Room at the Inn

“I don’t know. They’re being good about the leave. Family emergency.”

“But it’s got to end sometime. And then you take off again, because the world needs you.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You thought it.”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

The oven timer went off on the sweet rolls, which gave her an excuse to turn her back on him. She found a pot holder and opened the oven door, releasing the rich scent of cinnamon sugar and yeast. Homey, she’d always thought. Loving.

Her eyes filled with tears. She thought she made a difference, too. The kind of difference Glory had made. That the smell of sweet rolls mattered, and the fate of the factory building. The rescue of a stately mansion. Ordinary, everyday kindness.

He made her feel so small sometimes. Judged and found wanting. Diminished.

And he didn’t even know it.

She must not have been paying close enough attention to the oven, because the next thing she noticed was a burning smell, and the

n dark smoke and a yellow, flickering flame at the corner of the pot holder where she’d allowed it to touch the heating element.

“Aah!” Julie cried. She straightened abruptly and dropped it on top of the stove, then pushed the rack back in with her foot and slammed the oven door shut.

The whoosh of air pushed a tendril of smoke toward the ceiling and made the flame leap to life, four times as big.

She rushed to the sink, but he was already there, wetting a hand towel. He elbowed past her and dropped it over the pot holder to put it out.

She blinked. So much smoke. It had taken only a few seconds—how had the kitchen filled with smoke so fast? She reached over his shoulder and switched on the stove hood at high speed. The vent vibrated and rattled, magnifying the sound of the fan.

Carson turned around. His eyes scanned the ceiling.

“Why isn’t your smoke detector going off?”

“I don’t know. I—”

“When did you last test it? There’s enough smoke in here, it should be going off.” He stalked to the far window and flung it open, then did the same on the opposite wall. His face had gone dark and menacing. His movements were rough and jerky, not like him at all.

“I test it on a schedule. It was fine last time.”

She remembered the sweet rolls, grabbed another pot holder, and pulled them from the oven before they burned.

As soon as she’d set them down, his hands landed on her shoulders. He spun her around.

“It’s not fine now. The whole kitchen could’ve gone up in flames, and the fucking smoke detector wouldn’t have gone off.”

But that would never have happened. It was a pot holder. Not good, of course—she got that. But not a catastrophe, either.

Men got bent out of shape about this kind of stuff. Some protective male gene kicked in and turned them into assholes because they worried and didn’t know how else to express it.

But he was more than bent out of shape. He was furious.

“Why are you mad at me?”

“I’m not.”

“Carson, you are. It was an accident. I’m sorry I burned the pot holder, but jeez, don’t you think you might be overreacting? Just a little?”

He stalked away from her toward the window and braced his hands on the frame. “This house is a catastrophe. You’ve got 150-year-old wiring that’s going to short out in the middle of the night and start a fire, and you’re going to burn up in bed when the alarm doesn’t go off because you don’t have the sense to check and make sure it’s working.”