Cinderella Search (16 page)

“Most of the community. John Drysdale, a local real estate agent, told us someone was checking the place out this summer, with the intention of making a bid on it. Someone already in the resort management business. Why would you have come here, other than on your father’s behalf?”

He frowned. “For a quiet vacation?”

“Please, don’t try to deny it,” she said. “You were the only stranger who booked this year. All the others are repeats from past years.

“When you made your booking, we realized you were the most likely potential buyer and checked you out. It’s amazing how much personal information is available on the Internet. Your name isn’t all that uncommon, but how many Steven Jacksons are there whose fathers are major players in the resort business? He doesn’t exactly keep a low-profile, and his business methods are no secret. He sends in someone to look over a property he wants, discovers all its worst points, then makes a low-ball offer based on that knowledge. Okay, fair enough, I suppose that’s a valid business practice. Nobody wants to buy a pig in a poke, and most vendors try to show a place in its best light. But we’re not the vendors, and we don’t want him to buy it at all.”

“How would trying to scare me off with something as hokey as ghost stories prevent that?”

“It wasn’t just ghost stories. There were the sounds, the drawers, the clothes. It would have scared me!”

“Didn’t scare me, though,” he said, then gave a half-grin. “Okay, it did unnerve me a bit, but as soon as I found the timers and that disk I left the first and removed the second so I could sleep without all that howling and moaning waking me up. The drawers I could live with.” He grinned wolfishly. “I learned while living on shipboard that the best revenge for a practical joke is to pretend you don’t notice it.”

“It wasn’t a practical joke.” She explained about their wanting him to give his father a bad report. “That’s why we put you in the most uncomfortable bed in the house, one no one else is ever given unless we’re massively over-crowded, which hasn’t happened in about twenty years. We mean to buy this inn, Steve, but we won’t be able to do it until after the festival.”

Steve stood erect and backed up until he felt a chair against his knees and sank onto it as her words sank into him. “You’ve been toying with me, manipulating me, using me.”

“No!” Her protest was vehement—and almost convincing. “Or, not through malice,” she went on, actually admitting it. “Through desperation. But be honest, in coming here on an exploratory visit, pretending to be a legitimate guest, weren’t you manipulating us? Even if we hadn’t been on to you, you’d have found all sorts of faults and failures—things that are inevitable in an old building. What kind of report were you going to give him? One that would bring in a low bid, right?”

“Lissa—”

“So we gave you an excuse to make it a really low one. Or maybe none at all. Would your father want to buy a place full of ghosts and termites? Though the termites were just an inspiration on my part—I wasn’t supposed to fall through the ceiling. But after I fell, I thought up the termites and figured you’d leave. But you didn’t.”

He looked at her steadily for a moment or two. He’d known she had secrets, known something was going on, but never in his wildest dreams would he have come up with a scenario like this. “I see. That must have been disappointing for you.”

“Steve …” Lissa hated to beg, but for this, she’d do it. “We don’t want your father or anyone else to buy the inn because we’re almost in a position to do it ourselves. This year, with what we make from the festival, we should have just enough, but only if you don’t come in with a bid before our option runs out.”

“So, in order to regain the inn, your father asked you to make nice with me? Keep me happy, maybe? What was that supposed to accomplish?”

“If … if we don’t make enough to cover our bid, and your family takes over, Dad—we all thought it would be to our advantage to have you in our corner.”

“We, we, we,” he said, leaping up and pacing away from her. “You’re the one who seduced the hell out of me when you saw I wasn’t about to leave. You’re—”

“No!” she cried, rising just as swiftly. “I didn’t seduce you! I tried to resist you, but—”’

“Garbage,” he snapped, crowding in on her so close she felt the heat of his body. It would have melted her, but for the anger she saw simmering through him. “You learned a lot from that little princess story of yours, didn’t you? Made it a pattern for your life, maybe? You couldn’t slay the dragon by fair means, so you used foul. You outsmarted me, played me for a fool, made me show off and exhaust myself trying to prove to you what a wonderful dragon I was until I was too weak to resist you.”

“You’re crazy! It wasn’t like that at all. It—”

“Maybe I was crazy, but I’m not anymore. I’m beginning to see straight. You’re the one who’s trying to keep anyone else from buying the inn.”

“Not just me,” she protested. “Us. We, the committee in charge of fund-raising. The whole town.”

“It wasn’t the whole town that got into my blood, who kissed me till my eyes crossed, who made love to me like a sorceress. God!” Steve exploded, clamping his hands over her shoulders, unable to hide his roiling emotions from her.

She winced and he let her go, turned and strode away from her, coming to a halt near the huge fireplace. There, he spun and faced her again from a safer distance. “And you called me an opportunist!”

“I didn’t know you then, Steve. Didn’t care about—”

He cut off her words with a chopping motion of his hand. “Don’t bother, Lissa. Your explanations are specious just because they come from you. I don’t like being manipulated. I don’t like being used, and that’s exactly what you’ve done to me from the very beginning, you and those big brown eyes of yours, that sexy body. How do I know you didn’t crash through the ceiling on purpose, just to intrigue me?”

“I didn’t!” she shouted. Then, as if remembering where she was, and that it was the middle of the night, she modulated her tone. “You’ve got it all wrong!” she went on, pleading now. “Remember, when this all started, I hadn’t even met you, hadn’t come to know you. I hadn’t learned to … care about you.”

“And you want me to believe that you do now?”

“Yes.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. Those damned brown eyes brimmed with unshed tears. They were nearly his undoing, but he steeled himself, let his anger feed on itself, feeling it swell in his chest. “You don’t care about me now,” he accused, “and you didn’t care about me then.”

“Not then, no. I admit that. All I cared about was the inn and my dad. He desperately wants it back. Steve, please understand. It was in his family for years. His father lost it in … in a pinochle game of all things, to one of his rich guests who then made him manager.

“The inn was my dad’s home from the time he was born. He thought of it as his baby from the age of twenty when his father was killed in a plane crash and he took over managing it. He made it what it is now. Or, what it used to be, what the entire town knows he can make it again, once he’s in a position to take charge. I’ll do anything to help him achieve that goal.”

Steve stood silent, digesting what she’d said. “Obviously, then, you should be able to understand my doing what my father wants me to do, right?”

Miserably, she nodded, so miserably, he almost forgave her, almost told her the truth, that he wasn’t there on his father’s behalf. “Yes. I suppose so,” she said. “Your father runs a successful business. I know he needs to find opportunities to expand his area of operations. But not here, Steve. Please, that’s all I’m asking of you, not here!”

“Why not here? Because you don’t want him to? Aren’t you the one who told me no one can have everything they want?”

“This isn’t just for me. It’s for my dad. It’s important to him in a way that it can’t possibly be important to yours. The inn is all he knows, Steve, all he wants.”

“And you’re such a dutiful daughter, you’d even sleep with the enemy to get him what he wants. How altruistic of you, Lissa.”

He watched anger replace sorrow in her eyes, watched her chin come up and color flare in her cheeks. He’d never wanted her more than at that moment. But to take her now, to make love to her before he sorted through what he really felt for her after these revelations would have been wrong. For both of them.

Her anger was short-lived. “No. Not altruistic in the least,” she said, dropping down onto a chair, defeat in the droop of her shoulders. “If your father’s company gets the inn, there’s no guarantee they’ll do as the previous owners have done and let my dad store his old junk in the attic. If it has to be moved out, he’ll expect me to move off my boat and into a house where there’s room for it—and him. That’s what he wanted when I first came back. It would take two of us to pay the rent, but I don’t want to have to live with him, or his moldy old furniture that he keeps telling me is my ‘heritage.’ It’s a heritage I have no use for. Nor do I want to live in a house. I have my boat. It’s my freedom. I love it. I can’t give it up.”

“Even if your moving into a house with him would make your father happy?”

“That’s unfair,” she said. “Yes, I want Dad to be happy, but not at the expense of my own happiness. And unless he gets his job and his life back, I can’t have mine back.”

“So when he’s happily managing this place again, you’re free to go. Go where, Lissa?”

“I told you. I want to put my boat to work. I want to run tours. Oh, God, is it so hard to understand that I just want my dad to have what he wants, so I can live my own life again?”

Right. A life in which she’d have no use for furniture, no use for a house—a home.

Those two statements answered a lot of questions for him. Lissa Wilkins had no use for permanency. It wasn’t just the fear that she’d be left high and dry and hurting she’d been crying over. It was the fear of losing her freedom. If her dad got the inn back, then she’d be gone on the morning tide.

Why it surprised him, he didn’t know. Why it hurt him so, he didn’t want to think about. And he’d thought she was crying because he couldn’t offer her any ironclad guarantees. Bull. She was the one who couldn’t do that.

It struck him then that she hadn’t said she’d been crying because of his inability to provide guarantees, but because of their inability. She didn’t believe that his love, or her own for him, could create the kind of guarantees something in her yearned for—something she worked so hard at squelching. After all, she didn’t believe in happy endings.

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday … Where was Steve? She looked at the register each night she came on duty, but he hadn’t checked out. She’d had dinner with her dad and Rosa at Chuckles on Thursday. He hadn’t been there. She’d sat in the lounge for more than three hours after arriving at work, and he didn’t come downstairs. On Friday, someone mentioned he’d been fishing and had donated three salmon for the community barbecue during festival weekend.

Okay, he was avoiding her. That should have suited her just fine. It didn’t She ached to see him, yearned for just one more chance to make him understand. But he gave her no opportunity. On Friday night, she even considered slipping upstairs and knocking on his door, but pride held her back. Pride, mixed with a hefty dose of fear. As long as she hadn’t heard him say it was over, a small, secret part of her could pretend. Pretending was all right, wasn’t it? Just sometimes? After all, a little fantasy went a long way toward soothing an unsoothable pain.

Saturday morning, after an exhausting night trying to sleep, she gratefully turned the desk over to a sour faced Pete. He had still not forgiven her for calling him in early when she’d needed to escape. He’d made her week even more miserable than it had to be. Hell, he’d made much of the past two years miserable for her. This morning though, he was in an even fouler mood than normal because when she left, she wouldn’t be back for two full weeks and he’d have to find a different whipping girl on whom to vent his spleen. Gertie, the relief desk clerk would be taking her place. Lissa could almost laugh, since nobody, but nobody, intimidated Gertie. Especially not Pete.

Thank goodness the festival was the following weekend. The take would be tallied up, and maybe, just maybe, Pete would be out of a job. As, of course, would she. She couldn’t wait.

No sooner had Lissa returned to the boat than the phone started ringing. The exhibitor on the other end was demanding running water in his booth. By the time he hung up, she was envisioning fifty garden hoses strung together, snaking across the park. Hoo-boy!

The phone rang again immediately, and Lissa soothed another worried exhibitor. The minute that caller hung up, there was hammering on the door. In quick succession she dealt with the problems of six people, most of whom wanted to change the location of their particular booths.

“Traffic flow,” said Hank Marsden a regular exhibitor who created wrought-iron sculptures. “You have to think of traffic flow, Lissa. If people enter the park here—” with a grimy fingernail he jabbed at the plan spread out on the coffee table “—they’ll have spent all their money before they get to mine.” She’d had this argument with him twice before, and moved his booth both times. This year she meant to stand firm.

Someone else knocked on the door. “Come in!” she called, hoping it was another participant who also hated his or her location and would be willing to trade with Hank.

She had no idea if the man who trotted down the companionway still intended to have a booth. There was nothing on her master plan that said he did. But suddenly her mouth went dry.

Steve’s question echoed in her mind. Who gets to write the falling-in-love schedule?

She’d like to ask him who got to write the falling-out-of-love schedule. Obviously, he did. He looked bright-eyed, well rested, and not in the least disturbed. She just wished he’d tell her his secret. Then, on the other hand, maybe she didn’t want to know it. Maybe it was simply the fact that he had never been in love with her, had merely tossed the word around as casually as most men did in order to get what they wanted. It took her a moment to remember he hadn’t said that word until after he’d gotten what he wanted.