Room at the Inn (Novella): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (12 page)

He wanted it, but he didn’t know how to take it.

Leo’s shoes crunched over the frozen snow that covered the river rocks.

Carson was tired of getting in his own way. Tired of working hard all the time and changing nothing. Tired of always moving away from where he longed to be.

“Give the factory to Julie,” he said.

Leo told him, “Give it to her yourself.”

Chapter Thirteen

At the mansion, Carson paused before closing the passenger door. “Thanks for the lift. I’ll call you sometime if this—if everything works out.”

“I’d like that.”

He climbed the back steps and watched the red eyes of Leo’s taillights brighten then disappear as his oldest, best friend pulled out of the driveway.

Probably not the ass, after all. More like his guardian angel.

In the mudroom, he leaned his backpack against the wall and hung up his coat and hat, ignoring the instinct that told him to drop them all on the floor and rush to her. He didn’t even know where to find her, or what to say when he did. He didn’t know anything.

The kitchen was quiet and dark.

“Julie?” he called, walking toward the front of the house. “You up, Jules?”

Quickly, he searched all the downstairs rooms, but she wasn’t around. It was late, nearly ten o’clock. She usually didn’t go to bed this early, and he couldn’t imagine she would have on Christmas Eve. She would be angry, defiantly going about her life, talking to her guests, hardening her heart against him.

He’d blown his last shot with her—he was sure of it. She’d given him everything this time, taken him into her home and her bed. Julie had held nothing back, and he’d not only left her
again
, he’d done it with no honest acknowledgment of what they had between them. No explanation, no real good-bye.

He hadn’t even given her a Christmas present. He’d bought her a set of silicone pot holders from Bruce at the hardware store, but when he’d gone to set them on the countertop, it had struck him what a singularly small and petty present they were.
Here
, they seemed to say.
These will keep you from setting the kitchen on fire while I’m gone
.

So, in the end, he’d left without a gesture of any kind. Just a hug and a kiss on the forehead, and a promise to be back in a few months.

He might as well have punched her.

He found two people in the library, neither of them Julie. He didn’t stop to talk. There was no way he could concentrate enough to be polite.

Carson took the steps two at a time, all the way up to the attic, propelled by an urgency that seemed to come from outside him. He ascended so fast, his vision went gray at the edges. “Julie?”

The apartment was empty.

The darkness pressed down on his chest, pushing through him with a fast, cold pressure that forced him to brace his hands on his knees and suck in deep breaths, one after another.

She wasn’t here.

It hit him hard—so hard he tried to laugh, except his lungs wouldn’t work.

He was such an
idiot
.

He’d thought his father was trying to trap him, that Julie would entice him away from his real life. He’d thought this dark feeling was something optional that he could detach and leave behind, that he could be ruthless about sentiment because he didn’t need it.

Carson had been wrong about everything.

This was panic. Pure, black, dense panic at Julie’s absence and the unraveling of all his plans and everything he thought he understood.

Panic like he hadn’t felt in sixteen years, since he stood over her unconscious body in a hospital bed and saw that he could lose her, too. He could lose everyone.

He loved her. He’d loved her forever.

And he needed her to be
here
, safe where he’d left her, even though he didn’t remotely deserve it.

He had to find her, and he had to do it
now
.

But not looking like this. She’d made a stern face at the travel clothes he put on for the airplane. The clothes belonged to a different man—one he needed to leave behind.

Carson quickly unbuttoned his shirt and stripped it off. Dropped his pants and then remembered to unlace his shoes a few seconds too late and ended up hopping twice on one foot, awkwardly, before he came crashing to the ground.

He gave up and lay down so he could bang the back of his head into the wood floor a few times.

All these years, he’d been running away from death. He was afraid to lose her, so he’d left her.

Fucking
idiot.

He loved Julie Long—loved her certainty and her competence and her independent streak, her passion and her sense of humor and her crazy, giant house and the way she kept taking him back and forgiving him for being a complete asshole.

Carson loved the way she loved the town he’d tried to abandon, loved that she’d befriended his parents, loved that she’d called him back here to try to mend his relationship with his father.

And if he didn’t tell her soon, it might be too late.

He shoved off his shoes and flung his pants into the corner, stood up, and found the pile
of clothes he’d left behind in her closet. Duofold shirt, flannel button-up, dirty work jeans. This was who he was here, with Julie. This was the man he hoped she wanted.

He tugged on his boots, glanced in the mirror and saw a frantic stranger staring back at him with red cheeks and black eyes and flattened, straggly hair.

Nothing to be done about that now.

He thundered down the stairs to the first floor and stuck his head back in the library. “You know where Julie went?”

A rude interruption. It took the guests a few beats to process the question, and Carson gripped the jamb in both hands, tilting his torso into the room, ready to burst from the doorway and run just as soon as he had a direction.

“She’s still at the church, I think.”

He must have looked confused, because the woman clarified, “The Methodist church? She took a bunch of people to the Christmas Eve service. We’re Catholic, so we’re holding out for the Midnight Mass. She said she’d be back in time to drive us if you want to wait.”

He was already gone. He snagged his coat off the hook and burst out the back door.

Six blocks to the church, four of them uphill. He took the first two at a sprint.

Heavy, wet snow fell on his bare head and cooled the back of his neck as he ran. His boots slipped. His breath came out ragged and too loud, and when he started uphill, his thighs and lungs screamed at him to stop.

Carson ignored them. He got a stitch in his side, and he ignored that, too.

He owed her this. He owed her
more
than this.

He owed her the rest of his life, and half a lifetime’s penance.

When the slick sidewalk and the tilt of the road made running impossible, he staggered. He lurched. The snow stuck to his boots and made them heavy. Gravity tugged at him, but he refused to be subject to it.

His frantic pulse beat out her name.
Julie. Julie. Julie
.

In the churchyard, he didn’t even pause. He pushed open the oversized entry doors of the Potter Falls Methodist Church in the middle of the Christmas Eve service and brought it to a grinding halt.

“Julie!”

Over the top of a hundred grayed and graying heads, he found hers. Hair the color of wheat in October. Blue-purple eyes, and an expression that shifted from annoyance to surprise to a kind of soft, hopeful awe.

He stood there, stunned, dressed all wrong, and tried to remember how to breathe.

A cacophony of whispers broke out. The pastor cleared her throat.

Julie got to her feet and turned all the way around to face him.

She smiled, and Carson’s heart broke open.

After that, everything happened fast. He stalked to the front of the church and forced his way down the pew where she was sitting, stepping on toes and almost landing in Mrs. Miller’s lap, until he finally collided with Julie, who’d worked her way toward him from the opposite end. Two of her tourists slid to either side and cleared a space, and he had her in her arms, picked her up off the floor. She smelled like cinnamon and looked like Christmas, all red and green and gold, with tears in her eyes.

He kissed them away, kissed the corners of her mouth, kissed her nose and her chin and her lips, and he smoothed his hands over her temples and her hair, held her head, and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Jules. I’m so sorry.” He just kept saying it, over and over again, until she silenced him with a kiss that banished his panic and set something at ease inside him that had been wounded and dark and restless for a long time.

She laughed and clutched his shoulders when he kissed her neck. Her jaw. Her cheeks. She didn’t stop crying, but she laughed.

“What happened to Dubai?” she asked.

“They can find somebody else. I’m staying. I promise.”

“For how long?”

“For good. Forever, if you’ll have me, and even if you won’t, I guess, my dad— But Christ, I hope you’ll have me, Jules.”

She beamed and touched him, a tentative sweep of her cupped fingers over his face as if she couldn’t quite believe he had reappeared. “I decided I won’t.”

But he could see all her teeth, gleaming, and the dimple in her cheek. Gold earrings glinted in the candlelight, her eyes were wide and wet, full of emotion, and everything about her said
Yes, I’ll have you
.

“Change your mind one last time.”

Her lips pursed. He caught the mischief in her expression before she said, “I’m not sure I should.”

That’s when he picked her up and stood her on the pew, so everybody in the church could see her. Because this wasn’t just about Julie, this declaration he was about to make. It was about him, about Potter Falls, about the rest of his life. He caught sight of his father, standing a few pews away, watching him.

Martin winked.

Carson took Julie’s hand, cupped it in his, and caught her laughing eyes again.

The rustles and whispers died down, and the church filled with a silence so complete, it felt like a sacrament.

“Julia Marie Long, I love you.”

Off to the side somewhere, a woman gasped.

“I’ve loved you forever, but I’ve done a rotten job of it. You made a sacrifice for my family, and I left you for it. You took care of my parents, took care of my town, and I never thanked you.”

She opened her mouth to interrupt, but he kept talking. “Whatever you’re going to say, shut it. I’m only giving this speech once. I don’t deserve you, but I love you, and I’ve got thirty or forty years left, I hope. There’s no point to them without you. Being with you, loving you—Julie, that’s the point. That’s the whole fucking point.”

“Language,” someone said, and he realized what he’d done. Swearing in a church. His dad was going to have his head on a platter.

Carson dropped to one knee. “Jules, will you marry me?”

Another gasp. Julie trembled, and a cold horror crept through his veins, anchoring him to the earth. He was doing this all wrong. She would say no.

“You can think about it,” he offered. “I understand that this might seem, uh … hasty.”

She laughed, a slightly panicked sound, and ran her finger along his forehead, right below the band of his stocking cap.

“Is all this actually happening?” she asked.

Carson nodded.

“Did I really just get proposed to by a hobo-lumberjack who crashed Christmas so he could grovel in front of everybody in Potter Falls?”

She addressed this question a bit more to the crowd than to Carson. Which made his cheeks hot, but he figured he deserved it.

“Not everybody,” the pastor said. “He’ll have to take you over to the Catholic Church and do it again if he really wants to get everybody.”

“String him along, Julie,” a voice hollered from the other side of the church. “He’s made you wait long enough.”

And then there was a chorus of comments, shouted witticisms from all directions, and Carson held Julie’s hands and watched her face.

She didn’t believe him.

He dug around in his pocket for the key Leo had given him and held it up to her. “This is for you. For Christmas.”

Julie took the key and turned it over in her palm, bewildered.

“What’s it open?”

“The shoe factory. I’m giving it to you. Or, I guess actually, Leo is giving it to you. But only because I told him to.”

She frowned. “How generous.”

“I’m going to stay and fix it up. You can keep it or give it to a nonprofit or turn it into a cooperative—whatever you want—and I’ll run the construction site. It’s going to be great.”

The frown became the scowl. “You’re staying for a project.”

“I’m staying for
you
. And when this project’s over, I’ll find another one, or you can just keep giving me work at the house. I love your house. I love fixing it up for you. Whatever I need to do—”

Carson stopped, frustrated because she still didn’t look like she believed him. She looked like she
hated
him.

Abruptly, he pulled her down off the pew and against his body. He kissed her, hard, putting all the certainty he’d found into it. Wanting her to feel it.

He leaned down and spoke in her ear. “I was afraid, Jules. When my mom was sick, and you were so weak after the operation, and my dad fell apart … I was afraid of losing you, and I felt like I had to pick between what was pulling me out into the world and this … this panic I felt whenever I looked at you. I did the easy thing and left, and even that was harder than it should have been.” He straightened and looked into her eyes. They were wet, full of unshed tears.

“I love my parents, Jules, but I couldn’t stay away from here because I couldn’t keep away from
you
. Not for long. So I just kept coming back, and it kept getting worse—until this time.” He squeezed her hands, hard. “My job isn’t what makes me happy.
You’re
what makes me happy, and I’m not afraid anymore. If I lose everything, it won’t be worse than leaving you again. I need you. I love you. I want to make it up to you, every way I can think of.”