Chapter 6 Never Trust a Man with a Cleft Chin
Never Trust a Man with a Cleft Chin
That night, Lainey couldn’t sleep. To be fair, Lainey often couldn’t sleep. Her bedbound days had a tendency to throw off her body’s circadian rhythm.
You have to take your pills every day. Like, in a row, Bree had lectured her on more than one occasion. Dr. Sapkin said they’d be “life-changing” if you took them as prescribed.
Unfortunately for Lainey, she knew this to be true.
For one glorious month, she’d cobbled together a mix of free samples and a coupon for a two-week supply and experienced these “life-changing” effects as described.
It didn’t fix everything. They weren’t magic.
She still had migraines, but they weren’t as severe and they weren’t nearly as frequent.
That right there was the thing that would change her life—the frequency.
Fewer days trapped under her covers, blocking out the light, and trying desperately not to vomit could be the difference between holding down a normal job or carrying on as she had been.
Which, she had to admit, was a little threadbare.
And tonight, the dream of a different life—one that wasn’t controlled by pain—was keeping her up. Elliot’s proposal was truly unhinged, but it was also the first time in ages she’d believed things could actually change.
Lainey got out of bed and threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, realizing only when she’d made it to her car that she was severely underdressed for the crisp spring night air. It didn’t matter. She was doing. She was moving. She was taking control of the situation.
It was a bit after midnight, which honestly wasn’t so bad, considering.
She drove to the bed and breakfast where Elliot had mentioned he was staying.
His truck was parked in the number four spot, so she tried the fourth room first, praying that the Lodge B&B operated under an exacting organizational structure as she banged the tiny cast-iron door knocker at the top of the stairwell.
Relief swelled in her chest at Elliot’s groggy baritone calling out “I’ll be right there” through the wall.
“Lainey?”
He opened the door to reveal a rumpled version of the large, buttoned-up man she’d come to know and vaguely tolerate.
Going by his mussed hair and half-lidded eyes, he’d clearly been sleeping and had thrown on a Columbia University sweatshirt over his supposed bedtime uniform of boxer briefs and nothing else.
“Is this a dream?” he asked, squinting at her like she was sunlight shining into his eyes.
“Do you dream about me, Hodges?”
“Nightmares.” He pushed his glasses up his nose, sounding a breath more awake than he had before. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?”
Lainey didn’t answer. Instead, she stepped inside his room and shut the door behind her. Only the bedside lamp was lit. Her skin buzzed with adrenaline.
“What’s happening right now?” he asked, moving to the side.
His body loomed over her, the clean, crisp scent of his sweatshirt competing with the oily aroma of—the room came into focus—what she was now realizing was shelves upon shelves of cast-iron pans.
“What’s with the decor?” she inquired.
His yawn was comically wide and fully disarming. “It’s Lodge themed. Like the cookware.”
“Really?” Her eyes widened. “I did not expect that.”
“Why are you in my room at”—he checked the clock—“nearly one a.m.?” he repeated, more impatient this time.
The room was so quiet and glowing faintly in the nighttime hush.
She hadn’t imagined that this interaction would feel so intimate.
That he’d be staring at her with such curious intensity, like she were a wild creature who’d wandered up to his bed.
Or that he’d be standing so close, or that his sleepy warmth would radiate off him in waves.
He looked so undone. His face. His hair.
She was overcome with the impulse to put him back together.
She sidestepped out of his eyeline into the safety of a bookcase filled with black dutch ovens.
“I’ve given more thought to your proposal.”
“Oh?” He moved to sit at the edge of the bed, leaning back with folded arms and legs outstretched, forcing her backward a step. The lamplight cast his features in stark relief, sharpening his jaw, his cheekbones, that damn chin.
She blinked her eyes shut, willing the chin out of her mind. “So we’d be married. Legally,” she reasoned out.
He nodded, his eyes never leaving her. As though she might bite. “I’ve come to understand that’s how marriage works.”
“What would you get out of this arrangement?” she asked, ready for the other, more burdensome shoe to drop. Not that marrying him wasn’t the most burdensome thing possible, but if she was going to enter into a transactional marriage, she wanted to know what his side of the bargain looked like.
“You’d let me rent out Forest’s Bridge for my resort.”
She laughed. “Now, why would I do that when I don’t even want Larry’s architecture nerds peeping through my windows?”
“I could stop that. I own the property, remember? I could put up a privacy fence. The only people around your house would be our paying customers.”
“Don’t you mean your customers?”
“Ours. You and I would split the revenue for the whole summer. I’ll save my share to fix up the rest of the resort, and with your half, you could afford to pull back on a couple of side hustles and focus on your…tree sculptures? I’m still not sure what it is you do exactly.”
Lainey could barely contain her eye roll. “Okay, so the summer ends and then what?”
“We’ll get divorced, you’ll get your house back, and I’ll have a mostly operational resort that won’t have the cachet of a Groff property, but at least I’ll have a way out of this financial hole.”
“But you don’t trust me,” Lainey said, slightly baffled. It was the one thing she knew about this man. So why would he, of all people, suggest that they join forces to commit health-care fraud? “You think I’m a con woman who can’t remember names.”
He stood up from the bed, looking down at her through his eyelashes behind his wire frames. “I know you know my name, Lainey.” He leaned down closer, crowding every pot and pan in the room out of her vision. Her eyes blurred at the edges, even her own body a traitor to the conspiracy.
“Okay…What about the con-woman part?” she reminded him. And herself.
“Look.” He let out a long breath. “It’s business. You have something I want, and I have something you need. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. And you’re clearly committed to living in Forest’s Bridge forever, so—”
“I don’t want to live there forever,” she interjected, her mouth gaping.
He reared back. This clearly wasn’t something he’d expected her to say. “Then why won’t you leave?”
“You haven’t exactly made an offer to buy the place from me.”
“I can’t buy real estate right now. Do you understand how deep in debt my uncle left me?”
She poked his chest. “Yes, you’ve suggested something to that effect.”
He swiped his glasses off his face with one hand and massaged his forehead with the other, considering their dilemma. Lainey looked around—suitcase bursting with folded shirts, jackets hanging neatly on hooks—waiting patiently until he appeared to come to some conclusion.
He put his glasses back on. “Okay. You can’t sell the house to anyone else, right?”
“Because of you.”
“Because I own the land,” he corrected. “But you want to sell, right?”
“I mean, when I thought the house wasn’t worth anything and I had no money and nowhere else to live, I wasn’t desperate to sell, but now…”
If the house was worth something, Lainey could leave.
She could leave Timber Creek. Wisconsin, even!
She could do…well, she wasn’t sure what she’d do, but she wouldn’t be living hand-to-mouth anymore.
For the first time in her life, she’d have the time and space to want something.
She’d have decent health care. She’d have the money to set Gran up comfortably.
She could take her medication as prescribed and work a steady job or take art classes or both.
She thought back to her conversation with Bree at the VFW—her Sliding Doors moment.
For the first time in six years, she’d be able to buy a plane ticket to somewhere in France without picturing her bank account laughing at her in a haughty, francophone manner.
That kind of money could buy her freedom.
It could buy her access to a place where she could have affordable health care without having to stay married to her enemy.
“What if I bought the house from you?” Elliot asked.
Her eyes narrowed. “I thought you couldn’t afford that.”
“Not right now, but what if…” He paced in front of the bed.
“Instead of putting the summer’s revenue toward renovations, I DIY the bare minimum and save every penny we earn.
I’d pay down some of my uncle’s debt and get to a point where I might actually be approved for a mortgage loan, and at the end of the summer, I make you an offer? Then we’d get divorced.”
Lainey got her face as close to his as was polite for a woman internally deliberating a sham wedding proposal.
She squinted up at him, analyzing his expression, the creases bracketing his eyes, and the subtle cleft in his chin.
Never trust a man with a cleft chin, Gran had told her. Smooth talkers. Every one of them.
“Why do you want this house so bad?” she asked with narrowed eyes. He seemed desperate, and desperate people usually scared Lainey. Desperate people were liabilities. Lainey preferred people who behaved as she expected them to—good or bad.
“Vincent Groff is why I became an architect. I never dreamed I’d be able to own something of his, let alone Forest’s Bridge,” he answered.
“You’d really marry a stranger you don’t even like just to have your name next to his in a coffee table book?”
“I like you,” he said through a smirk that made her feel light and queasy all at once.
She swallowed. Hard. Why was swallowing so hard? “I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”