And I Love You (19 page)

“
What?
I do not snore!”

“Yes, you do. Little tiny snores. Very cute.”

“You’re making that up.”

“Okay, then. If that’s what you want to believe …”

She crossed her arms. “I’m never sleeping with you again.”

“Yes, you are. Tonight, in fact. I want you in my bed.”

“Not if you’re going to tell me I snore!”

“Then I won’t tell you. I’ll enjoy it in silence.”

“I may need to reconsider this whole thing in light of these revelations.”

“Please don’t do that.” Hunter pushed her arms aside and cupped her breasts, teasing her nipples gently.

She arched into him, wincing.

“Hurts?”

“Little bit. They got one hell of a workout last night.” She turned over to face him.

Hunter put his arms around her and looked down at her lovely, rosy skin, made even more so by the heat of the bath.

“I had a really great time,” she said. “Thank you.”

Touched by her sincerity, he said, “Thank
you
.”

“We should probably get going. Nina is leaving in a couple of days, and I want to spend as much time with her as I can.”

And just that quickly, the bubble they’d been in all night burst. Hunter felt her withdrawal keenly. If he’d had his way, they would’ve stayed here all day or at least until the Pig kicked them out of its belly.

Megan stood to get out of the tub, and Hunter offered his hand to guide her and then followed. He released her hand only to give her a towel and to wrap one around his waist. Then he reached for her again. “This is only the beginning, Megan.”

She smiled up at him, but she didn’t reply.

He could only hope she felt the same way.

H
ours later, Hunter pored over the information Nina had provided that outlined the diner’s financial situation. No matter how he spun the data, however, the results were always the same—the diner was operating in the red. Brett and Nina had bought the building at the peak of the real estate market and were carrying a hefty mortgage. That, coupled with the high cost of food and the relatively low prices Nina charged her customers, made for a less-than-profitable picture.

In addition to the financial news, the inspection performed that afternoon by his cousin Noah, a contractor, had yielded a number of costly upgrades that needed to be done to bring the building up to code. Nina and Brett were lucky they hadn’t been subjected to a fire department inspection in the last year. According to Noah, the hood over the grill had to be replaced immediately. Noah had told him it would be nearly impossible to insure the building without that upgrade.

Hunter took his role as the family’s fiduciary steward seriously. Regardless of his personal desire to keep Megan close by, he couldn’t, in good conscience, encourage his grandfather to invest his hard-earned money in the diner, knowing what he did now about the financial picture.

Running his fingers through his hair until it stood on end, Hunter tried to find a way to make the numbers work. He needed this to work. If it didn’t, what reason would Megan have to stay in town?

The thought of her leaving after the night they’d spent together made him feel sick and sweaty, as if he had some sort of flu or something. With tremendous reluctance, he picked up the phone to call his grandfather.

“Hey, it’s Hunter,” he said when Elmer answered.

“Ah, just the man I was hoping to hear from. What’s the good word?”

“I’m afraid there isn’t one.”

“What do you mean?”

“The numbers don’t add up, Gramps.”

“Speak to me.”

Hunter launched into a detailed explanation as to why it didn’t make financial sense for his grandfather to sink his money into the diner.

“Are these challenges you speak of insurmountable?”

The night without sleep suddenly caught up to him, and Hunter was exhausted at the thought of what needed to be done to turn things around at the diner. “Not completely, but normally when you invest in a business you do so because you feel it will be beneficial to you financially. I can’t promise that’ll be the case here. In fact, it could be the exact opposite of beneficial.”

Elmer was quiet long enough that Hunter wondered if he was still there. “Gramps?”

“I’m here. Just thinking.” After another long pause, Elmer said, “Have you ever heard the story of how my father came to open the store?”

Hunter pinched the top of his nose, trying to ward off an exhaustion-fueled headache he felt coming on. He loved his grandfather beyond all reason, but he didn’t have the patience at the moment for one of his stories. All he wanted was to see Megan again, but since she’d asked for a few hours with her sister, he was giving her some space. Hunter sat back in his desk chair, prepared to settle in for a few minutes. “Yes, I’ve heard it.”

“I don’t think you’ve heard the whole thing.” Elmer loved nothing more than to spin a yarn, and now was no different. “You know the store opened during the Depression when things were hard—really hard. Nothing you imagine can do justice to how bad it was. My first memories were of my mother crying over the fact that she couldn’t buy meat. ‘How am I to feed my babies if I can’t buy meat?’ I heard her ask my father one night. It didn’t register to me at the time that things were that bad. I figured it out much later, as an adult, when I had a family of my own to feed. I tell you this to give you context of what kind of moxie it took for my father, in that environment, to say, hey, let’s open a business that requires a significant investment in inventory.”

Despite his exhaustion, despite his desire to move the clock forward to when he could be with Megan again, Hunter was riveted by his grandfather’s story.

“My mother was vehemently opposed. They argued about it, and they didn’t often argue, especially in front of us. But they argued about the store. My father’s position was that he could fill a need for people in the Northeast Kingdom.”

“She didn’t agree?”

“She agreed it was a good idea. What she couldn’t handle was that opening the doors would take every dime they had along with some they didn’t. She was afraid of what would become of us if the store failed.”

“I’ve never heard all this.”

“It’s not something my father liked to talk about. He was crazy about my mother, and the fact that they disagreed so profoundly over this was hard on him.”

“But he convinced her.”

“Eventually, but it cost him. It cost
them
. I have to give my mother credit. Even though she didn’t agree with opening the store, she threw herself into helping him make it work. And they worked around the clock. She had him put a stove and refrigerator in the storeroom so she could cook for us when they had to work late. We had beds back there, too. We practically lived at the store for the first year. And at the end of that year, it was rather apparent to all of us that the store was going to fail.”

Hunter could barely breathe. He’d never heard that either. The literature on display at the store told an entirely different story of the family business that didn’t include any flirtations with failure. “What happened?”

“The Christmas tree farm happened.”

“How so?”

“My father heard a rumor that the owners of the farm had defaulted on the mortgage and abandoned the property. So he went to the bank and worked out a deal to take on the mortgage, beginning in January. That was in October. He called in everyone he knew to harvest the trees. My mother ran the store while he harvested trees until he couldn’t move because he was so sore from the backbreaking work. The sale of the trees that Christmas brought in the cash he needed to save the store and make the first mortgage payment on the tree farm. As you well know, we’ve run the farm ever since.”

“And it continues to be a cash cow every holiday season.”

“Never more so than that first year. The point of all this, my boy, is that all business, fundamentally, is a risk. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Jimmy Carter said, ‘Go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.’”

“So you’re saying the diner is the fruit?”

“I’m saying it could be the next Christmas tree farm. But if we don’t try, we’ll never know.”

“I’ll make the offer.”

“You’ve done your due diligence, son, and you’ve done it thoroughly the way you always do. The decision was mine and mine alone, just as it’s my decision to tell you to make the offer in your name, not mine.”

“Gramps,” Hunter said, flabbergasted. “It’s your money. I can’t do that.”

“Why not? It’s my money. I can do with it what I want, can’t I?”

“Of course you can, but—”

“No buts. What’s mine is yours. Make the offer and have it come from you. It’ll give me great pleasure to watch you turn that place into another Christmas tree farm. I have every confidence you can do it.”

Hunter wished he had the same confidence in himself. What did he know about running a restaurant?

As if he’d read Hunter’s mind, Elmer said, “If my father could figure out what he needed to know under the conditions he faced when he opened the store
and
make it work, so can you.”

“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. I’ll do my best to make you proud.”

“You always do. Every day of your life, you’ve made me proud.”

“Thank you,” he said, humbled by his grandfather’s effusive love.

“Let me know how it goes with the offer.”

“I will.”

“I happened to hear you took Megan out last night. I hope you had a nice time.”

“Yeah.” Hunter smiled at what had to be the understatement of his lifetime. “We had a nice time.”

“Glad to hear it. I like that girl. She’s feisty and isn’t afraid to say it like it is.”

“That about sums her up.”

“She’d be good for you. I’ve always thought so.”

“Always? How long is always?”

“For about as long as you’ve thought she’d be good for you. It might come as a shock to you to learn that not much gets by me.”

Hunter laughed hard. “That would hardly come as a shock to any of us.”

Elmer’s guffaw kept the smile on Hunter’s face long after they’d said their good-byes. His grandfather was truly one of the most uniquely authentic people in Hunter’s life, and the story he’d told him was one that Hunter would never forget.

Megan sat at the foot of Nina’s bed and sorted through a basket of socks, helping her sister pick out which ones to take and which ones to put in storage. The task helped to quiet her mind, which had been racing on overtime since she awoke that morning in Hunter Abbott’s arms after the most incredible night of her life.

“You’re awfully quiet over there,” Nina said as she worked on the closet. “What’re you thinking about?”

“Nothing much.”

“You’re not going to tell me what happened on a date that lasted all night? You’re not going to tell me why you actually called out of work for the first time … ever?”

“Sorry I left you shorthanded at the last minute.”

“Who cares about that? We coped. Talk to me about what happened with Hunter.”

“We had a really nice time.” And wasn’t that putting it mildly? She’d never had a better time with any man.

Nina plopped down next to her on the floor. “That’s
it
? That’s all you’re going to say? You spend more than twelve hours in the company of one of the hottest guys in town—hell, in the
state
—and that’s all you’ve got to say? It was
nice
?”

“You think Hunter Abbott is hot, Neen?” Brett said from the doorway. “You never told me that.”

Megan cracked up laughing. “Busted.”

“Go away, Brett. I’m digging for information that she’ll never give me if you’re in the room.”

“Pardonnez-moi.”
He’d been driving them crazy with the French all afternoon. “But I just wanted to ask your opinion.” He held up two pairs of dress shoes. “Take or don’t take?”

“Take them both and go away.”

“Just gonna be me and you after Wednesday. Don’t forget that.”

“I’m not forgetting, but I’m also not going to be forgiving if you don’t buzz off and let me snoop into my sister’s love life, so
au revoir
.”

Megan put her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

“Now you’re making me want to stay.”

“Brett!”

“Fine, I’m going, but you have to tell me what she says later.”

“You’d better not tell him,” Megan said after Brett left them alone.

“So far there’s nothing to tell,” Nina said glumly. “You gotta give me something.”

Megan hesitated for a moment, not wanting to say too much but needing to talk it out with someone, and Nina would always be her first choice. The thought of her being so far away in France when Megan needed her …

“Don’t do that. Don’t make that face. We’ll Skype and FaceTime and talk every day just like we always do. There’ll never be a time when I’m unavailable to you. Ever.”

Like always, her sister had said exactly what she needed to hear. Megan leaned in to her one-armed embrace and rested her head on Nina’s shoulder.

“We went for a drive when we left here last night. Ended up at a tavern on the side of the road called the Pig’s Belly.”