Page 80 of Merry Mended Hearts

This was Christmas Eve. Boone hadn’t stayed. Once he dropped me and the sleigh off, he’d headed back to hide away like he always did.

There had to be some way to reach him.

I dressed quickly but with care, in my favorite Christmas shirt with the vintage truck on the front and a pine tree in its truck bed. I tucked my skinny jeans into the ankle boots I’d brought and dusted makeup on my face.

He’d seen me when I’d first woken up, but I still wanted to make a good impression, considering how we’d all but ended things between us the last time we’d spoken.

Even so, a ridiculous amount of excitement at the prospect of seeing him again kept up. I’d never been good at hiding my feelings. Undoubtedly, I wouldn’t be able to hide from him how much I wanted to be near him again once I was, well, near him.

I had to make it clear I only wanted the notebook.

“It’ll be fine,” I told myself, pausing at my room’s door with my hand on the handle. “We’ll keep our distance. I’m going home. I have to remember that.”

The minute I opened the door, voices resonated in the hall. The same woman I’d spoken with the night I’d heard the radio play was out in the hall again, but she wasn’t alone this time. Her auburn hair was in a bun on top of her head, and rather than the friendly smile she’d offered me the other night, agitation showed clearly on her pretty face.

She faced a handsome man standing at the other end of the hall and called out, “No, I’m not, because it’s notmyroom, remember?”

The man raised a finger to his lips to shush her and hurried toward her. “People are going to think we’re nuts, Lacie,” he said. “Will you please calm down.”

The woman folded her arms. “I want to go home.”

“Everything okay?” I asked.

I had a feeling I’d stepped right into a couple’s squabble, but since I was already in the middle of it, I couldn’t exactly pretend I hadn’t heard what they were saying, especially not when Lacie and I had chatted in such a friendly way before.

“No, it’s not okay,” Lacie said to me. “Since the minute we got to this inn, our lives have turned upside down. No one will believe we’re not married. Even the computers are showing my last name is something it isn’t!”

The man’s steely jaw was set. He closed the rest of the distance between us. I didn’t know what to say.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I had my own room when we first got here. Your room, in fact.” She gestured to the door I’d just exited.

A fist clamped over my heart. Was she going to accuse me of kicking her out?

“I didn’t have anything to do with that,” I began, but she went on.

“Now, it’s gone, and all this snow closed the pass. So we’re stuck here. Sharing a room together. Do you know how hard it is to share a room with your ridiculously gorgeous best friend? This is Jared.”

He raised his hand in a little wave, and either wasn’t affected by the fact that she called him gorgeous—he kind of was, with dark hair and a stocky build—or he was too caught up in her explanation to do much about it.

And I kind of got what she was saying. I’d never had a friend who was a guy, but from the way he gravitated near her, from the tension I sensed budding between them, I suspected there was more than friendship going on.

All speculation aside, I still didn’t grasp everything she was saying. How could Lacie have a room of her own and not have one now?

I thought of the strange circumstances when I’d first arrived at Harper’s Inn.

“Weird,” I said. “Because when I got here, even though I had a room booked, the computers didn’t even have me in the system.”

“Really?” Lacie said. “What did you do? How did you end up in my room?”

She flapped her hand toward Room 13 behind me. Heat prickled along the edges of my skin.

“I don’t know. Junie just told me the next day that a room had opened up.”

“It sure did,” Lacie muttered. “The weirdest part of all is that she doesn’t remember that I had it before.”

“She doesn’t?”

---