Room at the Inn

Julie did something with her lips, a form of wordless disapproval. It took him a second to recognize it as an expression out of his mother’s arsenal.

Julie and Glory had spent fifteen years learning each other’s mannerisms. They’d grown close that first summer, when Carson brought Julie to Potter Falls—the summer his mother was finally giving in to diabetic renal failure and he’d dragged Julie home to help shore him up against the inevitable.

“That’s my mom’s face,” he said.

Her eyes widened, then brightened with a sudden grief that flooded him.

Stunned, he looked down at the countertop.

There was the honest reaction he’d wanted, slicing through all the awkward pretending they were doing and surprising them both.

Julie got a cloth from a drawer, wet it, and began wiping down the area around the sink. “If I have to put up with you,” she said lightly, “I might as well start channeling your mother.”

There was the old Julie.

And now Carson felt hollow and dark, unfit for company. It wasn’t his mother—he thought he’d about done all his grieving for her already. Her death hadn’t been a surprise.

No, he just got this way in Potter Falls. A physical unease built up in him, a harried bleakness, until he had to leave because … well, he didn’t know because why. Because it would get worse if he didn’t.

Ten days was longer than he’d stayed in a very long time.

Julie blustered around the kitchen, turning on a burner beneath a small saucepan full of water, cinnamon sticks, and orange peel. She’d gotten that from his mother, too.

A weird thought. A weird situation. But then, life was often that way—full of improbable occurrences and awkward human attachments. A girlfriend who donated a kidney to her boyfriend’s mother, then moved into his childhood home and released him to carry on with his life. A father who filled his house with trash to lure home the prodigal son.

Tricky business, navigating the minefield of his past.

Carson sipped the coffee experimentally. Delicious. He took a deeper swallow, savoring the heat that spread down his throat and fanned across his chest to settle in his belly. Julie swiped at another countertop, small and tidy as a sparrow in her baking-soda-spattered pants and sneakers. He caught himself staring at her ass and looked away, out the far window, down toward the frozen pond.

A cold, unwelcoming view. But even wrecked, Julie’s kitchen was warm

, and it smelled like home.

“Thanks for taking me in.”

“I’m pretending you’re the Virgin Mary.”

He blinked. She picked a bucket up off the floor.

“Bad weather? Room at the inn? Mary having a baby in the stable—any of this ring a bell?”

The comparison amused him, lightening the atmosphere. When she tried to hustle past him a second later to dump the water in the sink, he had to work to keep from flattening his hand over her stomach and holding her in place, just to look at her.

“Honey, I’m not the virgin anything.”

Her eyes dropped. “Don’t start that.”

It definitely wasn’t only him.

But he wouldn’t do anything about it. Julie was a trap. Worse, she was his father’s trap.

Carson wasn’t getting caught.

Chapter Four

Bruce smiled when Carson walked through the door of the hardware store. “Nephew!”

“Uncle!” he shouted. The customary reply. They’d been doing it since Dad started bringing him to the store, probably around the time Carson was weaned.