Page 17 of Once Upon a Fall

I know it’s not the shower curtain this time, because I looked at it after Dean checked out yesterday, and it was perfectly anchored to the wall. Not even a tiny fracture in the tile.

I was going to work on fixing other things in the Sleeping Beauty room that I took a shortcut on, but then figured what was the point? The other rooms need my attention more, and since there was no one staying there, I could do that later.

But then he came back. And that was . . . embarrassing. That’ll teach me to dance to Taylor Swift with my back to the door. I’ve learned my lesson. Hopefully someday I’ll be able to listen to Shake It Off again without getting the ick.

The question is, do I check on him? I really should have yesterday; then the whole half-naked-in-a-shower-curtain thing wouldn’t have happened, and maybe he wouldn’t have left and then come back and found me dancing with a drill.

I make a snap decision, get up from the floor, walk across the hall to the Sleeping Beauty room, and knock.

“Everything okay in there?” I ask through the door.

It swings open, the straight line of disapproval in full effect as Dean stands there. He has one hand on the doorknob, the other holding up what takes me a second to recognize as a floating shelf I’d hung on the wall opposite the bed so I could put a picture of a castle on it.

I peek around him to see the bare wall, the anchors ripped out, now leaving big torn holes, along with a few other holes next to them. I’d measured it wrong and was in a hurry, so instead of fixing my mistake, I just adjusted the shelf, so it covered the holes. I knew I hadn’t anchored it correctly, and I was going to ask Dominic to fix it, but in the craziness of getting everything ready, I forgot.

Oops.

“Oh, shoot,” I say. “I’ll get that fixed.” I hold my hand out, but he doesn’t give it to me.

“How about you let me do it,” he says.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I reply.

“I know I don’t,” he says. “But if I do it, it probably won’t fall off again.”

I huff a breath out my nose. I want to tell him he’s rude and mean, and he can take his disapproving lips and go . . . somewhere. Obviously, I would come up with something much more profound before I actually said it.

But also, he has a point.

“Aren’t you super busy doing . . . what are you doing in Autumn Ridge, again?”

I actually have no idea why this grumpy man is visiting this town for an entire month. Even the leaf-peepers only stay for a week at most. I didn’t bother to ask, mostly because when he booked the room, I was more interested in the money I would make than his reasoning.

He stares at me for a second, and I’m about to tell him it’s not any of my business when his mouth opens. “I’m figuring out what to do with my grandparents’ property. It’s the old apple orchard.”

I furrow my brow. “Which one?” We have a couple of them around here.

“The one that burned down.”

My eyes go wide. “The Alden family one? Wait . . . your last name is Alden. Oh, I should have put that together,” I tell him, like I’ve just solved one of life’s biggest mysteries.

He gives me one simple nod. “That’s the one.”

“So, what are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Right now there is a family of raccoons that’s moved in.”

“Oh, wow. You should charge them rent,” I say, the words falling out of my mouth. “Sorry, that was dumb.”

I mentally kick myself for my stupid joke.

One corner of Dean’s lips pulls up just briefly, though, and I take that as a small victory.

“I don’t think they’d pay.”

Was that . . . a joke? It’s hard to tell with how dry his tone is. I think I’ll count it, though.

“So, now I have to wait for someone to remove them, and I haven’t had much luck finding anyone to do it.”