closed her eyes, wishing she could open them again and find the whole thing was a figment of her imagination.
Unfortunately, it was all entirely too real. Elliot Bailey. Living next door.
She didn’t want him here. Stupid online bookings. If he had called in person about renting the cottage next to hers—one of five small, charming two-bedroom vacation rentals along the lakeshore—she might have been able to concoct some excuse.
With her imagination, surely she could have come up with something good. All the cottages were being painted. A plumbing issue meant none of them had water. The entire place had to be fumigated for tarantulas.
If she had spoken with him in person, she may have been able to concoct some excuse that would keep Elliot Bailey away. But he had used the inn’s online reservation system and paid in full before she even realized who was moving in next door. Now she was stuck with him for three entire weeks.
She would have to make the best of it.
As he tried the door again, guilt poked at her. Even if she didn’t want him here, she couldn’t sit here when one of her guests needed help. It was rude, selfish and irresponsible. “Stay,” she murmured to Cyrus, then stood up and made her way down the porch steps of Primrose Cottage and back up those of Cedarwood.
“May I help?”
At her words, Elliot whirled around, the fingers of his right hand flexing inside his sling as if reaching for a weapon. She could only hope he didn’t have one. Maybe she should have thought of that before sneaking up on him.
Elliot was a decorated FBI agent and always exuded an air of cold danger, as if ready to strike at any moment. It was as much a part of him as his blue eyes.
His brother had shared the same eyes, but the similarities between them ended there. Wyatt’s blue eyes had been warm, alive, brimming with personality. Elliot’s were serious and solemn and always seemed to look at her as if she were some kind of alien life form that had landed in his world.
Her heart gave a familiar pinch at the thought of Wyatt and the fledgling dreams that had been taken away from her on a snowy road so long ago.
“Megan,” he said, his voice as stiff and formal as if he were greeting J. Edgar Hoover himself. “I didn’t see you.”
“It’s a dark evening and I’m easy to miss. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
In the yellow glow of the porch light, his features appeared lean and alert, like a hungry mountain lion. She could feel her muscles tense in response, a helpless doe caught unawares in an alpine meadow.
She adored the rest of the Bailey family. All of them, even linebacker-big Marshall. Why was Elliot the only one who made her so blasted nervous?
“May I help you?” she asked again. “This lock can be sticky. Usually it takes two hands, one to twist the key and the other to pull the door toward you.”
“That could be an issue for the next three weeks.” His voice seemed flat and she had the vague, somewhat disconcerting impression that he was tired. Elliot always seemed so invincible but now lines bracketed his mouth and his hair was uncharacteristically rumpled. It seemed so odd to see him as anything other than perfectly controlled.
Of course he was tired. The man had just driven in from Denver. Anybody would be exhausted after an eight-hour drive—especially when he was healing from an obvious injury and probably in pain.
What happened to his arm? She wanted to ask, but couldn’t quite find the courage. It wasn’t her business anyway. Elliot was a guest of her inn and deserved all the hospitality she offered to any guest—including whatever privacy he needed and help accessing the cottage he had paid in advance to rent.
“There is a trick,” she told him. “If you pull the door slightly toward you first, then turn the key, you should be able to manage with one hand. If you have trouble again, you can find me or one of the staff to help you. I live next door.”
The sound he made might have been a laugh or a scoff. She couldn’t tell.
“Of course you live next door. I should have known.”
She frowned. What did that mean? With all the renovations to the inn after a devastating fire, she couldn’t afford to pay for an overnight manager. It had seemed easier to move into one of the cottages so she could be close enough to step in if the front desk clerks had a problem in the middle of the night.
That was the only reason she was here. Elliot didn’t need to respond to that information as if she was some loser who hadn’t been able to fly far from the nest.
“We need someone on-site full-time to handle emergencies,” she said stiffly. “Such as guests who can’t open their doors by themselves.”
“I am certainly not about to bother you or your staff every time I need to go in and out of my own rental unit. I’ll figure something out.”
His voice sounded tight, annoyed, and she tried to attribute it to travel weariness instead of that subtle disapproval she always seemed to feel emanating from him.
“I can help you this time at least.” She inserted his key, exerted only a slight amount of pull on the door and heard the lock disengage. She pushed the door open and flipped on a light inside the cheery little two-bedroom cottage, with its small combined living-dining room and kitchen table set in front of the big windows overlooking the lake.
“Thank you for your help,” he said, sounding a little less censorious.
“Anytime.” She smiled, her well-practiced, smooth innkeeper smile. After a decade of running the twenty-room Inn at Haven Point on her own, she had become quite adept at exuding hospitality she was far from feeling.
“May I help you with your bags?”
He gave her a long, steady look that conveyed clearly what he thought of that offer. “I’m good. Thank you.”
What else could she do but shrug? Stubborn man. Let him struggle. “Good night, then. If you need anything, you know where to find me.”
“Yes. I do. Next door, apparently.”
“That’s right. Good night,” she said again, then returned to her front porch, where she and Cyrus settled in to watch him pull a few things out of his vehicle and carry them inside.
She could have saved him a few trips up and down those steps by lending a hand, but clearly he wanted to cling to his own stubbornness instead.
As usual, it was obvious he wanted nothing to do with her. Elliot tended to treat her as if she were a riddle he had no desire to solve.
Over the years, she had developed pretty good strategies for avoiding him at social gatherings, though it was a struggle. She had once been almost engaged to his younger brother. That alone would tend to link her to the Bailey family, but it wasn’t the only tie between them. She counted his sisters, Wynona Bailey Emmett and Katrina Bailey Callahan, among her closest friends.
In fact, because of her connection to his sisters, she knew he was likely in town at least in part to attend a big after-the-fact reception to celebrate Katrina’s wedding to Bowie Callahan,
