“Guess what?” McKenzie said. “I have a horse, too. His name is Darth Vader and he’s my best friend, too. Next to my sister, anyway.”
Both women seemed charmed by Maddie, which wasn’t surprising. She seemed to have that effect on people.
“I wish I had a sister,” she said wistfully. “Even a brother, I guess, if he wasn’t a pain.”
“I’ve got five of them and I’m usually more than willing to give a few away,” Aidan offered.
“I want a baby sister or brother,” she said. “Your brothers are probably old like you.”
McKenzie Shaw and Sue both chortled at that and Eliza groaned.
He was only thirty-seven and until that moment he thought he was in the prime of his life—the past few months notwithstanding—but he suddenly felt like he should be looking into buying a Jazzy and investing in denture cream.
“Sorry,” Eliza murmured.
“You’re the one under pressure to procreate, not me,” he said.
Her color returned in a delightful pink tide. “Why don’t you have a cupcake?” she suggested quickly to distract her daughter.
“How are you really feeling?” Devin asked. “I worried about you all night.”
“Oh, I wish you hadn’t. I’m fine. A little achy but that’s all.”
“Would you mind if I perform a quick exam? That’s the real reason I came, because I wanted to check your condition for myself.”
He liked the doctor more and more for her diligence.
“Please?” she pressed.
Eliza sighed. “It’s completely unnecessary, but since you’ve gone to so much trouble, I suppose I can’t say no.”
“Is there somewhere private we can go?”
She gestured toward the hallway leading to the cook’s quarters. “Back here to the rooms I’m moving into. There’s a comfortable sitting room there.”
“Perfect.”
As soon as they walked into the other room, Sue rose. “I need to take those chicken pot pies out of the oven if I don’t want them to burn.”
“Can I help?” Maddie asked.
“No, but you can keep me company,” Sue said. “Come on, kiddo.”
They headed hand in hand toward the oven. Though they were only fifteen feet away, it felt like a football field as he was now virtually alone with the prickly new mayor.
“Would you and your sister care to stay for dinner?”
“No,” she said abruptly.
The polite thing would probably be to make casual, meaningless conversation. He didn’t have much patience these days for doing the polite thing. “You don’t like me very much, Mayor Shaw. Care to explain what I’ve done to offend you in the twenty-four hours I’ve been in town?”
She looked guilty for a moment before she sighed. “Transference, Mr. Caine. Plain and simple.”
Against his better judgment, he was intrigued. The situation didn’t seem plain or simple to him.
“I don’t like you or not like you,” she went on. “How can I? I don’t even know you. I’m sorry if I’m acting otherwise. I’m just...angry at the person who sold you half of my town.”
“Ben Kilpatrick.”
At the name, she made a face as if she had tasted something particularly nasty in Sue’s lemon bars.
“Yes. Ben Kilpatrick.”
Her animosity toward his old friend was startling. Nearly everybody liked Ben—or respected him, anyway. He was one of the hardest-working men Aidan knew.
“I love Haven Point, Mr. Caine. This has been my home my entire life. I know you haven’t spent very much time here but when you do, you’ll see it’s a magical place, a good town full of kind, decent people who are struggling to survive.”
“What I’ve seen of it would certainly back you up on that.”
“It’s a nice enough town now, but you should have seen it a dozen years ago. This was a dynamic community with a thriving economy—thanks in large part to the Kilpatrick legacy. After Big Joe Kilpatrick died and Ben inherited his estate, everything started to fall apart.”
Ben never talked about his family. He ignored direct questions and subtly and skillfully deflected the indirect ones. “Why do you say that?”
The mayor frowned. “Before Big Joe was even in the ground, Ben closed the boat manufacturing plant that was our biggest employer around here. Two hundred people lost their jobs in a single afternoon and we’ve never recovered from the blow.”
That must be the large empty factory building he had bought when he wasn’t quite in his right mind. He had walked through the facility a month ago and wondered what the hell he was going to do with it.
“Ben turned his back on this town and everything we stand for,” McKenzie Shaw went on, her features growing more and more animated—and angry. “While he was off doing Lord knows what in California, he let Snow Angel Cove—his beautiful family home that his grandfather had built by hand—fall into complete disrepair. You’ve done wonders with it, by the way. I’ll give you that. The place really does look great.”
“Thank you.” At least she was no longer giving him the skunk-eye. He would have to warn Ben not to make any unexpected visits to town unless he wanted to be hauled out to the middle of the lake and dropped in.
“What he did to this house was a crying shame. What he did to Haven Point was criminal. He owned half the commercial buildings in town. As an absentee landlord, he did nothing to upgrade the infrastructure or even do basic repairs like plumbing or electrical work. One by one, businesses either moved into better facilities on the outskirts of town, relocated to Shelter Springs or folded completely. The rest of us are barely holding things together. Now that the inn has burned down, we’re down to a couple of restaurants, my flower shop, an insurance office, the bank, the copy shop and a few gift stores. It’s pathetic.”
She didn’t seem to expect a response from him, just went on as if she had been rehearsing this speech since the election.
“I love this town, Mr. Caine, and I understand we need investment and smart planning. As the new mayor of Haven Point, I am more than willing to work with you, whatever you decide to do with your property here. I would beg you not to simply sit on it and do nothing. Oh, and if you think you’re going to come in and build some big tourist trap resort that will suck all the personality and life out of my town, I will fight you with every last breath in my body.”
“You don’t want tourists?” he asked, surprised at her vehemence. His hometown, Hope’s Crossing, had a booming economy because of tourism.
“Short-term visitors are fine in moderation. Sure. We welcome and embrace them. Lake Haven is breathtaking and the Redemption Mountains offer endless recreational opportunities. People have been coming here for the benefits of the mineral hot springs since Native Americans first stumbled onto them generations ago. They’re necessary and important to the area but we can’t survive on tourism alone. We need long-term employment, jobs that pay enough to support families.”
She had gone from looking at him like he was Satan’s favorite cousin to gazing at him with a completely unwarranted hope, as if he could step in and solve all the town’s problems.
He had bought a vacation home to escape the pressures and demands of his frenzied life in California, for crying out loud—and he hadn’t been thinking very clearly when he did it. He wanted