Page 13 of Dragged Home for Christmas

And a fair amount of desperation.

Chapter 6

“You can’t just throw us out.” Anthony squared his broad shoulders. “Not when we’re the ones who’ve paid the bills, the taxes,everythingsince Nick died.”

“Youpaid the taxes?” Mike stared at them.

Sam nodded. “We used up all our savings doing it, too. We’re down to our last dollars.”

“We could’ve left this place a year ago,” Elliott added. “But that would have meant giving Benjamin Sharp and slimeballs like him an open door, and we couldn’t do that to Nick.”

Mike frowned. “Who’s Benjamin Sharp?”

Jim sneered. “A businessman who wants to relaunch the Velvet House as a swanky historic hotel.”

“This Sharp guy, he wants to buy the place?”

Anthony nodded. “And news spreads fast. I give it a day, two at tops, before he comes sniffing around here with an offer.”

Mike thought fast. “But if I sell, that solves your money problems. I can pay you back everything you’ve laid out.”

And then you can leave, and I can find another place to live.

Sam frowned. “You don’t understand. Sharp isn’t from around here.”

“Does it matter if he isn’t local?”

Elliott sighed. “In the last two years, three multistate hotel groups have bought properties in P-town. A trend no one here wants to see continue any further.”

“So we stayed.” Jim sounded worn down. “Even whenwe couldn’t find jobs, because those are in short supply around here out of season.”

“During the summer, we all tended bar anywhere we could, we worked as servers, we cleaned up after events. Anywhere we could that would give us money.” Elliott shot a glance at Sam. “Some of us might even have done a few…extracurricularactivities.”

Sam responded with a superior eye roll. “Bitch, shut up. He was a nice guy.”

“He gave you a hundred bucks.No oneis that nice. Not unless they got something out of it.”

Sam placed his hands on his hips. “Sure he did. He got the pleasure of my company. Believe me, that was all he wanted. To sit with a lovely lady while he told her all about his wife who he’d lost to cancer last year. His words, by the way. Sure, he knew I was a guy. He came to one of the shows.”

Elliott swallowed. “I… I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

Sam swiped away a tear. “Before he went back home, he kissed me on the cheek and handed me a hundred. I smiled, wrapped his hand around it, and told him to keep it. That I’d loved hearing about Janelle and wished I could have met her. He shook his head and insisted I take the money because, he said, she would have been furious for him wasting my time.”

Mike watched their byplay, confused as fuck. He was starting to think the situation was more complicated than he’d anticipated.

Now what do I do?

“There’s somethingIdon’t understand.” Ashley frowned. “You have a bar here, don’t you? Couldn’t you have worked here? Or put on a show. That would have brought the money rolling in.”

Jim gave a tired smile. “Sounds good in theory, but you need to remember something. One, this wasn’t our place—it was Nick’s, and he was gone. That meant we had no legal rights. Two, even if we’dhadrights, running a bar means supplies of alcohol, and we didn’t have the money for that. Three, if wecouldhave run this place, that would have meant electricity, heating…I refer you to points one and two.”

“Plus, there hasn’t been a show here since we lost Nick,” Anthony added.

“You did shows here?” Mike glanced at the lobby. He couldn’t imagine they could have packed an audience into the limited space.

Elliott chuckled. “Not in here. Oh, we had small gatherings, with someone on a mic, but not a show.” He stood. “Come with me. I’ll show you.” He headed for the door.

“Will we need jackets?” Ashley asked.

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