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Wes heard the concern in Carolyn’s voice, but obviously Marissa didn’t catch it.
“Yes! She’s helping me with my app and with a secret project,” she said with a grin his way.
Wes did his best to send her a smile, but the food stuck in his throat.
“That’s interesting,” Carolyn said, moving her food around her plate.
His father-in-law didn’t look like he was even listening to the conversation, but Dustin was sending him a look. One he couldn’t quite decipher, but his head nod toward his mother meant Wes needed to say something about the situation.
Wes cleared his throat. “The renos are almost done. Sarah will be leaving soon.”
Carolyn nodded, looking slightly relieved. “Of course. I remember she was always so eager to leave town. I can’t imagine anything would make her want to stay now, not even that old inn,” she said as she resumed eating.
Not even the old inn.
Wes glanced at Marissa, and his daughter’s disappointment had his uneasiness growing. His mother-in-law might be eager to see Sarah leaving town again, but his daughter sure wasn’t.
Unfortunately, Wes couldn’t determine where exactly he fell on the spectrum.
…
Themed rooms were cliché and, thank God, her grandmother had thought so, too. It made repainting the B&B guest rooms a lot easier when Sarah didn’t have to worry about painting over Western or Hollywood Night themes, like other inns along the coast boasted.
Every room in Dove’s Nest was decorated in the same nautical colors and accents. Seafoam-blue walls with white baseboards and trim, black-and-white pictures of local surfers tearing up the waves, a uniquely handcrafted surfboard in the corner that duplicated as a full-length mirror, and seashell-decorated dispensers in the bathrooms.
Simple and old-school elegance. Or at least they used to be and would be again.
The walls were chipped and some of them stained from years of allowing smoking inside, but the decorations still held up, and the cosmetic work wouldn’t take more than a few nights to finish.
Sarah stood in the middle of the first room, already prepped. Painting tarps covered the floor, and blankets were draped over the furniture. Even the edges along the door and window frames and along the ceiling and baseboards were taped, thanks to Wes’s work crew.
She shuffled through her iPad for appropriate painting music. The problem was, she couldn’t define her mood. Since being back in Blue Moon Bay, her world had been an emotional roller-coaster ride—the death of her grandma, deciding to renovate the inn, and her growing attraction to Wes had her turned completely upside down, as though the ride had stopped mid-rotation on a loop.
Would she fall to her death? Or survive the cyclone of indecision and uncertainty?
And despite her best attempts at resisting, she was being drawn back to that journal. She was desperate for more answers about who this Jack guy was and just how much he’d meant to her grandmother, but she was also terrified to read any further. How many journal entries were written to him? Had her grandfather known about this man from her grandmother’s past?
She tried to remember as many details as she could, but all she knew was that her grandfather had returned from serving in the war and the two had fallen in love while her grandmother was working in a factory in San Francisco. During wartime, women had stepped up to fill in jobs that the men had vacated. They’d gotten married quickly, her grandmother had returned to running the B&B, and that was it.
But that wasn’t it. Not even close.
One true love…
Was her grandmother right? Was there just one person out there destined for someone else? Sarah had never felt the same pull of attraction for anyone the way she always had for Wes…but he’d been happy with someone else. If soul mates were a thing, how was that possible?
She sighed. She was being ridiculous. Letting the nostalgia of being at the inn and the secrets she’d discovered in the journal get to her.
She’d definitely be opening it again, but fear of what else she might discover that she wasn’t ready to learn gave her pause. For now.
Hitting shuffle on the iPad, she tucked it into the pocket of her faded, ripped jeans. Her favorite pair that she’d been clinging to far past their life span. They were like her comfort blanket—the ones she turned to when she just needed to relax. She tied her hair back into a high ponytail and got to work.
Opening the seafoam-colored paint, she stirred it until the consistency was just right and poured it into the rolling tray. She’d painted her bedroom in her family home countless times as a teenager, new inspiration demanding new vibrant colors as frequently as her changing hormonal mood swings.
So she had a little experience with a rolling brush.
She dipped it into the paint and started on the far wall, covering the patches of white where Wes’s crew had repaired dents and holes.
Humming along to a hip-hop track, she swayed her hips as she worked, feeling better with the completion of the first wall. Things had come together a lot faster than she’d expected. Dove’s Nest would soon look like a brand-new inn.
