Page 22 of The Fine Art of Faking It
“We’re a family of entrepreneurs,”his father had reminded him a thousand times. Gateses didn’t do anything at the hobby level. They were too busy being successful.
Personally, Davis thought his father had committed too much of his life to proving his success to his own parents. They’d cut Ferguson off without a dime—besides the modest trust fund from his grandparents—when he’d announced he was opening a winery in New York with a wandering hippie he’d met hitchhiking, so the story went.
Every dollar they made, his father treated as a “fuck you” to his father. Nothing came between Ferguson Gates and his success. Especially not family.
He’d put that hard-headed, single-mindedness to work in other areas. Ferguson had embraced Blue Moon and Tilly’s family feud with the Moodys as if both had always been his own. The man was fiercely loyal and excessively stubborn. It was an occasionally obnoxious combination.
Davis lugged his loot downstairs to the breezy first floor. The place was certainly well-ventilated with the gaping hole where the kitchen used to be.
His phone rang in his pocket. And he lost his grip on the dry-cleaning bag followed by everything else in his arms. It all landed unceremoniously on the floor just inside the front door.
“This is Davis,” he answered.
“Mr. Gates, this is Lionel from the Bouffet Insurance Agency.” The man sounded as if he were pinching his nose shut while speaking.
“Ah, yes,” Davis said, wrestling his load back into his arms and sandwiching the phone between his shoulder and ear. “Thank you for returning my call.”
“I’m sorry to inform you that while the fire is still under investigation, we are exercising our right to withhold payment.”
This time when the suits and pants and shirts fell from his hand, Davis did nothing to stop them. “I’m sorry. I have a concussion. Could you repeat that? It sounded like you were saying you aren’t going to pay.”
Lionel was unfazed by Davis’s sarcasm. “Mr. Gates, it is Bouffet policy to withhold payment until a cause has been determined. Frankly, we have to make sure this isn’t some kind of insurance fraud attempt. As a business owner, I’m sure you understand.”
“You want me to prove that I didn’t set my own home on fire?”
“Precisely.”
“What do I do with the gaping hole in my house until then?” Davis demanded. Yelling made his head hurt.
“That’s up to you, Mr. Gates. Best of luck.” And with that meaningless platitude, Lionel of the Bouffet Insurance Agency hung up on him. Davis briefly considered hurling his phone into the stone fireplace in his currently unlivable living room. But he’d endured enough destruction in the last two days.
Hands on his hips, he stood knee deep in laundry and surveyed his home. It had originally housed a farmer and his family of five back when the land was all pastures and fields. The two floors were chopped up into little box-like rooms. When he’d returned to Blue Moon after his years in California wine country, he’d done a little work here and there to make it more livable. Of course it had been the kitchen addition that had been destroyed. It couldn’t have been the too-small master bedroom upstairs or the odd-shaped den that wasn’t quite wide enough for a chair.
He had to admit, having the space at the inn to rattle around in had been an unexpected pleasure. As was the chance to see Eden up close in her home and at work. She’d remained an enigma since that unfortunate night in history. After he’d escorted Taneisha to the dance, Eden had shut herself off from him for the remainder of his senior year, even going so far as to file for a separation in Household Management and Partnerships class.
And he couldn’t blame her for it. He’d caved under pressure. Something he’d become more and more familiar with doing. And that wasn’t the kind of man Eden Moody was interested in. But that didn’t do anything to alleviate the guilt he felt for hurting her.
They’d never spoken a word to each other in all the years since. He had, however, found small ways of pushing her buttons, forcing her into the occasional email correspondence. Discussing the paving of their shared drive, the trimming of trees that straddled the property line. She was always coldly polite. But every time he was lucky enough to be in the same room with her, well, there was nothing chilly about their shared glances.
It was interesting that they both preferred to live where they worked. He’d seen her in action these past forty-eight hours. The consummate hostess, the focused entrepreneur. She made her guests—himself included—feel as welcomed as if the inn were their home. He admired that.
He’d never imagined teenage rebel Eden Moody would settle down to a career like innkeeping. No, he would have pictured her as a tattoo artist or some other creative, adventurous profession like the folk rock marketing exec. But somehow this suited her, too. And she was damn good at it. Not that she’d let him tell her.
Davis felt rather than heard the knock at the front door in the base of his skull where the dull throb of trauma still radiated.
Stepping over suits and socks, Davis opened the front door to Calvin Finestra, Blue Moon’s resident contractor. “It had to be the kitchen, didn’t it?” the man in coveralls sighed. Calvin and his crew had spent a very pleasant six weeks last spring building the addition. And now it was blackened rubble.
“What’s that smell?” Calvin asked.
“Stink bomb we think.”
“Who’d stink bomb you?”
Davis shrugged and held the door for the builder. “Your guess is as good as mine at this point. At least the smell is better today.”
The winery had been closed for two days due to the smell, and though he’d been holed up in his comfy guest bed next door to Eden, he’d seen the complaints on Facebook and knew the winds had carried the scent into town.
Calvin, his hands stuffed in his pockets and his white hair poking out from under his worn ball cap, surveyed the blackened hull of what had been a very nice kitchen. “Well, at least we didn’t build anything above it,” he said optimistically gazing up at the charred holes in the roof.
