James chuckled. “You did. The Morrisons just left. They’re heading out to Nantucket for the day and asked if they could leave their room key here so they didn’t lose it.” He pointed over his shoulder. “I hung it on the hook for their room. Hope that’s okay.”
“Of course.” I realized James had retrieved his laptop at some point and was working on something while I’d been deep in my own project plans. I ran a hand down my face, pressing my fingertips into my sore eyes. “How long have I been zoned out?” I looked at the surfboard clock behind the coffee maker. “Two hours? Are you kidding?”
I looked back down at the papers in front of me and noticed I’d added at least six full pages of supply notes and three more sheets of hastily scribbled diagrams, along with two empty coffee cups. I rubbed my face and grinned at him. “God, I love this. It doesn’t seem like work when you love it.”
I stood up to stretch and refill my water bottle from the cooler in the corner without realizing at first that James hadn’t answered me. When I turned back to the counter, I noticed the divots between his eyebrows.
He looked stressed. Clearly he had something on his mind, and while it was just on the tip of my tongue to ask him what it was, I realized it was none of my business. We weren’t friends. We weren’t anything to each other. It wasn’t my place to pry into his life, even though I wanted to.
I wanted to know what had caused the frown lines to grow so deep, and what I could do to ease them.
“Hey,” I said softly. “Thanks for holding down the fort, but you don’t have to stick around. Go have some fun.”
James glanced up at me. “Actually, I need to catch up on some work. I…” He looked flustered, but before I had a chance to ask him what was up, Karlie barreled in with her arms full of boxes. She headed straight toward James as if I wasn’t even there.
“Found them. By the way, never store important shit in Dad’s boat shed. They’re a little worse for wear, but this should have the old surveys and all of the paperwork you requested from the original…” She trailed off when she realized not only was I there, but I was shooting her daggers. “What?”
“What the fuck are you doing?” I came around the counter to take the boxes from her since she was pregnant. “You shouldn’t be carrying those.” It drove me crazy when Karlie refused to ask for help. She was stubborn and insisted she could do everything on her own. But I was family, and family meant that even if you could do it all on your own, you didn’t have to.
Then I saw the writing on the side of one of the boxes in my grandfather’s chicken-scratch scrawl: “Sea Sprite Inn 1957-1963.” It was a box of old documents for the inn. And Karlie had apparently been intending to hand it over to James.
“What the hell are you doing giving him all of this?” I asked, setting the precarious stack of boxes on the counter, as far away from James as possible.
Karlie frowned at me and fisted her hands on her hips. “Because it’s for him.” She shot me a look that warned against challenging her, but I shot her one back. We’d had years of playing eyeball chicken, and I wasn’t one to go down easy.
James must have seen the smoke beginning to curl up between us because he reached over and plucked the boxes off the counter before hurrying toward the door.
Oh, hell no.
“Stop.” My voice came out even firmer than I’d intended. James froze in his tracks.
11
James
Sawyer’s voice reached deep down in my belly and froze me in place. The things that voice could make me do.
I shuddered and squeezed my eyes closed for a beat before turning and facing Sawyer with my best “I’m in control here” lawyer expression firmly in place. “This is the information necessary for the due diligence on the project. It’s one of the requirements for the deal to go through, and your uncle Mark was helpful in making sure it got to me in a timely manner. He didn’t want any undue delay which might trigger a decrease in the bonus amounts.”
Even I hated how lawyerly I sounded in that moment, but I clenched my jaw and lifted my chin slightly, refusing to back down.
Sawyer didn’t look happy. In fact, he stalked toward me, snatched the boxes right out of my hands, and walked them over to a large wooden table and chairs in the corner of the lobby. He let them fall with a loud thunk. “Fine then. You can do your work here where I can keep an eye on these papers. As far as I’m concerned, they’re hotel property and don’t need to be removed from the premises.”
I didn’t point out that Karlie had just brought them over from her dad’s boat shed. Instead I said, “Then I’ll take them to my room.”
He crossed his arms. “You’ll work on them here or not at all.”
The way he stood, his worn T-shirt pulled across his shoulders, accenting the muscles, I had a flash of the way he’d looked the night before, shirtless and sweaty as he swung the sledgehammer at the motel room wall. I felt a shiver at the thought of me trying to snatch the boxes back and him physically restraining me. The thought of it kept me rooted in place, half-afraid of what I might do if I moved any closer to him.
Sensing that he’d won, Sawyer began packing up the checkers board and jigsaw puzzle that had been spread out on the large table and returned them to the games shelf against the wall. Karlie tapped her foot and smirked at him. “Bossy fucker. Things never change, do they? What do you think he’s going to do? Steal the boring schematics and sixty-year-old closing papers?”
Sawyer flipped the lid off one of the boxes and rooted around before pulling out a creased, light orange sheet of paper. His eyes skimmed down it before he held it up, flashing it between us. “Exhibit A: Grandad’s letter to Nana when she was in California taking care of her aunt.” He slapped it down on the table and dug through the box again until pulling out a postcard. “Exhibit B: the last time Nana heard from her sister Gwen before she died.” Again, he reached into the box. Over and over again, he pulled out items of sentimental importance until his voice sounded brittle and Karlie’s eyes were suspiciously damp.
The next time he bent for the box, I stepped toward him, grasping his forearm to stop him. Forcibly but gently I removed the papers from his hands and placed them in the little stack he’d made to keep them safe. “Hey,” I said softly. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m fine to work here. You know I don’t want to mess with any of your family’s important—”
His eyes were wild. “Except you do.” He yanked his arm out of my grasp and took a step back. “You want to steal this fucking place right out from under us. My family’s most important memory of all. Their legacy, our future, this place is—”
His breathing turned ragged, his voice cracking. He was practically yelling, and anyone who didn’t know him might think he was furious, but I’d spent enough time with him to recognize what emotion was causing him to tremble. It wasn’t anger; it was despair and desperation. It was frustration and fear.
Maybe he’d intended to drive me off, but that wasn’t going to work. Instead of turning and walking out of the lobby the way he might have wanted me to, I reached for him and yanked him in for a hard hug. I threaded my fingers into his hair, cupping the back of his head and holding it against my shoulder. With my other arm, I pinned him against me.