With This Kiss (9 page)

“You could live anywhere, couldn’t you, Sean?”

He certainly had the money and contacts to start a business anywhere. “Yes, I suppose I could.”

“Emerald Lake must seem so small compared to everywhere you’ve been.”

“It’s small,” he agreed, “but this part of the world is nice, too.”

“Even compared to Paris? Or Rome?”

“There are so many beautiful places that if you tried to rank them you’d go a little crazy.”

He could see the stars in her eyes as she tried to imagine all that beauty. It was obvious to him how badly she wanted to travel and see the world. So, then, why hadn’t she? He knew plenty of people who could barely scrape together the money for plane fare, but that hadn’t stopped them from traveling.

More questions were on the tip of his tongue but he was momentarily distracted by how beautiful she looked with the sun streaming in over her silky hair, her lips plump and soft from where she’d been biting them.

Upstairs in the bathroom he’d been schooling himself in how to proceed from here on out with Rebecca. He knew the right thing to do. Keep his distance. Don’t get any closer.

Which meant keeping the rest of his questions—ones that had nothing to do with Stu’s disappearance—to himself.

She put down her spoon and used a piece of bread to wipe clean her bowl before popping the bread into her mouth. She looked up and seemed startled to find him staring at her.

Her cheeks turning that lovely shade of pink he was liking far too much for either of their sakes, she quickly chewed and swallowed.

“I usually have much better table manners than that. Stu and I have known each other for so long, we’re pretty informal with each other. I guess I forgot for a moment that you and I have only just met.”

Something inside his chest grew warm at the knowledge
that she was comfortable with him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that kind of warmth.

“Actually,” he told her, “I think you’re onto something.” He grabbed the heel off the loaf and broke it in half, using it to clean his bowl just as she had.

Finally, she said, “You asked me at the beginning of lunch why I came to Emerald Lake and I don’t want you to think I make it a habit of not answering direct questions.”

To say that he was shocked to hear her actually admit to him that she wasn’t answering his questions about Stu was a major understatement.

He was floored.

Her eyes continued to hold his as she said, “The quick and dirty answer is that I needed a fresh start.”

“There are a lot of places you could have started over, rather than at an inn in the middle of the Adirondacks.”

“Sometimes it’s good to go where no one knows anything about you.”

“You knew Stu,” he reminded her.

“He’d told me about Emerald Lake for years and promised me if I ever came to visit that I wouldn’t want to leave. Maybe that’s what took me so long to finally come here. Maybe I was afraid to fall in love with some place that I couldn’t easily pick up and run from.”

Jesus, there she went again, saying things that most people wouldn’t dare say out loud. Heck, most people wouldn’t even admit something like that to themselves.

There were so many questions he still wanted to ask. But he knew better, knew that learning more about Rebecca would only draw him in deeper to the subtle web she clearly knew how to weave around people.

Yes, she was certainly good. He’d give her that. But no matter how genuine she seemed, how open and honest, Sean wouldn’t make the mistake of letting her weave a spell around him.

“Alice will be leaving soon. I should probably check on the front desk, make sure nothing has come up that she needs me to deal with before she leaves. I’m sure you have other things to take care of this afternoon.”

He got the picture. She wanted to get rid of him for a little while. And the truth was, he needed a break from her smile, from her fresh, sweet scent, from the way soft, silky pieces of hair had escaped her ponytail and were brushing against her chin.

Despite needing to remain on guard with her, he couldn’t deny that she was very good at her job.

“Thank you, Rebecca. You’ve taught me a lot today.”

Instead of accepting his compliment, she frowned. “Something tells me you already knew how to clean a toilet.” She bit her lip. “The truth is, I might have been a little bit upset with you earlier today. I shouldn’t have wasted so much of your time with cleaning the rooms.”

“I appreciate you telling me that, but you didn’t waste a single second of my time. I need to learn this inn from the ground up and that’s what you were showing me. Most people wouldn’t have the guts to hand me rubber gloves and a scrubber.”

She cleared their plates from the table and put them in the commercial dishwasher. “Let me know if you need anything else today. Otherwise, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He was looking forward to it far more than he should.

Fortunately, the one person guaranteed to help remind him to stay far, far away from the temptation that Rebecca
presented was likely waiting for his report on Stu’s whereabouts.

No doubt, dealing with his mother would be a fitting punishment for those few moments when he’d foolishly let himself enjoy being with Rebecca.

R
ebecca had been too close to Sean for too many hours. There shouldn’t have been anything exciting about bumping into each other as they made beds and vacuumed floors, but evidently even doing completely mundane tasks with him got her heart moving too fast.

She still couldn’t believe how good he’d been about doing whatever she had tasked him with. He hadn’t once acted too important for bathrooms or dusting. Even Stu had always complained about doing the cleaning on days when they were short staffed. But Sean had simply gotten to work and done a heck of a job. Maybe even a better job than she’d done, given how distracted she’d been by his nearness.

Okay, so she felt like a big coward for running, but how could she have stayed another second more without being able to take a full breath? She needed to clear her head. No, more than that, she needed to get it screwed back on straight.

Because the craziest thing of all was not so much that she could feel herself falling under his spell… but that
moment in the guest room when he’d seemed just as captivated by her. As if he was surprised by his feelings, but couldn’t help feeling them anyway.

Nearly at the front desk, Rebecca caught sight of herself in a hall mirror. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks were flushed, and her normally well-groomed hair looked like she’d been driving in a convertible with the top down all afternoon.

She must be crazy to think Sean was attracted to her, she thought as she pulled out her hair band and tried to quickly finger comb her hair back into some semblance of order. She didn’t have to see pictures of the women he dated to guess his type. Polished. Highly educated. Perfect.

Not that it mattered. Because even if he was attracted to her, even if Stu’s disappearance wasn’t hanging awkwardly between them, she still wouldn’t go near him with a ten-foot pole.

She knew darn well what her old MO would have been. Just like Andi had said, Sean’s mysteriousness, the hints of darkness she saw in his eyes, along with fact that he was drop-dead gorgeous, would have had her giving herself over to him, like a modern-day beauty to the beast, turning herself inside out to win his love.

To save him.

Only, all the while, she’d end up losing herself more and more. Until the day he’d decide he was done with her.

Rebecca knew all about losing, about trying to rebuild herself back up into something whole again. Hadn’t she already learned her lesson, darn it? Looking back into her relationship file told a clear-cut story. One darkly handsome, dangerously mysterious man after another. Stu had
been the only deviation to the picture-perfect pattern, but that was simply because she’d been trying to swing as far as she could in the opposite direction.

She couldn’t fall into the old trap again, couldn’t repeat the same cycle she knew by heart.

Especially not when one Murphy brother had already left her in the lurch.

No question about it, the next time she fell in love, it was going to be with a man who didn’t fall into either of those categories and was neither too sweet nor too mysterious. For once in her life, she was going to be strong and smart rather than letting her contrary heart lead the way.

Because, unfortunately, her heart hadn’t been right one single time.

“Sorry I’ve been gone all day, Alice,” she said as she approached the check-in desk.

“Don’t worry about it,” the young woman said with a smile. “Hey, did you do something to your hair? Or are you wearing different makeup?”

Rebecca stopped dead in her tracks a couple of feet from the desk. “No.” She dreaded having to ask but she said, “Why?”

Alice shrugged. “You just look so pretty today, that’s all.”

Rebecca knew the right thing to do was to say thank you. But she was terrified that Alice would put two and two together and realize what—
who—
was responsible for her flushed cheeks.

God, she could only imagine the gossip in town if people thought she was drooling over her ex-fiancé’s older brother.

“You know what? We’re pretty low on fire logs. If you don’t need me for anything else, I’ll head out and grab some before you go for the day.”

“It’s really cold out there today,” Alice said, “and we probably have enough logs to last the next couple of days.”

But Rebecca was already shoving her arms through the warmest down coat she had in the back office. After putting on her snow boots and grabbing her bag, she headed outside.

The crisp, cold air shocked the breath out of her for a moment. But instead of turning around and heading back into the warmth of the inn, she was glad for the way the cold woke her up. She couldn’t daydream about impossible happily-ever-afters in this kind of weather.

Crunching carefully through yesterday’s snow, she was just turning around the corner of the inn when she looked up and saw the most breathtakingly beautiful sight.

The sun was just starting to set over the snow-dusted lake, a dozen spectacular colors radiated down from the sky to the icy treetops on the mountains that surrounded Emerald Lake.

For all that she longed to see the seven wonders and smell the salty scent of the ocean as it crashed on coasts all over the world, Rebecca was home. Emerald Lake would always be the place her heart longed to come back to, a haven for her soul, for her dreams.

Sean being here, Stu being gone, didn’t change that. This small town, her friends, her career as innkeeper, they were all part of her new life.

One day she’d find the missing pieces: a husband who loved her as much as she loved him, and children to cuddle and play with and love the way that her parents loved her.

All would be well, she told herself as she started stacking wood in the small red wagon she kept by the pile.

Fortunately, she knew her own heart and mind this time. And she knew better than to go in and try and save Sean. Even though it went against every part of who she actually was, even if it ended up being the hardest thing she’d ever done, she was going to remain completely logical where Sean was concerned.

And for once, she was going to save her emotions for a man who was capable of returning them.

Besides, between running the inn and the festival, she had so much on her plate she couldn’t possibly waste any time mooning over some guy. Lord knew, over the years, she’d put more than enough energy into men who were incapable of ever loving her.

Expecting his mother to be home and his father to be off working one of his contracting jobs, Sean was surprised to find his father at the house, lifting a heavy sander out of his truck.

“I’ve got the other side, Dad.”

Neither of them said anything more until they’d carried the sander into the house and up the stairs to his parent’s bedroom. Most of the furniture was out of the room. Only the bed frame and mattresses were propped up against the wall.

After they put the sander down, his father said, “I could use an extra hand with the bed, too, if you don’t mind.”

When Sean was a kid, he and Stu had loved to play hide-and-seek in the huge king sleigh bed. His father had made the head-and footboards out of a birch tree he’d cut
down himself. Growing up, Sean had thought his father was the biggest, strongest man in the world.

Taking in his father’s gray hair and slightly gnarled knuckles, he wondered when that had changed. He hadn’t spent much time with his father since leaving for college and suddenly he realized it was one of the things he regretted most.

“I’m happy to help,” Sean told his father.

Moving the heavy frame was definitely a two-man job. No question about it, Sean thought as his muscles complained at the weight, he definitely had spent too much time behind a computer these past years.

As a boy growing up on Emerald Lake, he’d spent most of his time outside. Boston had plenty of nice spots, but nothing compared to his hometown.