The kids hung their heads.
“Tell Miss Harper you’re sorry.”
“Sorry,” they both echoed.
“Your sword is way too floppy,” Billy said a moment later. “I’ve got some better ones in my room if you ever want to borrow one. They won’t bend like that so you can really fight.”
I swallowed. “Thank you.”
Greyson was fully smiling now, but he put a hand to his mouth to cover it when he saw me looking.
“Are you still going to help daddy cook?” Molly asked. “And can I still have one of your pony toys?”
“I’ll have to dig through boxes to find those old toys, but I promise I’ll look today.” I decided to ignore the first question. Right now, I just wanted to be able to crawl into a dark corner and will myself to forget the past two minutes.
“Come on,” Greyson said, urging his kids toward my door.
“Did you put out the fire?” I asked.
He stopped in the doorway. “It was just a small fire.”
“Can she come help you make breakfast for us?” Billy asked. “She’s actually a good cook.”
“I don’t know if that’s the best idea,” I said. I wasn’t sure I was capable of being near this man without suffering a case of terminal embarrassment.
Greyson’s eyes fell below my waist, and he shook his head, looking back up suddenly as if he’d just realized where his gaze was. “I don’t think that would be a good idea, either.” He paused. “She’s cooking for the whole town tonight, remember? She’s got a busy day.”
I tried not to think about what that gaze of his had meant. Was he imagining me beneath my dress with no panties? Did he like what he imagined? The questions drove a spike of immediate warmth through me. I pressed my thighs together a little tighter. No. He was probably just thinking I was a weird, horny maniac.
I opened my mouth to tell them they could go when my cat, Goblin, came scurrying out from behind the couch. He was aggressively batting the dildo with his paws, moving it clearly into view from where I’d thrown it so all four of us could be reminded of my shame.
“Ohh,” Billy said. “It’s a cat toy.”
Greyson didn’t bother hiding his smile this time. “You could say that. Come on, kids. We’ve bothered Miss Harper enough for today.”
“Just Harper is okay,” I said. “You make me feel like an old woman when you call me that.”
“Twenty-three going on eighty, huh?” he asked.
So he remembered how old I’d told Billy I was. But that didn’t mean anything. Maybe he just paid close attention to people or had a good memory. “Are you guys coming tonight?”
“Yes,” Molly said confidently.
Greyson shrugged in her direction. “Sounds like we are.”
“See you then,” I said.
The look he gave me when our eyes met made my arm hairs stand up. It was just an innocent “goodbye,” but there was a shadow of something more in his eyes. It was gone as quickly as it came, but I knew I’d spent the next several days–weeks, even–trying to imagine what dark thoughts could make a man’s eyes glow like that.
9
GREYSON
I opened a filing cabinet in my grandfather’s office and found a few boxes of assorted chocolates. They were all empty except the coconut flavored candies. I sighed, looking around the room. Where the hell did he keep his actual documents? And what kind of animal thought it was okay to mix coconut flavored chocolate in with normal chocolate?
I’d decided I needed to have a very close look when I went to take my morning shower and discovered the water to the whole building had been shut off. I was oddly grateful that we didn’t have a single guest, but I needed to figure out what the hell was going on with the place.
Zack had taken Molly and Billy to look at his rehabilitation center because they hadn’t stopped begging since we got here yesterday. That gave me the morning to try to figure out what was going on with Gramps and his inn. The first problem was that nobody had tried to check in since we’d arrived. A little napkin math told me he’d need something like four guests per night on average just to break even.
I could already feel my brain turning over the possibilities. This was what I did, after all. Except in D.C. I worked from the corporate end of things. We managed a few hundred hotels across the country, and my branch helped absorb struggling hotels into the “Stay Inn” umbrella. We bought them out, redecorated, and found a way to supercharge their earnings. So I was regularly traveling to various locations around the country to assess. Before the divorce, I’d traveled even more. Now, I only took trips when Katie had the kids.
But nothing in all my travels was quite like Gramps and his inn. The places I saved were usually off the freeway. They had peeling wallpaper, mold, and no character. A place with this kind of unique charm had tons of potential, but Fairhope wasn’t exactly a tourist destination.