Wifi?”

  He winced. “Dicey at best. A lot of these walls in here are triple-bricked. You might have to consider hard-wiring for fast, reliable connections. Call Maple Cable tomorrow—it’s a family business. Brenda and Barbara run the office. Charlie, their brother, will come out and hook you up. Just don’t get him chatting because he has a tendency to never stop, and soon you’ll be looking at pictures of his fifteen grandkids. If he pulls out his wallet, cut the conversation and run.”

  She laughed, and he smiled for a moment before glancing away. He was gorgeous when he didn’t smile, but when he did, his blue eyes sparkled, and his smile made her heart race. “Wonderful,” she said.

  The people she was relying on to wire her inn had one technician, they were all related, and the place was called Maple Cable? It was all fine. She would not reveal the fact that she had never gone more than an hour without checking her phone or lived in a place without a solid-four-bars of service. “Okay. Great. So, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He nodded. “Good luck.”

  Three hours later, Emily had pretty much confirmed her own naïveté. How had she actually thought she’d be able to get any sleep in this house? What had been a grand old home during daylight hours had basically become a haunted mansion. She huddled inside her new sleeping bag, trying to find a comfortable position. But the hard floor made it impossible—as did the numerous loud, strange noises inside the house. There were no sirens or horns outside. There were, however, owls and crickets; they were fine. But then the howling of what she assumed were wolves startled her into an upright position.

  Were there wolves out there? She grabbed her phone to google what parts of Ontario wolves lived in, only to find it at one bar. Dammit. Maple Cable better fix this situation for her tomorrow.

  Relax, Emily. It’s not like she needed to go outside or anything. Those wolves were probably really far away. She took a deep breath and settled back down on the floor. She could do this.

  Staring up at the ceiling, she tried not to think of her condo back in the city. It had been perfect. Her bed was big and soft and had lots of fluffy pillows. She had a security system. She had wifi. She had a fridge and an oversize glass shower and a separate deep soaker tub with a ledge just large enough to hold her wineglass and phone.

  She closed her eyes, and then a second later, some kind of scratching noises in the wall had her wide awake again. She scrambled up, her heart pounding. She was on the floor. Not smart if you didn’t like spiders or mice. Why was it so dark in this place? No streetlights to break up the darkness. She stood inside her sleeping bag and hobbled to the light switch. There was no shame in a grown woman sleeping with the lights on. She’d already mopped the floor and it was gleaming. Still. Her gaze went to the bag of Cheetos—which she hadn’t opened. Well, if there was ever a time to go back on a major life change, an imminent infestation of rodents would be it. What if something crawled on her while she slept? Maybe she should sleep in her SUV. After another scan of the room, she hobbled over to the Cheetos and water bottles and sat back down.

  Her phone vibrated and she read the new text. At least there was reception again.

  Her stomach dropped. It was from her brother.

  When are you going to stop acting like a spoiled brat and come back to work?

  She ripped open her bag of Cheetos and angrily chomped while trying to think of a reply that would end this text stream quickly. She dusted off her index finger and typed furiously. I’m not working for you. Ever.

  Don’t be petty. You owe Mom and Dad. Don’t be selfish.

  If Dad wanted me to run the business, it would have been split between us. I’m moving on. Starting my own life. I’m allowed to do that. Good luck with Dad’s company.

  She did the unthinkable and turned her phone to airplane mode. She was done. She was also mad at herself for eating Cheetos. She folded the bag and drank water, trying to wash away the flavor. She should have added wine to her shopping list. She wasn’t going to let her brother send her spiralling into an abyss of misery; she’d already done that. The first month after she’d left the city, after her parents’ death, she’d been a shell of her former self. It had taken her six months to get here, to a place where she could focus on her future and put her past behind her. But then her brother would text or call out of the blue. Some days just communicating with him, even through her phone, was too much.

  She could barely stand to make eye contact at the end, that last day. All she saw and heard were the words he’d hurt her with her entire life. No more.

  But as she sat there in the dark room, wind whistling through the old windows, tree branches swaying against the old roof, and wolves howling in the distance, doubt about her ability to pull this off crept in. She held her head in her hands, not knowing what she was doing anymore, helplessness engulfing her. She’d come here almost out of spite, to prove that she could build a company from the ground up, to make her brother suffer, but now she was the one suffering. She was risking everything, putting her entire life savings into this project, into this giant old house that no one wanted. There was no exit plan. If her business flopped, she wouldn’t even be able to cash out and sell this house, because the real estate market here wasn’t like the one in the city. The value of this home would be too high to sell for a profit. It might take five years to find the right buyer for a house like this.

  She had loved talking about real estate acquisitions with her father. She had grown up by his side, at their offices, in their different inns, seeking out potential new properties. She had thought she’d be running that company one day. She’d lived and breathed it. It was a part of her. She had been his right-hand woman. Her brother had never loved it. He’d argued with their father constantly, mocking all of them.

  And he’d torme
nted, ridiculed, and belittled her when they were growing up. Twelve years her senior, he had used his position of authority to demean her, and she had always vowed that one day she’d have her own life—at her father’s company. She had thought her father was a kindred spirit.

  She was done with her old life. She was done playing the good girl, the one everyone in the family could dump on and treat like garbage. She’d done her soul-searching in the first month after she’d left Toronto. She knew it was her own fault she’d let all of them treat her that way. She wasn’t her brother’s puppet to manipulate anymore. She was a grown woman who had a life to build. She needed to shed all her old inhibitions, all the limitations that others had put on her. She needed to not care anymore what people thought of her. She needed to live. She needed a social life, she needed friends.

  She needed to prove she could be successful on her own.

  The biggest betrayal had been her father leaving the company to her brother. The two closest men in her life had hurt her horribly, each in different ways, but both powerfully. She refused to be the victim any longer. She was here to build her own life, without a man to interfere. She took a deep breath and scanned the room one last time, looking for scurrying rodents. After seeing none, she lay back down again, slowly. Neither man nor mouse would stop her.

  Chapter Three

  Cooper Merrick sat across from his two brothers at the Sunshine Diner. He’d always thought it was an ironic name, considering the place was like a hole in the ground and the windows were so grimy that sunlight barely got through. They made the best damn breakfast, though, so it was usually packed every morning. And because it was on one of the rural highways just outside of town, truckers often stopped in, as well as early-morning blue-collar folk. It was a bit of a rough crowd, but the food was fresh, the coffee strong, and the service was efficient, with the same waitresses for at least a decade.

  His older brother, Brody, set down his mug of coffee. “So rumor has it that the woman moving into Julia Birmingham’s old house is widowed with three kids.”

  Cooper snorted and shifted in his seat. “Uh, no. Not quite. More like twentysomething from the city, planning on turning her grandmother’s heritage home into a profitable luxury inn.”

  His younger brother, Austin, leaned forward. “Hot?”

  Hot… Hot wasn’t exactly the adjective he’d use to describe Emily Birmingham. She was more beautiful than hot. Maybe slightly in over her head, he thought as he remembered the slight orange tinge to her fingertips and the stains on her shirt when she’d walked into his sister Callie’s coffee shop. And now he was thinking about the woman under the disheveled clothes. Curvy, beautiful. He didn’t like thinking that way anymore. Those days were long gone. These were the solitary Cooper days, and he’d decided precisely five years ago that he preferred solitude. Solitude didn’t kick you in the ass when you were down, couldn’t lay a finger on you. Solitude didn’t force a grown man to his knees with only a bottle of whiskey to comfort him at night.

  He took a sip of coffee and answered his brother. “She’s attractive.”

  “What, are you eighty?” Austin asked with an irritating smirk.

  Brody laughed, the sound as irritating as Austin’s smirk.

  He frowned at both of them. “No. It doesn’t matter if she is or isn’t hot. She’s a client. We’re the contractors. Oh, and here’s some actual relevant information to make our lives hell—she’s going to be living there during the renovation.”

  Brody swore under his breath. “Seriously? That place isn’t going to be liveable.”

  Cooper shrugged and sat back in the orange vinyl booth. He had been surprised when she’d sprung that piece of info on him, but he’d also felt bad for her. She seemed very alone. “None of our business. The home has been maintained; it’s not like it’s falling apart. But this reno is going to be on a massive scale. And she wants it done fast. We’re installing eight new bathrooms as well as removing the two existing ones. Every damn window and shutter in the house needs to be restored. New boiler. New kitchen, new electrical… The scope of this project goes on and on. I made up some preliminary notes last night. We’re going to be there for months.”

  Austin set his coffee down, looking serious for once. “Does she have zoning approval to turn that place into an inn?”

  Cooper shrugged. “I don’t know, though I doubt it, or we would have heard about it by now. We’ll have to find out. I’m sure there will be a lot of protest over that. Even though she’s not looking to change anything that’s already protected, she is changing it from a family home to an inn. Wait till the historical society gets wind of it.” It was well known the Maple Hill Historical Society was…overzealous in their mandate to ensure strict adherence to whatever parts of the home were protected under the heritage code.

  Brody leaned forward, giving him his classic worried frown. Out of the three of them, he’d say Brody was the most serious and a classic Type A personality. “What’s she like? Is this going to be a lot of high-maintenance stuff?”

  What was she like…? He thought about that for a moment. He wouldn’t say she was high maintenance in the usual sense, because despite the luxury Mercedes SUV sitting in the drive, she seemed very down-to-earth and casual. But she did seem complicated. Definitely not a pushover. She’d also looked like she was going to pass out when he mentioned the possibility of crappy wifi. She was from the city, though. The last couple of years there seemed to be more and more city folk relocating when they got wind of the cheap real estate out here. They sold their homes in Toronto for well over a million bucks and then bought the best properties around here, thinking they were getting bargains. He finally said, “She seems normal.”

  “Great description. So glad we met for breakfast. At least now we’ll know exactly what to expect,” Austin said, bunching up his napkin and chucking it at him.

  He caught it and was about to throw it back when their waitress appeared. They kept their mouths shut as Penny delivered their breakfast. It was common knowledge whatever Penny overheard would be broadcast to the whole town by dinner.

  After she left, Cooper started with the bacon and turned his attention to his younger brother. “Fine. What are you dying to know?”

  Austin shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “Good.” It was good, because that’s all he would say about the matter. He certainly wouldn’t let them in on the fact he’d found himself thinking about her last night while he was making his notes.

  “Is she going to do anything with the barn?”

  “Didn’t ask yet. She doesn’t strike me as the type to have use for a barn. It’s designated historical, though, so the barn stays. We’ll just repair it enough so it’s not a hazard.”

  “Why the hell would anyone want to turn that old place into an inn?” Austin said.

  Austin had always hated historical houses and had built himself a home that was modern in every way. Cooper loved heritage buildings. He liked working on them, restoring them to their former glory. He was actually excited to be working on the old house, and he was relieved Emily didn’t want to make it completely new or strip any of its character. He was under the distinct impression it was a restoration, not a renovation, and he liked that. He stuffed food into his mouth so his brothers wouldn’t expect him to answer the question. But then someone else did.

  “Because it’s a beautiful piece of property. And it’s our job to make sure we do her vision justice.”

  They all looked up to see their dad standing there. Cooper slid over in the booth so he could sit. “Didn’t think you were meeting us this morning,” Cooper said as his dad settled in.

  “Well, I thought I’d tag along for a bit, make sure you boys are nice to Ms. Birmingham.”

  Penny came over with her famous carafe coffee, poured a fresh cup for their dad, and gave the rest of them refills. “The usual, Mac?”

  “Just the coffee today, Penny.” She nodded and then walked off.

  “We’re always
nice,” Austin said, wiping his mouth now that he’d polished off his Hungry Man plate of three eggs, Texas toast, bacon, sausage, and ham.

  “Well, she’s a special case. Her grandmother, Julia, was a well-respected member of this community, and we’re going to treat her granddaughter the same.”

  “You don’t need to make us sound like animals you’re trying to tame. We have excellent reputations,” Austin said.

  Their father gave Austin a pointed stare. “Excellent business reputations, yes.”

  Brody snorted in agreement.

  “But I’ll leave that conversation for another day. So, you boys ready to head over to the house?”

  Cooper nodded. “Yeah. I’ll meet you over there.”

  Their dad put his coffee down. “Great. Now, let’s all do our best and treat her like family. Your mother’s already talking about inviting her to Sunday night dinner. I’ll stop by Callie’s and pick us all up some muffins on my way.”

  They watched their father leave in silence. Cooper shrugged off the discomfort that came with the mention of inviting Emily to dinner and treating her like family. Their dad always stopped in to visit Callie at her coffee shop—they all did, every day at different times. Their father was still pretty fit, aside from the small paunch he’d put on in the last five years. He still had a full head of hair; it was all gray now, but it was there. He was active in the business, not doing much work, more just giving running commentary critiques of their work and then meeting with prospective clients. Every night he’d go home to their mother. Their parents had been married forty years and were still very much in love.

  Cooper stood, wanting to leave before he was forced to answer more questions about Emily Birmingham. “I’m outta here, too. See you two slackers at the house,” he said, not bothering to wait for a retort.