Читать книгу Big Sky Reunion - Charlotte Carter - Страница 10

Monday morning, Melinda took her aunt to Manhattan for her three-times-weekly physical therapy appointment. When they got back home, it was time for lunch, followed by a much-needed nap for Aunt Martha.

Melinda gathered up a bucket, rolls of paper towels, plastic trash bags and cleaning supplies and carried them to the shop. The door opened much easier this time and she stepped inside.

A groan escaped her lips. Where to begin?

“Take your pick, Melinda Sue,” she said aloud. The whole shop had to be cleaned up eventually.

Leaving the door open to let some fresh air in, she walked over to the cash register beside a glass case that displayed yarn winders and bobbins.

She’d checked the cash drawer on Saturday and found less than twenty dollars in change. Tugging a plastic box out from beneath the register that was crammed with file folders, she squatted down to go through the records.

Invoices from three years ago were mixed with even older records. None were noted as paid. A handwritten ledger showed checks written from 2001 through most of 2006 and a bank balance that wasn’t worth writing home about. Hadn’t Martha paid any bills since then? Maybe she’d switched to a different bank account.

Blowing out a discouraged sigh, she made a cursory examination of the rest of the business records, then set the box aside. She’d have to talk to Martha about the bookkeeping. Her time while Martha napped would be better spent cleaning and tossing what wasn’t usable.

On her knees, she pulled everything out of the display case, set the items aside and used window cleaner on the neglected shelves and inside of the case. Years of grime darkened paper towels as one section of glass after another began to sparkle.

“Hello? Anybody here?”

Melinda started at the sound of Daniel’s familiar voice.

“The shop’s not open,” she called from behind the counter.

“Your door is.” His boots tramped across the wood floor until his long, jeans-clad legs materialized in front of the display case. “Hey, Goldilocks. Looks like you’re hard at work.”

“I am.” She considered asking him if he’d enjoyed his date with April, but thought better of it. Instead, she squirted window cleaner on the next section of glass.

“Is Aunt Martha planning to reopen the shop?”

“We’re thinking about it.” She swirled the glass cleaner around, blurring her view of his legs.

“That a fact?” he drawled, an arrogant grin in his voice. “Want some help?”

She lifted her head too fast, whacking it on the inside of the display case. She rubbed the back of her skull.

“No! I’m fine.” She looked up at him. Foolish woman! She should’ve known he’d be grinning at her, a wolfish grin, a grin that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made them flash with amusement.

“You got another one of those squirt bottles? I can do the outside of the case while you’re working on the inside.”

Trapped on the inside, he meant.

She wanted to tell him no, she didn’t have another bottle of window cleaner. But he was just clever enough to look over the display case, spot her spare bottle and see that she was lying.

She reached for the bottle and tossed it up and over the case, following that with a roll of paper towels. “There you go, Swagger. Do your best.”

“I intend to.”

An odd shimmer of unease slid down her back. What did he mean by that? And did she want to know?

Over the next few minutes, she kept her head down and her hand moving on the glass. At one point, her hand and his were only the thickness of two paper towels and the glass apart. His heat seemed to burn right through the transparent barrier to her palm.

She snatched her hand back. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead.

“I wouldn’t think Aunt Martha would be well enough to keep the shop open by herself,” Daniel commented in a casual tone.

“Probably not.”

“She going to hire someone to help?”

Melinda sat back on her haunches and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “If you must know, I’m going to manage the shop for her.”

“Yeah? You know enough about knitting to run this kind of operation?”

“I ran a very successful knitting shop in Pennsylvania until—” She clamped her mouth shut. She didn’t want to finish the sentence. Daniel had no need to know about Jason. She didn’t want his sympathy and didn’t want to discuss the subject. The depth of her loss, her failure, was far too painful.

“Then I bet your aunt is happy you’re staying in Potter Creek.” He took a final swipe at the outside of the display case. “So am I.”

She didn’t respond. She couldn’t. The sincerity in his lowered voice had nearly undone her. Her chin trembled. She tamped down the emotion welling in her chest as hard as she could and dug deep to find the protective shield that had kept her sane the past three years. A shield that kept the PTSD at bay most of the time.

She balled the damp paper towel in her fist. “Don’t feel you have to stick around on my account. I’m sure April would be happy to see you,” she said.

He laughed. A big, booming, masculine laugh that exploded from deep in his chest and bounced off the walls of the cluttered knitting shop.

Confusion knitted her brows. Why did he think her remark was so funny?

Standing, his grin unnerving her, he placed the glass cleaner and paper towel on the counter. “I’ll be sure to give April your regards.”

The rest of the week was a blur of taking Aunt Martha to physical therapy, scrubbing the shop clean and sorting yarn, creating bins of fifty-percent-off odd skeins and discarding others that had faded or become hopelessly tangled.

Invariably, sometime during the day Daniel showed up. Once he came with a bucket and a squeegee on a pole to clean the front window, inside and out.

Another day he came with a container of chili Arnie had made that he wanted taste-tested for the chili cook-off at the Potato Festival. Daniel stayed long enough to climb up a ladder to clean the ancient light fixtures and replace burned-out bulbs.

Aunt Martha and Melinda devoured the chili for dinner that night.

Melinda wasn’t sure what Daniel was trying to accomplish. She hadn’t given him any cause to think she was interested in him. On the contrary, she was often sharp with him. The fact that she’d begun to look forward to his arrival didn’t mean a thing.

Or so she told herself.

She didn’t want a relationship with anyone, certainly not with someone like Daniel, a consummate flirt and ladies’ man.

A man who had always made her heart beat faster.

By the following Monday, Melinda declared she’d scrubbed, cleaned and sorted all she could. Now she needed new, fresh stock, which would enable her to hold a grand reopening next Saturday. Her dream was to someday add needlepoint to the inventory, but not yet. She had to get the yarn sales on a solid footing first.

She was on her cell phone, having placed an order for yarn and other supplies with a Denver wholesaler, when Daniel strolled into the shop. She acknowledged him with a quick lift of her hand, palm out, sending a message that she didn’t want to be interrupted.

“I’m sure Aunt Martha’s Knitting and Notions has had an account with you for many years,” she said into the phone. “I’ve seen the invoices.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but that account has been inactive for a long time,” Jeff, the sales rep, replied.

“Well, then, let’s reactivate the account, shall we? We’re planning to reopen this Saturday and I need that merchandise. Please.” She used her sweetest, most persuasive voice to cajole the man on the other end of the line.

“To reactivate the account, I’ll need you to complete our credit forms and submit them. They’re online at our website. You can download them.”

Aware that Daniel was poking around the shop, flipping through pattern books, looking as relaxed as he would in a public library, Melinda gritted her teeth. “How long will it take to get them approved?”

“Two or three weeks is the usual time period.”

She groaned and dropped her head into her hand. “Let me explain again, Jeff. I want to reopen the shop this Saturday. That’s five days from now. I need the merchandise no later than Friday to stock the bins. I cannot wait two weeks for approval of credit.”

“It often takes three weeks, ma’am.”

Holding the phone away from her ear, and holding her temper in check, she looked up at the ceiling. She drew a steadying breath and brought the phone back to her ear.

“What do you suggest I do in the interim while you check our credit?”

“You could charge the merchandise to a personal credit card. We’d ship this afternoon and you’d have the delivery by Wednesday.”

“A personal credit card.” The words landed with a thud in her midsection. Since declaring bankruptcy, she’d been living on a cash basis. She didn’t want to run up any personal debt. The one credit card she possessed had a very low limit, which she’d almost exceeded buying the airline ticket to Bozeman and hadn’t paid that off yet. “I don’t have my card handy,” she hedged. “I’ll have to check with the shop owner.”

“I’d be happy to wait, ma’am.”

That wasn’t likely to help much. Aunt Martha seemed to be living on her Social Security, which was less than munificent. Assuming she had a credit card, Melinda doubted it had a high enough limit to cover the cost of the merchandise she’d ordered.

Daniel crossed the shop to the counter and handed her his credit card.

Gaping, she stared at the silver card embossed with Daniel’s name and O’Brien Ranch. She shook her head.

“Ma’am, are you still there?”

“Uh, hang on a minute, Jeff.” She covered the phone with her hand. “I can’t use your card, Daniel,” she whispered.

“Why not? You need the merchandise. When you get the shop open and doing business, you can pay me back.”

“I’m buying more than a thousand dollars’ worth of yarn and notions.”

He lifted his shoulders in an easy shrug. “That’s fine. Think of it as a loan.”

“I may not be able to pay you back right away.”

He touched her hair, twirling a finger through one of her curls. His lips curved ever so slightly with the hint of a smile. “We’ll work it out.”

Goose bumps sped down her spine and her knees went weak. She definitely shouldn’t let him do this. It wasn’t right for him to pay for what she couldn’t afford. But if she didn’t, how could she reopen the shop without a decent selection of yarn?

“Ma’am, did you want to call me back when you work something out?”

“No, I, uh…”

Daniel slipped the cell phone from her hand. “Hi, Jeff. I’m Daniel O’Brien, a friend of the shop owner. We’ll put the charges on my card. How does that sound?” He winked at Melinda.

While she stood staring at him dumbstruck, Daniel reeled off all the necessary information to charge his card over a thousand dollars.

When he finished, he handed the phone back to her. “You’re all set. Everything should arrive Wednesday and you’ll be ready for Saturday’s opening.”

“You shouldn’t have…” she stammered, her face flushing. “I mean, I shouldn’t have let you—”

“The proper response is, ‘Thank you, Daniel.’”

She closed her eyes to block out the intensity, the caring, she saw in his. Self-consciously, she fiddled with the same strand of hair that he’d twirled over his finger. “Thank you, Daniel.”

“Good girl. Now what have we got to do to get ready for Saturday?”

She stepped back, trying to think, trying to blot out the gratitude that was making her act stupid and jumbled her thoughts as completely as a kitten could unwind a ball of yarn. She didn’t deserve his kindness.

“I need to make up some flyers to post around town. A big sign for the shop’s window.” The gears in her brain that had stalled under Daniel’s determined assault began clicking again. “Place an ad in the newspaper. Get a reporter to cover the opening.”

“Sounds good. You get the flyers made and I’ll deliver them to the stores in town, get the owners to post them in their windows.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Sure I do. I need you to be a big success so I’ll get my money back.”

That sounded ever so logical except for one little problem: Melinda was pretty sure Daniel had a totally different agenda in mind.