Chapter 2
Hank Steele’s house had good bones. That was the first thing Sunny noticed, standing at the sagging front gate with the early morning sun on the back of her neck.
It was the grandest of the dozen old Edwardians on the street and, by a wide margin, the worst kept, which to her eye made it the most honest of the lot. Somebody had loved this house once, but nobody had loved it lately.
But the turned porch posts were still sound under their failing paint.
The deep eaves still threw a true, level line, which meant the roof was in decent shape.
Behind a drooping gutter and clapboard gone the gray of an old fence, she could read its bones the way she’d been trained to in another life.
The builder, some hundred and twenty years ago, had gotten the proportions exactly right, and no amount of neglect had managed to take the beauty out of this grand old lady.
Her fingers itched to strip it back to the wood and find out what was hiding under all that tired paint.
There had been a time she got paid handsomely to do such things—to walk a client through a house and tell them, with the easy authority of a woman who’d never once worried about a bill, exactly which walls were add-ins and which were load-bearing and what the place could look like if somebody only had the eye and the budget.
The eye she still had. The budget was eleven dollars.
She was not here to admire a house, and she told herself to cut it out.
She was here to ask a stranger for a job that, as far as she could tell, didn’t exist. The only reason she’d shown up at all this morning was she was certain Rose, a woman she had met exactly one day ago, would drag her to this house herself if she had to.
Hank Steele. Surely, he was related to Reno Steele, the man who’d taken care of her family for the past three years.
Unless Hank was an older man, which might make him Reno’s father, she guessed they must be brothers.
How ironic would it be if she went from the payroll of one brother to the payroll of the other?
Sunny squared her shoulders and climbed the steps onto the gracious, welcoming porch, which had several floorboards in need of replacement and had only one pathetic, aluminum and plastic webbing lawn chair by way of furniture.
In the late 1800’s, this would have been a living space fully as much as any room inside the house.
There would have been sofas and chairs, ottomans and side tables out here.
She felt like a fraud standing here. And she knew better than to head into an interview with no confidence whatsoever.
Her father had been a C-suite executive, and her mother came from old West Coast money.
She’d been trained from childhood how to operate in a high-powered business environment.
Maybe mostly as a hostess and helpmate to a rich powerful husband, but nonetheless.
The lessons applied to asking for a job, too.
In spite of her reservations about doing this, her fear of what Rose would do if she chickened out won over her shame and shyness.
Eleven dollars in the bank meant she didn’t have the luxury of giving in to shame or shyness.
She’d woken up Presley early this morning and left her in charge of the other three children at the rental.
She hated asking Presley to be head babysitter and surrogate parent.
She was the adult. It was her job to raise the children she’d chosen to have.
Of course, that had been another time and place altogether, when she and Winston had more money than they could possibly spend in one lifetime.
Every whim could be fulfilled and to want anything was to have it, back then.
But now, her choices were finite. She had to find a job, and that meant Presley had to step in and look after her younger siblings. She’d told Presley she’d be back in an hour.
She had one hour to find out whether this town’s kindness had a hook buried somewhere inside it.
A small sign hung by the front door, neatly hand-lettered and a little faded: H. STEELE, M.D. She opened the screen door, which squeaked loudly for want of oil, and went in.
The oversized foyer had been pressed into service as a waiting room.
It was furnished with mismatched chairs, a nice, old wool rug worn pale down its center stripe, a coffee table loaded with out-of-date magazines, and a coffee can sprouting pencils.
The space had been beautiful once but was only tired now.
She was beginning to understand this was the whole house’s condition.
To her right through an open pocket door that had to original to the home and was made stunningly beautiful mahogany, she saw a doctor’s office.
It had a tall examining table, bright lights, and a stool on wheels beside the table.
Behind those stood a very large oak desk.
How it hadn’t collapsed under the weight of the sheer chaos of papers stacked haphazardly over every inch of it, she had no idea.
Sunny stopped in the doorway and stared at the mess, her whole body still and focused, the way it went when a set of books was about to confess its dirty little secrets to her.
The chaos wasn’t dirty. It was just . . . defeated. She spotted the shoebox Tessa had mentioned last night. Sur enough, it overflowed receipts into places unknown.
She spied a box too full to shut, packed with envelopes.
Even from all the way across the generously-sized room, she clocked three different insurers’ logos.
A metal cash box sat on the floor beside the desk with its lid askew.
A wall calendar to one side of the desk was still turned to March.
She didn’t even want to think about the state of the filing cabinets that had to be around here somewhere.
If Hank Steele couldn’t manage his money any better than this, she surely couldn’t keep up detailed medical files.
She’d walked into a financial and record-keeping crime scene, professionally speaking.
It wasn’t technically a crime to be disorganized, of course.
But a business run like this was nothing less than a slow-motion disaster.
She’d seen this in her university courses.
It was what happened to good people who were very good at one thing and had let everything else go to seed while they did it.
“May I help you?” a male voice asked.
He’d stood at a small sink in the corner, drying his hands, and he turned at the sound of her in the doorway. Tall, built athletic but solid. He had brown hair just starting to go gray at the temple. Not Reno’s father then. Must be his brother.
He walked toward her, and he had an unhurried way of moving that she expected put most children and animals—and scared job applicants—at ease.
“You must be Doctor Steele,” she said politely. “I’m Sunny Carter.”
A question crowded into her mind cold and fast. Did he know who she was? Had Reno told him about her? Not about her being a broke widow with four children, but the other part. The public part. How she’d been the wife of a man whose name made national headlines.
“Most folks, even my patients, call me Hank,” he said.
His eyes moved over her, not the inappropriate way some men looked, just a quick inventory to check a potential patient for signs of illness or injury. He hung the towel on its hook and waited calmly, like a man with all the time in the world and no particular need to fill any of it.
It unsettled her more than questions would have.
She took a deep breath. Confidence, Sunny. Project being in control of the situation.
“Rose sent me,” she said, getting straight to the point because that was the only way she knew to do anything that frightened her.
“About a bookkeeping position. Handling your billing and insurance—“ she gestured at the desk before she could stop her hand.
“—all of this. She said you were looking to hire.”
Bafflement crossed his face.
“I’m not looking to hire anybody.” He frowned as he said it though. “I mean. God knows I need to. But I haven’t thought about it, yet. I only told Rose yesterday morning that I was drowning in paperwork. I haven’t gotten as far as deciding what to do about it.”
And there it was. The hook, the catch, the seam she’d known had to be somewhere in it.
There was no job. Rose had taken one look at the broke widow choking down free eggs and manufactured her a charity position out of a man’s idle complaint.
And now she was standing in a stranger’s office uninvited, having announced herself as the answer to a question he hadn’t asked.
Heat climbed her neck, and she knew her fair skin was turning a blotchy red she couldn’t hide.
She knew better. Nothing this good ever fell into anyone’s lap. Not a cheap, affordable house, and not a job she was ideally suited for in some tiny town she just happened to be stranded and broke in.
She’d let one good supper and a porch full of laughing women talk her into hoping, which was the single most expensive and devastating thing a person in her position could do.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, in the smooth, bright, well-bred voice she kept for exactly these occasions, the one that could close a conversation faster than a cash drawer could slam shut. “There’s been a misunderstanding. I won’t take up any more of your time.”
She was already turning. She had a hand on the doorframe.
“Don’t,” he said. His voice wasn’t sharp. Just certain. The way he might say it to someone about to step off a curb in front of a truck they hadn’t seen.
She stopped.
“I am drowning,” he said simply. “That part’s true, whatever Rose did or didn’t decide on her own. I’ve practiced medicine for a decade and never once kept my own books. There was always somebody at the office who did it. Now there isn’t, and . . .”