No Forever Like Nantucket (A Sweet Island Inn Book 6) Page 6

  What other job could she find where she’d feel as fulfilled as she did now?

  There was nothing. Nothing else. If Mae lost the inn, she’d lose everything.

  Debra clapped her hands, shocking Mae out of her thoughts. She jolted and a bit of warm coffee sloshed out of her mug and onto her jeans.

  “Okay, come on, Mae. Out with it.” Debra raised a brow. “What’s going on with you?”

  “Nothing!” Mae dabbed at the coffee stain on her jeans with a paper napkin, worrying at the wet spot even as it continued to spread.

  Lola clicked her tongue. “We don’t believe you. You seem upset.”

  Debra leaned in close, brows knit together. “Is it about Dominic?”

  “No!” she answered quickly. “No, definitely not.”

  “Because if this is about him…” Lola said, glancing nervously at Debra. “If you think you’ve made a mistake, we can help you get out of it. I’ve got a bottle of rat poison in my garage, so you just say the word and I’ll—”

  “Lola! Goodness gracious, no. Perish the thought. I want to marry him,” Mae insisted, looking both of her friends in the eyes, trying to convey her sincerity. “I promise I do. It has nothing to do with Dom.”

  Debra lifted a finger straight into the air. “A-ha! It. You said, ‘It has nothing to do with Dom,’ which means there is something that’s bothering you.”

  “Good catch,” Lola said, snapping her fingers.

  Mae’s shoulders sagged forward. It looked like she didn’t have much of a choice but to tell them. They’d never stop pestering her if she didn’t.

  “It’s about the construction site across the road,” Mae admitted. “It’s going to be a hotel.”

  Her friends sat upright, eyes wide. “How do you know?” Debra asked.

  “They just put the sign out by the road this morning,” Mae explained. “We drove by it on the way here. It has a picture of the plans and the name of the hotel. The Sweet Island Hotel.”

  Lola gasped and Debra bolted up, her napkin and half a scone falling to the deck. “They can’t do that.”

  “It has to be illegal. That’s the name of your inn,” Lola said—as if Mae didn’t already know.

  “Apparently, they can. Dominic is going to talk with his lawyers to try and sort it out, but even if we can get them to change the name, I’m not sure it will matter.”

  Debra dropped back down into her chair with a thud. “What do you mean it won’t matter?”

  Mae shrugged. “I run a small inn. The rooms are clean, the food is good, and we have a private beach, but the hotel is nice. They’ll have a heated pool, a dog park. Money to spend on nice amenities. I can’t compete with that.”

  This was not the conversation Mae wanted to be having on the morning of her engagement. But it also felt good to get her worries out of her head. Speaking them aloud made them feel less like loose bowling balls rolling around between her ears.

  “First of all,” Debra said, “you run an amazing small-town inn. The rooms are luxurious, the food is incredible, and the guests have a private beach. That point can’t be undersold.”

  “Yeah,” Lola agreed. “Who wants to come to an island to lounge in a heated pool? I’d much rather go see the ocean.”

  “Exactly.” Debra snapped her fingers. “And people come to Nantucket to experience the culture. They don’t want a corporate experience they can have anywhere in the world. They want the experience only Mae Benson can give them.”

  “Like a standing reservation at the island’s hottest new restaurant, Little Bull.” Lola wagged her brows. “No hotel will be able to offer their guests that perk.”

  Once again, Mae wanted to give in to her friends’ positivity, just like she’d wanted to trust Dominic that his lawyers could make this all go away. But even with their kind words, doubts lingered. Worries festered.

  In the last few years, Mae had seen all of her children start their lives over. They’d broken off engagements, started new careers. Started new businesses, even! The Bensons had proven themselves a resilient bunch.

  The problem was, they were Mae’s children. Young adults. People with their whole lives stretching out ahead of them. A red carpet of opportunities and possibilities. As a senior citizen, Mae was supposed to have her life figured out by now. She was supposed to be settled and comfortable. A content grandma with no nasty surprises on the horizon.

  Hitting the restart button was for the young. Mae didn’t think it was an option for her.

  “I’m just not sure I’ll be able to compete,” Mae said, taking a deep breath to hide the tremble in her voice. “I can only lower my prices so far. I can’t order things in bulk the way a hotel can. I can’t rely on another site on the mainland to cover any deficits. All I have is this one little inn, and I’m not sure she’s built to weather this storm. I’m not sure I’m built to weather this storm.”

  Debra frowned. “Come on, Mae. This isn’t like you.”

  “Yeah, you’re usually the positive one,” Lola agreed. “Our glass-half-full friend.”

  Mae lifted her mimosa glass. “My glass is half-full. I have the two best friends in the world and an incredible fiancé.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Debra encouraged, a tentative smile tipping the edges of her lips.

  “The problem,” Mae continued, “is with the other half of the glass. If the inn gets taken from me, I’m not sure my glass will ever be full again.”

  Their small party fell silent. Mae felt bad for bringing her friends down. They’d gone to the trouble of holding their tongues for two weeks and setting up a lovely brunch celebration, and here came Mae, ruining it with doom and gloom.

  “I’m sorry,” she sighed. “This is not how today was supposed to go, I’m sure. I just can’t stop myself from worrying. Dominic thinks his lawyers can fix this, but I don’t see how.”

  Debra waved both hands in the air and shook her head. “No apologizing. As they say, ‘It’s your party, and you can cry if you want to.’ Though I’m not sure crying is going to help this situation.”

  Mae sat up straight and cleared her throat of the rising emotion. “You’re right. Whining and worrying won’t help. I need to do something.”

  They both stared at Mae, blinking, expectant.

  Finally, Lola spoke. “Well, what are you doing to do?”

  7

  Sara

  Nantucket Fire Department

  Sara felt like she was suffocating.

  With Patrick refusing to make up her mind for her, she returned to her office and tried to continue sorting mail. But the task seemed futile. Not to mention triggering.

  She wanted to forget about the lucrative offer, just for a few minutes. But with each piece of mail she picked up, it was fresh in her mind. Would this mail still have her name on it in a few months? Or would it be addressed to someone else? If she sold the business, would she still be in charge of sorting the mail? Maybe this office wouldn’t even be hers. Maybe someone else would sit here and sign paperwork and sort mail.

  Sara didn’t like the paperwork, but she did like her office.

  She’d finally gotten around to hanging pictures on the walls. The most recent photo, one with all six of her nieces and nephews sitting in the grass behind her mom’s inn, smiled back at her when she glanced at it. The new owner probably would chuck that straight in the garbage.

  Sara sighed and rested her forehead on the desk. So much for her productive day of playing catch-up.

  Her already glacial mail sorting pace slowed even further, until Sara found herself tearing the perforated edge of a ten percent off coupon for an electric lawn mower. She ripped it carefully, one tiny perforation at a time, relishing the tiny tik-tik-tik sensation of the paper giving way.

  “You’re stalling, Sara Benson,” she said aloud in the empty office. The silence swallowed up her words.

  She looked over to another picture on the wall. It was her on the day she graduated from culinary school. Beaming proud in her
chef’s whites, a diploma in one hand and a whisk—her mother’s idea, which Sara hated and protested and only agreed to go along with when her dad cajoled her to be nice for Mom’s sake—held aloft in the other.

  “What would you do?” she asked her old self quietly.

  Unsurprisingly, the picture did not respond.

  Growling in disgust at her own malaise, Sara swept the tattered coupon into the recycling bin, grabbed her keys, and marched out of her office.

  In the kitchen, Jose was swaying along with his favorite R&B station on the radio while he opened can after can of San Marzano tomatoes. He didn’t even hear Sara walk through the kitchen and through the back door.

  If she was suffocating, she knew just the hero to save her.

  It wasn’t rare for Sara to drop by the station and find Joey and the other firemen watching a ball game on the flat screen in the rec room or playing basketball on the hoop they’d installed on the far end of the large concrete driveway. Being a firefighter, it seemed, involved an awful lot of shooting the breeze with the fellas.

  But today, lo and behold, they were washing the trucks. The large glass garage doors were thrown open, and two of the fire trucks sat glistening wet in the driveway, the sun highlighting the sparkles in the ruby red paint.

  There were sudsy buckets of water scattered around and a hose from each side of the building snaking across the concrete. A few firefighters knelt down scrubbing at the chrome rims. Others stood on top of the tires, reaching as high as they could up the sides of the truck. The last few men clambered up on ladders to spray the top. Water ricocheted off the metal and turned to rainbows in the air.

  All that was left to complete the fantasy montage was for them to take off their shirts and, in slow motion, dump the buckets of water on each other. Sara smirked at the mental image.

  Then, as if the universe had read her mind, Joey came walking around the truck. Shirtless.

  Fighting fires did wonders for the physique. Joey was trim and cut, and for the first time since she’d opened the letter, Sara’s mind went utterly blank.

  She’d seen Joey shirtless at the pool in Charleston, of course. But something about the setting today seemed to demand a few more seconds of slack-jawed appreciation.

  Which ended with an abrupt record-scratch jolt when another one of the men fired a hose in Joey’s direction with a laugh.

  “Put on a shirt!” the man called.

  Joey dodged the jet of water and waved a finger of warning in the air. “The only reason I don’t have one is because MacIntosh sprayed me.”

  “And because you want to make us old fat guys feel bad!” Hobbs said, placing both hands on his stomach and shaking it.

  That sight broke Sara out of her trance. “No way, you’ve still got it, Hobbs,” Sara called out, walking across the hot pavement.

  Since she’d parked on the side of the building and walked around to the back, the men hadn’t heard her approach. Now that she’d spoken, they all whipped around to see her.

  Joey and Hobbs both grinned.

  “You hear that, Joey?” Hobbs asked, smoothing out his walrus mustache with two fingers. “I’m coming for your girl.”

  “Come for my girl and I’ll tell your wife,” Joey warned, eyes narrowed.

  Hobbs waved away his threat. “Sherryl wouldn’t mind. She loves Sara’s cooking, too. She’d like having her around more often.”

  Stealing Sara away from Joey had become a recurring joke around the firehouse. It all started when Sara delivered a tray of Super Bowl snacks for the guys on shift during the game. Apparently, her lamb and feta sliders, sticky balsamic ribs, and double chocolate fudge brownies were real man-catchers.

  “I’m not sure how Joey looks the way he does with that kind of food around all the time,” MacIntosh said, waving at Sara from the top of a ladder between the two trucks.

  “I don’t make it all the time,” Sara said. “Only for you boys.”

  Joey grabbed the still-damp shirt hanging over his shoulder and pulled it on, his arm struggling through the wet sleeve. Then he wrapped the damp arm around her shoulder, pulling her inside.

  “Don’t encourage them,” he muttered.

  “But it’s so fun.” She smiled and wrapped her arms around Joey’s waist as they walked.

  She’d never been a cuddler until she met Joey. Now, she liked being close to him. It had something to do with dopamine levels and serotonin from human contact, she was sure. Purely science. And the fact that, even when he should smell like a wet dog, she wanted to bury her face in his shirt and take a big whiff.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked, leaning back against a long wooden table set along the side wall of the firehouse.

  With the trucks outside, the space felt even more cavernous. The tall ceilings were a maze of metal piping and air ducts and the concrete floors were polished to a nearly reflective shine. In some ways, it reminded Sara of being in a restaurant kitchen. Which brought the letter to the forefront of her mind once again.

  “I just wanted to see you.”

  “Procrastinating?” he asked, raising a suspicious brow. “I thought you had a ton to do today.”

  “I did,” Sara admitted with a sigh. “I do. But I don’t want to deal with any of that right this second. Let’s talk about literally anything else.”

  “Nice weather we’re having, eh?”

  “Okay, anything but that.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “Shut up and tell me how your day is going, you clown.”

  Joey pressed a hand to his chest. “I feel used.”

  Sara laughed. “You love it.”

  “Guilty as charged.” He jumped up to sit on the table, his legs swinging casually beneath him. “But I do actually have kind of big news. I went on my first solo fire inspection run.”

  Sara frowned. “You did Little Bull’s yearly inspection by yourself last month.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t count. You’re my girlfriend. Nepotism, or whatever.”

  “Okay, hold on.” Sara held up her hands. “Is my inspection this year legal or not?”

  He laughed. “You’re all legal. But I wasn’t nervous about inspecting Little Bull. You just had a fire last year, so I knew everything was upgraded and up to code because Hobbs did his own inspection after all that mess. Plus, you’re easy to impress.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “All I have to do is show up in my overalls, and you start taking me very seriously.”

  “I do love a man in uniform,” she admitted.

  Joey winked at her. “Well, I don’t think the foreman at the new hotel cared about my uniform very much. So it felt like a big deal.”

  “That is a big deal! But wait, what hotel?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Joey snapped. “The site down the road from your mom’s house? It’s going to be a hotel, apparently. The foreman is an old friend of your brother’s, I guess? Nick… something or other…”

  “Nick Nelson?”

  Joey nodded. “He said the site was going to be a hotel. There were, like, ninety-five rooms. Plus a ballroom, a spa, and an outdoor pool. It looked nice.”

  Sara raised her brows. “Like, nice enough to make my mom’s inn obsolete?”

  Joey winced. “Crap. I didn’t even think about that. But I’m sure it’s fine, right?”

  Sara had no idea. Whatever was going on, her mom was probably handling it. Mae Benson had an answer for everything. “I’m sure.”

  Joey relaxed, leaning back, his palms pressed flat to the table. “So what don’t you want to deal with?”

  “That’s the end of my procrastination, I guess.” Sara skimmed the toe of her shoe over the shiny concrete floor. “When I was going through the mail this morning, I sort of… found something.”

  Joey’s blonde brows pinched together. “Uh-oh.”

  “No, it’s not bad.” Sara bobbed her head back and forth. “At least, I don’t think so. Actually…” She groaned an
d leaned forward, pressing her forehead into Joey’s chest. “I have no idea.”

  He rubbed her back. “I’m on the edge of my seat. Spill.”

  Sara pulled back and stood tall, trying to exude a confidence she didn’t feel. “I was sorting a ginormous pile of mail this morning. I think I broke records for the most mail ever received in one week. It was massive.”

  “Is that the news? That you broke a world record?”

  “No.” She chuckled and took a deep breath. “In the stack, I found a letter from a lawyer. Or lawyers, plural. Nelson & Associates.”

  “That means nothing to me,” Joey said. “Continue.”

  “They are working with a person or people or… company. I’m not really sure on the details.”

  “That makes two of us,” Joey laughed. When Sara frowned at him, he held up his hands in surrender. “Sorry. Just trying to follow the thread of the story here.”

  Sara felt like she needed to sit down. Even though the firehouse was all cool concrete and metal, she was overheating. She moved next to Joey and jumped slightly to sit on the edge of the wooden table.

  “Okay, in short, someone wants to buy Little Bull,” she said. “I’d remain on as Executive Chef for at least a year, but the business side of things would be handed over to someone else. And they want to pay me a lot of money. Like, a lot a lot.”

  “Oh. Whoa.” Joey’s forehead wrinkled and his lips pursed as he processed. He nodded his head and raised his brows, responding to his own thoughts. Sara was desperate to hear exactly what those thoughts were.

  “Well?” she prodded after a few seconds. “What do you think?”

  Joey turned to her, his face slowly spreading into a wide grin. “I think this is amazing, Sara.”

  One second, Sara was sitting on the table. In the next, she was in the air, pressed against Joey’s chest.

  “You do?” she asked, gasping for breath from his tight hold.

  Joey sat her down and nodded. “Of course! Why wouldn’t I? First, you got that award and now, someone wants to buy your restaurant? You’re a hit!”