Chapter 12
“Oh my god.” Julia leaned back in her chair with a deep, contented sigh. “This was heavenly.”
“Honestly,” Ethan chimed in, pushing his bowl away and putting his hands on his stomach with a groan. “I don’t know how you normally do this, but I feel confident in saying you’ve outdone yourself.”
The four of them—Ethan, Julia, Maggie, and Norman—were sitting in the formal dining area of Donwell Cottage after finally enjoying the evening meal that Maggie had made.
“Why, thank you,” Maggie replied, cheeks turning slightly rosy with the praise. “Julia’s bread was the perfect accompaniment.”
“Very true,” Ethan agreed, sending her a sideways grin. “That, I can say with experience, was as delicious as ever.”
Julia, to her chagrin, felt pleasure course through her at his compliment. That damn specific words-of-affirmation love language that she’d tried so hard to overcome was always causing her grief and embarrassment at the most inopportune times.
Norman had been doing his slow nod the entire time they’d been talking, and Julia had to double-check to make sure he wasn’t actually, literally nodding off to sleep. But no, he appeared to simply be in contented agreement with the rest of the table.
“Julie is the best baker,” he said eventually in that slow, drawling way of his.
Even though they were about a thousand miles or more from anyplace that could be considered the Deep South—and Norman himself had been born in New Jersey—there was something about the tempered, melodic way he spoke that Julia found soothing.
It didn’t even bother her that he called her Julie.
She caught Ethan’s expression as Norman spoke, something akin to amusement without any of the understanding or compassion that Julia normally reserved for Norman.
She understood the old man was an acquired taste, but she still made a mental note to have a talk with Ethan about Norman’s contribution to Donwell Cottage and how he should be considered—and treated like—family.
All the time she had known Ethan, he had been compassionate to a fault. But he rarely suffered fools. If he felt there was someone holding him back in any way, shape, or form, he left them in the dust.
It had never been one of his greater qualities, and it was even more of a bitter pill to swallow now in hindsight.
Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t realize she’d been shamelessly, openly staring at Ethan, long after Norman had finished talking, until Ethan said, “Do I have something in my teeth?”
Blinking to clear her head, she looked away quickly. “Probably.” Addressing the rest of the table, she added, “Anyone interested in dessert?”
“Oh yes,” Maggie said quickly, with Norman nodding enthusiastically beside her. “But you sit right down, missy, and don’t get up again. You need to rest that ankle. Norman and I will take care of the coffee and dessert. Just give me a min—”
She cut herself off as Ethan sheepishly stood from his chair.
“Actually,” he began, “as tempting as that sounds, I have a few emails to go through in preparation for the arrival of our guests tomorrow.” He picked up his plate and looked around awkwardly. “Where do I…?”
“Here.” Julia took the plate from his hands, which Maggie then took swiftly from hers before she could attempt to stand or do anything with it.
Julia shot her a look—which she got back twofold—before she turned back to Ethan.
“You never really told me what to expect with those two tomorrow…Did you want to go over it now? While Maggie and Norman are”—she gestured to the table, only to find that Maggie had swiftly disappeared with the dirty dishes and Norman was nowhere to be seen, either, making it the first and only time she had witnessed him move at anything other than a snail’s pace—“here.”
“You can fill them in after,” Ethan said. “No point in dragging them back in here now. Like I said, I do have to check some emails.” Was it her imagination or did she see him wince at the idea? “But then I can meet you in your room in like fifteen or twenty minutes. We can go over everything then.”
Her room?
She opened her mouth to tell him he was more than welcome to come back to one of the main rooms, including the office, if he wanted to talk, but weariness overcame her at the thought of once again being contrary.
Not that she wanted him in her room; she was just tired of arguing about every little thing.
Julia let out an inaudible sigh. She supposed he was still a guest. Perhaps she needed to be respectful and not so demanding.
If he wanted to meet in her room—highly unorthodox and borderline unprofessional for a real guest, mind you—but if that was where he wanted to meet, then that was where she would be.
At the end of the day, it was just Ethan, after all.
She knew nothing was actually going to happen.
She would have simply felt more comfortable in common areas where there were witnesses (and alibis).
Her ankle throbbed then, a reminder that she might do well being settled for the evening as opposed to hobbling all over the house.
“All right,” she reluctantly acquiesced. “But I’m having dessert first.”
* * *
Julia lay in her bed, staring up at her cracked, patched, and cracked again ceiling, a bag of ice resting loosely on her sore ankle.
After Maggie had returned and served her a quick dessert—some of the cherry pie that Julia had baked the other day, another two a.m. session that involved four pie crusts and multiple breathing exercises—she then shooed her off to her bedroom, Norman assisting her carefully down the stairs the same way he had helped her up them earlier that evening.
As she lay there, she considered how it wasn’t the most appropriate position for her to be in when a guest came to discuss something with her, but she supposed meeting in her bedroom trumped any semblance of propriety regardless. Still, should she get up? Make herself look busy?
Maybe she should be reading a book in the worn chair in the corner? Or going over yet more bills and paperwork at the small desk she kept in her room, a catchall for whatever spillover made its way from the large desk in the office?
Even the thought of getting up felt arduous. She found herself physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted after the day she’d had. The longest day in recent memory, following the longest week. The anticipation alone had been exhausting, and she felt like she needed a break from her own mind.
Unfortunately, she was stuck with it, in all its dysfunctional and defective glory.
Best I can do is kittens, said her brain, flooding her psyche with images of adorable fluffy little cats tumbling over one another in a symphony of cuteness.
She shifted slightly, and the ice pack flopped off her sore ankle, becoming even more ineffective than it already had been, just resting there without the pressure and the coldness working together to heal her body’s betrayal.
Doing an ungraceful sit-up, she was attempting to reposition it on her leg when Ethan chose that moment to appear in her doorframe.
It reminded her of his appearance earlier that evening, when she’d been struggling to adjust the ice over her bandaged ankle in the tub. This time he hadn’t announced himself, but at least she was in her bed. And wearing clothes.
He remained in casual dress, his hair still pushed away from his face, although long since dried, the burnished locks seeming to fall effortlessly into careless yet somehow perfectly styled layers.
He even had the single boy-band bang sweeping over one brow.
She spitefully wanted to feel it for evidence of hair spray, but managed to refrain.
Without saying anything, he entered the room and batted her hands away from her leg.
Then he repositioned the ice pack securely, glancing around the room quickly before his eyes landed on a scarf she’d had hanging off the back of a chair.
He used it to tie the ice pack around her ankle, finishing it with a knot that bordered on slightly too tight.
When she opened her mouth to protest, he held up a hand.
“It needs to be tight,” he rumbled, his voice quiet but insistent. “Or else it’s useless.”
“It’s useless if it cuts off my circulation,” she retorted, though admittedly the ice and the pressure seemed to soothe the soreness almost immediately.
He rolled his eyes with a smirk. “Just leave it, you whiner. If that swelling doesn’t go down, someone might need to wheel you into town for X-rays.”
“Wheel me? You know we have a car, right?”
Shrugging, he sat at her feet on the opposite corner of the bed. “I don’t know anything.”
The words were said innocently enough, but she felt a weight to them, a wealth of meaning that could quickly take an awkward turn, so she changed the subject.
“Speaking of knowing nothing, care to tell me what to expect this week from our two celebrities?”
“Yeah.” Running his hand through his hair, he looked down awkwardly. “So, you know the story about them and what we want to do—”
“Right, isolate and shoot cupid arrows at their faces.”
“Aim lower. They need their faces. So when they arrive, just treat them how you would a typical guest. Give them some scones, show them around, and show them to their separate rooms.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to turn this into some sort of only-one-bed type of situation? I can call back all the guests we released for this week—you know, a the-inn-is-full kind of thing…?”
“Only one—” He snorted. “No. This all has to be aboveboard. We aren’t pimps, for Christ’s sake.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“Give them each their own room,” he continued through clenched teeth. “The two nicest ones you have—”
“Are you trying to tell me you don’t think Cabin is one of my nicest rooms?”
“If Cabin—is that what you call it? Cabin?—is one of your nicest rooms—”
“Don’t you dare talk bad about Cabin, or else you can sleep with the horses.”
That gave him pause. “You have horses?”