Wanda’s voice, which had been by turns cheerfully cajoling and stubbornly challenging, fell to a barely audible level. “You haven’t been home in over a year.”
Home. How could Lorelei explain that Texas hadn’t felt like home since her father had died twenty years ago? Her freshman year of college, Lorelei had joked with her roommate about “Philadelphia freedom” because moving to Pennsylvania truly had liberated her. She’d been free of living in a house that was a shrine to her dad, free of her mother’s increasingly bizarre beliefs. Lorelei had soothed her frazzled nerves with the orderly logic of numbers and let her first snowy Pennsylvania winter numb a decade of tangled emotions.
“You know I had to cancel at Christmas because I had the flu,” Lorelei had defended herself. “I’ll come down for a visit this year. I promise.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, Mom. Soon.” Soonish, anyway. “But not this month, okay? I’ll look at my calendar, talk to my boss and get back to you.”
Her mother had sighed, clearly skeptical. “Sure. I’ll be here.”
Reaching for the door to the conference room, Lorelei gave a quick shake of her head, her long dark hair swirling about her shoulders, and banished the memory of her impulsive promise. Now was the time to focus on the more pressing topic of risk management. One of the few women in her department, she was determined to distinguish herself among her colleagues. She straightened her spine and stepped into the office, her footsteps now swallowed by the plush carpet. But a last lingering stab of guilt pierced her. I’ll talk to my supervisor tomorrow about vacation time. Conscience appeased, Lorelei lost herself in the two-hour meeting, all thoughts of Texas and her mother pushed aside.
LORELEI WAS SEATED AT her desk, immersed in notes for a liability audit, when a male voice said, “Knock knock,” from the doorway. She glanced up to see Rick Caulden.
He flashed a knowing smile. “You forget about me again? Reservations? Tuesday night? Any of this ringing a bell?”
“Of course I remember. I’ve been looking forward to our dinner. I just thought you were going to call when you got here.” She enjoyed her periodic dates with the handsome attorney.
Employed by a law firm several blocks away, Rick worked as hard as she did. He was charming but refreshingly unsentimental. They shared the same pragmatic streak and career drive.
“Tried calling,” he said. “Kept going straight to voice mail, so I decided I should come up, find out if your meeting ran long and if I was on my own for dinner.”
“Oh, right—I turned my phone off before the meeting and totally forgot to turn it back on.” A mistake, or a Freudian slip? Had she deliberately left it off because she suspected Wanda would call back? Maybe Lorelei had been trying to avoid the guilt trip of feeling like an ungrateful daughter yet again.
As soon as Lorelei repowered the phone, a message bubble appeared. She frowned. “Wow, that’s a lot of missed calls.”
“At least three of them are me,” Rick said.
And the other six? “Hang on a sec.” She stood, gathering her purse and coat. “I just want to check voice mail before we go.”
“Sure.” He smirked. “I always make our reservations for fifteen minutes later than I tell you. I know how difficult it is to drag you out of the office.”
Under different circumstances, she might have pointed out that she spent an equal amount of time waiting on him or assuring him she didn’t mind canceling because he needed the extra time to prepare a motion or speak with a client. Right now, she was more concerned with her messages than Rick’s unexpected double standard.
Because of the 830 area code on the missed calls, Lorelei assumed her mother was phoning from one of the hotel lines instead of her private number. But it wasn’t Wanda’s voice that greeted her.
“Lorelei? I don’t know if you remember me, but this is Ava Hirsch.”
As if Lorelei had been gone so long she wouldn’t recall her mom’s best friend? Though Ava’s husband was of the vocal opinion that Wanda was “a gallon shy of a keg,” the two women had always been inseparable.
“I’m calling…” Ava stopped, sniffed and tried again. “I’m calling about your mother, dear.”
At the end of the sentence, Ava’s voice broke and the world tilted beneath Lorelei’s feet. She groped blindly for her chair.
“Lorelei? What is it?” Rick’s concern sounded miles away; Ava’s condolences were even more distant, fading beneath the pounding in Lorelei’s ears.
But Lorelei didn’t need to hear the rest of the message to know. She was going home to Fredericksburg, after all.
Chapter Two
Sam Travis was well-versed in the ghosts of Texas lore—he’d shared many a local legend with tourists around the campfire—but he’d never felt haunted until now.
No matter which room he moved to in the bed-and-breakfast, he still saw his landlady, eccentric Wanda Keller, who had been mothering him on and off for the past three years. Maybe I should have left with the others. As of this morning, there had been two other guests staying at the inn. Another proprietor in town had promptly offered them free rooms in light of the tragedy. Wanda had been well-liked in town, even by loners like Sam.
Sam worked multiple seasonal jobs that kept him in motion, but he always circled back to Wanda’s, helping her with minor repairs and enjoying her cooking for a week or so before leaving again. It had taken him over a year of just being able to show up, his usual room always vacant, before he’d realized that she held it perpetually open for him. When he’d insisted she shouldn’t do that, she’d called him dummkopf and responded that it was her inn and she’d do whatever she liked. This B and B, now painfully devoid of her presence, was the closest thing he’d had to a home since the dusty bunkhouse where his uncle had raised him.
But not close enough that he wanted to own the place. He recalled the shock on Ava Hirsch’s tear-streaked face that afternoon—it had mirrored his own.
“What do you mean, she left it to me?” Too flabbergasted to keep his voice down, Sam had earned angry glares from all the nearby nurses.
Behind her wire-rimmed glasses Ava’s eyes had been the size of poker chips. “You didn’t know? I never would have said anything. I thought…”
Sitting alone in the dimly lit kitchen hours later, Sam raised his half-finished beer in an affectionate toast. “Still meddling from the great beyond, Wanda?” She’d always nagged him to settle down. If Ava were right about the change to her friend’s will—something Sam still didn’t quite believe—then maybe it was Wanda’s gentle way of coercing him into putting down roots.
He shook his head at the asinine idea of him as a hotel manager. Granted, this was a very small hotel, but that made it worse. Guests expected a personal touch, that extra dose of folksy hospitality. On the trail, in his element, Sam did just fine with tourists as long as they followed his rules about the horses. Most clients who wanted to rough it had a certain expectation of what their guide would be like. His occasionally gruff demeanor fit the part. He didn’t have Wanda’s gracious nature. The first time some the-customer-is-always-right twit complained about sheet thread count or something equally ridiculous… Well, being raised by a cantankerous bachelor uncle was not the same as attending charm school.
Even though he wouldn’t be staying, he was touched by the gesture. If she had bequeathed him the inn, her intentions were good. Wanda may have been trying to give him a home—which was more than his actual mother had ever done—but she seemed to have overlooked that what he’d loved most about