Chapter Twenty-three – Lark #2
Nolan steps out from the back hall at the same time, and for one weird suspended second, all three of us just exist in the same ruined room with too much history that doesn’t belong together.
Kenzie’s gaze lands on me first, then deliberately drops to the handwritten renovation schedule spread across the counter before returning to my face.
“Well,” she says. “This is charming.”
I slowly set the scraper down before I accidentally use it for something that would derail the rest of my life.
“Can I help you?”
Her smile sharpens slightly. “I was actually hoping to help you.”
Nolan’s eyes narrow immediately. “And you are?”
She turns toward him with bright, easy interest. “Kenzie.”
He doesn’t offer his name back.
Interesting.
“Lark,” Kenzie says, turning toward me again, “I’ve heard so much about you.”
That gives me the choice of either acknowledging Holt outright or pretending not to understand her implication.
I choose a third option.
“That sounds unfortunate.”
For one fraction of a second, surprise flashes across her face. Then admiration. Then something uglier.
“I like her,” she says to Nolan like I’m not standing right there.
Nolan’s mouth does not move. “You shouldn’t.”
Kenzie laughs softly, delighted.
“Oh, I definitely should.”
My skin crawls.
Some people flirt with a room and make it lighter. Kenzie makes it feel watched.
“I’m working,” I say. “So unless you need a room—which you can’t have because we’re closed—you can leave.”
She drifts farther inside instead of backing out, fingers trailing absently across the edge of the front counter. Too casually. Too comfortable. Her gaze catches briefly on the open ledger again. Then the renovation timeline. Then the calendar hanging beside the office door.
My stomach turns slowly. She’s not here to flirt. She’s gathering information.
“Holt didn’t tell you about me,” she says.
Straight to it then.
“No,” I answer evenly. “And I didn’t ask.”
I see it in the slight shift of her expression. Her smile thins just enough to expose something colder underneath it.
“Smart,” she says. “Though that’s not nearly as fun.”
Nolan moves then—not toward her exactly, but enough to shift the sensation of the room. Enough that she notices. Enough that I do too.
His body already placing itself between her and the office hallway where the permits and keys are stored.
Interesting.
“You need something?” he asks.
Kenzie’s gaze flicks toward him.
“You his replacement?”
I blink. Nolan doesn’t.
“No,” he says calmly. “I’m the guy asking whether this is going somewhere useful.”
The tension that follows stretches tight enough to snap. Kenzie looks between us again, calculating something I don’t like, then she smiles, like she learned what she came here to learn.
“Tell Holt I stopped by.”
“No,” I say.
Her eyes narrow slightly. “No?”
“No,” I repeat. “If you have something to say to him, you can tell him yourself. Somewhere that isn’t here.”
For a second, I think she’ll push. I think she might enjoy a bigger scene. Instead, she smiles again, all teeth and no warmth.
“Good,” she says softly. “You do have a spine.”
Then she turns and walks out, bells rattling behind her as the door swings shut hard enough to make the front window tremble in its frame. The silence she leaves behind is worse than the noise.
Nolan looks at me. “That her?”
I don’t ask what he means.
“Yes.”
Nolan looks toward the window, then the street beyond it.
“She alone?”
I frown. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Nolan.”
“I’m asking if she came alone.”
“I don’t know.”
His expression closes before I can read it. “You need to tell Holt.” His jaw tightens. “She gives off gasoline and bad decisions.”
That pulls a startled, involuntary laugh out of me. It feels wildly out of place in the room and exactly right too.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s about it.”
He studies me a second longer. “You going to tell Holt?”
I pick the scraper up again, more for something to do with my hands than because I’m ready to work.
What he means is that I tell Holt she came here, that she looked around the inn like she was casing it, that she used his name as a way to get under my skin, and then left smiling like she’d accomplished exactly what she meant to.
He means I stop trying to keep everyone’s messes compartmentalized and admit this one might be bigger than my pride.
Again. I hate that he’s right.
By late afternoon, the skies threaten rain again, but don’t fully commit.
The inn feels tighter after Kenzie leaves, every creak sounding more suspicious than it should, every passing car outside the front windows making me look up.
Nolan catches me doing it twice and, to his credit, doesn’t mention it.
He starts checking the side gate himself every time he circles back in from the yard.
The first time, I tell myself it’s practical.
The second, it feels protective.
By the third, I’m not sure why it makes the back of my neck prickle.
By the time I finally call it, my shoulders ache, and my patience is gone.
The drive back to the farm is too short for how much I need to think. Holt’s truck is already in the drive, which means his shift ended on time for once, and that should feel lucky instead of necessary.
It feels necessary anyway.
He’s on the porch when I pull in, one forearm braced against the railing, T-shirt damp at the collar like he came in from outside and never bothered to sit down. He straightens the second he sees my face.
That alone almost undoes me.
I barely get the car door shut before he’s stepping down into the yard. “What happened?”
No greeting. No softness around the edges. Straight to the point. Maybe that’s why I tell him everything.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just the facts as I remember them, standing there in the cooling evening with the smell of cut hay drifting over from somewhere beyond the barn and Rook pressing against my leg like he can tell the story in my body before I finish putting it into words.
Holt doesn’t interrupt. That’s how I know he’s angry. Truly angry. He gets quieter, not louder.
By the time I get to Kenzie asking whether Nolan was his replacement, his face has gone so still it almost reads as calm. Almost.
“She came to the inn,” he says.
I nod.
“Looked around.”
Another nod.
The muscle in his jaw shifts once. “And you didn’t call me.”
The words aren’t accusatory. That almost makes them harder.
“I handled it.”
He stares at me for one long beat. “You should not have had to.”
I set my bag down on the porch step. “I’m not made of glass.”
“I know that.”
“Then stop acting like—”
“Like what?” He steps closer, rain-heavy wind pushing a loose strand of my hair across my face before he catches it and tucks it back with a gentleness that completely ruins the fight I was trying to start. “Like I don’t know exactly how ugly this could get?”
The words stop me cold because beneath the anger, there’s fear.
Not for himself. For me. Holt Wright is dangerous in a way that has nothing to do with fire.
It should feel like pressure. Instead, it feels like care without condition, and that is still the hardest thing in the world for me to know what to do with.
“I’m telling you now,” I say, quieter. “That counts.”
His gaze holds mine. Then, slowly, he nods once. “Yeah. It does.”
The air shifts around us. Rook gives up on whatever this is and trots toward the barn, probably hoping for Tabby and less emotional incompetence from both of us. Holt watches him go, then looks back at me.
“Walk with me.”
We take the path around the side pasture slowly, boots sinking slightly into damp ground still soft from the storm.
The evening is that strange in-between kind where the sky can’t decide whether it wants to darken or hold on to light just a little longer.
The air smells like wet earth and cattle and cut grass and something electric from the weather hanging off in the distance.
Holt tells me more about Kenzie than I expected him to. Not all of it. Not enough to make the story feel complete, but enough.
How she came along at a time when he was still playing at being reckless because people expected him to.
How what existed between them was never really more than a distraction dressed up as fun.
How she liked pushing boundaries just to see where they were.
How he ended it because he got tired of feeling like every room got smaller when she walked in.
“And now she’s back,” I say.
His mouth hardens. “Yeah.”
“Do you think she set the fire?”
He doesn’t answer right away, and the fact that he takes the question seriously is answer enough before words ever arrive.
“I think she’s capable of wanting attention in the ugliest way possible,” he says. “I think she doesn’t like being ignored. And I think if she decided this was about proving something…”
He lets the sentence die. Doesn’t need to finish it. Because we both know where it goes.
The barn comes into view at the end of the path, lit soft from inside.
Tabby shifts in her make-shift stall as soon as she hears us, little snuffling sounds carrying through the open door.
Rook is already there, sitting in the straw like some tiny sentry who got bored of his post and upgraded to livestock.
I laugh despite everything.
Holt glances at me. “What?”
“He looks like he pays rent.”
“He acts like he does too.”
We step inside together. The air is warmer here, fuller.
Hay and animal heat and the old wooden bones of the place wrapping around us in something that feels safe enough to borrow.
Tabby noses at my hand the second I offer it, and Holt leans against the stall beside me, close enough that I can feel the heat of him even before he touches me.
When Holt finally speaks, his voice is lower.
“You need to know something.”
I turn toward him.
“If this gets worse,” he says, “I’m not going to be good at pretending I’m calm about it.”
A smile touches the corner of my mouth before I can stop it. “That’s your warning.”
“That’s me being honest.”
I look at him fully then, at the steadiness in his face and the strain underneath it, at all the ways he’s trying to stay careful while already half over the line.
“Okay,” I say. “Then here’s mine.”
He waits as I step closer. Close enough that my hands can find his shirt without reaching.
“If this gets worse,” I say, “I’m not leaving.”
The words land between us like something final. His hand comes to my waist slowly, almost reverently, like he knows exactly how much of me that sentence cost. Then he kisses me. Just deep and certain and full of all the things we don’t know how to solve yet.
It doesn’t fix anything.
Kenzie is still out there. The fire still happened.
My mother still believes control is love dressed up properly.
The inn still needs more money and more work and more faith than I can guarantee.
But when Holt kisses me in the dim warmth of the barn with Tabby purring quietly behind us and Rook finally, blissfully, not interrupting…
None of it gets to be the whole story.