Nora Roberts - The Hollow

“I might. I don’t have any real gardening experience. My mother puttered around a little, and I had a couple of houseplants in my apartment.”

“You’d be good at it. Color, shapes, tones, textures. You like doing what you’re good at.” He turned off the sidewalk toward the building that had housed the gift shop. Its display window was empty now. Depressingly so.

“It looks forlorn,” Layla decided.

“Yeah, it does. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.”

Her eyes widened when he pulled out keys and unlocked the front door. “What are you doing?”

“Showing you possibilities.” He stepped in, flipped on the lights.

Like many of the businesses on Main, it had been a home first. The entrance was wide, the old wood floors clean and bare. On the side, a stairway curved up with its sturdy banister smooth from the slide of generations of hands. Straight back an open doorway led to three more rooms, stacked side by side. The middle one held the back entrance, and its tidy covered porch that opened to its narrow strip of yard where a lilac waited to bloom.

“You would hardly know it was ever here.” Layla brushed her fingertips over the stair rail. “The gift shop. Nothing left of it but some shelves, some marks on the wall where things were hung.”

“I like empty buildings, for their potential. This one has plenty. Solid foundation, good plumbing-both that and the electric are up to code-location, light, conscientious landlord. Roomy, too. The gift shop used the second floor for storage and office space. Probably a good plan. If you have customers going up and down steps, you’re just asking one to trip and sue you.”

“So speaks the lawyer.”

“It needs the nail holes plugged, fresh paint. The wood-work’s nice.” He skimmed a hand over some trim. “Original. Somebody made this a couple hundred years ago. Adds character, respects the history. What do you think of it?”

“The woodwork? It’s gorgeous.”

“The whole place.”

“Well.” She wandered, walking slowly as people did in empty buildings. “It’s bright, spacious, well kept, with just enough creaky in the floors to add to that character you spoke of.”

“You could do a lot with this place.”

She swung back to him. “I could?”

“The rent’s reasonable. The location’s prime. Plenty of space. Enough to curtain off an area in the back for a couple of dressing rooms. You’d need shelves, displays, racks, I guess, to hang clothes.” As he looked around, he hooked his thumbs in his front pockets. “I happen to know a couple of guys very handy with tools.”

“You’re suggesting I open a shop here?”

“Doing what you’re good at. There’s nothing like that in town. Nothing like it for miles. You could make something here, Layla.”

“Fox, that’s just… out of the question.”

“Why?”

“Because I…” Let me count the ways, she thought. “I could never afford it, even if-”

“That’s why they have business loans.”

“I haven’t given any serious thought to opening my own place in, well, in years, really. I don’t know where I’d begin even if I was sure I wanted to open my own place. For God’s sake, Fox, I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow much less a month from now. Six months from now.”

“But what do you want today?” He moved toward her. “I know what I want. I want you. I want you to be happy. I want you to be happy here, with me. Jim Hawkins will rent it to you, and you won’t have any trouble getting a start-up loan. I talked to Joe at the bank-”

“You talked to them, about this? About me?”

“Not specifics. Just general information. Ballparking what you’d need to start up, what you’d need to qualify, the cost of licensing. I’ve got a file. You like files, so I put together a file.”

“Without consulting me.”

“I put together the file so I could consult you and you’d have something tangible to look over when you thought about it.”

She walked away from him. “You shouldn’t have done all that.”

“It’s the sort of thing I do. This”-he swept his arm in the air-“is the sort of thing you do. You’re not going to tell me you’re going to be happy doing office work the rest of your life.”

“No, I’m not going to tell you that.” She turned back. “I’m not going to tell you I’m going to dive headfirst into starting a business that I’m not sure I want in the first place, in a town that may not exist in a few months. And if I want my own business, I haven’t thought about having it here. If I want my own, how can I think about all the details involved when all this madness is going on?”

He was silent a moment, so silent she swore she heard the old house breathing.

“It seems to me it’s most important to go after what you want when there’s madness going on. I’m asking you to think about it. More, I guess I’m asking you to think about something you haven’t yet. Staying. Open the shop, manage my office, found a nudist colony, or take up macrame, I don’t care as long as it makes you happy. But I want you to think about staying, Layla, not just to destroy ancient fucking evil, but to live. To have a life, with me.”

As she stared at him, he stepped closer. “Put this in one of your slots. I’m in love with you. Completely, absolutely, no-turning-back in love with you. We could build something good, and solid, and real. Something that makes every day count. That’s what I want. So you think about it, and when you know, you tell me what you want.”

He walked back to the door, opened it, and waited for her.

“Fox-”

“I don’t want to hear you don’t know. I’ve already got that. Let me know when you do. You’re upset and a little ticked off, I get that, too,” he said as he locked up. “Take the rest of the day off.”

She started to object, he saw it on her face. Then she changed her mind. “All right. There are some things I need to do.”

“I’ll see you later then.” He stepped back, stopped. “The building’s not the only thing with potential,” he told her. And he turned, walked away down the bricked sidewalk in the April sunshine.

HE THOUGHT ABOUT GETTING DRUNK. HE COULD call Gage, who’d sit and drink coffee or club soda, bitching only for form, and spend the evening in some bar getting steadily shit-faced. Cal would go, too; he had only to ask. That’s what friends were for, being the company misery loved.

Or he could just pick up the beer-maybe a bottle of Jack for a change of pace-take it to Cal’s and get his drunk on there.

But he knew he wouldn’t do either of those things. Planning to get drunk took all the fun out of it. He preferred it to be a happy accident. Work, Fox decided, was a better option than getting deliberately trashed.

He had enough to keep him occupied for the rest of the day, particularly at the easy pace he liked to work. Handling the office on his own for an afternoon added the perk of giving him time and space to brood. Fox considered brooding an inalienable human right, unless it dragged out more than three hours, at which point it became childish indulgence.

Did she really think he’d crossed some line and gone behind her back? That he tried to manipulate, bully, or pressure? Manipulation wasn’t beyond him, he admitted, but that just hadn’t been the case with this. Knowing her, he’d believed she’d appreciate having some facts, projected figures, the steps, stages compiled in an orderly fashion. He’d equated handing them to her on the same level as handing her a bouquet of daffodils.

Just a little something he’d picked up because he was thinking about her.

He stood in the center of his office, juggling the three balls as he walked back over it all in his mind. He’d wanted to show her the building, the space, the possibilities. And yeah, he’d wanted to see her eyes light up as she saw them, as she opened herself to them. That had been strategy, not manipulation. Jesus, it wasn’t like he’d signed a lease for her, or applied for a loan, a business license. He’d just taken the time to find out what it would take for her to do those things.