Peach Orchard Inn, Present Day
A HONEYBEE ORCHESTRA serenaded the rhododendron as Julia led Eli Donovan out the back way across the plank-board porch and down the steps toward the carriage house. Bingo ambled around the corner of the inn to sniff the newcomer’s pant leg. A shadow of his former self, the old dog had once been as hyper as a kindergarten class on red Kool-Aid. Oh, the wonderful times he and Mikey had enjoyed. She wondered if Mikey remembered the dog who adored him, who had looked for him and refused to eat when Mikey didn’t come home.
“That’s Bingo,” she said simply. “He’s friendly.”
Eli scratched Bingo’s floppy ear and ruffled the neck fur, all the while looking toward the ramshackle carriage house. Julia winced, seeing it from a stranger’s perspective.
“The previous owner, maybe even the one before that, didn’t do anything with it, either. The rooms are piled with old junk.”
The tired two-story building with the sagging upper balcony sported a boarded-up bottom where carriages and later cars had been parked. At one end, near a tangled mass of wild roses Julia hadn’t had the heart or time to cut down, was an entrance door with a dirty upper window. The top floor would have been the living quarters for the driver and his family, though now the dormer windows were obscured by cardboard boxes and other stored items.
“What’s in there?” Eli asked.
“Odds and ends. Junk. A few ragged antiques. A bit of everything, I think. When Valery and I bought the house, we added to the collection. Anything we didn’t immediately toss was stuffed in here or down in the cellar.” And both had already been packed.
He paused a few feet out from the building and looked up. He had a quiet about him, a deep reserve. She couldn’t decide if he was thoughtful or hiding something. The latter troubled her slightly. She knew nothing about this man who was willing to work for little beyond a roof over his head. What kind of man did that?
A desperate man. A man down on his luck. A man with nowhere else to turn.
But why? He seemed intelligent, well-spoken with the soft drawl of a well-bred Southerner. He was sad, an emotion that circled him like an aura. That alone had kept Julia from rejecting his strange offer outright. She understood bone-deep, unshakable sorrow.
“A lot of work,” he said.
“Too much?” She watched him in profile as he perused the derelict building.
He was taller than her by several inches, with broad shoulders and well-muscled arms that had seen work. But he was too thin and the bones of his face were too prominent, as if he didn’t eat enough. Neither detracted from his dark and rugged good looks, though noticing men was Valery’s pastime, not hers. Yet, there was mystery about Eli, perhaps due to his tendency toward silence. Not that silence was a bad thing.
“No.”
Terse, to the point and a little uncertain, as though he expected her to send him down the road in that jalopy of a car he drove. He intrigued her, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Thanks a lot, Val.
She’d never hired anyone for help around the inn other than Dylan Winfeld, a teenager who cut the grass when she or Valery grew overwhelmed. But she’d known Dylan forever. His family lived next door to her on Sage Street. Eli Donovan was a stranger.
They’d reached the weathered entrance into the carriage house.
“Where are you from, Eli?”
The question seemed to catch him off guard. His hand paused on the doorknob and his body went still. He focused on the closed door. “Knoxville. Is this locked?”
She reached into her pocket and handed him the key. The door screeched open and he stepped aside to let her enter. A gentleman’s action and one she duly noted just as she’d noted the way he held a fork and used a napkin and the way he’d remained standing until Valery was seated.
“You have family waiting there?”
Her back was to him as they entered the small space, but when he didn’t reply, she paused to look over her shoulder.
“No,” he said, and something in those mysterious eyes flickered. Family was not an easy topic for Eli Donovan.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’d do without mine. When—” She caught herself before it was too late. She’d almost said, When Mikey disappeared.
Talking about Mikey today seemed to be emotional quicksand and she did not want to suffocate in front of a perfect stranger.
“You have other sisters? Brothers?” He asked the question quickly as if he somehow knew about her son and couldn’t bear to hear the story again.
“Only Mom, Dad, Valery and me, but a pretty big extended family.” She didn’t add that her parents had been divorced for years but lived in the same town without killing each other.
“You’re not married.” Again, that terse comment as though conversation was a struggle. Was he naturally shy?
“Divorced.” A wound that didn’t throb anymore. David’s marriage to Cindy Bishop had ended that. Not that she hadn’t wept bitterly when he’d produced another son within a year. He’d forgotten Mikey the way he’d forgotten her. Clean sweep, put the past behind him and moved on as if they’d never lived together in the pleasant three-bedroom brick house on Sage Street. “You?”
Theirs was a casual conversation, nothing personal, a potential employer getting to know a potential employee.
“Never.” He gave a short, self-deprecating huff that made her wonder.
When she tilted her head in question, his gaze shifted from the rising stairs to the door leading into the carriage bay. “Up first or through the lower floor?”
“Let’s go up.”
“You should lead. I don’t know the way.”
She stepped around him, aware of his size and close enough to catch the earthy, outdoors scent of him. Her elbow brushed his jean jacket and the rough texture prickled the skin on her arms.
Disconcerted, she gripped the railing and started up. His movement behind her was quiet, but she could feel him there, a polite distance though still too close for comfort. She felt self-conscious, as if her hips were too wide and their sway meant something other than advancing up a set of narrow, rickety stairs.
At the top, a musty, dusty odor greeted them. Julia stepped into the open space. “We could make two bedrooms and baths up here, I think. Or perhaps a family suite.”
He regarded the crowded space with interest. “A lot of stuff up here.”
“I warned you. Valery poked around in some of it. Old trunks of clothes, discarded furniture, tools, anything and everything. It appears everyone who ever lived here left things behind.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Considering we’ve had no immediate plans to rehab the space, I hadn’t really thought about doing anything, but you’re right. To transform this into guest rooms, we’ll have to get rid of everything.”
“Or store it somewhere else.”
“Maybe I could have a sale.”
He hitched one shoulder. “Maybe.”
“First, we’ll have to sort through, I guess.”
“I can do that for you.” He gestured toward a battered vanity. “How old is this place?”
“Pre-Civil War, though I doubt any of the furniture is that old.”
She shoved a box out of the way to make a path to the dormers. A spider darted across her foot. She let out a squeak and jumped back.
A shiny boot, its relative newness out of sync with the rest of the man, obliterated the hairy creature.
Julia gave an embarrassed laugh. “I hate spiders. A neighbor boy used to torment me with them.” She didn’t know why she’d felt compelled to add that last bit.
“Probably plenty of them in here.”
“A joyous thought,” she said wryly. “And another reason I have avoided the carriage house.”
The corners of his mouth quivered like the stirring of a single leaf by a breath of air. His eyes lit and, every bit as quickly, dimmed.
Had he smiled once today? Did he ever? What weight could a man possibly carry that he rarely smiled? Even she had found her smile again.
“Mind if I look around?”
“Go ahead. That’s why we came, but if it’s all the same to you, I’ll stay right here.”
“Spiderwebs everywhere.” As if to prove the point, he waved his hand into a thick web strung between a stack of boxes and the wall and wiped the cottony mess down the sides of his jeans.
“Exactly.” She remained beside a stack of boxes piled on top of a bureau in need of repair. The bulky piece of mahogany had been here when she’d first arrived and, like so many other things, had simply been too much to deal with at the time.
The wooden floor creaked beneath Eli’s weight as he approached the windows. Thick, dusty cobwebs crisscrossed panes so dirty the sun barely penetrated the glass with a hazy, translucent light.
“Can they be saved?” she asked.
“The spiderwebs? Or the windows?”
A joke. The man had made a joke. Julia smiled. “Saving the planet does not include spiders.”
The hard face softened. “The windows won’t live, either.”
“Darn.” She stuck a finger between her teeth and gnawed a cuticle. “So much for authenticity.”
“We’ll save what we can and reconstruct the rest.” He traversed the remainder of the second story, testing floorboards and running wide, competent hands over the decayed and peeling wallpaper. Julia had a moment of panic at the thought of her strained budget and the amount of money this project could take.
“Valery and I did most of the work on the inn ourselves. I’m not sure if I can afford to pay someone to do all this.”
He turned, gave her another of his long, silent looks before his eyes slid away. There was something about his eyes—a hunger, a plea and, worst of all, a hopelessness that felt too much like kinship.
With a silent nod, he dropped his head and started toward the stairs.
Surprised, Julia put out a hand. “Wait.”
He paused to look over one shoulder, holding to the rickety rail. His shaggy hair curled around his ears, a boyish contrast to the hard masculinity.
“Where are you going?”
A muscle twitched along his cheekbone. He met her gaze before glancing away. “To find a job.”
He looked as defeated as any man could, a stray dog kicked one too many times.
Something basic and hurting called out to her. And because she understood desperation, she softly said, “We’ll figure something out.”
Dark eyes flicked up to hers, though there was no real hope in him. “You sure?”
Not in the least, especially not now with this strange awareness humming across the crowded storage area stronger than the smell of dust and age. “Do you really have the skills to undertake a renovation like this?”
“Yes.” No waffling, no false modesty, but then she had a feeling Eli Donovan hadn’t the energy for either.
“Okay.” She released a small breath, puzzled that she wanted him to take the job. The bone-deep, abiding sadness that seemed to emanate from his every pore touched a chord in her, plucked a broken string that needed repair as badly as the carriage house. As badly as he did. “Ready to see the rest?”
Without a word, he descended the stairs. This time she was the follower, looking down on the top of his dark hair, at the growth swirl at the crown and at the broad shoulders that seemed burdened with the weight of the world.
Or perhaps she was merely being fanciful, conjuring images of a wounded soul in need of healing and hope. It wouldn’t be the first time her mind had imagined things that didn’t exist.
They reached the bottom, another area crammed with the flotsam and jetsam of Peach Orchard Inn’s past lives.
“This area’s not as packed. Thank goodness. I think the last owners parked a car here and kept the space reasonably shoveled out. There’s an office of sorts through that door,” Julia said, pointing to the south wall. “Anyway, I take it for an office. It might have been anything. But there’s a bathroom, not a great one but with functional plumbing so I’m hopeful this area can become another guest room.”
“Plumbing? Must have been added long after the original building.”
“The carriage house could be newer than the inn. I just don’t know. The old photos we used in restoring the house didn’t show the backyard.”
“Maybe we can find others.”
“I’d like that. The inn’s history interests me, but I haven’t had much time to research.”
They stepped around a bicycle with one wheel, a bedstead, wooden crates and an old telephone before pushing through the door into the other room. Dust and dirt layered everything.
Eli stuck his head into the adjoining bathroom, a three-quarter affair with a brick-bottomed shower. “Good enough.”
Julia frowned at his back. If he thought this was good enough for her guests, they might have a problem getting on the same page. “Guests expect nicer.”
He withdrew his head and leveled a look in her direction. “For me. I can bunk here.”
“Here? No, Eli, room and board means one of the rooms in the house. You can’t live out in this.”
“Why?”
“Well—” She gestured at the sad, filthy room. “Look.”
“You have cleaning supplies?”
“Yes, but—”
“You need your rooms for paying guests. This will do for me.”
“There’s no furniture.”
He nudged his chin upward. “I’ll find what I need upstairs.”
He was the strangest man and Julia didn’t quite know what to think of him.
While she pondered, he crossed to the single window and shoved upward, propping it open with a discarded brick. A whisper breeze of spring freshness wafted inside, bringing along a shaft of sunlight.
“No.”
“My requirements are basic at present.”
There it was again. The kind of word choice that said Eli Donovan was not an uneducated laborer, though he appeared to be. Who was the man hiding behind the silence?
The question jolted her. Was he hiding something? And if he was, did she dare hire him to live on the same property with her guests and two women alone?