Where Your Heart Is (Lilac Bay Book 1) Read online

  “I guess not.”

  “How is your grandmother?” he asked, his voice polite. He cleared it. “And, uh, your mother?”

  No matter how many years passed, there was always that note in his voice when he mentioned her. It had taken me ages to identify it, but I was pretty sure it was betrayal.

  “Everyone seems to be pretty good,” I said, that same fake bright voice sounding almost shrill in my ears. “Mimi is holding down the fort while Pops recovers. Posey is engaged, did I tell you that? And Mom is…well, she’s doing her thing, I guess. I haven’t seen her much, honestly.”

  I was sure he could hear the sharpness in my voice. He might speak of her in bitter tones—mine would always be disapproving. Disappointed.

  He cleared his throat again. “Well, say hello to everyone for me.”

  “I will, Dad.”

  “And make sure you let me know of any ridiculous happenings,” he added, chuckling a little. “Remember the pie-eating contest?”

  I grinned even though it made me feel a little disloyal to Posey and my grandma. As far back as I can remember, my father and I had made it a practice to point out all the silly island events and behaviors, laughing heartily every time. If I had gotten my hatred of the place from anywhere, it was from him. He couldn’t conceive of living in a place without fine dining, museums, and baseball stadiums, let alone cars. I feel you, Dad, I thought, picturing the walk I had in front of me with a pang. I missed my Audi already.

  There were muffled voices in the background, and I heard him barking at some underling. “I should go, Iris,” he said. “Lots to do.”

  “Okay. Where are you, anyhow?”

  “Taiwan,” he said. Then a snort. “A far cry from the island you’re on.”

  I knew he was joking, knew it was the kind of joke we had made together countless times, but it still rankled. “True,” I said, forcing a laugh.

  “I’m coming,” he practically hissed, mouth away from the phone. “Talk to you soon, Iris.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “I meant it, young lady. You need to get back out there. Don’t let this trip stretch on and on.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Thanks for calling.”

  But he had already hung up.

  I didn’t bother hurrying to the café. Posey had texted back while I was on the phone, wishing me luck with the “fire breather,” as she liked to call my dad.

  I’ll have the shift manager show you around, she wrote. See you after school!

  The café was a ten-minute walk from Mimi’s house. Situated at the corner of Main and Lilac, it was in the best possible location in town. The Lilac Café had long been a popular place for tourists and year-rounders alike. As I approached the familiar brick façade, I couldn’t help but look at the sad, paper-covered windows to the right. Rose’s. Their old restaurant, long since abandoned.

  It’s really a shame, I thought as I entered the café. Such good real estate going to waste. The dining room at Rose’s stretched over two floors, the first giving a nice view of Main Street and the square out front, and the second level providing breathtaking views of the lake. My grandfather was famous for the food he served—and not just on Lilac Bay. It was the kind of food people used to make a special trip to the island for. Had I had a restaurant like that in Chicago I could have—

  What are you doing? A little voice in the back of my head whispered. It sounded suspiciously like my father’s. I shook my head and looked around the café. This was what I was supposed to be concentrating on today. Helping my cousin and grandmother out during a difficult time. I was not here to fantasize about restoring the restaurant. I was not here to be a developer. I was here to get a little time and space away from home before going back to the real world and finding a job.

  You have enough ties here with the family, I told myself sternly as I made my way to the back. You don’t need to be tied down to some pet project, too.

  I didn’t need to be tied down to anything else on this island.

  There was a low rumbling voice from the staff office, and I wondered who was on schedule as shift manager today as I pushed the door open. Maybe it would be that Mike guy. He may have been too young for me, but I wouldn’t complain about having him to look at. Posey hadn’t said who to expect, not that I knew all that many of my grandmother’s employees but—

  “Oh my God,” I groaned. “What are you doing here?”

  But I knew as soon as David Jenkins turned that scowling face in my direction. He was sitting in the manager’s office, in the exact seat I had seen Posey sit in the other day. He was the shift manager.

  “I work here,” he said, hanging up the office phone in his hand, eyebrows raised slightly as if in challenge.

  “You work here?” I knew I probably sounded like an idiot, repeating the obvious, but I was too shocked to care. Why in the hell hadn’t Posey told me?

  “You saw me here on Friday,” he pointed out.

  “I thought you were like, a delivery guy or something.”

  “Well, I’m not. So what are you doing here?”

  “I told Posey I would help out here while I’m in town.”

  His face tightened. “You’re the new girl I’m supposed to be training?”

  His horror at the prospect couldn’t have been more apparent.

  “I don’t need to be trained,” I snapped. “I’ve helped out in the café since I was twelve, for God’s sake. I know how to make coffee.” When he didn’t appear mollified, I crossed my arms. “Posey wants me to spend most of my time getting the books organized. I just need you to show me where everything is kept these days in case I need to help out up front.”

  He held my gaze for a long moment before abruptly standing. “Fine. Follow me.”

  “Oh, it would be my pleasure,” I muttered, half under my breath. A quick look over his shoulder told me that he probably heard me; I merely gave him my sickly-sweet smile as I followed him from the office.

  “Stock room is back here,” he said, gesturing down the hall to an open door. The lights were off, and I could just make out stacks of boxes in the darkened room. “I try to keep it organized when I’m here but…” He shrugged a little. “It’s tough to keep up with it, working part-time.”

  “You only work here part-time?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me despite my desire to speak to him as little as possible. “How’d you get to be a manager then?”

  “I guess your grandmother trusts me,” he said, not even slowing as he continued down the hall. “Employee break room is here.” He shot another glance over his shoulder. “We try to keep the staff from eating out in the shop.”

  God, could he be more condescending? How old did he think I was?

  “Bathroom is that way. Storage cooler is here.” He stopped at the end of the hall. It was a little dark; one of the overhead lights had burned out. In the shadows, his scowl wasn’t so pronounced. He almost looked… nice.

  Luckily, he opened his mouth a few seconds later, leaving me in no doubt of just how not nice he was. “There’s a security door back here that opens into the alley. We only go out this way at the end of the night, once we’ve set the alarm.” He studied my face for a second, as if trying to decide something. “I guess Posey can give you the alarm code…if she wants to.”

  I’d spent a good amount of time with David Jenkins once upon a time. I certainly don’t remember wanting to punch him in the face every second that we spent together back then. “You think I’m not entitled to the code?” I asked, crossing my arms. “Seriously?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not giving out the code to someone without instructions from Rose to do so.”

  “Instructions from Rose. You mean my grandmother? God, David! I’m family! Of course she wants me to have the code!”

  He shrugged again, and I swear my blood pressure must have gone up ten points. “Then I suppose she’ll give it to you.”

  I could
feel myself actually shaking as I glared at his smug face. “I’m getting that code.”

  “Good for you.” He turned to head back down the hall, and for one blissful second, I thought I’d won that round. Then he had to open his mouth. “But not from me.”

  I satisfied myself by glaring at the back of his head the entire way down the hall and out into the café.

  “Coffee’s on this side,” he said, pointing at the left counter. “Fudge and candy is over there. But customers can buy from either side.”

  “Thanks,” I sneered. “I never would have been able to figure out which side the coffee was on without your stellar guidance.”

  He ignored me, ducking under the counter to the coffee area. “We keep a supply of stock up here in the cabinets so we’re not constantly running back to the stock room.”

  “What’s the procedure when you need more?”

  He sighed as he turned back to me, as if my asking a simple question had completely exhausted his patience. “What?”

  I spoke as clearly as possible through clenched teeth. “What’s the procedure when you need more stock?”

  He blinked at me. “You go in the back and get more.”

  You’re here to help Posey, I reminded myself. Murdering this jerk in the middle of the store would be decidedly unhelpful. “And do you write it down somewhere?” He blinked some more. “Fill out an inventory sheet? Some kind of request slip?”

  He scratched the back of his neck. “Uh, we mostly just grab what we need.”

  I frowned at that. I’d spent a lot of time in kitchens around the world, and I’d never seen a successful set up where employees were allowed to just go grab whatever they wanted without any record. How would management know what needed to be reordered? How did they prevent theft? “Well, that’s gonna change,” I grumbled, more to myself than to him.

  “Fantastic,” he said. “Some off-island outsider coming in and switching everything around is exactly what this place needs.”

  Before I could do more than sputter at him wordlessly, he turned on his heel to stalk across the store to the other register. “You know what, Iris? I have a lot to do. And like you said, you’ve been working here since you were a kid. So why don’t you get to whatever it is you think needs improving, and I’ll do some real work, okay?”

  “I’m just trying to help my grandmother,” I started to say, anger making my skin feel hot, but David cut me off before I could finish.

  “Yes, it’s obvious from the past twelve years that you’re all about helping family.”

  In retrospect, it was a really good thing Cora Hanson walked into the café at that moment. Because otherwise, I might have actually smacked him. When he smiled at her like nothing was happening, my anger grew. “Hey there, Cora,” he said, his voice all sweetness. “It’s good to see you so early in the morning.”

  She started to say something about her coffee machine being down, but I barely heard her. My hands were shaking, and I knew I had to get out of the café. I turned and practically ran down the hallway to the manager’s office, which, luckily, David had left open.

  I paced the room for several minutes, trying to get myself together. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, I told myself. How dare he think he can make judgments about my relationship with my family? He didn’t even know me.

  Which, okay, wasn’t exactly true. I spent a lot of time talking to David Jenkins during my months on the island. I knew the topic of my family had come up on more than one occasion. As had my feelings about the island. But that was years ago.

  And it was also the last time you came back, a little voice in my head reminded me.

  I sat, feeling a bit sick to my stomach. It wasn’t exactly a mystery to me that some people might not consider me the model granddaughter. But that didn’t give David Jenkins, of all people, the right to criticize me in my family’s own shop.

  Besides, I reminded myself, I’m here now. And I’m here to help.

  I picked up the ledger closest to me, rubbing at my temples. “Concentrate on this,” I muttered out loud. Numbers and receipts. Balance sheets. Profits and loss. The running of a business. That was what I was good at. That was how I could help.

  Two hours later, all thoughts of the encounter with David had left my head. I was completely engrossed in the books in front of me. The sick feeling his words instilled had been replaced by a sicker feeling of dread. The books were a mess.

  I knew that most businesses on the island didn’t come close to turning a profit until the summer tourism season started. Businesses here were made or broken based on the season. A good season meant you might just have enough cash to get you through the rest of the year. A bad one…well, it wasn’t exactly easy surviving for any amount of time if the tourist season was bad.

  To be fair, my grandmother’s café was closer to operating in the black than a lot of local businesses would be this time of year. It was obvious that she had a loyal, yearlong customer base on the island. And that was a good thing. But God, it was close.

  Looking at the profit margins made me feel ill with nerves. There just wasn’t an inch of room for a mistake. If anything went wrong this season—say, if the weather was bad or a cooler needed to be replaced—there was nowhere near a big enough cushion for them to cover such an unexpected expense. And with my grandfather’s medical issues and the stress Mimi Rose was clearly under… I swallowed, pulling another ledger toward me. I would just have to find ways to increase those margins. There must be some improvements that I could make to save money. There had to be.

  I had no idea how long I sat like that, ledgers covering the desk in front of me, a notebook at my side to scribble down ideas. The good news was that I’d found a ton of inefficiencies already. The bad news was that I’d have to convince my grandmother to make changes. Not something she was particularly well known for.

  I shoved the notebook away, rubbing my eyes and stretching out a kink in my neck, wishing I would have brought some coffee back with me.

  A noise at the doorway made me jump, and I spun in the chair to see David standing there, a mug of coffee in his hand.

  “I thought you could use this,” he said, his eyes not meeting mine as he thrust the cup toward me. “You’ve been at this for hours.”

  “I have?” My burning, bleary eyes should have been all the proof I needed to trust his assessment. I glanced at the coffee mug, surprised he would go to the trouble.

  “Jesus, I didn’t poison it,” he groused, pushing it closer to my face.

  “Thank you.” I took the mug from him and breathed in the aroma, feeling slightly more awake already.

  “So.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at the mess on the desk. “How’s it looking?”

  I took a long pull from the mug before answering. The coffee was strong and good, just like I remember it being. My grandmother always prided herself on offering a good cup of coffee to her customers. “It doesn’t look great.”

  He nodded. “I figured. It’s been…tough on your grandmother, without Frank around.”

  It startled me a little, to hear him refer to my Pops by his first name. How close had they gotten, I wondered, in the years since I left Lilac Bay?

  “I do the best I can to help,” he said quickly. “But like I said, I can only be here part-time and…” he trailed off, rubbing the back of his neck. “I know it’s not enough.”

  “What else do you do?” I asked. “If you’re here part-time, I mean.” He finally met my eyes, and my breath caught a little. They really were beautiful eyes.

  “I work at Cora’s pub,” he finally said, looking away. “And down at the Elks.”

  “That sounds… busy.”

  He shrugged, the action not bothering me nearly as much as it had that morning. Maybe it was the lack of open hostility rolling off of him. “I like to be busy.” His grey eyes found mine once more. “Something we always had in common, if I remember.”

  I swallowed, directing my a
ttention to the coffee mug. There was something unsettling about looking right at him when we weren’t furious with each other.

  “Anyhow.” He cleared his throat. “I’m actually heading out now. Mike is here for the afternoon shift. He might get a little busy around three—lots of kids from the school stop by then.”

  I had a feeling by “lots of kids,” he meant lots of girls. And I was confident the timing of their stopping by had as much to do with the start of Mike’s shift as it did with the end of the school day.

  “So he might need a hand,” David finished.

  “I’ll let him know he can call me up,” I told him. “Thanks.”

  He stood by the desk for a long moment, and I wondered if the awkwardness I felt radiating from him was in my head. “I shouldn’t have said that, about… you know. The last twelve years.” He rubbed the back of his neck, something he seemed to do whenever he was agitated. It must have been a new habit, picked up sometime in the years after I left.

  “Well, it’s not like you were saying anything I haven’t thought myself.”

  “Doesn’t make it right for me to say it.” He gestured at the mess of books and papers on the desk “It’s, uh, pretty obvious you care about your family. I shouldn’t have… well. I shouldn’t have implied.” He let out a loud, frustrated sigh. “Look, I’m sorry if I was kind of an asshole this morning. I just didn’t expect to see you.”

  I knew he was making an effort, and it was obviously hard for him. I should have accepted his apology and kept my mouth shut. But I could still feel the way he had looked at me—the way he had been looking since I arrived on the island. Like I was some kind of disappointment. Like I had offended him in some way. And it still stung. I took a deep breath. “And what about seeing me makes you feel like you have to be an asshole, David?”

  He didn’t answer for a long moment, his eyes searching my face. I wanted to look away from the power of that gaze, but I forced myself to sit up straight, chin high, unblinking. What was it Libby had said the other night? About what she saw in his eyes when he glared at me? Passion. I somehow managed to suppress a shiver. Is that what I was seeing in his eyes now? But that was just silly. He obviously couldn’t stand me. I lifted my chin another millimeter, determined not to let him see what effect he was having on me with his scowls and searching gaze. When he turned away first, I felt a ridiculous rush of satisfaction. If there were points to be had, I had definitely won that one.