Page 96 of Just One Little Bargain

Evie

The three of us spill out into the cool September night, gravel crunching underfoot. The string lights along the garden path throw soft gold across the parked cars. Daisy’s looped her arm through mine, partly out of affection, and partly, I suspect, because she’s clocked that the fourth cocktail has rearranged my relationship with walking in a straight line.

“Evie Feywin?”

The voice comes from behind us, and I turn to find a man coming down the restaurant steps who’s, frankly, rude levels of good-looking. He’s older, comfortably past forty, with ebony hair salted with silver at the temples and a face that has clearly never once been ignored or kept waiting. He’s wearing a well-cut dusky coat and moves without any hurry at all.

“That’s me,” I say, and Daisy’s grip tightens on my arm.

“Forgive the interception.” He stops a courteous distance away and hands me a business card between two fingers. “Julian Ashford. I write for The Hidden Getaway.”

My brain, sluggish as it currently is, recognizes the name with alarming speed. The Hidden Getaway isn’t a blog or a regional pamphlet. It’s the glossy travel quarterly that runs one long-form feature per issue on a single overlooked destination. What happens to those places afterward isn’t subtle. Coverage there doesn’t fill a weekend; it fills years of bookings.

“You’ve heard of us,” he observes, reading my face.

“I’ve coveted you in dentists’ waiting rooms,” I admit, which is the drinks talking, and also true.

“I’ve been in town about a week now,” he goes on, “long enough to learn that when people keep pointing me in the same direction, I should pay attention. More often than not, they’ve been pointing me toward the Foxglove Inn.”

I can’t think of anything appropriate to say. Hope has already gotten ahead of me, sprinting toward a conclusion he hasn’t stated. I try to rein it back. For all I know, he’s about to ask if I do weddings. But he keeps standing there, watching me cradle his card in both hands with embarrassing care.

His mouth tilts. “I’d like to see it properly, Ms. Feywin. Talk to you about what you’ve built there. No obligation to do it tonight, of course. I’m not going to ambush a woman on her night off and demand a tour. But I think this town has been sitting on something excellent, and I want to be the one who tells everybody about it.”

“Yes!” I answer faster than dignity would prefer. “I’d love that. Tell me what works for you, and I’ll make the time.” I tighten my grip on the card. “And thank you. You have no idea what it means to hear that from you of all people.”

“I’ll be in the area a while yet,” he says, already stepping back. “Whenever it suits you is fine with me. The good ones are always worth waiting for.”

Then he’s gone, disappearing back through the restaurant doors. Daisy makes a sound I haven’t heard since we were teenagers.

“Evie!” She’s got both my shoulders now and is shaking me. “That’s a national feature! Your whole next year could be booked solid if it goes well.”

“I know.”

“Say something other than I know, you maniac! You’re being scouted!”

Maddie plucks the card from my fingers, examines it, and hands it back with the closest thing to reverence her face is capable of. “Okay. That one I approve of. Don’t overthink it into the ground.”

The instruction is, of course, futile. Under the pleasant haze and the improbability of it, hope is already filling next year’s calendar in my head. The Foxglove Inn is the only thing I’ve ever risked everything on, and this man just told me it deserved the whole world’s attention.

Across the lot, Rick’s truck has been idling at the curb, headlights cutting twin beams through the night. He doesn’t honk. Rick would sooner run out of gas than do that. We disentangle ourselves and cross to him.

Daisy climbs into the back with me, while Maddie takes the passenger seat beside her dad. The cab smells the way it always has: motor oil and whatever the little tree-shaped air freshener swinging from the rearview is supposed to smell like. It has never been remotely forest-related.

“Good night, girls?” Rick glances back at us.

“The best.” Daisy leans her head against my shoulder.

Rick’s a big man, broad through the shoulders and softer through the middle now that he’s in his fifties. A gray mustache frames a mouth that rarely does more than flatten. Decades behind the bar are written into the scars across both hands. Ask him anything and you’ll get one of two looks: unimpressed or deeply unimpressed. If he answers at all, it’s usually a grunt. One of the best men I know, though.

Rick’s been our ride home from things ever since we were thirteen, when we had no business being out late enough to need picking up and were too stubborn to admit it. My dad left when I was young, and I spent a lot of years learning not to count on anyone showing up. Rick was among the first to teach me differently, just by being at the curb every time—engine warm, never wanting a thing for it. He’d hand you a bottle of water and grunt at your seatbelt, but get you home safely. As far as Rick’s concerned, Daisy and I have always come attached to Maddie like a two-for-one deal, and somewhere along the way, he started treating us as extra daughters he never signed up for and never once complained about.

Maddie’s place comes first.

She glances at her dad. “Try not to open before ten.”

“Bar’s not gonna run itself,” Rick says.

Her mouth flattens in a way I recognize.