Room at the Inn (Novella): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (2 page)

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. Her 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.

So many errors in judgment attached to the same crooked smile. The same pair of hands. The same tall, lean, hard body.

When Carson came to Potter Falls, he just sort of … happened to her.

She would drop by to see Glory, only to discover he’d turned up unannounced for a visit, and her heart would stop at the sight of him sipping coffee at his mother’s kitchen table.

She would come out of the library and walk into him on his way up the steps, and he would wrap one arm around her to steady her as she tumbled into the past with a lurch of nostalgic lust.

His first time home after college, back when he was in the Army Corps of Engineers, he’d taken her to the movies, and she’d learned that it was possible to suffocate from yearning.

Julie had never been able to resist him—had in fact only quit sleeping with him because he’d stopped trying to get her to. Which was both a profound relief and a terrible blow to her pride.

“We’re acquaintances,” she said. A little more sharply than she meant to. “Old acquaintances. At best.”

The lip quirk turned into a grin, and she felt a flush creeping up her throat and into her cheeks. He was standing too close, smiling too warm. It pinged down through her, a little sonar burst of sexual homecoming. If he kissed her hello, his lips would still be cool even though his hands were hot. His hands were always hot.

And he always did this to her. One minute in his presence, and she was thinking about kissing him. Five minutes, and her mind’s eye would be screwing him on the kitchen table. Within an hour, she’d be spinning impossible fantasies again.

In a week, he would be gone.

She brushed past him to the check-in desk and fiddled with the guest book, flipping back through the pages as if she were looking for some essential bit of information she’d lost track of.

Such as what had happened to all her goddamn poise.

“I still work at the library part-time,” she said to the book.

She’d clocked forty-hour weeks for a decade before she had enough money saved up to buy the house, then spent three years fixing it up on evenings and weekends. She’d had it open for another three, and she loved everything about it. She loved cooking breakfast for paying customers and helping them discover the beautiful corner of the world she called home. She loved decorating for Christmas and volunteering at the hospital and keeping the Chamber of Commerce on its toes.

She loved living in Potter Falls.

She did not love Carson Vance. Not anymore. Not since he’d made it clear that her home was his prison.

Learn your lesson. Grow up
.

Julie flipped the book shut. “Right now, I’m closed.”

Carson stuck his hands in his coat pockets and watched her. Three beats. Four. Five.

“All right,” he said. “But if I’m going to walk back over to my dad’s, you think you could fortify me with a cup of coffee? Whatever you’ve got back in the kitchen smells good.”

“It’s dark roast. Ethiopian.”

“Perfect.”

She wanted to say no, it would not be perfect. He would not be permitted in her kitchen. She didn’t want to see him in there later, a ghost presence lingering and messing with her sanctuary.

Unfortunately, she’d spent too many years as one of his mother’s closest friends to deny Glory’s son a cup of coffee on such a cold day.

“Come on, then.”

She turned around and walked ahead of him, telling herself,
This is how it’s going to be this time. You’re the one who walks away
.

But she could feel his eyes on her all the way down the hall, and she kept waiting for his hands to land on her hips. To push her against the wall. To sneak inside her shirt, flatten over her stomach, roam over her breasts, and make her crazy.

She couldn’t let him stay.

She would never survive it.

Chapter Three

Someone had set off a powder bomb in the kitchen.

“Whoa,” Carson said.

Julie’s appearance had warned him she was doing some home-improvement work, but he hadn’t been prepared for this kind of mess. A ladder stood in the center of the room, rags and buckets littered the floor, and every surface was coated with white dust and flakes of paint.

“What are you up to in here?”

“I’m cleaning the ceiling with baking soda.”

“Are you just flinging it up there and hoping it’ll stick?”

“No, Carson.” She spoke to him like a schoolteacher might lecture an unruly eight-year-old. “I made a paste, and I’m scrubbing it into the cracks with a toothbrush.”

“Is it working?”

“Not really.”

He set his hands on his hips and considered the ceiling. Better than staring at Julie. She’d grown her wheat-colored hair out long and covered it up with an ugly bandana, but other than that, she was just how he remembered her.

Dangerous.

“What’s under all that paint?”

“Tin.” As she said it, he saw the answer for himself—one area that she’d managed to get cleaned off enough so he could spot the dull gray beneath. A single square foot surrounded by 199 more that were still coated in a century’s worth of blistering paint. Plus baking-soda paste.

“Pain in the ass of a job.”

“It’s going to be beautiful.”

“Yeah, but it’ll take you a few months, at least.”

She frowned. “I have a few weeks. I’m going to be full for Christmas, so it has to be done by then.”

“You’re off your rocker if you think you can do this in a couple weeks.”

He checked himself. It was a terrible habit, baiting Julie. He needed to knock it off.

She always messed him up this way, turning him into a version of himself even he couldn’t like. Not that she purposely transformed him into a giant walking penis when he got in her vicinity. It wasn’t her fault at all. It was just their past. More than that, it was
her
. He got edgy and turned on and irritable around Julie, and he always ended up doing the wrong thing.
Arguing with her. Putting his hands on her just to feel that soft skin and all the heat they created. Getting lost in her body and the sound and smell of her.

Part of it was how much he hated the way she treated him now—just like when they had met at Alfred University. Three hundred miles northwest of Manhattan, well up in the boonies, and yet she’d been so snooty, a real-life New York City rich girl sitting next to him in class. He’d burned to know if she was like that all the way through to her bones, or if it was just an act. When he finally did get her talking to him, they’d bickered. A lot. Half the time, he’d picked fights with her purely for the pleasure of watching her eyes brighten and her skin flush.

It turned out she was like that in bed, too. The contrast drove him crazy. For most of college, he split his time between studying and debauching Julie. Messing up her hair. Feeling her frantic fingers at his fly. Sinking into her while she moaned in his ear and whispered words no blushing virgin should have known. Words he’d taught her for the sheer pleasure of listening to them spill from her mouth as he thrust inside her.

Carson shook his head to clear it. Jesus. He’d just gotten here, and she was already frowning at him in that superior way she had, and he was already dying to fuck her.

Julie ignored his taunt and busied herself with pouring him a cup of coffee.

“Do you still take cream and sugar?”

“Just cream.”

She cleaned off a spot on the counter, set the mug and a container of half-and-half on it, and wiped off a barstool for him to sit on.

“Thank you.”

He felt strange, perched on the stool. Out of place in this domestic space that had so much of her in it. Deep cobalt tiles behind the countertops and orange hand towels. A red stand mixer. Pictures on the fridge of people he didn’t know, and one snapshot of his parents, laughing. He looked at her ceiling again, just to have somewhere to look.