to stand, “let’s go see the assistant principal. She’ll get you all set up.”
Stace struggled to her feet, the picture of the condemned woman, and Rudy thought, I sheltered this kid way too much. In hindsight, he should’ve made much more of an effort to expose his daughter to new experiences, new people, before she’d become so…so ossified. Still, when her eyes swung to his, begging him not to embarrass her by giving her a hug, he knew her pain was real.
A pain that, no matter what kind of spin he put on it, he’d caused.
“I’ll be back at—” He looked at the secretary.
“Three,” she supplied, holding one arm out to guide Stace to the inner sanctum. His daughter took two steps toward the secretary, and Rudy took one step—backward—toward the office door, and Stacey spun and wrapped herself around his waist, barely long enough for him to react, then darted off again.
How did they do that?
Back outside, feeling like The Hulk as he wove his way back to the parking lot through a sea of winterized little kids, he had to ask himself…what if it didn’t take, with Stace? How long did he dare wait out the normal pangs of homesickness, her resentment at his having, as she’d reminded him no less than a dozen times since their arrival hours, ruined her life?
And what if he couldn’t turn the inn around, make a go of it? Enthusiasm was all well and good, but the fact remained that he’d gone into this more or less blind. Oh, he’d taken a few courses and read everything he could get his hands on about running a bed-and-breakfast, but—
“Rudy?”
He blinked, then looked down into Violet’s round, flushed face, freckled in the unforgiving daylight, framed by a zillion coppery coils that skated and slid across the shoulders of that shapeless down coat. In the sunshine, she was…incredible, a Technicolor marvel of pale cream and deep pink and underside-of-the-leaf-green and a thousand shades of fire, and he had to literally order his hand not to lift to her face. Just long enough to ground him again, to remind him what it was like, to touch a woman. To yearn.
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