Battling the Best Man: A Harmony Falls Novel, Book 2 (Crimson Romance) (4 page)

“Can I get my coat?”

Will turned to see Gilbert Hoover standing in the open doorway, and then he turned back to see the only remaining coat on the rack, some sort of military jacket. “Sure, help yourself. I was just heading out.”

He patted the man on the shoulder as he pushed past him. Three steps into the ballroom, his brother and mother approached.

“Where have you been?”

Will glanced down at his mother whose curtly delivered question had him searching for a safe answer. He settled on, “Helping with coat check.”

Mark chuckled. And before Will could drive an elbow into his brother’s side, she settled between them, taking them both by the arm.

Flanked by two of her boys and with her chin lifted higher than humanly possible, she let Will and Mark guide her to the door.

While Will walked at a sloth’s pace, barely lifting the soles of his dress shoes off the waxed wood floors, he scanned the empty room, looking for Kory, but there was no sign of her. He ground his back teeth together, frustrated he’d let his uncertainty around her waste an entire weekend.

“Are you sick?”

Will glanced at his mother, who was looking up at him. “No.” He caught sight of Mark, grinning like a psycho clown.

“Then stop looking like you’re sick.” She pinched Will’s bicep. “Stand up straight.”

Mark’s laughter was followed by a sharp,
“Ouch!”

By the time they reached the town car, the small amount of excitement and intrigue that managed to seep into the weekend was a distant memory. The Mitchells were back to business as usual. Mother and Mark occupied the spacious backseat. Will sat up front with the driver.

“Thank God we’re done with all this wedding nonsense.” The Mitchell family matriarch wasn’t one to mince words. “Now, we can get on with what’s important. William, Rand Nelson says his mother’s care is abhorrent in the home. The aides are mean to her.”

Will gripped the door handle and stared straight ahead. “We’ve investigated her claims, and I can assure you, they are inaccurate.”

“We can investigate all we want, but if a resident and her family feel they’re being mistreated, then we have a problem. This is all the more reason to unload that asset, which is a liability in my opinion.”

“Yes, Mother,” Will said, ignoring the impulse to mention Mrs. Nelson and a dozen other residents would be homeless when he did. Mother wasn’t one to sympathize.

“I told Bruce Carter you would meet with him about the vacant drugstore space.”

Will shook his head. “I’m already in talks to lease the space to George Chompsky.”

“Oh please! George can barely make the monthly rent in that closet of an office he has downtown. He’ll never be able to afford that space at twice the square footage. No, Bruce’s logging business is flourishing and he’ll easily have the capital.”

“Fine, I’ll talk to Bruce,” Will said, swallowing the emotion that came with knowing this wasn’t going to end in George’s favor. His mother was right, and usually Will wouldn’t favor feelings over the bottom line, but in taking care of Will’s dog, Molly, George had become a friend. He’d been the town vet for thirty years, and it wasn’t his fault too many people in Harmony Falls were forced to pay for services in labor trade or baked goods. All Will wanted was to make the numbers work in George’s favor as payback for the good he’d done, but Will should have known he wouldn’t be able to pull it off. Those types of gestures were better left to Justin, the Mitchell son who was allowed to have a heart.

Twenty minutes later, Will walked through the door of his condo, already blissfully stripping off his jacket and tie. Some of the tension he’d acquired in the car disappeared. All things considered, he was a lucky man, maybe not as lucky as Justin, who was headed to the beach on an extended honeymoon, but certainly luckier than Mark, who was headed home with their mother. Somehow that poor bastard drew the short end of the stick.

Scooping an arm beneath Molly’s belly, Will helped the ten-year-old Australian Shepherd onto the bed and stripped out of his clothes, leaving behind his boxers. The sheets were cold against his skin, and he tried not to think too much as he dropped his head to the pillow. He’d done enough thinking for one day. A few incomplete thoughts about tomorrow’s meeting and the hospital takeover flashed in his mind. Molly snuggled against his left side, and he closed his eyes. Sleep. Will welcomed it with a heavy sigh.

Too bad he tossed and turned much of the night, dreaming about Kory.

If anything could make Kory wish away her return to Chicago, it was the smell of her mother’s Applewood bacon. It wafted down the hall from the kitchen and she took a deep breath as she sprawled on her back underneath the quilt that had been a graduation present from Grandma Carter. Kory stared up at the faded NSYNC poster nailed to the ceiling. Justin Timberlake looked like he had boobs. She squinted, reached for her glasses on the bedside table and pushed them up her nose. Okay, so they weren’t boobs, just oddly defined pecs. She blinked the haze from her eyes as she glanced at the rest of the crew. They were all so awkward. And yet, they were hanging on her ceiling. In her defense, she’d been fifteen years old when she drove in those four nails under Alice’s watchful eye, and fifteen-year-olds weren’t very smart—they made decisions with overactive hormones.

Kory’s slow-to-start brain conjured an image of Will. Certainly, he had better pecs than Justin Timberlake.
Crap.
She did not want to be mind-ogling Will Mitchell’s pecs. Even if they were the greatest pecs known to man, there wasn’t a thing she would do about it. The wedding was over, and so should be the erratic thoughts and behavior that led her to kiss him.

Apparently, thirty-year olds weren’t much smarter than fifteen-year-olds.

Lifting a leg over Smith’s snoring body, Kory shimmied from between the dogs. After smoothing Wesson’s fur, she pushed off the mattress, a little surprised they were still with her, considering bacon smelled up the house. Their devotion despite her eighteen-month-long absence was sweet.

The minute she stood, they hopped off the bed and stretched while she threaded arms into her robe and guzzled from the glass of water her mother never failed to set on the desk. She unplugged her phone from the charger, scrolled through emails, deleted a few, saved the rest for later and flicked over to Facebook, where Alice was posting pictures from the drive to the beach. Most were too blurry to appreciate, but Kory smiled anyway, happy Alice’s dreams had come true. It was a sappy notion, made sappier by Alice’s proclamation she was living her fairytale. Kory didn’t believe in fairytales, at least not ones that ended with white knights in luxury cars who opened their checkbooks and magically solved life’s problems. Of course, she’d never tell Alice that, especially not now that the white knight turned into a husband.

To each her own
, Kory thought as she dropped the phone into her front pocket and cinched the belt around her waist. She was married to ambition, and she liked it that way.

The dogs trotted from the room, no doubt aware of the bacon now that they were up and moving around. Kory drew a deep breath and held onto the heavenly scent until her mouth watered. She was going to enjoy this meal—her last home-cooked food before she headed to the airport and back to Chicago where she lived on protein bars and coffee in paper cups. Wesson bounded down the stairs ahead of her, but Smith didn’t follow. He stopped half in and half out of Mom and Dad’s bedroom, his tail tucked between his legs.

Kory patted her thigh. “Come on, boy. Bacon.”

The dog backed up, looked at Kory, and then spun a circle before he disappeared into the bedroom.
Odd.
Kory’s gut clenched the way it always did when she was examining a patient and instinct told her to take a closer look. For the first time in years, she didn’t want to pursue her instinct. But four agonizing steps later, she was inside the bedroom.

Smith sat on the bed beside Dad. It wasn’t like him to sleep in. Maybe he drank more than she realized at the reception.

“Hey, you two. Time for breakfast.” The words felt tacky in her mouth, and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end.

Dad’s hand trembled, but his head didn’t turn.

Shit.
“Dad?” She jumped toward him. One good look was all it took for her to grab the bedside phone. “Hang in there, Dad. You’re having a stroke. Mom,” she called over her shoulder as she dialed.

“911. What’s your emergency?”

Kory rattled off the details with surprising detachment. Stroke. Right-sided weakness, unable to talk. By the time she hung up the phone, her mother was screaming at her side.

“Ken! Oh my God! Ken!” And then she looked at Kory. “Do something.”

But there wasn’t anything she could do except make sure he stayed breathing—make sure she stayed breathing, too. “He’s going to be okay,” she said, gathering his lifeless hand in her hand and staring hard into his wide eyes. “Paramedics are on their way.”

• • •

Will walked into the meeting room at Harmony Falls Elder Care and twenty women went silent.

“Ladies,” Will said, flashing a smile around the packed room. “Thank you for meeting with me.” He sat in the empty chair at the head of the table and removed his father’s Montblanc pen from his inside breast pocket, setting it gently atop the legal pad with the engraving facing up. “Valley Hospital System, which owns Valley Hospital in Rileyville, has recently purchased two smaller hospitals in the surrounding community, and now, they want to purchase this independently owned nursing home from my family. Their intention is to close the nursing home, transfer the patients and current employees to their hospital-owned nursing homes in Rileyville, and build a free-standing, Valley Hospital-affiliated urgent care in this space. Of course, you all probably know this by now, because nothing is a secret in Harmony Falls.” A few women chuckled while others nodded. “If you’ve attended any of the town hall meetings, you also know the majority is in favor of the deal because it means not having to drive to Rileyville for things like broken bones anymore. But the deal’s not done until all terms are agreed upon, including your terms. So…” he tapped his fingers on the pen “…shall we get started?”

The moratorium on talking broken, noise exploded until their voices amounted to nothing more than the buzz of a swarm of mosquitos. He held up his hands. “Bev, let’s start with you.”

The woman to his right pinched at her brightly colored scrub top, pulling it away from her belly. “I talked to Joe about this. He said he learned a lot about rights from the electrician’s union. Said we need to make sure our service here counts toward retirement credits there.”

Will nodded and scribbled the request on the legal pad. “Sounds reasonable. Who has the most seniority?”

“Gerty. Right?” Bev asked as she leaned forward and looked down the long table.

“Twenty years,” Gertrude said, nodding.

Bev kept talking, but seeing the woman who unceremoniously interrupted last night’s kiss with Kory, left Will jostled for a second or two. If she hadn’t walked in, how far would things have gone?

The sensible majority in his brain snatched control, shoving him back into the present. “I’m sorry, Bev. Can you repeat that?”

“I said, will they pay for parking in one of those garages, or will we have to? I think they should.”

One after the other, the women spoke in surprisingly efficient order, while Will short-handed everything. As he crossed the T’s in “Troutman,” Janelle spoke up. “We don’t have dental here. We’d like dental.”

Will nodded. “I would be surprised if it’s not part of the benefits package for a big hospital system, but I’ll verify.”

“Back to the idea of our years here counting,” Gertrude said. “Can you make that across the board, not just for retirement? I’d hate to be stuck with the worst shifts because they look at me as low-woman on the totem pole.”

Will didn’t see how that would work. Existing staff wouldn’t be happy to give up prime shifts to newcomers, but he wrote it down anyway, and by the time the hour ended, he’d filled four legal-sized pages with his chicken scratch.

On his way out of the meeting room, Fran grabbed his arm. “Thank you.”

“I haven’t done anything yet. Hold that thought for when I strike a decent deal.” He thought to pat the nursing home director’s hand but instead he offered an awkward smile.

“What do you mean you haven’t done anything? We all know your family is keeping this place fully staffed even though it’s never been a moneymaker, and you’re losing a ton of money every day it stays open. You could’ve closed it when Dr. Render retired. Lots of people say that.”

He shook his head. “Don’t believe everything you hear, Fran.”

“I don’t have to. I can form my own opinions. I know this business. I’ve seen the books. So thank you.” She squeezed his arm.

Something tickled his Adam’s apple until he coughed. If she knew how tenuous this deal was, she wouldn’t be praising him. Valley Hospital System had done an excellent job of enticing the Mitchells and leading them on. Lately, his gut told him the end result of this back and forth wasn’t going to be good. In that case, keeping the home fully staffed without a way to recoup the financial loss wasn’t heroic—it was stupid. At least that’s what his mother would say.

Fran walked ahead down the wide hallway’s peeling laminate floors, and then stopped to chat with Gertrude. The women smiled brightly as he passed them. No doubt, they’d be talking about him as soon as he was beyond earshot. Between the buyout and the kiss Gertrude witnessed last night, there was quite a bit to say.

Will slipped his right hand beneath his suit coat to rub the hotspot of nerves on his left side. He hated to think people were talking about him, especially when the talk revolved around anything other than his personal and professional successes, but he couldn’t change what he did in that coat room, and he couldn’t deny Fran’s statements about the dire predicament this home was in. His mother was right; it was the sole black mark in the Mitchell family business portfolio. It was the sole black mark on him.