Читать книгу Hideaway Hero - Kathleen O'Brien - Страница 5

This Valentine’s Day was starting out colder than usual—well below forty degrees at midnight, darn near flirting with freezing. When Gabe went out to replace a beam of rotten wood at the top of the grape arbor, the full moon had risen, a cold, white wafer in the starry black sky. From his perch, he could see its reflection lying on the bay like a crust of ice.

He turned away from the sight and shifted the hammer in his gloved hand, ignoring the familiar twinge in his bad shoulder. He forced his focus back on his work. Tomorrow was an important day, the day that could save his business from bankruptcy, and he was already behind schedule. If he allowed his gaze to keep drifting to the bay, the repair to the beam would take twice as long as it should.

For ten years, ever since his driven, upwardly mobile life had exploded and left him at rock bottom, he’d worked hard to develop an immunity to stress. Even when he bought the Hideaway, he hadn’t allowed himself to invest too deeply in it—emotionally, at least. Succeed or fail, he told himself, it didn’t matter. Instead of always climbing, with his eye on the next dollar or the next score, he tried to appreciate the simple things. Like a crisp pear, or a smart dog. Or an icy Valentine’s moon.

But somewhere along the way, he’d started to care about the Hideaway. Really care. The hotel and its staff had become his heart, and now that he was in danger of losing it, he felt all the old passion and ambition boiling to the surface.

Tomorrow a woman from Bay Beauty magazine was coming to do a feature spread on his low-profile bed-and-breakfast, and to ensure the Hideaway stayed in business he needed to impress her. And he had to prevent her from pursuing the angle she’d hinted she might want to use—the sexy innkeeper and his bevy of female guests.

Not just because it would make him, and his inn, look sleazy and ridiculous. The real problem was that it was a dangerously short trip from “hunky hotelier”to the ugliness buried in Gabe’s past.

Which meant he’d have to keep a strictly professional distance from all his guests this week.

Including Greta.

He gripped the hammer tightly and shook his head. Could the timing be any worse? This was the first year Greta would be staying alone. And he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

“Hey, gorgeous. Are you going to stay up there all night?”

He peered over the edge of the arbor. The voice had come from the pool, back toward the main building, and it was decidedly female.

He kept the pool light on until three, since many of his guests liked moonlit dips in its heated waters, so as he peered in the direction of the pool, the glowing turquoise rectangle blinded him for a minute. But after a few seconds, he made out the body stretched across a cushioned lounger. A curvy body—but oddly…well, hairy.

She looked like a long, undulating…ferret.

He squinted, then groaned. Not ferret. Mink. Above the ankle-length mink coat, the platinum-blond tresses helped him put a name to the body. Katie Marchada. Bay-view suite, second floor west.

Where her twelve-year-old son and her husband were undoubtedly sound asleep right now.

Damn it. The truth was, the Bay Beauty reporter had a point. He did have a lot of female guests—a lot of lonely women who enjoyed getting a few days of TLC from a handy, attractive guy like Gabe.

Some of them wanted a lot more than that, though, and it wasn’t always easy to convince them that simple TLC would actually make them happier in the long run.

And something told him it would be extra difficult to convince Katie Marchada of that. He’d had a rotten sense about this woman from the minute she checked in. It hadn’t taken a rocket scientist to interpret the way she twirled the shiny end of one platinum curl while she scanned Gabe from head to toe.

“So are you coming down?”She shifted, the glossy fur catching the moonlight. “Because a girl could freeze out here, you know.”

Maybe not mink, after all. More like cougar.

He thanked his lucky stars the reporter wasn’t on-site yet. What a great photo this would make for the Bay Beauty magazine spread! The cornered hunter run up a tree by the hungry predator.

He stuck the hammer into his belt like a gun and stepped onto the ladder with a sigh. His to-do list was already long enough without adding pest control to his chores.

No choice, though. Somehow, without wounding her self-esteem, he had to maneuver her back into her room before her husband woke up.

And before he found out what, if anything, she had on under that coat.

As his foot hit the ground, the perfect idea came to him. “I’m sorry you can’t sleep,”he said as he picked up his tool bag and headed her way across the pool deck. “But I’m actually glad to see you.”

“Ditto,”she said, her eyes half closed and a smile like the Cheshire cat playing on her full lips.

“I don’t know if you heard about the magazine reporter coming tomorrow.”He didn’t wait for an answer. “But just my luck—the garbage disposal chose tonight to go kaput. I could really use someone to help me clear out the gunk.”

Her eyes widened suddenly. Somehow, he managed not to laugh.

“Well, I’d love to, of course I would.”She licked her lips nervously. “But if I were gone that long, my husband might—”

As she fumbled her way through her excuses, Gabe could hardly bring himself to pay attention. All he could think was…

Greta would have said yes.

“What’s wrong with me?”

The face in the mirror repeated Greta’s question back to her, like some annoying elementary school monkey-see-monkey-do game. As she lifted her hair and piled it on her head, the woman in the mirror did the same with her own dark red hair—which, in all honesty, seriously needed brushing. Greta stuck out her tongue, and the mirror woman did the same.

“This is not a joke. He dumped me in a card. And he didn’t even write the card himself. He dictated it to the florist. What’s wrong with me?”

The woman in the mirror just blinked stupidly.

About half an hour ago, Greta had realized that opening the bottle of champagne and drinking two-thirds of it had been a mistake. Especially with only strawberries and cream in her stomach to absorb the alcohol.

But hey. No use crying over spilled milk.

Spilled champagne.

Whatever.

She sat on the big canopied bed, cross-legged, wearing nothing but her underclothes, a slip and the beautiful green scarf she’d bought herself after last week’s triumphant closing. Frivolous, her father would have said about the purchase, if she’d mentioned it to him. Plow the money back into the business, and you’ll have time for self-indulgence later.

“Well, I needed it now,”she told him, or at least an imaginary version of him. “Later I’ll be a dried-up, lonely spinster, and no one will care that I absolutely rock this scarf.”

The woman in the mirror rolled her eyes and chose that moment to speak. “Well, no one cares now, either. I don’t see anyone else in this bed. Do you?”

To her horror, her eyes started to glisten. She put her hands up to her face, hard, as if they could form a dam to hold the tears in. She wasn’t going to cry over Franklin Marks. She wasn’t going to cry over anything or anyone.

And not because, for as long as she could remember, her father had always called weeping a form of cowardice. Your mother died bringing you into this world, he’d say coldly. And you’re going to repay her with whining?

She wasn’t going to cry because…

Because it was ridiculous. She hadn’t even loved Franklin.

And because suddenly she felt a lot more like getting sick than crying. She flattened her hands against her stomach, groaning. She needed food. She hadn’t eaten all day…except for the strawberries.