Chapter 1
“Y’all, I’m telling you, you’ve never heard such quiet.” Livia Delacroix aimed her camera through the slightly wavy glass front door of Chata Bed and Breakfast. She’d signed away most of her inheritance to buy the small hotel, sure her mom would have approved of Livia making it the business of her dreams.
Almost entirely sure. Sure enough to make up for any smidges of anxiety that she was in over her head, relocating to the town she hadn’t even seen since she was thirteen.
So it was okay if her first impressions of Chata were … lonelier than she’d hoped. Outside, there was nothing but dusk and—well, nothing. Dusky sky, undulating dark line of trees, hills and fields impossible to see.
She kept her narration upbeat as she moved up the stairs. Probably she’d edit it out. Overlay a more sensible audio when she put the video together. Her friend Maggie had advised her to talk through this first gander of her new venture. Her initial reactions could be gold. Livia hid all her doubts, and kept talking. “I know what you’re thinking: how do you hear quiet, right? But I bet you know what I mean. It’s nothing but crickets and owls out here. Are they crickets, do you suppose? Grasshoppers? Frogs? What chirps at night?”
Maggie would be scoffing about now if she heard this footage. Livia grinned, pausing at the first guest room door. “My intuition says they’re crickets. So I’m sticking with that. And if it turns out the charming little town of Honey Wine, Texas, is overtaken with marauding locusts, y’all can laugh at me later. Okay. This first room is called Persimmon.”
She switched on the overhead light and gasped. Remembered to keep her camera steady and her dismay curtailed.
Livia had expected some surprises, sure. She’d bought the place sight unseen, with only outdated website photos, vague memories of a brief stay with her mom, and a good report from her structural engineer as evidence that she hadn’t lost her hard-won good sense.
Not that she’d been slip-shod about the process. Kent Stipple, the former owner, wanted to sell fast without involving realtors; he’d grumbled that there was nothing they could do he couldn’t manage himself. Chata B&B had been his wife Sissy’s passion, but she’d passed on the year before, and he was ready to retire. Livia had talked to him about everything Chata—which translated to “cottage” in Czech. How cute was that? A sweet nod to the Bohemians that had settled Honey Wine back in the mid-1800s.
Before closing, she’d gone over the accounts with a fine-tooth comb and reviewed every report. She knew that she’d find that Chata was as much rough as diamond. But she’d signed the papers, rented a trailer, and now stood in the middle of Persimmon, ready to concede that she might not have been entirely prepared for this undertaking.
She was tempted to call Mags and brainstorm solutions that would let her back out of this venture unscathed. Only the prospect of her friend’s sardonic comments kept her from outright fleeing.
The building itself had all the rustic charm she’d remembered. Good bones. The common areas were slightly worn, but the kitchen was large, with gracious windows overlooking the ranks of trees. The high end appliances, only a few years old, circled a large central island.
Every time she explained how Chata was everything she’d always dreamed of, Maggie and other friends from their hotel management program found increasingly less polite ways to call her a fool. Sure, Livia had entertained secret doubts, even while completing her never-ending ‘before I move’ checklist. But she’d ridden up the uneven, unpaved road to the building just as twilight settled the surrounding hills into dusky tranquility, and had felt peace descend.
All traces of that peace fled when she walked into Persimmon.
“Right. Well. The layout isn’t bad. We have a spacious king bed, daybed tucked against the wall, this great brick and tile fireplace. Desk and two—oh.”
Her attempts to cheerfully narrate the video skittered south.
“Right, so this will not be in the final cut. Do you see how that armchair’s missing half its fabric down the side? Do you see how it clashes with the wallpaper?” She laughed shortly. “Not that I’m likely to keep that up. Top of the list of things to replace, honestly. Or top, so far.”
She trailed off as she spotted ragged holes in the foam under the frayed fabric of the armchair. Not obviously made by animals, but if critters were the culprit, she wouldn’t be surprised. Spinning slowly, she took in the room. It was a good size. The window and doors were sturdy. She couldn’t smell mold or mildew. In fact, the B&B’s air was pleasant, thanks to the cedar or cypress or some other fragrant trees covering the property.
She could work with it.
She had to. She’d sunk every one of her options into it.
Boosting a smile into her voice, she said, “I love Persimmon. It is unique. One of a kind.” Or so she hoped. She still had to investigate Chickasaw, Mulberry, Loquat, and Jujube.
And then she undercut her entire point by focusing in on the fireplace mantle, where five angels perched. They were all different styles—ceramic, plaster, something that might be cornhusk.
And then she zoomed in on the four mismatched lamps. The angular brass 70s-era one by the porch door. On the desk, a porcelain urn-shaped base with celadon glaze and a gilt-rimmed inset of a pastoral French scene. The one on the left bedside table, with a scrolled plaster of Paris base topped with a bust.
“I think that’s Mozart,” she told her camera, of the bewigged man with a flouncy shirt and a violin resting against his chest. “Could be Brahms? Not Beethoven, though. I’d recognize him for sure. Shame I can’t read music, because whoever’s symphony is decoupaged on the shade might give me a hint.”
She was going to have to cut so much wobbly camera work when she edited this video. Livia barely had her shaking shoulders under control by the time she’d circled to the other bedside table. And then she lost it again.
In the ill-lit photos on the website, Persimmon had seemed full of wood and charming rag rugs and comfortably upholstered furniture. She couldn’t begin to remember what the lamps had looked like. But definitely not like this.
She’d have remembered this.
The final lamp was full-color painted resin of a cowboy astride his horse, and the dangling light switch was his lasso. She managed a close-up of his seen-too-much, far-reaching gaze, before shutting off the recording and collapsing on the mercifully comfortable bed.
She took a quick photo to text to Maggie, because she needed to share the hilarity. Needed to have at least some sense of not being completely alone as she explored her new home and business. It might get creepy otherwise, all this darkness, and the chirping bugs, and the boards that creaked underfoot.
And if she felt totally alone, she might start wondering what she’d gotten herself into.
Buying Chata sight unseen hadn’t seemed that bonkers a plan. Sure, when she’d made the offer, Mags and them had mentioned that most people didn’t blow their inheritance on some property hundreds of miles from any place they’d ever lived, even with all her research about the town’s growing tourism economy. Didn’t go from managing the high thread-count luxury of a European-style Dallas hotel to sole proprietorship of a five-room B&B on the outskirts of a small Hill Country town. No matter how quaint it looked on the website. No matter her sepia-tinged memories of that one spring break getaway and and Mom had spent at Chata, back before they’d locked horns in a clash they’d never managed to resolve before Livia’s impetuous flouncing away from the safe haven Mom had tried to create for them after her parents’ divorce.
Her mom would have wanted Livia to pursue her dreams. And if she caught herself rubbing her thumb over the contours of Mom’s old ruby ring on her right hand at the thought, that was just a habit. It meant nothing.
She pretended that if she said it enough, she wouldn’t be making it up. Pretended that she knew what her mom would have thought about her wild venture. Pretended that Mags didn’t know damn good and well that Livia was pretending.
Prior to discovering Chata, Livia would have said things were fine. She and Mom hadn’t been close since before Livia left for college, but they talked a few times a year. Mom consistently said how much she just wanted Livia to be happy, even if she never seemed to grasp the difference between the unsophisticated, resentful suburban girl Livia had been at seventeen and the well-traveled, competent hotelier she’d become.
So after Mom’s death, she’d gone on with life as usual. Well, life as usual, if her usual life hadn’t been contaminated by those five long years with Terry, and also, somewhere in the sub-structure, the festering disconnect from her mom. Really, what went on as usual was work. Always work.
And then she’d covered someone’s shift and wound up stuck on front desk duty one slow evening, with little to distract her from idle thoughts of the directionless expanse of her future.
And Livia preferred not to think about the directionless expanse of her future.
Between occasional calls from guests, she’d read an industry magazine cover to cover, and ran across Kent’s ad. “For Sale: rustic B&B in scenic Honey Wine. Newly updated, regular occupancy, make Chata’s past a part of your future.” The black-and-white photo showed a wood-frame three-story house with porches wrapping each level, absolutely surrounded by trees and empty sky.
Livia’s heart had unaccountably leapt when she’d seen it. It took a good few minutes of staring, hand to her chest, before she reconciled it with that half-buried memory of her and Mom eating pie at a diner, plunging into a deep blue swimming hole along the river, and reading on a porch while hummingbirds darted overhead.
By the time her shift was over, she’d read every review of Chata B&B on three travel sites, half-memorized the layout of Honey Wine from the town’s tourism page, and surreptitiously logged in to her bank account so she could stare, again, some more, at the balance that had landed there after probate on her mom’s will was cleared.
The next morning, she’d phoned Kent.
Chata was still there. Still for sale. She could afford it. Within a couple of weeks, they’d worked out a deal. Within a couple of months, the deal had closed.
She’d kept meaning to take some time off, to make the five-hour drive to see it again in person, but giving notice to the hotel had sent the owners into crisis mode. They’d recruited her straight out of college and shepherded her to her current position; Livia cared enough to do what she could to leave things in experienced hands. Which meant interviewing. And more interviewing. And then hiring, and training, and more training. By the time they’d squared everything away, it was her closing date, so she checked her gut, found she was still inordinately excited about Chata, and signed the papers.
It was almost weirder that she never met Kent than it was that she hadn’t seen Chata in fifteen years. They’d used different branches of the same title company, hers in Dallas and his in Honey Wine. She’d hired a local inspector and surveyor to check the place out, and he’d sent his books to her once they’d signed the sales contract. All in all, Livia was pretty impressed with how honestly the old guy had represented his property. Everything he’d said—that the bathrooms were outdated but functional, and the driveway uneven, but the well water was pure and the kitchen was commercial quality—checked out. For all his hard-to-understand mumble-grumble over the phone lines, and his distrust of realtors that had led him to place the sales ad, Kent had kept the place in good repair and, most importantly, kept heads on beds. Repeat heads on beds, actually—there were folks on the review sites that mentioned they returned to Honey Wine every couple of years, and always stayed at Chata.
It boded well. And what Livia really, deeply, desperately wanted in her life was something that boded well.
She wasn’t a fool. Her friends said it was nothing but magical thinking, when she’d been careless enough to tell them that Chata “just felt right,” but there was more to it than what they termed her “run away to the country and pretend that the simple life’s the life for you” philosophy. First off, she wasn’t running. She’d always planned on owning her own place someday, from the moment she’d enrolled in the hospitality program. And she’d done damn well in school—damn well at her job, too. All of it in service of her dream—to have business cards reading “Livia DeLacroix, Owner.”
And now she could.
If it also meant she could leave behind some memories, a handful of the less charming aspects of Dallas, and a few of its bad-for-her residents, that was nothing but a bonus.
After the shocks of Persimmon, she gave up on attempting to record her initial impressions of Chata, stowing her phone while she explored the rest of the rooms. They were definitely … unique. She’d examine closer in the light of day, but most of what she clocked seemed, as expected, cosmetic. Kent had included all furnishings and decor with the deal, other than the stuff in the top floor owner’s suite.
Livia had a few furnishings of her own in the trailer—her comfortable desk chair, the dinette set from her apartment, a storage chest she’d mostly packed because it had been with her so long it was hard to imagine a new life without it. The few of her mom’s stained-glass windows that survived after cleaning out her house. But mostly she’d brought clothes, books, electronics, and her stack of pillows and bedding. She carted a few armloads up to the owner’s suite before returning to Persimmon, and settling down against the rickety brass headboard to make notes by the light of the atrocious lamps.
It ought to have been enough to exhaust her into sleep, even with the strange surroundings. But her mind leapt in chaotic rhythm, cataloging the night sounds—surely those were crickets—and flashing on odd new worries. Would her wifi be strong in all the guest rooms? What if her guests were used to some unknown favorite breakfast treat of Kent’s and resented her famous jalapeño cornbread muffins? What would she find to replace the collection of scary angels on the mantle?
After a half-restful night, Livia started early the next morning, unloading the trailer all by her lonesome. So Maggie could just bite her skeptical tongue. Never mind that she left the table and half her boxes stacked in the entryway for the time being. Livia needed to return the trailer and deal with her own transportation needs before she could do much of anything else.
She followed all the twists and turns to the interstate and zipped up to a nearby town where she could finally unhitch. Of course, if she’d realized how difficult the road up to Chata would be on her sedan’s suspension, she could have skipped installing a trailer hitch on it and bought something sturdier to begin with. But never mind. She searched for used car dealers while waiting on the rental trailer paperwork, glad she’d kept easy access to her car’s title while organizing herself for the big move. It took the expected bit of negotiation, but by the time Livia stopped by a grocery store to stock up, she was in her brand new, pale blue, slightly used pickup. Bonnie, she named it, short for the state flower, bluebonnets, which carpeted the Hill Country every spring.
The salesperson took a picture of her sitting in the truck's cab, which she sent to the Dallas group text before heading back to Chata.
Back home.
Livia was pretty darn proud of herself.
Even if no one else was around to hear her brag about it.
By the middle of her third morning at Chata, Livia was dying for someone to brag to. Not for the sake of the bragging—though her lists were kick-ass levels of thoroughness—but because the crickets and deer and the corpses of dried out millipedes filling one corner of Bonnie’s garage were all the company she’d had, and it would have been nice to see a familiar face. Or even an unfamiliar one.
Too bad she’d had Kent block off bookings for several weeks so she could renovate and settle in.
Mags pointed out, during one of the calls Livia was initiating too often, that if Livia could go through the entire process of buying Chata without driving down to see the place, she shouldn’t already be begging for a visit.
“But you’ll love these hills,” Livia wheedled. “You should see how purple and azure the sky is as the sun sets over the treetops. And watching the stars come out! It’s like nothing you’d ever see in Dallas. You know you’d love that.”
“Yep, one day. I have my doubts about your motives just now.”
“Some friend.”
“Live with it. Now go away. I know you keep calling so I’ll get fired for personal calls at work and not have that as an excuse to stay put.”
“You saw through my diabolical plan?”
“I’m clever that way. Go make a grocery list or something. I sent the crumb cake recipe, by the way. Check your email.”
“You’re the best.”
“Damn straight. Don’t forget it.”
“Love you, Mags.”
“Yeah, yeah. Later.” Maggie hung up.
Livia carried her third cup of morning coffee up to her top floor suite. She’d begun moving some of the weirder—but still in decent shape—furniture up to her own space, giving her more latitude to rearrange and redecorate the guest rooms. She was measuring the windows for new blinds when a cloud of dust down the hill caught her attention. It grew and moved closer. By the time Livia figured out how to shove open the window to lean out for a better view, she’d discounted a pile of possibilities. The satellite internet guys weren’t due for three more days. The mailman left everything down by the street. Kent had called from Louisiana the previous day to report that he’d gotten a royal flush at the poker tables. Though why he’d thought Livia needed to know that, she wasn’t sure. Probably he wanted to give her an opening in case she needed to yell about the millipedes.
So she wasn’t expecting anything to be roaring up her driveway. She checked her cell phone was getting a signal and ducked back into the shadows, hoping to see without being seen. A dusty Jeep swung into the parking area, barely missing Bonnie, and the silence once it was off was as loud as had been the noise of it trekking up the hill.
Livia stood back and watched as an athletic, tall, dark, and possibly handsome—under his ball cap it was hard to tell—stranger emerged and turned to stare, balefully, straight up at her top-floor window.
Chapter 2
Around dawn, Greg had pulled into a rest stop to spend a little time jogging in the fresh air, before the place filled up with cranky families and gas fumes. He'd been driving all night; he'd intended to set out from Mississippi far earlier than midnight—hell, he'd intended to make the drive two months later, company documents in hand, letting Uncle Kent know in advance so he'd be ready to sit down and listen to what Greg had to say.
But that sure as shit wasn't happening now.
"Papers are signed," Uncle Kent had said. Like there wasn't anything he could do about it.
Okay, there wasn't. Legally, fine, he was all tied up. But like hell was he going to sit back, while the plans he'd been making for two years just evaporated around him. So he'd given notice to his boss at the excursion company, gotten out of his lease, and hit the road. Well, gone to The Raft for goodbyes, which weren't as brief as he'd intended, then hit the road.
After a few jumping jacks and press-ups, Greg dug a sandwich out of his cooler and slid back behind the wheel, letting his phone tell him what he already knew: in five hours, he’d be back in Honey Wine. It had been five, six years since he'd been there on any kind of regular basis. Not that he figured the town would have changed much. Not that he figured the folks with their disapproving eyes had cleared out, like he couldn’t tell what they still thought of him. Like they were subtle about it.
Still and all, it wasn't like the whole town was against him, especially, it seemed, now that Uncle Kent was gone. And it wasn't like he didn't have some kernel of brattiness within him that looked forward to rubbing their noses—the noses that wrinkled at him since his childhood, sure he’d never amount to anything—in his success. He hadn't gone so far as to practice the 'that's right, I'm hot shit, never thought you'd see that, did you?' look in the mirror, but he may have imagined an encounter or two.
And then Kent had sold the place out from under him. To some stranger, some city gal, some non-relative. Probably she had the kind of slick wiles and bona fides the old man valued over anything Aunt Sissy wanted for the land. She might even’ve confused and bamboozled him in the bargain.
Not that it justified his forgetting entirely about Greg. Aunt Sissy would never have done it, no matter how slick the city gal was. Aunt Sissy had known Greg had dreams and plans and was on his way to achieving them. She must have told her husband. She would have mentioned it, even the bones of his ideas, enough that Kent would have known not to just up and sell it to some wily city gal without talking to him first. Dad and Sissy had smiled over it, once: Greg’s plan to reunite the land his Forst grandparents had split between their kids. And with Sissy gone, Greg and his Dad were the last Forsts left. He’d once figured that would mean something to Uncle Kent.
But his uncle hadn't sounded the least contrite when he called to announce his new address. "Sold Chata," he'd said, like it was no big deal. Just a thing he did, entirely his own business.
Technically, yes. Never mind Greg's land next door. Never mind his dreams. Never mind what Sissy must have wanted.
Shit. Aunt Sissy would have wanted it, wouldn't she? She hadn’t been merely humoring him and Dad?
Greg wasn't finding the PBJ as restorative as it might be. He chucked it in his trash bag, queasy. It had never occurred to him that Aunt Sissy might have told Uncle Kent specifically not to sell to Greg.
But Kent held the rope swing incident against him, more than a decade on. Apologies hadn’t mattered—not to him. Everyone else forgave him, even his mom. As for Aunt Sissy, she was never hard to convince of his basic innocence. Sissy had been soft. Especially with Greg. Seemed to realize he needed it more than most, not that he would have ever outright said so. Maybe a result of being raised alongside his dad, who also never outright said anything. Sissy had the knack of knowing stuff about what people needed—it was downright mystical, this little nothing-sized old Czech lady, able to tell in the merest glance what was up deep inside everyone she met.
Greg had seen her in action over and over, when he was the summer help at the B&B. He'd be cleaning the kitchen and Sissy would glance in to say, "Pitcher of iced tea and some cookies out here, okay?" and he'd bring it out to the porch where Sissy had her guests installed in rocking chairs, relating some folktale or teaching them to distinguish the various trees. And whatever thing she was saying, by the time she'd finished, the guests were smiling fondly, or were energized and ready to tackle new adventures, or had reached across to hold hands.
Greg didn’t think he had the same power. But Kent didn't, either, and he’d run the place nearly two years after Sissy died, so it wasn't like that was a good reason to keep Chata from him.
Whatever the man’s reasons—he’d stayed stubbornly quiet when Greg asked—it’d spurred Greg to amp up his timeline and head back to Honey Wine straight away. He didn’t know what he could do about it, but the first step was to get a look at the city gal who'd gone and stolen his dream.
***
Livia stepped cautiously out onto the front porch. Up close, he wasn't that tall. Just something to do with the perspective from the third-floor window, then. He was handsome, indeed, now that she could see his square face and high cheekbones, which had the same horizontal slash as his narrowed eyes and his dark brows. If he looked that good mad, Livia was dead curious what he'd look like laughing. Though maybe it was already a laughing face, and he just had odd expressions. Since he was a total stranger appearing out of nowhere to glare at her, she really couldn't say.
"Can I help you?"
The guy didn't even blink for a moment, then glanced at the emptiness around him.
Now that wasn’t at all creepy. Maggie would have a field day. "Hey, some muscle-bound man just drove up to my isolated house in the woods and is staring at me like I ran over his favorite dog and he needs to enact retribution, and I opted to walk out to him without even dialing 911 first. What's up with you?"
Too many years in the service industry, clearly. "If you're lost, I can get you a map to town," Livia tried, glancing from his Mississippi plates to her phone to check the signal.
"Not lost."
Well, that helped answer a few dozen of her questions. But despite the two-word answer, his voice was friendly enough.
"Well, then. Welcome to Chata B&B. I'm Livia DeLacroix, and I'm afraid we're not open just at the moment. I'd be happy to give you referrals in the area, if you need a place to stay." Unless this guy was the kind of regular who thought he could just show up and get a room based on his long-standing history with the place, she still didn't know why he was standing there.
He shifted, dropping his shoulders in a way that let Livia relax a fraction. His eyes stayed narrow, though, when he said, “I’m Gregory Forst. I live next door.”
He didn't glance left or right, much less point helpfully at a nearby rooftop. Not that Livia could see any rooftops—her place was isolated, though there was a stretch of power lines down the hill a ways. She waited a beat for more, and got nothing. Okay, then. “Are you the local welcome wagon?”
At that he laughed, and Livia had been right. Wowza. Never mind being laughed at for her sarcasm, never mind the strange man/remote woods horror story set-up; this Gregory Forst was yummy. Instant fantasy material. Great. Just what she needed. The boy next door was a stone cold hottie. And mysteriously antagonistic.
And possibly a liar liar pants on fire, given the out-of-state plates, but when she glanced at the bumper of his Jeep, he noticed. "I've been working over near Jackson, but I grew up here. My dad and my Aunt Sissy inherited this land way back when. She married Kent, and they started Chata up on their half of the property." He finally pointed, uphill at an angle past the back of the B&B, not that Livia had noticed anything but trees that way. "Dad didn't do more than build a little house there for the three of us. It's mine now."
"Uh-huh." Articulate, Livia. Real conversationalist there. But she'd seen pictures of Kent and Sissy Stipple on the Chata website. Even given that Gregory Forst wasn't as tall as she'd originally thought, he had a lot more size to him than tiny Sissy had. Sissy was little and fair, with big round eyes and gray-blonde hair falling to brush her tiny round chin. Figuring for gender and generational differences, Livia still failed to see a single trace of her in the delectable specimen before her. "So, Kent never mentioned I'd have his nephew as a neighbor."
Gregory's jaw tightened just a tad. "No, well. He didn't know that I'd be moving home just yet."
"And you grew up in Honey Wine?"
He glanced down the driveway towards town. "That I did."
"You know all the locals?"
He nodded briefly. "I know them."
"They know you?"
"They do. Are you looking for them to vouch for me? I'd show you my ID, but I guess it won't prove much. Try Ellie at the Honey Wine Cafe, if you want. I bussed tables for her after school for three years. Or Mason, from the trail riding school. I mucked stalls there on weekends."
"Lots of jobs."
“Everyone was bent on keeping me busy, growing up here. Used to work at Chata, too, summers."
Interesting. The touch of hostility about the town, and the fact that he was repeatedly mentioning his connection to her place. Livia sensed an agenda. Well, may as well tackle the bear if it shows up growling on her porch. "And what brings you back to Honey Wine, sooner than expected, Gregory?"
"Greg." He nodded.
Not an answer, Greg. Livia waited.
And waited.
Fine. She could growl, too. "What brings you to Chata, Greg?"
He glanced away, eyes tight. Shook his head. Eventually said, “Sometimes people come and go to my place via your drive and the bridge just up there. My own drive is a twisty pain. Figured I should let you know, in case. And meet you. Welcome wagon, like you said.”
With that, he climbed back into his Jeep and drove past her along the wooded drive.
***
Well, that had gone well.
Greg opened the kitchen door of the stone and timber frame house he’d grown up in, dropping his duffle on the dining table as he automatically walked to his childhood room and slammed the door behind him. Took him a couple of beats to notice there was no bed in the bedroom. Couple more beats to remember that he’d moved everything he’d wanted from there into the master after Dad left, replacing the twin bed Dad had obstinately insisted upon with his queen-sized one, stocking the closet with his own clothes and a couple of boxes of school memorabilia. And yet every time he’d returned since Dad took to the road, he’d ended up in his old room, staring befuddled at the desk where his bed once sagged.
His encounter with pretty little city gal Livia DeLawhatever sure hadn’t helped him feel any more grounded. Defensive, gripping that cell phone like it was her lifeline, acting as if he was trespassing. He hadn’t even gotten out of the parking area and onto the porch. Her porch. No longer Kent’s porch. Not Sissy’s. Nowhere he’d be bringing guests lemonade anymore, not that lemonade runs had been necessarily part of his plans. But he’d had plans.
Big plans.
His degree in forestry management was never going to make him a million bucks, but growing up on this land, spending hours roaming through the trees, observing the wildlife, learning through interaction how the plants and streams and sun and bugs all worked together—it was his calling. And once his YouTube channel had taken off, letting others in on his passion for the ecology of the land, he’d learned how to stash away revenue to pursue something more. He’d envisioned a way to bring others out to the place, make some tourism money while still protecting the ecosystems.
But it wouldn’t work, not the way he imagined it, unless he had Chata, too. He needed Chata’s land, with its access road, and high bluffs, and the landing area at the low curve of the creek. His half of his grandparents’ land filled his soul, but didn’t on its own give him the same commercial opportunities.
Cesta, he was going to call it. “Journey” in Czech, to go with “cottage” for Chata. Sissy would have liked that. His dad did, for sure—he was always saying things like “Make life an adventure, but come home at the end.”
Greg stepped out onto the front porch. If he stood on the far side of the bay window, just past the obstruction of a couple of the older cypress edging the stream, he could see Chata. Mostly just the side and part of the back, but as he watched, the new owner moved onto the second-story porch. She wasn’t doing much. Looking around. Jotting something in her notebook. Kicking each of the porch rails with her tennis shoe-shod foot, as if Kent would have let any of them go loose for even half a day. Greg smiled, remembering the fall weekend they’d spent replacing the nails in every slat: “Safe side,” was about all his taciturn uncle had said when Greg had asked why they were bothering. It had been one of his first days of paid work, early on in his teens. It hadn’t occurred to Greg for years that maybe Uncle Kent had been making work for him to do, not until after so many other friends of his family had employed him to bus tables, curry horses, stack lumber, clear garden beds, and otherwise lock him in place with labor that kept him from the kind of trouble his parents frowned on.
Any rate, as Livia was finding out, the porch was sturdy. Her pale limbs flashed as she moved. Shorts in the dead of winter was a choice, but Greg had ditched his own sweatshirt once he hit home. Was warming up just standing there, watching Livia trying to find fault with Chata.
“Screw it,” he muttered to no one, and headed inside for a quick shower. Time to develop tactics, because another of his dad’s aphorisms had to do with not letting obstacles to your first plan stop you from coming up with a second plan that was even better.
“Y’all, I’m telling you, you’ve never heard such quiet.” Livia Delacroix aimed her camera through the slightly wavy glass front door of Chata Bed and Breakfast. She’d signed away most of her inheritance to buy the small hotel, sure her mom would have approved of Livia making it the business of her dreams.
Almost entirely sure. Sure enough to make up for any smidges of anxiety that she was in over her head, relocating to the town she hadn’t even seen since she was thirteen.
So it was okay if her first impressions of Chata were … lonelier than she’d hoped. Outside, there was nothing but dusk and—well, nothing. Dusky sky, undulating dark line of trees, hills and fields impossible to see.
She kept her narration upbeat as she moved up the stairs. Probably she’d edit it out. Overlay a more sensible audio when she put the video together. Her friend Maggie had advised her to talk through this first gander of her new venture. Her initial reactions could be gold. Livia hid all her doubts, and kept talking. “I know what you’re thinking: how do you hear quiet, right? But I bet you know what I mean. It’s nothing but crickets and owls out here. Are they crickets, do you suppose? Grasshoppers? Frogs? What chirps at night?”
Maggie would be scoffing about now if she heard this footage. Livia grinned, pausing at the first guest room door. “My intuition says they’re crickets. So I’m sticking with that. And if it turns out the charming little town of Honey Wine, Texas, is overtaken with marauding locusts, y’all can laugh at me later. Okay. This first room is called Persimmon.”
She switched on the overhead light and gasped. Remembered to keep her camera steady and her dismay curtailed.
Livia had expected some surprises, sure. She’d bought the place sight unseen, with only outdated website photos, vague memories of a brief stay with her mom, and a good report from her structural engineer as evidence that she hadn’t lost her hard-won good sense.
Not that she’d been slip-shod about the process. Kent Stipple, the former owner, wanted to sell fast without involving realtors; he’d grumbled that there was nothing they could do he couldn’t manage himself. Chata B&B had been his wife Sissy’s passion, but she’d passed on the year before, and he was ready to retire. Livia had talked to him about everything Chata—which translated to “cottage” in Czech. How cute was that? A sweet nod to the Bohemians that had settled Honey Wine back in the mid-1800s.
Before closing, she’d gone over the accounts with a fine-tooth comb and reviewed every report. She knew that she’d find that Chata was as much rough as diamond. But she’d signed the papers, rented a trailer, and now stood in the middle of Persimmon, ready to concede that she might not have been entirely prepared for this undertaking.
She was tempted to call Mags and brainstorm solutions that would let her back out of this venture unscathed. Only the prospect of her friend’s sardonic comments kept her from outright fleeing.
The building itself had all the rustic charm she’d remembered. Good bones. The common areas were slightly worn, but the kitchen was large, with gracious windows overlooking the ranks of trees. The high end appliances, only a few years old, circled a large central island.
Every time she explained how Chata was everything she’d always dreamed of, Maggie and other friends from their hotel management program found increasingly less polite ways to call her a fool. Sure, Livia had entertained secret doubts, even while completing her never-ending ‘before I move’ checklist. But she’d ridden up the uneven, unpaved road to the building just as twilight settled the surrounding hills into dusky tranquility, and had felt peace descend.
All traces of that peace fled when she walked into Persimmon.
“Right. Well. The layout isn’t bad. We have a spacious king bed, daybed tucked against the wall, this great brick and tile fireplace. Desk and two—oh.”
Her attempts to cheerfully narrate the video skittered south.
“Right, so this will not be in the final cut. Do you see how that armchair’s missing half its fabric down the side? Do you see how it clashes with the wallpaper?” She laughed shortly. “Not that I’m likely to keep that up. Top of the list of things to replace, honestly. Or top, so far.”
She trailed off as she spotted ragged holes in the foam under the frayed fabric of the armchair. Not obviously made by animals, but if critters were the culprit, she wouldn’t be surprised. Spinning slowly, she took in the room. It was a good size. The window and doors were sturdy. She couldn’t smell mold or mildew. In fact, the B&B’s air was pleasant, thanks to the cedar or cypress or some other fragrant trees covering the property.
She could work with it.
She had to. She’d sunk every one of her options into it.
Boosting a smile into her voice, she said, “I love Persimmon. It is unique. One of a kind.” Or so she hoped. She still had to investigate Chickasaw, Mulberry, Loquat, and Jujube.
And then she undercut her entire point by focusing in on the fireplace mantle, where five angels perched. They were all different styles—ceramic, plaster, something that might be cornhusk.
And then she zoomed in on the four mismatched lamps. The angular brass 70s-era one by the porch door. On the desk, a porcelain urn-shaped base with celadon glaze and a gilt-rimmed inset of a pastoral French scene. The one on the left bedside table, with a scrolled plaster of Paris base topped with a bust.
“I think that’s Mozart,” she told her camera, of the bewigged man with a flouncy shirt and a violin resting against his chest. “Could be Brahms? Not Beethoven, though. I’d recognize him for sure. Shame I can’t read music, because whoever’s symphony is decoupaged on the shade might give me a hint.”
She was going to have to cut so much wobbly camera work when she edited this video. Livia barely had her shaking shoulders under control by the time she’d circled to the other bedside table. And then she lost it again.
In the ill-lit photos on the website, Persimmon had seemed full of wood and charming rag rugs and comfortably upholstered furniture. She couldn’t begin to remember what the lamps had looked like. But definitely not like this.
She’d have remembered this.
The final lamp was full-color painted resin of a cowboy astride his horse, and the dangling light switch was his lasso. She managed a close-up of his seen-too-much, far-reaching gaze, before shutting off the recording and collapsing on the mercifully comfortable bed.
She took a quick photo to text to Maggie, because she needed to share the hilarity. Needed to have at least some sense of not being completely alone as she explored her new home and business. It might get creepy otherwise, all this darkness, and the chirping bugs, and the boards that creaked underfoot.
And if she felt totally alone, she might start wondering what she’d gotten herself into.
Buying Chata sight unseen hadn’t seemed that bonkers a plan. Sure, when she’d made the offer, Mags and them had mentioned that most people didn’t blow their inheritance on some property hundreds of miles from any place they’d ever lived, even with all her research about the town’s growing tourism economy. Didn’t go from managing the high thread-count luxury of a European-style Dallas hotel to sole proprietorship of a five-room B&B on the outskirts of a small Hill Country town. No matter how quaint it looked on the website. No matter her sepia-tinged memories of that one spring break getaway and and Mom had spent at Chata, back before they’d locked horns in a clash they’d never managed to resolve before Livia’s impetuous flouncing away from the safe haven Mom had tried to create for them after her parents’ divorce.
Her mom would have wanted Livia to pursue her dreams. And if she caught herself rubbing her thumb over the contours of Mom’s old ruby ring on her right hand at the thought, that was just a habit. It meant nothing.
She pretended that if she said it enough, she wouldn’t be making it up. Pretended that she knew what her mom would have thought about her wild venture. Pretended that Mags didn’t know damn good and well that Livia was pretending.
Prior to discovering Chata, Livia would have said things were fine. She and Mom hadn’t been close since before Livia left for college, but they talked a few times a year. Mom consistently said how much she just wanted Livia to be happy, even if she never seemed to grasp the difference between the unsophisticated, resentful suburban girl Livia had been at seventeen and the well-traveled, competent hotelier she’d become.
So after Mom’s death, she’d gone on with life as usual. Well, life as usual, if her usual life hadn’t been contaminated by those five long years with Terry, and also, somewhere in the sub-structure, the festering disconnect from her mom. Really, what went on as usual was work. Always work.
And then she’d covered someone’s shift and wound up stuck on front desk duty one slow evening, with little to distract her from idle thoughts of the directionless expanse of her future.
And Livia preferred not to think about the directionless expanse of her future.
Between occasional calls from guests, she’d read an industry magazine cover to cover, and ran across Kent’s ad. “For Sale: rustic B&B in scenic Honey Wine. Newly updated, regular occupancy, make Chata’s past a part of your future.” The black-and-white photo showed a wood-frame three-story house with porches wrapping each level, absolutely surrounded by trees and empty sky.
Livia’s heart had unaccountably leapt when she’d seen it. It took a good few minutes of staring, hand to her chest, before she reconciled it with that half-buried memory of her and Mom eating pie at a diner, plunging into a deep blue swimming hole along the river, and reading on a porch while hummingbirds darted overhead.
By the time her shift was over, she’d read every review of Chata B&B on three travel sites, half-memorized the layout of Honey Wine from the town’s tourism page, and surreptitiously logged in to her bank account so she could stare, again, some more, at the balance that had landed there after probate on her mom’s will was cleared.
The next morning, she’d phoned Kent.
Chata was still there. Still for sale. She could afford it. Within a couple of weeks, they’d worked out a deal. Within a couple of months, the deal had closed.
She’d kept meaning to take some time off, to make the five-hour drive to see it again in person, but giving notice to the hotel had sent the owners into crisis mode. They’d recruited her straight out of college and shepherded her to her current position; Livia cared enough to do what she could to leave things in experienced hands. Which meant interviewing. And more interviewing. And then hiring, and training, and more training. By the time they’d squared everything away, it was her closing date, so she checked her gut, found she was still inordinately excited about Chata, and signed the papers.
It was almost weirder that she never met Kent than it was that she hadn’t seen Chata in fifteen years. They’d used different branches of the same title company, hers in Dallas and his in Honey Wine. She’d hired a local inspector and surveyor to check the place out, and he’d sent his books to her once they’d signed the sales contract. All in all, Livia was pretty impressed with how honestly the old guy had represented his property. Everything he’d said—that the bathrooms were outdated but functional, and the driveway uneven, but the well water was pure and the kitchen was commercial quality—checked out. For all his hard-to-understand mumble-grumble over the phone lines, and his distrust of realtors that had led him to place the sales ad, Kent had kept the place in good repair and, most importantly, kept heads on beds. Repeat heads on beds, actually—there were folks on the review sites that mentioned they returned to Honey Wine every couple of years, and always stayed at Chata.
It boded well. And what Livia really, deeply, desperately wanted in her life was something that boded well.
She wasn’t a fool. Her friends said it was nothing but magical thinking, when she’d been careless enough to tell them that Chata “just felt right,” but there was more to it than what they termed her “run away to the country and pretend that the simple life’s the life for you” philosophy. First off, she wasn’t running. She’d always planned on owning her own place someday, from the moment she’d enrolled in the hospitality program. And she’d done damn well in school—damn well at her job, too. All of it in service of her dream—to have business cards reading “Livia DeLacroix, Owner.”
And now she could.
If it also meant she could leave behind some memories, a handful of the less charming aspects of Dallas, and a few of its bad-for-her residents, that was nothing but a bonus.
After the shocks of Persimmon, she gave up on attempting to record her initial impressions of Chata, stowing her phone while she explored the rest of the rooms. They were definitely … unique. She’d examine closer in the light of day, but most of what she clocked seemed, as expected, cosmetic. Kent had included all furnishings and decor with the deal, other than the stuff in the top floor owner’s suite.
Livia had a few furnishings of her own in the trailer—her comfortable desk chair, the dinette set from her apartment, a storage chest she’d mostly packed because it had been with her so long it was hard to imagine a new life without it. The few of her mom’s stained-glass windows that survived after cleaning out her house. But mostly she’d brought clothes, books, electronics, and her stack of pillows and bedding. She carted a few armloads up to the owner’s suite before returning to Persimmon, and settling down against the rickety brass headboard to make notes by the light of the atrocious lamps.
It ought to have been enough to exhaust her into sleep, even with the strange surroundings. But her mind leapt in chaotic rhythm, cataloging the night sounds—surely those were crickets—and flashing on odd new worries. Would her wifi be strong in all the guest rooms? What if her guests were used to some unknown favorite breakfast treat of Kent’s and resented her famous jalapeño cornbread muffins? What would she find to replace the collection of scary angels on the mantle?
After a half-restful night, Livia started early the next morning, unloading the trailer all by her lonesome. So Maggie could just bite her skeptical tongue. Never mind that she left the table and half her boxes stacked in the entryway for the time being. Livia needed to return the trailer and deal with her own transportation needs before she could do much of anything else.
She followed all the twists and turns to the interstate and zipped up to a nearby town where she could finally unhitch. Of course, if she’d realized how difficult the road up to Chata would be on her sedan’s suspension, she could have skipped installing a trailer hitch on it and bought something sturdier to begin with. But never mind. She searched for used car dealers while waiting on the rental trailer paperwork, glad she’d kept easy access to her car’s title while organizing herself for the big move. It took the expected bit of negotiation, but by the time Livia stopped by a grocery store to stock up, she was in her brand new, pale blue, slightly used pickup. Bonnie, she named it, short for the state flower, bluebonnets, which carpeted the Hill Country every spring.
The salesperson took a picture of her sitting in the truck's cab, which she sent to the Dallas group text before heading back to Chata.
Back home.
Livia was pretty darn proud of herself.
Even if no one else was around to hear her brag about it.
By the middle of her third morning at Chata, Livia was dying for someone to brag to. Not for the sake of the bragging—though her lists were kick-ass levels of thoroughness—but because the crickets and deer and the corpses of dried out millipedes filling one corner of Bonnie’s garage were all the company she’d had, and it would have been nice to see a familiar face. Or even an unfamiliar one.
Too bad she’d had Kent block off bookings for several weeks so she could renovate and settle in.
Mags pointed out, during one of the calls Livia was initiating too often, that if Livia could go through the entire process of buying Chata without driving down to see the place, she shouldn’t already be begging for a visit.
“But you’ll love these hills,” Livia wheedled. “You should see how purple and azure the sky is as the sun sets over the treetops. And watching the stars come out! It’s like nothing you’d ever see in Dallas. You know you’d love that.”
“Yep, one day. I have my doubts about your motives just now.”
“Some friend.”
“Live with it. Now go away. I know you keep calling so I’ll get fired for personal calls at work and not have that as an excuse to stay put.”
“You saw through my diabolical plan?”
“I’m clever that way. Go make a grocery list or something. I sent the crumb cake recipe, by the way. Check your email.”
“You’re the best.”
“Damn straight. Don’t forget it.”
“Love you, Mags.”
“Yeah, yeah. Later.” Maggie hung up.
Livia carried her third cup of morning coffee up to her top floor suite. She’d begun moving some of the weirder—but still in decent shape—furniture up to her own space, giving her more latitude to rearrange and redecorate the guest rooms. She was measuring the windows for new blinds when a cloud of dust down the hill caught her attention. It grew and moved closer. By the time Livia figured out how to shove open the window to lean out for a better view, she’d discounted a pile of possibilities. The satellite internet guys weren’t due for three more days. The mailman left everything down by the street. Kent had called from Louisiana the previous day to report that he’d gotten a royal flush at the poker tables. Though why he’d thought Livia needed to know that, she wasn’t sure. Probably he wanted to give her an opening in case she needed to yell about the millipedes.
So she wasn’t expecting anything to be roaring up her driveway. She checked her cell phone was getting a signal and ducked back into the shadows, hoping to see without being seen. A dusty Jeep swung into the parking area, barely missing Bonnie, and the silence once it was off was as loud as had been the noise of it trekking up the hill.
Livia stood back and watched as an athletic, tall, dark, and possibly handsome—under his ball cap it was hard to tell—stranger emerged and turned to stare, balefully, straight up at her top-floor window.
Chapter 2
Around dawn, Greg had pulled into a rest stop to spend a little time jogging in the fresh air, before the place filled up with cranky families and gas fumes. He'd been driving all night; he'd intended to set out from Mississippi far earlier than midnight—hell, he'd intended to make the drive two months later, company documents in hand, letting Uncle Kent know in advance so he'd be ready to sit down and listen to what Greg had to say.
But that sure as shit wasn't happening now.
"Papers are signed," Uncle Kent had said. Like there wasn't anything he could do about it.
Okay, there wasn't. Legally, fine, he was all tied up. But like hell was he going to sit back, while the plans he'd been making for two years just evaporated around him. So he'd given notice to his boss at the excursion company, gotten out of his lease, and hit the road. Well, gone to The Raft for goodbyes, which weren't as brief as he'd intended, then hit the road.
After a few jumping jacks and press-ups, Greg dug a sandwich out of his cooler and slid back behind the wheel, letting his phone tell him what he already knew: in five hours, he’d be back in Honey Wine. It had been five, six years since he'd been there on any kind of regular basis. Not that he figured the town would have changed much. Not that he figured the folks with their disapproving eyes had cleared out, like he couldn’t tell what they still thought of him. Like they were subtle about it.
Still and all, it wasn't like the whole town was against him, especially, it seemed, now that Uncle Kent was gone. And it wasn't like he didn't have some kernel of brattiness within him that looked forward to rubbing their noses—the noses that wrinkled at him since his childhood, sure he’d never amount to anything—in his success. He hadn't gone so far as to practice the 'that's right, I'm hot shit, never thought you'd see that, did you?' look in the mirror, but he may have imagined an encounter or two.
And then Kent had sold the place out from under him. To some stranger, some city gal, some non-relative. Probably she had the kind of slick wiles and bona fides the old man valued over anything Aunt Sissy wanted for the land. She might even’ve confused and bamboozled him in the bargain.
Not that it justified his forgetting entirely about Greg. Aunt Sissy would never have done it, no matter how slick the city gal was. Aunt Sissy had known Greg had dreams and plans and was on his way to achieving them. She must have told her husband. She would have mentioned it, even the bones of his ideas, enough that Kent would have known not to just up and sell it to some wily city gal without talking to him first. Dad and Sissy had smiled over it, once: Greg’s plan to reunite the land his Forst grandparents had split between their kids. And with Sissy gone, Greg and his Dad were the last Forsts left. He’d once figured that would mean something to Uncle Kent.
But his uncle hadn't sounded the least contrite when he called to announce his new address. "Sold Chata," he'd said, like it was no big deal. Just a thing he did, entirely his own business.
Technically, yes. Never mind Greg's land next door. Never mind his dreams. Never mind what Sissy must have wanted.
Shit. Aunt Sissy would have wanted it, wouldn't she? She hadn’t been merely humoring him and Dad?
Greg wasn't finding the PBJ as restorative as it might be. He chucked it in his trash bag, queasy. It had never occurred to him that Aunt Sissy might have told Uncle Kent specifically not to sell to Greg.
But Kent held the rope swing incident against him, more than a decade on. Apologies hadn’t mattered—not to him. Everyone else forgave him, even his mom. As for Aunt Sissy, she was never hard to convince of his basic innocence. Sissy had been soft. Especially with Greg. Seemed to realize he needed it more than most, not that he would have ever outright said so. Maybe a result of being raised alongside his dad, who also never outright said anything. Sissy had the knack of knowing stuff about what people needed—it was downright mystical, this little nothing-sized old Czech lady, able to tell in the merest glance what was up deep inside everyone she met.
Greg had seen her in action over and over, when he was the summer help at the B&B. He'd be cleaning the kitchen and Sissy would glance in to say, "Pitcher of iced tea and some cookies out here, okay?" and he'd bring it out to the porch where Sissy had her guests installed in rocking chairs, relating some folktale or teaching them to distinguish the various trees. And whatever thing she was saying, by the time she'd finished, the guests were smiling fondly, or were energized and ready to tackle new adventures, or had reached across to hold hands.
Greg didn’t think he had the same power. But Kent didn't, either, and he’d run the place nearly two years after Sissy died, so it wasn't like that was a good reason to keep Chata from him.
Whatever the man’s reasons—he’d stayed stubbornly quiet when Greg asked—it’d spurred Greg to amp up his timeline and head back to Honey Wine straight away. He didn’t know what he could do about it, but the first step was to get a look at the city gal who'd gone and stolen his dream.
***
Livia stepped cautiously out onto the front porch. Up close, he wasn't that tall. Just something to do with the perspective from the third-floor window, then. He was handsome, indeed, now that she could see his square face and high cheekbones, which had the same horizontal slash as his narrowed eyes and his dark brows. If he looked that good mad, Livia was dead curious what he'd look like laughing. Though maybe it was already a laughing face, and he just had odd expressions. Since he was a total stranger appearing out of nowhere to glare at her, she really couldn't say.
"Can I help you?"
The guy didn't even blink for a moment, then glanced at the emptiness around him.
Now that wasn’t at all creepy. Maggie would have a field day. "Hey, some muscle-bound man just drove up to my isolated house in the woods and is staring at me like I ran over his favorite dog and he needs to enact retribution, and I opted to walk out to him without even dialing 911 first. What's up with you?"
Too many years in the service industry, clearly. "If you're lost, I can get you a map to town," Livia tried, glancing from his Mississippi plates to her phone to check the signal.
"Not lost."
Well, that helped answer a few dozen of her questions. But despite the two-word answer, his voice was friendly enough.
"Well, then. Welcome to Chata B&B. I'm Livia DeLacroix, and I'm afraid we're not open just at the moment. I'd be happy to give you referrals in the area, if you need a place to stay." Unless this guy was the kind of regular who thought he could just show up and get a room based on his long-standing history with the place, she still didn't know why he was standing there.
He shifted, dropping his shoulders in a way that let Livia relax a fraction. His eyes stayed narrow, though, when he said, “I’m Gregory Forst. I live next door.”
He didn't glance left or right, much less point helpfully at a nearby rooftop. Not that Livia could see any rooftops—her place was isolated, though there was a stretch of power lines down the hill a ways. She waited a beat for more, and got nothing. Okay, then. “Are you the local welcome wagon?”
At that he laughed, and Livia had been right. Wowza. Never mind being laughed at for her sarcasm, never mind the strange man/remote woods horror story set-up; this Gregory Forst was yummy. Instant fantasy material. Great. Just what she needed. The boy next door was a stone cold hottie. And mysteriously antagonistic.
And possibly a liar liar pants on fire, given the out-of-state plates, but when she glanced at the bumper of his Jeep, he noticed. "I've been working over near Jackson, but I grew up here. My dad and my Aunt Sissy inherited this land way back when. She married Kent, and they started Chata up on their half of the property." He finally pointed, uphill at an angle past the back of the B&B, not that Livia had noticed anything but trees that way. "Dad didn't do more than build a little house there for the three of us. It's mine now."
"Uh-huh." Articulate, Livia. Real conversationalist there. But she'd seen pictures of Kent and Sissy Stipple on the Chata website. Even given that Gregory Forst wasn't as tall as she'd originally thought, he had a lot more size to him than tiny Sissy had. Sissy was little and fair, with big round eyes and gray-blonde hair falling to brush her tiny round chin. Figuring for gender and generational differences, Livia still failed to see a single trace of her in the delectable specimen before her. "So, Kent never mentioned I'd have his nephew as a neighbor."
Gregory's jaw tightened just a tad. "No, well. He didn't know that I'd be moving home just yet."
"And you grew up in Honey Wine?"
He glanced down the driveway towards town. "That I did."
"You know all the locals?"
He nodded briefly. "I know them."
"They know you?"
"They do. Are you looking for them to vouch for me? I'd show you my ID, but I guess it won't prove much. Try Ellie at the Honey Wine Cafe, if you want. I bussed tables for her after school for three years. Or Mason, from the trail riding school. I mucked stalls there on weekends."
"Lots of jobs."
“Everyone was bent on keeping me busy, growing up here. Used to work at Chata, too, summers."
Interesting. The touch of hostility about the town, and the fact that he was repeatedly mentioning his connection to her place. Livia sensed an agenda. Well, may as well tackle the bear if it shows up growling on her porch. "And what brings you back to Honey Wine, sooner than expected, Gregory?"
"Greg." He nodded.
Not an answer, Greg. Livia waited.
And waited.
Fine. She could growl, too. "What brings you to Chata, Greg?"
He glanced away, eyes tight. Shook his head. Eventually said, “Sometimes people come and go to my place via your drive and the bridge just up there. My own drive is a twisty pain. Figured I should let you know, in case. And meet you. Welcome wagon, like you said.”
With that, he climbed back into his Jeep and drove past her along the wooded drive.
***
Well, that had gone well.
Greg opened the kitchen door of the stone and timber frame house he’d grown up in, dropping his duffle on the dining table as he automatically walked to his childhood room and slammed the door behind him. Took him a couple of beats to notice there was no bed in the bedroom. Couple more beats to remember that he’d moved everything he’d wanted from there into the master after Dad left, replacing the twin bed Dad had obstinately insisted upon with his queen-sized one, stocking the closet with his own clothes and a couple of boxes of school memorabilia. And yet every time he’d returned since Dad took to the road, he’d ended up in his old room, staring befuddled at the desk where his bed once sagged.
His encounter with pretty little city gal Livia DeLawhatever sure hadn’t helped him feel any more grounded. Defensive, gripping that cell phone like it was her lifeline, acting as if he was trespassing. He hadn’t even gotten out of the parking area and onto the porch. Her porch. No longer Kent’s porch. Not Sissy’s. Nowhere he’d be bringing guests lemonade anymore, not that lemonade runs had been necessarily part of his plans. But he’d had plans.
Big plans.
His degree in forestry management was never going to make him a million bucks, but growing up on this land, spending hours roaming through the trees, observing the wildlife, learning through interaction how the plants and streams and sun and bugs all worked together—it was his calling. And once his YouTube channel had taken off, letting others in on his passion for the ecology of the land, he’d learned how to stash away revenue to pursue something more. He’d envisioned a way to bring others out to the place, make some tourism money while still protecting the ecosystems.
But it wouldn’t work, not the way he imagined it, unless he had Chata, too. He needed Chata’s land, with its access road, and high bluffs, and the landing area at the low curve of the creek. His half of his grandparents’ land filled his soul, but didn’t on its own give him the same commercial opportunities.
Cesta, he was going to call it. “Journey” in Czech, to go with “cottage” for Chata. Sissy would have liked that. His dad did, for sure—he was always saying things like “Make life an adventure, but come home at the end.”
Greg stepped out onto the front porch. If he stood on the far side of the bay window, just past the obstruction of a couple of the older cypress edging the stream, he could see Chata. Mostly just the side and part of the back, but as he watched, the new owner moved onto the second-story porch. She wasn’t doing much. Looking around. Jotting something in her notebook. Kicking each of the porch rails with her tennis shoe-shod foot, as if Kent would have let any of them go loose for even half a day. Greg smiled, remembering the fall weekend they’d spent replacing the nails in every slat: “Safe side,” was about all his taciturn uncle had said when Greg had asked why they were bothering. It had been one of his first days of paid work, early on in his teens. It hadn’t occurred to Greg for years that maybe Uncle Kent had been making work for him to do, not until after so many other friends of his family had employed him to bus tables, curry horses, stack lumber, clear garden beds, and otherwise lock him in place with labor that kept him from the kind of trouble his parents frowned on.
Any rate, as Livia was finding out, the porch was sturdy. Her pale limbs flashed as she moved. Shorts in the dead of winter was a choice, but Greg had ditched his own sweatshirt once he hit home. Was warming up just standing there, watching Livia trying to find fault with Chata.
“Screw it,” he muttered to no one, and headed inside for a quick shower. Time to develop tactics, because another of his dad’s aphorisms had to do with not letting obstacles to your first plan stop you from coming up with a second plan that was even better.