LITMIR.BIZ

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off in the direction that Clarke had taken. “You can do much better than the likes of him.” She sighed. “Your father’s just too kindhearted, giving anyone work who shows up on his doorstep with a sad story.”

      The woman pressed her lips together. She had to know how that sounded. But Alex knew Dorothy hadn’t meant to be critical of her dad, the man she looked up to and respected more than anyone else. “Of course, I shouldn’t talk. If it wasn’t for that wonderful man, heaven only knows where I’d be right now.”

      Alex didn’t want Dorothy to dwell on the past, or what had initially brought her, destitute and desperate, to the inn.

      “Well, all I know is we’d be lost without you, so there’s no use in speculating about a state of affairs that mercifully never came about.” She squeezed the woman’s hand. “We all love you, Dorothy. You mean the world to us.”

      The other woman blushed.

      Dorothea O’Hara had been a guest at the inn some twelve years ago. Down on her luck, abandoned by the man she’d given her heart—and her savings—to, she had checked into the inn, wanting to spend one final night somewhere warm and inviting. Before she ended her emotional suffering by taking sleeping pills. After the fact, Dorothy had been quite frank about her intentions, much to the upset of the Romans.

      Years later Richard told his daughters he must have subconsciously sensed how unhappy Dorothy had been because something had prompted him to knock on her door that evening and engage her in a conversation that went on for hours.

      Newly widowed, he’d talked about his four daughters, about the adjustments all five of them had had to make because of his wife’s sudden passing, about how strange life had seemed to him at first without the woman he loved by his side.

      He’d talked about everything and anything until the first rays of the morning sun came into Dorothy’s room.

      For Dorothy, dawn had brought with it a realization that she was still alive—and still without options. She confessed to the man she’d been talking to all night that she wasn’t going to be able to pay for her stay.

      Embarrassed, she’d offered to work off her tab.

      It hadn’t taken long for her to work off the debt. Once she had, Richard told her that if she didn’t have anywhere else to go, he would consider it a personal favor if she stayed on at the inn.

      She’d quickly become family. As had some of the other guests at the inn who were initially only passing through.

      The inn, Alex firmly believed, was the richer for it.

      But there were times, few and far between, when her father made a mistake, a bad judgment call. This latest contractor had been one of those calls.

      Christina Roman MacDonald walked in, munching on an apple. Alex knew her sister would have preferred a breakfast pastry—one of her specialties as the inn’s resident chef and one of the most requested items on the breakfast menu. But she was trying to instill healthy eating habits in Ricky, her four-year-old son, and that meant apples rather than pastries.

      Swallowing what she’d been chewing, she said, “Hey, I just saw J.D. and his motley crew climbing into that beat-up truck of his. The guy almost ran right over me to get to it.” It wasn’t a complaint, just an observation. “Fastest I’ve seen the lot of them moving since they got here last week.” Cris nodded in the direction of the rear of the inn. “What’s up?”

      “Miss Alex’s temper,” Dorothy told her. There was no small note of pride in the woman’s voice. “She finally got fed up with that so-called contractor’s grand plans.”

      Leaning forward, the heavyset woman confided in as close to a whisper as she could manage, which meant it could undoubtedly be heard in the center of the closest San Diego shopping center, “No disrespect intended, Miss Alex, but it certainly took you long enough. The man was charging you for breathing—times five, since he was also padding the bill to pay for those five ‘helpers’ of his.”

      “Now,” Cris pointed out, “they did work sometimes.”

      “Yeah,” Dorothy snorted, “every time your father walked by.”

      “Well, the main thing is that they’re gone and we won’t have to put up with them any longer,” Alex said, trying to put an end to the matter. Of course, they still had to deal with the contract her father had signed, but in it her father had outlined specific things he’d wanted done. Clarke’s plans strayed dramatically from the contract. The fact that he’d backed down so easily—without first speaking to her father—clearly told her that she was right.

      “Yeah.” Cris nodded, regarding what was left of her apple as if she was seeking the answers to the mysteries of the universe. “Now all you have to do is explain all this to Dad.”

      Dorothy waved her hand at the problem, dismissing it. “Mr. Roman’s a saint,” she proclaimed with feeling. “He’ll understand that you were just looking out for him, Miss Alex.”

      “Or overriding him,” Cris chimed in with a barely suppressed grin.

      “It’s not like that,” Alex protested. “I wasn’t overriding him. If Dad was just a little bit tougher, I wouldn’t have to be so vigilant.” It wasn’t that her father was a pushover or easily hoodwinked, it was just that he saw the best in everyone, even in those who didn’t seem to have a decent bone in their bodies. “There are times when I think that he could just give the inn away if it wasn’t for us.”

      “For you,” Cris corrected her pointedly. They all knew that Alex was the fighter, the one who led the cavalry charge if a charge needed to be led. “The rest of us would just let Dad be Dad. I guess what I’m saying is, thanks for handling all that so we don’t have to.” And then she nodded. “He really is just too darn nice for his own good.”

      “Who is?” Richard inquired, walking into the reception area and crossing over to join his two eldest daughters. He nodded at the housekeeper. “Morning, Dorothy.”

      She could have tried to bury it in rhetoric, but what was the point? Alex thought. She believed in being honest.

      “You,” Alex told her father without any hesitation.

      He knew that look. For a moment he allowed himself to be sidetracked. What he’d come in to tell his daughters could wait a few minutes. It didn’t change anything, but keeping the news from them even a moment longer was a moment they were spared from dealing with what he had to tell them.

      “Why do I get the feeling that my eldest daughter is about to sit me down for a lecture?” he asked with a smile.

      Alex shook her head. “No, no lecture, Dad.”

      “But she does have some news to pass on,” Cris informed their father when Alex said nothing to follow up her simple denial.

      “Oh?” Richard turned to his eldest child. There were times she was so much like her mother, it gave him both pleasure and pain to look at her. Pleasure to remember all the good times they had shared together and pain because the time he had to remember was so very short in comparison to the rest of his life.

      He spared Dorothy a glance as he waited for Alex to enlighten him. The housekeeper’s face was an open book and if there was something he really needed to know, he would be able to see it in her expression.

      When the woman who never failed to let him know that he had saved her life that night they’d talked until dawn averted her face so he couldn’t look into it, Richard knew the news couldn’t be good.

      Did they already know?

      No, Richard decided. What he saw in his daughters’ faces was discomfort, not sorrow or despair.

      Looking at Alex, he said, “I’m listening.”

      CHAPTER TWO

      ALEX COULD FEEL three pairs of eyes on her, waiting expectantly.

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