you his scar?”
Josie’s eyes went wide and she shook her head.
Gabe lifted his chin and drew a line across part of his throat. “Pirates got him.”
Immediately Josie looked dubious and Delia stifled her own smile. Gabe had just insulted Josie’s tenuous status as a big kid.
“There are no such things as pirates.” She looked scornful. “You’re fooling around.”
Gabe sighed and straightened. “You’re too smart, Josie Johnson. Too smart for me. I think we’ve got some coloring books around here somewhere. My wife’s idea.” Gabe’s eyes twinkled.
Ah, yes. The wife.
Smooth smiles or not, there was no way any woman could combat the love Gabe clearly had for his wife, Alice.
Delia hadn’t met Alice yet, but Gabe’s feelings for her practically filled the room.
Gabe turned to the cabinets near the bar to look for the coloring books and Josie rolled her eyes at Delia.
Josie thought she was too old for such things and maybe she was, but Delia lifted her eyebrow anyway. The kid would sit and play with rocks or stare quietly into space or whatever it took for Delia to finish this interview.
They needed this job. They needed it bad. They had no cash and nowhere to go.
Gabe turned around armed with puzzles, books, coloring books and big boxes of crayons and colored pencils.
“After a few dinner-hour disasters, Alice bought this stuff for the guests with kids,” he said, handing everything over to Josie, who perked up at the sight of the puzzles.
The girl was a sudoku fanatic.
Josie settled herself at one of the tables and Delia gripped her hands together behind her back, in an attempt to stem the anxiousness whirling through her stomach.
“Where were we?” she asked, while Gabe watched Josie.
“Sorry.” Gabe shook his head and laughed. “My wife and I are expecting and I just…It’s nuts to think I’m going to have an eight-year-old kid at some point.”
He’d told her about the baby maybe a million times when they should have been talking about the inn’s new spa services. But Delia smiled. “It goes by fast, that’s for sure.” She paused for a moment and channeled some of her mother’s graceful social niceties. “You were talking about the new addition to the lodge—”
“Right, right. Sorry.” Again the lethal smile and she hoped this Alice woman knew how lucky she was. “Follow me.” He led her to a door in the back corner of the dining room, next to the elegant desk, where guests checked in. The door had a discreet sign on it: Spa.
“We’re still adding the finishing touches, but here it is.” He pushed open the door to a dimly lit hallway, painted a soothing gray-green. “There’s a little bit of paint and electrical work to do. We wanted to leave it fairly unfinished so whoever we hired could make the space their own.”
Delia stood on the threshold and let the chills run through her. Her gut, her head, her heart—they all said, This is it.
Daddy always said his momma had the sight. Delia didn’t believe in those things anymore—not since Jared had taken a sledgehammer to her life—but she could see herself here. Working. Raising Josie.
This couldn’t be a better situation.
Autonomy and security, at least for the time being.
Gabe stepped down the hallway and Delia turned to shoot her willful daughter a look then followed him through the door.
“Our reservations fell so dramatically once the fall colors ended we knew we had to do something.” He opened the door to a massage room with a big padded table positioned in the center. There was a shelf for her lotions and even an outlet so she could plug in her hot pot to do hot-stone massages. “We’re getting a few cross-country skiers but it’s still not enough. So—”
“So, you’re an inn and spa.”
“Exactly. We were going to wait a few years before adding the spa, but we figured sooner rather than later would help us all keep our jobs.” He grinned again and Delia wondered if anyone ever said no to the guy. No wonder his wife was pregnant. “We’re ready to start advertising the services, but we wanted to get the right person in, someone who we knew could handle the work and had the right philosophy.” Gabe paused, offering her an opportunity to tell him her philosophy.
Funny, she used to have one of those. Now her whole philosophy was surviving the day.
“I was trained in San Antonio,” she said. “I apprenticed at the Four Seasons there and am a registered massage therapist and yoga instructor.”
“The last month and a bit?” he asked. “You have a gap in your résumé.”
Delia forced herself to smile and let the lie slide right off her tongue. “I went to France. Personal reasons.”
“Ah, nothing better than personal reasons that lead you to France. Josie must have loved it.”
The implication that she must have taken her daughter slid through her like poison. “She did. We both did.”
It didn’t even faze her anymore, the lies. Her heart didn’t trip, her hands didn’t go cold, and her face didn’t go hot.
She was thirty-seven years old and a liar, now. Another black mark on Jared’s hell-bound soul.
“I ran my own business for five years previous to France and at the same time worked at a holistic health center as part of an integrated care system for people suffering from terminal illness.”
“That’s all right here, Delia.” Gabe looked down at his clipboard, where she guessed her résumé was. “I’m hoping to find out a little bit about you. About what you think you can offer and what you think we can offer you.”
Right. She felt desperation well up in her gut like sticky tar, clinging to her courage and will, dragging her down to someplace scary.
“I want to be a part of something that people love. Something generous and good,” she said, the truth like an elixir, clearing away the fear and despair, the hunger and sleeplessness. Jared used to mock her for thinking she could help people with her “rubdowns.” But she’d seen the proof firsthand.
But even as she said the words, they felt like a lie. She hadn’t been living a generous life in far too long. Jared’s poison had infiltrated her being and she felt small and bitter. So she reached deep into the reasons she’d become a massage therapist, trying hard in this beautiful place to reconnect with the woman she’d once been. “I want to work side by side with people who work hard to do their best, to provide the best experience for guests. I want to help people recover, to feel better, to step lighter and maybe laugh a little more. That’s why I loved working at the holistic center. I want to make people’s lives a little bit easier—”
“Done. You’re hired.”
Delia
