Yours, Mine...or Ours?. Karen Templeton
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if it’s all the same to you.”
“Amends?” A wary curiosity flickered in her eyes. “Like how?”
“Like a job offer. Sort of. And a place to live.”
At her intake of breath, he moved in for the kill. “The car’s at least got a heater. And hot chocolate.”
“Hot chocolate?”
“I passed a Dunkin’ Donuts on the way over.” He shrugged. “I took a chance.” When her gaze drifted over to the car, he said, gently, “I was a cop. A good cop. I swear, you’re safe with me.”
He thought he might have seen one corner of her mouth twitch. “I only have your word on that, you know.”
Rudy flipped up his collar. His thighs were stinging, his butt was going numb and he didn’t even want to think about what was happening to other parts of his anatomy. “Okay, so yeah, for all you know I could be some raving weirdo. Actually my kid probably thinks I am, dragging her up here to live and everything. But that’s beside the point.”
He bent slightly to see her face, pretty and soft and round and pinked with the cold. Like one of those old porcelain-headed dolls his mother liked to collect. “So why don’t you go tell your friend inside to keep an eye out, and we’ll stay right where you can see the house.”
“I don’t know…”
“Violet. Please. Let me at least try to make this right, okay?”
She wavered for another several seconds before, with a sharp nod, she skipped up the porch stairs, opened the door and spoke to whoever was inside, then marched back down the walk, her coat swishing slightly in the still night air.
“This had better be some damn good hot chocolate,” she muttered as he opened the door for her.
Chapter Three
In the grand scheme of things, Violet mused as she sipped the hot chocolate, did it really matter who came up with the idea first? Because sometimes there was a fine line between forging your own destiny and begging. Between determination and desperation.
So all in all, she decided, sitting in Rudy’s nice warm car, the cozy throw he’d had dug out of the backseat snuggled around her thighs, the scent of big strong man mingling with the sweet, warm breath of the chocolate, things were probably working out better than she could have hoped.
“Better” definitely being a relative term. Because she felt a little how Moses’s mother must’ve felt after she’d hidden her baby in the rushes so Pharoah’s daughter would find him, then going and offering herself as a wet nurse. Yeah, she’d been able to stay with her baby, which was some consolation, but he was no longer really hers, was he? A temporary arrangement was all it had been.
Not that the house had ever been hers, Violet reminded herself. But in her heart, it was the same thing. She pressed her lips together, staring into the dark, jittery liquid. “Let me get this straight—you want me and the boys to come live in the house—”
“Well, in the apartment over the garage, if that’s okay. But yes.”
Violet chewed the inside of her cheek to keep the flutter of excitement leashed. It was Violet herself who’d convinced Doris to renovate the space a few years ago, for families who might prefer a self-contained area with its own kitchen to staying in the bed-and-breakfast proper. The apartment wasn’t big, only one bedroom, but flooded with light in the winter, tenderly shaded by a dozen trees in the summer. And the sofa bed didn’t smell like old gym socks.
A dream she’d given up, twice, now hovered again in front of her, a firefly begging for capture—
Stop it, she told herself. Don’t you dare let yourself get caught up again in something that never existed except in your own head.
“And in exchange,” she said, not looking at him, not showing her hand, “you want me to help you put the inn back in order?”
“And then stay on as breakfast cook after we’re up and running again. Like you did for Doris.” She could feel his gaze on the side of her face, earnest and warm. Another man hell-bent on rescuing her. “I can’t pay you much to start, but at least all your living expenses would be covered.” He paused. “And if you wanted to work part-time somewhere else and needed to leave the boys…I suppose we could work something out about that, too.”
Violet’s eyes shot to his. Having no idea about his renovation plans, she’d only planned on asking for the cook’s job. Funny, she mused, doing her best to keep from slipping into that open, steady gaze, how guilt so often motivated the innocent far more than it ever did the guilty.
“Wow,” she said, looking away again. “That’s really generous.”
“Not a bit of it. You’d be doing me a huge favor. Because I’d have to hire someone eventually, anyway,” he said to her slight frown. “So who better than someone who already knew the drill?”
Another sip of hot chocolate was in order while she pretended to think. Rudy apparently took her hesitation for bitterness. With good reason.
“Violet,” he said in that gruff-soft way of his that would be her undoing if she wasn’t careful. If he wasn’t. Two years without a man’s touch is a long time. Becoming a nun, she thought ruefully, had never been on the short list. Yet another reason why she hadn’t exactly immediately embraced the idea. Because hanging around Rudy Vaccaro…
Yeah, she needed that aggravation like a hole in the head.
“I know this isn’t what you’d hoped for,” he was saying, “but I can’t undo what’s done. Or give you the place just because—”
“Of course you can’t give me the house!” she said, startled that he’d even think such a thing. “Yes, I’m disappointed, but I’m not delusional!” She already knew he’d bought the house outright. Which made him borderline insane as well as impossibly generous. Another strike against him. “The house is yours, fair and square. I mean, if there’s no will, there’s no will, right?”
He looked at her again, oozing concern and macho protectiveness, and she wanted to say, Quit it, will ya? because her body and her emotions and her head were on three different pages, which was not good.
“So Doris did tell you she was leaving it to you?”
Violet nodded. “A month before she died, maybe, she swore she was going to put it in writing, so there’d be no question. I knew Doris ever since I was little, I usedta work there during the summers when I was a teenager. I’d—” Her words caught in her throat. “I’d never known her to break a promise before.”
But then, her life was a junkyard of broken promises, wasn’t it?
“And you never had a chance to search the house?”
Violet looked right into those night-darkened eyes and half wanted to smack him one. “Jeez, what is it with you? I would think finding that will would be the last thing you’d want.”
“So maybe I’m just making sure I’ve got nothing to worry about.”
After a moment, she averted her gaze. “Not too long before Doris passed, her daughter Patty came up here from Boston and strong-armed the old girl into a nursing home. And of course, the minute Doris was out, so were the boys and me. A week later, the house went up for sale. I’m guessing Patty got power of attorney or whatever.”
“So when the old lady died, everything went to Patty.”
“Exactly. And obviously she wasn’t about to let me in to go looking for a will she’d hardly want me to find.”
“If there was one.”
Violet hesitated, then lifted the cup to her lips again. “If there was one,” she echoed over the stab of betrayal.
One wrist propped on the steering