Room at the Inn
The statement hung in the air, suspended. Its subtext swelled and filled the space between them.
I’ll see your ten and raise you fifty.
“She’s fixed the place up real nice,” Martin added.
He sounded so casual, so damned neutral, the hair on the back of Carson’s neck stood up.
Overplaying his hand.
Martin wanted this—wanted him to go stay at Julie’s bed-and-breakfast so badly that he’d filled the upstairs bedroom with crap and refused to let Carson remove it.
Carson shoved the last corner of toast in his mouth and closed his eyes as a wave of unwelcome emotion crashed through him. Anger and unwillingness blended together in a kind of needy desperation that he remembered from adolescence, when it had beat in his bones every day he didn’t manage to get out of Potter Falls.
He took a deep breath and dismissed the feeling. Unimportant. Irrelevant.
A bed was a bed, and he needed one. It didn’t matter what his father hoped would happen after that.
Julie Long hadn’t been enough to keep him here sixteen years ago. She sure as hell couldn’t keep him now.
Chapter Two
It was something about the way he planted his feet.
Julie considered the problem as she traversed the hall from the kitchen to the lofty entryway. Her visitor stood next to the check-in desk, his body turned three-quarters away from her, arms crossed, two fingers tapping against his bicep. He had his shoes a bit more than shoulder-distance apart, his backbone perfectly vertical, but even so, everything about him seemed to have this tilt to it, a slight pitch forward as if any moment he might shift his weight to the balls of his feet and just … go.
Like he was made of pure energy, and it went against his nature to rest.
“Carson,” she said.
He turned toward her, pushing off his knit hat. His dark hair was all mashed down, the tip of his nose red from walking over here in the cold.
The bastard wasn’t even aging.
“What can I do for you?”
Glory would’ve fussed over him. The instant he crossed the threshold, his mother would have taken his coat and poured him coffee and set him down in the warmest corner of the front room. For anybody else, Julie would do the same. But he wasn’t anybody else.
She straightened her spine and located the bottomless reserve of poise she’d developed as a girl. The trick was not to care, not to let him throw her, and not to let him stay.
He studied her, brows drawing in over hazel eyes that seemed capable of reading all the thoughts and feelings she’d banished from her face. But he can’t, Julie reminded herself. That’s the whole point of the face.
Then came that lopsided smile that made her stomach flip over, and instead of answering her question, he closed the careful gap she’d left between them with two strides and extended his hand. “Jules. It’s been a while.”
She pressed her warm palm against his and wished fervently that someone had told her before she gave Carson Vance her virginity that she’d never again be able to shake his hand without having dangerous, carnal thoughts.
Mother of God, he had great hands.
“Three years,” she said.
He hadn’t come home for the funeral. Everyone in town talked about it for weeks afterward, but Julie wasn’t surprised. Carson coped with strong emotion by putting it at a distance. He’d loved his mother, so he’d weathered her death on the other side of the world.
Appropriate, if you were Carson. Ungrateful and disloyal for anybody else.
He frowned. “Surely not that long.”
“Last time you came home wasn’t too long after I bought this place. That makes it about three.”
In Potter Falls, every season had its own familiar cadence. Here, a year felt like a year. Three years felt like three. Only four hours north of Manhattan, where the landscape barely registered the weather, Potter Falls was a world apart.