Homecoming Reunion (7 page)

“Because of the cost?”

“He has always balked at the cost. But I think changing things from the way my mom liked them was too hard.” She paused, a flicker of sorrow catching her unawares.

Garret acknowledged this with a slow nod of his head. Then, after another moment of quiet, as if honoring her sorrow, he flipped through the sheets and stopped at one. “So we have a dilemma. Draw from the operating loan to fix up the inn and increase our expenses and hope for more business or leave it the way it is and slowly watch the income decrease even more.”

“I don’t think it’s going downhill that quickly,” she said, trying not to sound defensive.

“Think what you want,” he said with an absent tone as he flipped through the rest of the financial statements, “But from what I see around me and on these papers the income is decreasing exponentially.”

“So why did you buy the place?” she snapped. Then wished she hadn’t. History with Garret aside, he was now her boss.

“For the potential.” He put the papers down on the desk. “I think this inn could do much better than it is and I think I’d have to agree with your father. The renovations are further down the list of things to be done first.”

She frowned, easily recalling his reaction to the general state of the inn. “You said yourself it needed a major overhaul.”

“It does. But let’s start with the easy stuff first. Lose the cook. Anyone with a face that sour can’t possibly make food taste good. We need to actively seek new business. Are you on the Chamber of Commerce?”

“I am, but haven’t had time to attend the meetings.”

“That’s a place to start. We need to reach out and make connections. Drum up new business.”

“That’s only half of the battle,” Larissa protested. “I have a suggestion box and one of the main comments is the state of the rooms. How old-fashioned they look.”

“So we try to draw people in another way and emphasize the food rather than the rooms. As for the bookkeeping, I want us to move into the current century and set up the accounts so that we can view and pay bills online. What is more important, we need to get an external audit done on the books. So that we get a balanced view of the inn’s true financial situation.”

Larissa felt a moment of confusion. “That makes it look like we don’t trust Orest.”

“It’s not a matter of trust, it’s a matter of solid business practices.”

“But he’s an old friend of my mother,” Larissa said in her defense.

“Your mother isn’t running the inn anymore and friendship doesn’t balance the books.”

Larissa blanched at his callous comment but Garret was still talking and not looking at her.

“As for other staff,” Garret continued, making a note on the pad of paper in front of him. “I’d like to get Emily Dorval back working for us. I think for now the easiest thing to rectify is the cooking. The rest is fairly superficial stuff that will have to wait until we can increase traffic to the inn.”

“Why Emily?”

“She knows the kitchen. And I remember her as a good cook.”

“She
was
a good cook. A great cook.”

“I sense some hesitation.” He dropped his pen on the table and leaned back in his chair, his arms folded over his chest as he rocked back in the chair.

Larissa fingered the edge of the papers she had in front of her, trying to formulate her thoughts. “I don’t know if she’ll come back,” Larissa said quietly.

“Why not?” Garret prompted.

“We had a bad fight,” Larissa admitted rubbing her forehead as if to ease away the memory of that afternoon. “It happened about a month after my mother died. Emily wanted to make substantial changes to the menu. I told her the inn couldn’t afford it. She made an obscure comment about the inn’s finances. Blamed my mother for not being more careful...” To her shame Larissa’s voice broke as she recalled the high emotions of the moment. She was still grieving the loss of her mother and Emily’s words seemed callous and uncaring. When Larissa had run the idea of changes in the menu past her father, he was adamantly opposed to spending more money. So Larissa had to go back and tell Emily no.

“A year after she quit I was in Cranbrook,” Larissa said. “I had hoped to talk to her, to mend some fences between us, but Emily wasn’t working that day and the moment was lost.”

“So I have to do some major sweet-talking to get her back.”

“And give her a raise and be looking at a large increase in costs none of which we can afford according to the financials.”

“We have an operating loan,” he said.

“We’re fairly deep into it already.” Larissa said.

“So we go to the bank and make it bigger. It looks like there’s still enough equity in the place to give us some wiggle room.”

“We still have to pay it back.”

“Part of the challenge.” He shoved his hand through his thick hair and shot her a crooked grin.

His expression yanked her so quickly back to the past, it took her breath away. How often, as a young girl, had that very look sent her heart beating just a little faster?

She repressed the faint flutter she felt now, recognizing that Garret was as good-looking as he was then. Better-looking, if she were honest.

Then he was just a young man, tall, gangly, his long, dark hair perpetually falling into his wary eyes.

He had filled out, his shoulders had broadened and the unruly hair had been tamed, as had his attitude.

To a point.

“I am sure we can turn this inn around,” he said with a note of confidence that encouraged her but, if she were completely honest with herself, nettled her at the same time. “But we have to be willing to take some risks.”

“You’ve never run an inn before,” she said allowing a tiny note of asperity to creep into her voice.

He shrugged off her comment. “I’ve been involved in enough businesses to be able to step back and be analytical about the bigger picture.”

She wanted to agree with him, but the niggle of annoyance grew. “An inn is more than a business,” she said, looking past him through the window behind him, struggling to keep her voice even. “It becomes people’s home away from home. They come here to rest from a journey they’re on or they come here to be away from their ordinary life. It’s a place where people trust us to take care of them and that requires more than a good business mind to do properly.”

Her voice had risen slightly on her last words and when she was done she realized she had clenched her fists on the table in front of her.

In the silence that followed she faintly heard the plaintive wail of the train’s horn sounding through the valley, as if it echoed her own state of mind.

“You have a real heart for this place, don’t you,” Garret finally said, breaking the quiet.

“It has been in my family for decades and I know it’s old and needs work, but it is still a part of this town’s history.” She finally glanced away, thankful to see a serious expression on his face. “It has a lot of potential.”

“I agree about the potential,” Garret said quietly. “I just hope we can agree on how to realize it.”

“Do you still think rehiring Emily is the way to go?”

He nodded and Larissa sensed he wasn’t wavering on this. She tapped the edges of her statements into a neat pile and picked them up. “So is there anything else we need to talk about?”

“Not for now. I’ll take care of Emily and our current cook and let you deal with Orest and the audit. If you could take care of that in the next couple of days, then we can get moving on some other changes.”

Larissa released a sigh, wondering what her father would say about the situation.

But then she looked up at Garret and caught his frown, as if he sensed her hesitation.

“Will that be a problem?” he asked.

She wanted to say yes, but in her heart, in spite of her resistance to the idea she knew he was right.

“No. It’ll be fine,” she said quietly looking away. Then, to her shock and dismay, she felt Garret’s hand touch her arm. It was the merest brush of his fingers on her sleeve but it seemed to scorch her skin through the material of her shirt.

She jerked her arm back then chastised herself for her foolish overreaction. And when she saw Garret’s eyes harden as he pulled his hand back, she felt even more foolish.

“I wanted to say sorry for my comment about your mother not running the inn anymore,” he said, pulling his hand away. “It was insensitive. I guess I was trying to say that things are different now and I’d like to move on.”

Larissa sensed an underlying meaning to his words but as she held his gaze, she felt the tension between them even more keenly.

“I’d like that too,” she said, keeping her own comment purposely ambiguous.

“We’ll be working together for a while,” he added, his hair falling across his forehead as he dropped his head to one side. “May as well try to get along as best as we can. I mean, the past is past, right?”

She gave another curt nod, and added a casual smile, wishing the action would create a corresponding emotion. She knew he was right, but why did his practical words create a lingering sense of desolation?

Chapter Five

“D
id you have a chance to look over my suggestions?” Emily asked as she slowly walked around the kitchen.

Garret glanced down at the piece of paper he held in his hands and nodded. When he first saw the list of Emily’s “suggestions” he had struggled with both the extent and the cost.

“I know it seems like a lot,” Emily said, as if he had spoken aloud, “But you said you wanted me to think of quality first so I did. I wanted to do this a few years ago, but Larissa said the money wasn’t there.”

“Her father didn’t think it was,” Garret said, feeling the need to defend Larissa.

“There are other reasons,” Emily said. Then without bothering to add to her ambiguous statement, she folded her slender arms over her stomach, glancing around the kitchen with the air of a woman who had just come back to find rodents taking up residence in her home. “Anyhow, this place is falling apart.”

“It’s only been four years since you’ve been here. Surely it hasn’t gotten that bad,” Garret said, turning over the paper. Didn’t matter how many times he looked at it, the final number still made him gulp.

Keep calm and carry on
, he reminded himself. It’s an investment in the right part of the inn that will pay off in increased revenue.

That is, if his other plans came together the way they hoped. He’d spent the past few days visiting various members of the Chamber of Commerce, stopping in at local businesses and drinking more coffee than was good for him. All this was in an effort to chase down some ideas he had for boosting business at the inn.

“Shows how much you know about running a kitchen.” Emily walked around the butcher-block counter to the stove and leaned over it, looking up. “This fan is so gunked up with grease that we’ll need a new one. I doubt the filters have been changed. The refrigerator lost a seal and got mildew. The pots and pans needed replacing when I was still here so that’ll need to be done.” She shot him a challenging look. “I won’t cook in a lousy kitchen with substandard equipment.”

As he faced down a very determined Emily, Garret felt a niggling of sympathy for Larissa’s situation four years ago. He had never seen this side of the cook when he and Larissa were stealing cookies from her cookie jar.

But he swallowed his trepidation, ignoring the dollar signs plunging into a black hole in his mind. “I’d like to go ahead, but we need to finalize everything with Larissa.”

Emily’s eyes narrowed and she planted her hands on her narrow hips. “That girl has always done what her daddy tells her, you know that,” she said, her dubious expression tweaking second thoughts in Garret’s mind. “I don’t want everything changing when daddy comes back.”

“Her
daddy
is just a phone call away right now,” Garret reminded Emily. “I’m sure if Larissa wants to defer to him, that’s all it would take.”

Emily replied with a curt nod. “Okay. Then, let’s go see what she says.”

Garret stood aside to let Emily lead the way. He still had his second thoughts about what Emily wanted to do, but he was the one who wanted her back. He had to back Emily on what she wanted and hope and pray the chances he took would pay off.

Garret went ahead of Emily and reached for the door just as she gave him a quick smile. “Always the gentleman, aren’t you?”

“Not always,” he returned.

“Yes. You were. I always thought Larissa was lucky to have you,” she said as she walked to the office window overlooking the grounds. “I still don’t think she should have let you go.” Her tone was careful, as if she knew her words moved into places Garret didn’t want to follow.

He didn’t. He had come here looking ahead, but it seemed that the past kept coming up behind him and tapping him on the shoulder, reminding him of who he once was.

“It wasn’t just her,” he muttered, thinking of the last-ditch effort he had made when he came to the house and Larissa stood in the doorway, her father behind her. Jack Weir had told Larissa to close the door. To come to him.

She had made her choice, but looking back, he couldn’t blame her. Not really. He couldn’t have begun to give her what she was used to.

“Maybe not, but I know her father certainly had a heavy hand in her life,” Emily continued, her back to him, still looking out the window. “But she was always a good girl. Just let her father tell her what to do too often. Probably what got in the way of you and her getting more serious.”

They were serious enough, Garret thought, setting the papers on the desk beside the computer. He had proposed to her. Wanted to move away from Hartley Creek with her.

Garret banished the memories. Time to move on. Move ahead.

“I should go see what’s keeping Larissa,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

As he closed the office door behind him he saw Orest Wilson standing at the desk chatting with Larissa. She wore her hair loose today, flowing over her shoulders and down her back. Instead of the skirts he’d seen on her the past few times, she wore a loose blouse, blazer and narrow legged pants.