Innkeeper's Daughter Read online

  There was no missing the interest in the boy’s eyes.

  “Hungry?” Wyatt asked.

  “Hung-gree,” Ricky confirmed.

  Wyatt selected one of the mini croissants Alex had brought him. “How’s this one?” he asked. “Looks like it’s ham and cheese. You like ham and cheese, Ricky?”

  Ricky stretched his arms out, wiggling his fingers.

  But as Wyatt started to hand over the goods, Alex deliberately turned her body so that the croissant was suddenly out of her nephew’s reach. Ricky made a high-pitched protest.

  Alex looked at him very deliberately and asked, “Ricky, what do you say when someone offers you something and you want it?” They’d been through this several times before. She was just trying to hammer the lesson home.

  Ricky appeared crestfallen, then looked at Wyatt and said in a very subdued voice, “Yes, peas.”

  The words, combined with the boy’s deadly earnest expression, made Wyatt laugh. “Well, I don’t see any peas on this plate, but here’s a sandwich for you.” He offered the mini croissant to the boy.

  Releasing his hold on the back of her neck and trusting Alex to hold him steady, Ricky leaned over and grabbed the small croissant with both hands. The second he had it, he bit into it with gusto.

  “Good!” Ricky declared, humming as he chewed.

  “You be sure to tell your mama that,” Alex said. “She’s been preparing all this since before you woke up, little man.”

  “By herself?” Wyatt queried.

  “No. Rosemary King came in at six this morning, bless her, and pitched right in.”

  “Rosemary King?” Wyatt repeated, a quizzical expression on his face. He was obviously trying to put a face to the name and for a moment, he was drawing a blank.

  Alex nodded, keeping an eye on Ricky as he made short work of the croissant, eating it with such unrestrained enthusiasm, you’d have thought that it was the first meal he’d had in over twenty-four hours.

  She loved seeing her nephew’s innocent reaction to things. At four, he wasn’t restricted by the dictates of the world around him. There were no pretenses. What you saw was what you got. If he liked something, you knew it, just as, if he didn’t like something, he didn’t hold that back, either.

  “You’ve seen her at the inn before,” she absently said to Wyatt. “Slender, in her late fifties, she’s been to dinner a few times when you and your dad were here. Rosemary has a modest little house in the area. She’s quiet, tends to blend into the background.”

  Wyatt laughed shortly. “Everyone does around you.”

  His comment caught her up short.

  What are you up to? she wondered, looking at him.

  On the surface, what he’d just said sounded like a compliment, but this was Wyatt and nothing was that simple if it involved him.

  She pinned him with a long, probing look. “That’s not a compliment, is it?”

  He had to admit, he did enjoy confusing Alex. “That’s an observation that you tend to drown everyone else out, not to mention make them fade into the background.”

  Still holding Ricky, she shifted him to her other side so she could get a clearer look at the enemy. “Are you saying I talk too much?” she challenged, her voice dangerously low.

  Wyatt laughed. “Well, you certainly don’t talk too little.”

  She studied him for a long moment, as if weighing whether or not to take offense, or to just roll with it.

  After a moment’s deliberation, Alex said, “Not bad, but you can do better.”

  “I’ll work on it,” he told her.

  Alex nodded. “You do that.” She kissed the boy in her arms. “Time to go find Andy and reunite you with your fun aunt.”

  “Why?” Ricky cried mournfully, twisting around so that he could see Wyatt more clearly. It was obvious that her nephew wanted to stay with him.

  This time, Alex didn’t shift to allow Ricky a better view.

  “No, Wyatt’s eating and then he has people to talk to. You can see him later.” She’d already begun walking away, as she asked over her shoulder, “Are you really going to finish writing your dad’s book on the history of the inn?”

  He’d already rescheduled his other commitments. As far as he was concerned, this took priority over everything else. “I told you, I gave my father my word that I would finish it for him.”

  “And you’ll be staying here until you’re finished?” she asked.

  Wyatt could sense her discomfort. He smiled broadly. In days gone by, he knew that his grin alone would have been enough to set her off. But over the past couple of days, he’d become acutely aware of a different, far more complex Alex than he’d ever thought existed.

  “Every single day until I finish it.”

  Alex groaned and rolled her eyes. “Just how far did your dad get with this book?”

  “From the notes I saw, I’d say a little short of halfway through.”

  She moaned. She could feel desperation nibbling away at her. “And there’s really a market for this?” she challenged.

  Wyatt had always been practical in his own way. Working on something that wouldn’t ultimately turn out to be profitable wasn’t his style. Maybe he could be reasoned out of this—or at least made to postpone it.

  “My dad’s old publisher seems to think so.”

  “Does my father have final approval?” she asked.

  Ricky had begun fidgeting and more than anything, she wanted to set the restless boy down, but she had a feeling he would take off like a shot and she didn’t feel up to running after her nephew. He was faster than he had a right to be.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Wyatt replied. Not wanting to raise his voice to be heard, he came closer. Ricky started leaning more and more in his direction. “My father never said anything to me about asking for your dad’s final approval.”

  “But you could show it to my dad once you’re finished with the first draft if you wanted to, right?”

  Wyatt inclined his head. “If I wanted to.”

  She narrowed her eyes. She’d been that way all of her life: exceedingly protective of her family and most especially of her father. Not that she thought Wyatt would knowingly write something that might hurt either her family’s reputation or her father, but then again, he could very well write something that might unexpectedly create negative repercussions for them.

  “Want to,” Alex instructed in a low, no-nonsense tone that a general might use when ordering recruits into battle.

  “If you’re trying to hypnotize me, it’s not working. And threatening me with bodily harm stopped being effective the summer I finally grew taller than you,” he reminded her.

  She hadn’t been contemplating bodily harm, but it did seem tempting. Granted she was by no means stronger than he was, but she was just as clever and the trick here would be to beat him to the punch, something that she’d managed to do a number of times in the past.

  “How about threatening you with the fact that it’s the right thing to do and you know it?”

  Putting the verbal sparring temporarily on hold, Wyatt looked at her, seemingly mystified. “Why would you think I wouldn’t do right by the inn—or your dad?”

  “Because when you come right down to it, I don’t trust you any further than I can throw you,” she informed him. “Just remember, a book on the inn isn’t a book about me, it’s about my family. People who have always been nice to you.”

  The smile that played on Wyatt’s lips was one she couldn’t begin to fathom. All she knew was that it seemed to target the pit of her stomach, creating an odd, pinched feeling dead center that refused to go away.

  “Except for you,” he said, his gaze all but pinning her to the spot.

  She raised her chin. “Like I said, this book isn’t about me.”

  The fact that he didn’t agree with her, but instead said nothing, made her uneasy. While she was confident Wyatt really did like her father and was fond of her sisters, she was also aware of the kind o
f relationship the two of them had had with each other over the years. There were times, she was willing to admit, when the one-upmanship got out of hand and though she wouldn’t have said it out loud, it was usually her fault.

  Would that affect the kind of book Wyatt wrote?

  He was a decent enough person, but getting this sort of revenge had to be tempting.

  She closed her eyes and blew out a breath. “This means I’m going to have to be nice to you until you finish writing this thing and get the galleys back from the publisher, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want you to strain anything, now,” he said.

  Too late, she thought.

  “Right,” she muttered. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Looking forward to it,” he responded as she walked away.

  Locating Andy, Alex entrusted Ricky and the care and feeding thereof to her youngest sister.

  “Missed you, guy,” Andy said, taking a firm hold of their nephew’s hand and setting him on the ground. He tugged a couple of times, testing if he could get free, then surrendered to the inevitable—for now. “Was he with you all this time?” she asked Alex.

  “Actually, most of the time he was with Wyatt.” As she spoke, Alex scanned the crowd, looking to see if Wyatt had gone on to connect with any of his father’s associates—and if so, who—purely out of innate curiosity, she told herself.

  Stevi joined them for a moment, walking in on the last sentence. “There’s a side of Wyatt I never thought I’d see,” she told her sisters.

  Alex wasn’t sure just where she was going with this. “You mean, grieving?”

  “No, I mean the way he was with our precious nephew here,” she explained, bending to kiss the top of Ricky’s head. The boy smiled up at her. “I was watching him earlier. Wyatt’s really good with kids.”

  “Well, he’s really good with Ricky, anyway,” Alex qualified. What was it about the man that had her wanting to say “black” if the word “white” was associated with him?

  Andy and Stevi exchanged confused looks. “And the difference being?” the latter asked.

  “He likes Dad. He gets along with you two. I know he likes Cris. So he has to be nice to Ricky since he’s Cris’s son, Dad’s grandson and your nephew.”

  “Not necessarily,” Stevi countered stubbornly. “He could just ignore him. A lot of people don’t know what to do around kids so they just ignore them, hoping the kids’ll just go away.”

  Alex sighed. She had a pretty good idea what her sister was up to. “You don’t have to try to build Wyatt up, Stevi, I’m being as nice to him as I possibly can, okay?”

  Andy grinned, shaking her head. “And it hurts, doesn’t it?”

  “You have no idea.” Alex pretended to clutch at the region where her heart was. “The pain is excruciating.”

  “Wait, let me go find a bullet for you to bite on,” Stevi replied.

  “Don’t,” Andy warned Stevi. “Knowing Alex, she’ll find a way to fire it at Wyatt.”

  “You two are giving me too much credit, you know that, don’t you?” Alex asked, looking from one sister to the other. “Besides, I don’t need bullets. There are other ways to exact revenge if that was what I was after.” The corners of her mouth curved ever so slightly, making her words sound more foreboding.

  “Alex,” Stevi warned. “You’re supposed to be on your best behavior, remember?” Leaning in toward her, she added quietly, “Especially during the reception, with all these people around.”

  “Me?” Alex asked innocently, splaying her hand across her chest.

  “Shocked?”

  “Didn’t you know? I’m always on my best behavior,” Alex said with a wink.

  “Heaven help us,” Stevi declared with a long, weary sigh.

  Alex smiled as she heard her sisters both groan behind her as she walked away.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ALEX HAD NO SOONER walked away from Andy and Stevi than she saw Dorothy making her way around the outer fringes of the reception very slowly. From where Alex was standing, the housekeeper appeared to be scanning the crowd, her round face stamped with a look of concern. Alex could read it even at a distance.

  Whatever it was, she didn’t want her father being bothered with it. He had enough to deal with just getting through this funeral. Though he tried to keep up appearances, she could see that Uncle Dan’s death had really hit him extremely hard. She didn’t want anything else heaped on his shoulders.

  The bite to eat she’d promised herself was going to have to wait a little longer, Alex decided.

  Turning, she headed away from the buffet tables, picking up her pace as she wove her way through the clusters of people who had come to say their final farewell to Uncle Dan.

  Raising her hand over her head as she got closer to the housekeeper, Alex called out her name and waved.

  Dorothy heard her before she saw her. Alex could see her cock her head.

  “Dorothy, over here!” Alex cried.

  Dorothy saw her and appeared immensely relieved. She quickly hurried over.

  Alex took hold of the woman’s hands when they reached each other. “You look like you just got a call from the IRS saying we forgot to pay our taxes for the last five years and they’re going to be taking the inn away from us.”

  The worst-case scenario took the older woman aback. “Well, it’s not that bad,” she admitted.

  Alex flashed the housekeeper a bright smile. “Good, then we’ll handle it, whatever it is. Now, what’s up?” she asked, slipping her arm around the woman’s wide shoulders.

  “It’s Ms. Carlyle,” she confided. At a spry ninety-five, Anne Josephine Carlyle was the inn’s oldest guest, hands down. She was also, as of a couple of years ago, their only resident guest. “She made several complaints to me about the noise coming from the reception and just now. She told me she would be in her room, packing. She said that if she wanted to endure this kind of noise, she would have just stayed in her old apartment complex instead of moving in here.”

  Alex suppressed a sigh. She needed to nip this in the bud before it got out of hand. She started heading toward the inn. “And you say she’s packing?”

  “That’s what she said when she left the dining room,” Dorothy told her as she quickened her pace to keep up. Alex hurried up the back steps to the veranda, heading for the inn’s back door. “I tried to talk to her, to explain about poor Mr. Dan, but she didn’t seem to want to listen. She completely shut me out,” Dorothy told her. “I tried, Miss Alex, I really did.”

  The fact that Dorothy felt she’d failed to change the older woman’s mind left her visibly disheartened.

  “I know you did,” Alex assured her as they walked in together. “This isn’t your fault, Dorothy. I guess when you turn ninety-five, you feel like you’ve earned the right to have a few things your way.”

  Anne Carlyle had been coming to the inn long before Alex’s father had taken over the management of the place from her late grandfather, Kent.

  Initially, the retired fifth-grade teacher spent a couple of weeks at the inn every summer. The rest of the time, she and a group of her friends, all teachers and all either widowed, divorced or never married, would select a different European country to visit and they would go on vacation there together.

  But as time passed and her group of friends grew smaller and smaller by attrition, Ms. Carlyle spent more and more of her summers at the inn. She believed the stretch of sand by the point reminded her a little of the Riviera.

  Eventually, as her mobility became an issue and the former avid hiker needed a cane, the elementary school teacher stopped traveling abroad altogether. Retirement and advanced age, plus a healthy inheritance left to her by her mother, eventually saw the woman setting up permanent residence at Ladera-by-the-Sea.

  Alex’s father had placed her in the Queen Mary Room. It was on the ground floor, part of the original inn, although it, along with the other original rooms, had been remodeled twice. And, most importantl
y, Anne Carlyle’s room was located just off the dining room, only requiring her to make a short walk for her meals.

  Arrangements had been made when she finally moved in for her monthly rate, lower than other guests, to include three meals. Alex’s father had managed to assuage the woman’s pride by saying she was eligible for a discount since she was staying at the inn year-round.

  Right now, she doubted Ms. Carlyle was actually going to carry out her threat and leave, but she knew the woman probably wanted to be talked into staying. This rather flimsy reason to vent her displeasure was more likely a ploy to get someone to tell her that she mattered.

  Reaching her door, Alex told Dorothy she would handle it from here.

  The housekeeper looked at her uncertainly. “You’re sure?” she asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” Alex assured her.

  Dorothy inclined her head, accepting the decision. “Call if you need me.”

  “Don’t I always?” Alex smiled.

  She waited until the housekeeper was gone before knocking quietly on the former teacher’s door.

  “Ms. Carlyle?” Alex raised her voice, aware that the woman was a little hard of hearing. “It’s Alex. May I come in, please? I’d like to talk with you.”

  In response, Alex heard shuffling on the other side of the door. But the petite woman didn’t open to her. “I’m busy packing. What do you want?”

  “It’s about the packing,” Alex acknowledged. “I’d like to apologize for all the noise today.”

  There was no reply. Alex stood there, silently counting off numbers in her head. She was going to give the woman to the count of one hundred before she tried to knock again.

  The door opened just as she reached eighty-three.

  The slender, gray-haired woman, who looked remarkably years younger than the date on her birth certificate, looked at her through rimless glasses. Her sharp, gray eyes missed nothing.

  “I find it very disturbing, you know,” Ms. Carlyle finally said in a crisp voice. “All this noise. I can’t hear myself think.”