Doing It Over (A Most Likely to Novel Book 1) (30 page)

Jo turned on her lights, filled the night air with sirens. “I’m not taking any chances.”

Melanie shot out of bed with the first pounding on the door.

She slammed her hand against the side of the bed to find the light switch, and clicked it several times before remembering that the power had gone out hours before. From the sound of the rain outside, it wasn’t back on.

Footsteps in the hall accompanied Wyatt’s voice. “I think it’s Jo. Her squad car is in the drive with the lights on.” He kept his voice low to avoid waking Hope. Or more importantly, the tiny, four-legged barking machine that had finally stopped yipping a couple of hours before. Between the events of the day, the rain, the power outage, and the new addition to the family, Melanie wasn’t going far from Hope’s room.

Sure enough, Jo pounded on the front door one too many times and Sir Knight started to bark from inside Hope’s closed door.

Melanie tossed on a bathrobe and checked Hope’s room.

On the bed, Sir Knight took up residence. Already the room started to smell like wet puppy.

“What is it, Mommy?”

“I don’t know, honey. Auntie Jo is here. Just go back to sleep.”

Sir Knight barked.

“You, too.”

Hope placed her unbroken arm on the dog and quieted him down.

Miss Gina met Melanie in the hall with a flashlight. “What’s all the fuss?”

They both walked down the front stairway to find Jo and Agent Burton saturated and talking with Wyatt.

When Melanie and Miss Gina joined them, they went silent. “What is it?”

Jo glanced up the stairs. “Is Hope okay?”

“Attempting to sleep with a puppy pouncing on her.”

There was relief in Jo’s stance.

“Let’s go sit down.”

That was never good. “Jo? Cut the crap, what’s going on?”

“It’s Nathan, Mel . . . we, ah, we found his car off the side of the road.”

Melanie knew she was half-asleep, but it was the next words from Jo’s mouth that woke Mel up.

“He’s dead, Mel.”

She placed a hand over her mouth. “Oh, God.” Her stomach lurched and her head started to spin. “I need to sit down.”

Wyatt was there, his arm around her waist as they all moved into the sitting room.

Miss Gina moved around and twisted on a couple of vintage oil lights.

Dead? She felt herself start to rock. Guilt for wishing he’d just jump off a cliff started to wiggle inside with the thought of him gone. Her eyes started to swell with emotion. Much as she disliked the man, hated him even, death wasn’t really an option. “You’re sure it was him?”

Jo cringed. “I saw him.”

A numbness rolled over her, the reality that her daughter would now grow up without her father sank in.

“There will be a lengthy investigation,” Agent Burton told her. “We need to rule out suicide.”

Melanie shook her pounding head. “He wouldn’t have had the stomach for that.”

“Told you,” Jo said to the agent.

“So it was an accident?” Miss Gina asked.

When Jo and Agent Burton didn’t respond quickly, the three of them stared.

“If not an accident, then . . .”

Rain started to pour outside, giving the silent room a level of background noise that hummed.

“We need to rule out homicide, too.”

It took a few minutes for Jo and Agent Burton to explain their theory, and their haste to return to the inn that night to make sure everything was all right.

“If what you say is true, you think Lewis is still close by.”

“We have to assume he is.”

The room lit with a splash of light, and a few seconds later shook with the sound of thunder.

Sir Knight protested from Hope’s room upstairs.

Ruther watched as the sheriff and the Fed walked into the house.

Picking the lock on the back door was elementary level breaking and entering. Old houses like this littered the countryside where he grew up, making his ease of entry absolute. It helped that as a guest at the inn, posing as Patrick Lewis, he’d practiced picking the lock to ensure his entry at a later time.

The back route to the upper floors invited him. Voices from the parlor indicated the players he expected. When he heard his alias, he stopped and listened. He heard Lewis, and homicide. His palms itched. Getting rid of Stone had the blood in his veins pounding. The image of a tiny blonde with perfect skin and innocent eyes blurred his vision and had him standing on the back stairs of the inn.

He took the stairs slowly, even though the rain drowned out the squeaky steps.

The closer he moved toward the room, the more he felt alive.

Outside her bedroom door, Ruther took a deep breath.

When lightning hit, he opened it quickly as thunder shook the house.

The sight and sound of a dog stripped the smile from his face.

When the barking didn’t stop, Wyatt stood to check on the puppy. “I’ll be right back.”

Melanie offered a tiny smile she didn’t feel as he walked from the room. “I can’t believe he’s dead. I’m . . . jeez, I don’t know what I am.”

Miss Gina patted her knee. “You cared for him once. It’s okay to feel sad.”

Melanie glanced at the candlelit face of her friend. “Hope. What am I going to tell her?”

“Damn it!” Wyatt’s voice from upstairs had everyone on their feet. “Jo!”

Sir Knight was barking above his voice.

“Hope isn’t in here.”

Melanie hardly registered Agent Burton removing a gun from behind her back before Mel jumped to her feet and ran toward the stairs.

Melanie climbed over Jo to look inside Hope’s room.

The window was closed; the dog ran in circles before darting out from under their legs toward the door.

Don’t panic . . . don’t panic.
“Hope?”

“She was just here.”

Sir Knight barked obsessively toward the back stairway that led to the kitchen and back door. They heard a loud thud and rushed to the noise. There they shone a flashlight toward the narrow space and paused.

The sight of Hope, standing at the top of the stairs, her little dog running up and down the back steps, nipping at the edges of her daughter’s nightgown, would sit with Melanie for years to come.

“Mommy?” Hope’s tiny voice called to her.

“Sheriff?” Agent Burton called from the bottom of the stairs.

“What are you doing out here, sweetie?” Melanie reached her daughter and knelt.

Hope all but jumped into Melanie’s arms, and that’s when she noticed the moaning from a man at the bottom of the steps.

Jo pushed past them and none too gently helped Agent Burton cuff the man.

“Bloody dog,” she heard him saying over and over again.

Melanie picked Hope up and took her away from the scene going on below. Melanie placed her in the center of her bed and let the dog jump up onto her lap. After lighting every candle in the room, she took stock of her daughter.

She was shaking like a leaf in the wind and hugging the puppy within an inch of its life. “Sir Knight saved me, Mommy. He bit the queen and I pushed her really hard.”

Melanie placed her daughter in her lap and rocked her until all the shaking went away.

EPILOGUE

It took Wyatt a week before he moved his stuff back to his house. Even then, he didn’t leave the Bartlett girls’ sight for very long. It helped that he was laying the foundation to the new guest house and needed to be on the property during most of the daylight hours.

Lewis was in custody, wearing orange and doing his best to avoid extradition. His crimes in the UK superseded those in the past few months in Oregon. As the ends of the case tied up, they did find a money trail from Nathan to Lewis. And Ty had no problem calling Nathan out even before he found out the man was dead.

Melanie didn’t attend Nathan’s funeral. Wyatt could see the doubt in her decision until after it was over. Then she seemed to come to terms with the man and their combined past.

It was Hope that shocked everyone. Two days after Lewis had attempted to take her from her room, she tossed all her fairy tale books in the trash. More surprising, not one of them asked her why she did it.

They all understood perfectly.

Summer was fading into fall when Wyatt finally asked Miss Gina the question everyone wanted to know. “So when are you going to open for business again?”

She pointed across the lawn. “When are you going to get that house built?”

“There’s a correlation?”

Miss Gina shrugged her shoulders and went back into the house.

One particularly breezy afternoon, Wyatt sent the small crew he brought in for the framing home early for the weekend.

Sir Knight barked from inside the rough framing of the house, which told Wyatt that Hope was close by. Sure enough, he found her climbing between the studs, her dog barking at her feet.

“What are you doing, young lady?”

“Climbing.”

“I can see that.” He swiped her off the wall and placed her on her feet. “Your arm just got out of the cast, remember the doctor told you no climbing trees until Halloween?”

“Well the doctor isn’t here, and I feel fine.”

She started to climb again, and he took her by the waist and set her back down. “Enough.”

Her chin came out in defiance. “You can’t tell me what to do. You’re just my mom’s boyfriend. You’re not my dad.”

Her words stung, but he used them anyway. “One day I’m going to be your dad, and you’ll eat those words, princess.”

Hope lowered her defiant little chin and narrowed her eyes. “Really?”

Considering he couldn’t leave Melanie and Hope’s side for a night without texting Mel until midnight and finding an excuse to come over daily . . . yeah, it was safe to say he was in for the long haul.

“Yeah, so don’t make me spank you.”

Hope made a perfect little O with her lips. “You won’t do that.”

“You’re right.” He snatched her around the waist and started to tickle her. “I have much better ways to punish disrespectful little girls.”

Sir Knight barked and ran in circles around them for the few minutes Hope giggled in her attempts to get away. She cried “uncle” before the two of them ran off.

When Wyatt turned back to his work, he saw Melanie standing in the soon to be doorway, her arm leaning against the frame. How long had she been standing there?

“Hey, darlin’.” He moved in for a kiss, didn’t linger long. The fact she never unfolded her arms told him she had something on her mind.

“Hey.”

“What brings you out here?”

“Do I need an excuse to see my
boyfriend
?”

He chuckled and turned away. Oh, she’d definitely heard his conversation with Hope. How to play this?

“Is there something you need to say to me?” she asked, not moving.

“Nope, not really. Did you have something on your mind?”

She pushed off the two-by-four. “Anything you wanna ask me?”

“Yeah.” He pointed to the drill behind her. “Can you hand me that?”

She lowered her hands from her hips, grabbed the drill, and thrust it into his hands.

Pretending disbelief, he looked at the drill, then her. “Did I miss something? Why are you mad?”

When she let go of the drill, he nearly dropped it. “You’re infuriating sometimes. You know that?”

She twisted to leave and he caught her hand. “You’re adorable when you’re angry.”

Melanie actually growled at him.

Any minute she would stomp her foot the way her daughter did. Instead of waiting for it, he leaned in and kissed her. “I love you when you’re angry.”

“Whoa . . . what?”

He’d never said the words aloud and knew they sank in slowly. “Yeah, the way your eyes crinkle right here.” He tapped the space between her eyes. “The way you glare with that attempt at a stink eye.” He squinted his left eye and not the right. “I love you when you’re angry.”

“When I’m angry?” She did the stink eye thing, and he was hard-pressed not to laugh at her.

“And when you’re laughing. Like when I’m tickling you or when you’re watching TV and talking to it. I love you then, too.”

She was starting to catch on and folded her arms across her chest. “So you love me when I’m angry, and when I’m laughing?”

“And when you’re doing that thing you’re doing with your arms right now. That’s pretty adorable, you have to admit.”

She looked down at herself.

“And when I’m making love to you. That noise you make when I’m making you—”

He didn’t finish before she grabbed him by his shirt and kissed him hard.

Wyatt bent his knees and lifted her off her feet. She took his lead and wrapped her legs around his waist, laughing into their kiss. “I love you, Melanie.”

“You picked a funny time to tell me.”

She kissed him again. This time when she pulled away, an expectant look crossed over her face.

“What?”

There was that stink eye was again.

He laughed.

“One day,” he started to say . . . “One day, that isn’t today, I’m going to ask you to marry me.”

Her stink eye faded.

“And on that day, you’re going to say yes.”

She bit her bottom lip. “Am I?”

“Yes, you are.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because you love me.”

She made herself comfortable in his arms as he placed her back up against the partial wall. “How do you know I love you?”

“You talk in your sleep.”

The stink eye made another appearance.

“Well, I could say no.”

He kissed her briefly. “You won’t.”

“You’re so sure of yourself.”

“Yeah. A little cocky. But I happen to know you came back to River Bend for a do-over. And that do-over is with me.”

She smiled, tilted her head to the side, and kissed him again.

When he finally let her back on her feet, her cheeks were flushed and he told her he loved that part, too.

He swatted her butt as she turned to leave. “Now get out of here so I can get this done.”

Melanie swatted him back and kissed him briefly. Then against his lips she told him what he already knew. “I love you back.”