style="font-size:15px;"> “Here?”
She smiled. “I bought this house.”
No.
“Is your last name Addison?” he croaked out the words. “F. S. Addison?”
“I’m Faith Starr Addison. Starr is my middle name and my mother’s name.” She drew her brows together. “How did you know?”
He ignored the question. “You bought this house from Miss Larabee?”
Faith nodded. “She’s so sweet. She reminds me of my late grandmother. We met for the first time last night at dinner. We watched one of my movies together.”
“Dinner and a movie?”
“Yes.” Faith adjusted her baseball cap. “She asked me for my autograph. She was so cute.”
Gabe fought a wave of nausea. He remembered Miss Larabee’s one great passion—the movies. She’d once dreamed of being an actress. Damn. Dinner with a movie star must have been the offer “too good to pass up.”
Still that didn’t explain her selling the house to Faith. Not after he’d shared his own dreams about the house with Miss Larabee over tea during his weekly visits—dreams of restoring the house the way his grandfather had always wanted to do and raising a family here. Guess that couldn’t compare to dinner with flighty and flaky Faith, as the press called her, who merely had to learn to smile and speak on cue and steal people’s dreams.
She sighed with apparent satisfaction. “Henry was right when he told me it would be perfect for a B and B.”
Gabe froze. He couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. But he had to. He had to know. “You asked Henry to find you a B and B here in town?”
“No, I’d never heard of Berry Patch,” she said. “I hadn’t spoken with Henry in months, but he called out of the blue to say hi. We were catching up when I told him about looking for a B and B to buy and he explained how Berry Patch is an up-and-coming tourist destination in the heart of wine country.”
Movie star turned innkeeper? That made no sense. “Why would you want a B and B?”
She stiffened. “I always thought I’d go into the hotel business someday.”
“I can’t see you as innkeeper.”
She raised her chin. “I spent a lot of time working at inns and B and Bs when I was a teenager.” A slight smile formed on her lips. “You should taste my stuffed French toast.”
An invitation? He didn’t think so. Besides Gabe wasn’t interested. She was the enemy. Hell, she was his worst nightmare. The kind of woman his ex-wife had wanted to be. And now he worked for her on a house that should belong to him.
“After Henry told me about this house, he e-mailed me pictures. I made an offer that day. Everything went so smoothly I have to believe it was fate.”
Not fate. Henry. Damn him.
Gabe felt as if he’d been hit in the gut. And it was his friend, Henry, throwing the punches. A mix of emotions swirled inside Gabe. Anger, frustration, betrayal. He clenched his fists.
It was all Henry’s fault.
No, it wasn’t. Henry didn’t know about Gabe’s dream of owning this house. It wasn’t something they discussed over beers at The Vine. He had only shared the plan of his life with his family and Miss Larabee.
“Is something wrong?” Faith asked.
Very wrong. And now he knew why.
The owner’s notes—containing glitzy, glamorous and thoroughly modern changes to the remodeling plans—he’d received via Henry suddenly made a lot more sense. Gabe didn’t like the notes or her.
“You aren’t what I expected,” he said finally.
“I never am,” she murmured with a faraway look in her eyes. But in a moment, her gaze sharpened. “So I have a couple of questions for you. Who are you? And why is your dog sleeping on my front porch?”
My front porch.
Gabe bristled at the words. Resentment overflowed. There was so much he wanted to say to her. “I quit” was tops on the list. He glanced at the house.
Remember what’s important.
It wasn’t Faith. Or him.
It was this house.
His grandfather had been obsessed with restoring it for as long as Gabe could remember. It hadn’t taken long for him to feel the same way. Each time the bus passed by here on his way to school, his own desire had intensified. But when he’d accompanied his grandfather to fix a leak for Miss Larabee, something had happened. Something that went deeper than the house.
Even though Gabe had only been fourteen at the time, everything he wanted in life had crystallized during that first visit—a wife, kids, a dog and this house. The perfect family living the perfect life in the perfect house.
A life totally different from his own.
His family had been far from perfect. Too many kids, too many animals and a house that was nothing more than fodder for a wrecking ball.
He wanted that perfect life. Desperately.
Gabe had made a plan and set out to achieve it. He’d married the girl of his dreams right after high-school graduation. Next on the list were children. But his wife hadn’t wanted to stay in Berry Patch. He hadn’t wanted to leave. So they’d divorced.
But he wasn’t about to let his dream die. Unlike his father, when Gabe made a plan he stuck to it. So what if his first wife hadn’t gone along with his blueprint for a perfect life? So what if Henry had messed up Gabe’s chance of buying this house? So what if Miss Larabee had sold the house out from under him?
Gabe wasn’t giving up.
He had to remain strong, steadfast, to protect the house from Faith.
Already the second floor suffered from remuddling—what happened when remodeling destroyed the character of a home—and he wasn’t about to allow any more damage to be done. And that’s what would happen if he followed through with the changes suggested by F. S. Addison. But Gabe wasn’t about to do that. He would succeed with the Larabee house where his grandfather had failed with the farmhouse Gabe grew up in. The mess of a house his parents still called home.
While Gabe was growing up, his father had ignored Grandpa’s suggestions about remodeling the house. Instead of having a plan, his father took whatever extra money he had and simply added on whatever space he thought they needed most. But the money never lasted due to a tractor needing a new engine or some other farming mishap, so his dad just stopped whatever he was building. He never finished anything. Gabe’s bedroom had been nothing more than drywall and Astroturf for more years than he cared to remember. He’d had to finish it himself when he got older. And his sister Cecilia’s room, too. If not for him, the house would still be a bunch of unfinished rooms and additions.
“Are
