Sophie Pembroke - Room For Love

“Sorry I’m late,” Izzie said, slipping into an empty chair at the table. Cyb hadn’t even noticed her enter the pub. She, at least, looked as if she belonged there, with her blue jeans low on her hips and her blonde hair swinging across her shoulders. Cyb had looked like that once. Without the jeans, though, of course. “Jacob had to get home so the childminder could leave, so I just got him to drop me off by the park and walked in from there.”

Moira jerked half out of her chair at her other grandson’s name. “Does he need me to—?”

Izzie shook her head. “He’s fine. Just worried about leaving a bad impression with Miss Archer.”

“Why didn’t he call me?” Moira asked. “He knows I would have gone and got Georgia.”

Looking awkward, Izzie shrugged. “He just didn’t want to bother you again, I think.”

Something else new, that. A single father raising a little girl, and on a chef’s wage. Nancy couldn’t have been paying him much. If Moira didn’t help out so much, especially when Jacob was working weekends, he’d probably never be able to afford the childminder to cover the afternoons when Georgia wasn’t with her mum.

It wouldn’t have been like that in the old days.

“Never mind that, Izzie-girl.” Stan leaned far enough across the table to make the poor girl actually move her chair back a little. Stan forgot sometimes how intimidating he could be to people who didn’t know him as Cyb did. “Tell us what’s going on up there.”

“I thought Nate was coming with you,” Moira said, wrinkling her forehead. Cyb really should remind her to stop that. It wasn’t as if they didn’t all have enough wrinkles already without wilfully making things worse.

Izzie gave a secretive grin. Or, rather, the sort of grin Cyb knew meant she was about to share a good secret. “He was. He walked us to the gate, but then he said he had to get back and do some job or another urgently.” The grin got wider. “And I heard him tell Miss Archer he’d be around later. If she wanted to talk. Even told her where his room is.”

The table fell silent. Cyb tried to imagine good, honest Nate ‘putting the moves’ on anybody, and failed. Of course, Harry always said she hadn’t much of an imagination. It wasn’t that Nate wasn’t good-looking, of course, although far too tall really, which couldn’t be helped. No, the issue was, he really only cared about three things: his garden, his grandmother, and Nancy. Cyb knew Izzie had been excited when he’d first arrived, but he hadn’t shown any interest at all. And Izzie, with her blonde hair and big blue eyes, was far prettier than Carrie Archer. Unless...

“He must have a thing about redheads,” Cyb said absently, and Stan glared at her. Not a lot of time for romance, Stan. Which was a shame, really.

“We’re not here to discuss Nathanial’s courting habits,” he said, his tone curt. “Now, what was Carrie doing?”

Izzie shrugged. “Looking through papers in the drawing room. I think they’re the ones Nancy left.” She paused. “She didn’t look very happy with them.”

Silence again. Even Cyb knew what those papers said.

Moira let out a loud sigh. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Perhaps there were other papers, too. Financial ones. Not just the ones about us.”

“I’m not sure that’s any better,” Stan said, his voice ominous. “No, Moira, I don’t like it. We need a battle plan. And for a battle plan to work, we need to have better intelligence.” He turned to Izzie. “Izzie-girl. You’re our eyes and ears backstage at the inn. I need you to watch everything, listen to everything, and report everything back to me. Everything. You got that?”

Izzie’s blue eyes were wider than ever as she nodded. Cyb wondered if Stan had really thought this through. Even she could see he’d probably get more reports about Nate’s possible attempts to seduce Carrie than anything else.

Maybe he should. Maybe Carrie would be the one thing to make him stay. Moira would like that.

Nancy would have, too, actually. Cyb smiled. Maybe the old girl had known exactly what she was doing, leaving that confusing will behind.

“Good. Then, with that sorted, I call to a close this meeting of the Avalon Inn Avengers.” Stan banged his empty pint glass on the wooden table, and Cyb sighed. Perhaps Moira was right. They really should have spent some of the meeting trying to come up with a better name.

* * * *

Carrie sat staring at the envelope in front of her long after Nate had shut the door behind him. Then, using only the tips of her fingers, she removed it from the pile and leaned it against the lamp on the table beside her.

It contained Nancy’s final words to her. It was only right to save it until last.

Instead, she started in on the stack of papers below it. They didn’t make for any happier reading.

First came a financial summary, which was every bit as bad as Carrie had feared. Mortgage documents lay beside insurance policies and details, along with notes on why none of them would pay out for the things that needed fixing. There were some builders’ quotes for most of the work detailed in the survey and, underneath, a letter of refusal from the bank, not sounding very sorry at all that they couldn’t extend Nancy’s existing loan with them to cover it. At the bottom was the Avalon’s latest bank statement. In credit, at least, she supposed. But the balance wasn’t anywhere near enough to cover everything that needed doing.

Carrie sighed. A project like this was going to need financial backers, and she was the one who’d need to find them and convince them to invest.

Well, she’d wanted to prove herself. Now she knew how she could do that.

Time for the next folder.

This one, labelled in Nancy’s sprawling hand, boded a little better. “Current bookings,” Carrie read aloud, and smiled. If people were willing to stay at the Avalon when there was a good chance it might fall down around their ears, just wait until Carrie had finished with it.

Flipping the folder open, she started reading, her smile slipping with every word.

It wasn’t a long list, but what there was would take up a great deal of the inn’s resources, with very little recompense. It also explained why Nate’s Seniors had been loitering around earlier, without even the excuse of a flamenco lesson. They were waiting to see which way she was going to jump.

“‘Bridge night, every Wednesday evening, in perpetuum. Dance night—themed—every Monday evening, in perpetuum. Sing-songs, in bar, at will and as needed.’ Who makes bookings this way?”

Carrie slammed the file shut. Not one decent, proper booking in the lot. There wasn’t even any information on what the groups paid for the use of the inn.

“Oh, God, what if she wasn’t charging them at all?” Carrie let out a moan, and dropped the folder to the floor.

How was Carrie supposed to turn an old people’s home into a designer wedding venue?

She leaned back in her chair, rubbing circles at her temples with her index fingers, and considered. The most important thing was keeping the inn. To do that, she needed money, and apparently the banks weren’t likely to provide it. So she needed someone else. Someone who would put up the money but not get involved in the running of the inn.

“It’s my inn, now,” Carrie reminded herself. “So I’m going to have to run it my way.”

It might upset the Seniors, might even upset Nate and the rest of the staff. But the Avalon had been losing money for months. If they wanted to keep it going at all, there were going to have to be some big changes.

“Maybe they can have a dance night once a month. And move the bridge club to lunchtimes.” That sounded fair. A compromise. At least, to start with. Carrie was pretty sure she could phase them out, after the first few months. There had to be other, more suitable inns around willing to accommodate them.