Page 139 of Perfectly Matched: Harbor Falls Romance Collection

Murphy’s Law must truly exist.

A storm delayed Gracie’s flight into Boston on Wednesday until after midnight, which in turn forced her to take a cab instead of the shuttle to her hotel—a cab for which she had to pay an exorbitant price. The cabbie was new and didn’t know how to get to the hotel, made several wrong turns, and once there, charged her for exactly every wrong turn he’d made. Then, the hotel desk clerk told her she had no knowledge of Gracie’s reservation. Luckily, Gracie produced the confirmation number and they were forced to give her a nice suite for her original price.

It was the only good thing that happened the entire trip.

Thursday, she acquired a touch of food poisoning. She assumed the culprit was the marinated calamari she’d eaten for lunch. The remainder of her evening was spent in the bathroom. She accomplished only a little shopping that day.

Friday morning, she had a dispute with a vendor at a lingerie show and ended up abruptly canceling the order she’d come specifically to Boston to get. Angry at herself, she almost missed her flight home, then found out that due to more weather disturbances, her flight was re-routed through Atlanta where she endured a four-hour layover.

Besides all that, her toe had turned black. She was almost certain it was broken.

By the time she was ready to pull into her parking spot behind the shop around ten o’clock Friday evening, Gracie knew the only thing on her agenda for the remainder of the night would be to fall into bed and oblivion for the next ten hours or so.

Except there was one teensy-weensy problem.

There was no empty parking space behind her shop. Not even the space reserved for her marke.

“private parking.”

Rick’s red BMW was parked in his space right next to it.

There were no empty spaces behind either shop.

Or even on the street in front of the shop.

What the heck was going on?

Finally, her anger and her blood pressure rising, she parked three blocks away in the bank parking lot, retrieved her luggage from the trunk of her Honda, then hurriedly wheeled and hobbled her way up the sidewalk, grumbling all the while.

This last hurdle was not putting her in a good mood.

For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out who would have the audacity to park in her private parking space behind her own home!

She was tired, dammit!

She’d had a helluva past three days.

Her toe hurt.

And she just wanted to go home. To bed! Such a simple thing. That’s all she wanted.

Before the night was through, someone was going to cough up some explanations. The more she thought about it, the angrier she became.

About a block away from her shop, she heard the music. It did nothing to lift her spirits.

Party. Damn. Someone was having a party.

Party?

Bah humbug! She felt like such a Scrooge.

Friday night?

Rick?

Stopping abruptly, she cocked her head to one side. No, certainly it wasn’t Rick. A small little get-together with friends, he’d said. Izzie would be there, too.

Something wasn’t right.

Grasping her stomach at the thought, Gracie moved on.

Slowly, she walked closer to the cafe, the music growing louder. And louder. Glancing toward the street, she noticed a city police cruiser making a slow progression past the shops. Both hers and Rick’s.

She picked up her step. Country rock music filled her ears.

Finally, she came to a halt directly in front of Rick’s cafe. She stood in the door, staring inside. The door was open; music and laughter poured into the street. What in the world?

Gracie glanced about. People. Everywhere. Wall to wall.

People with drinks.

People playing cards.

People laughing.

People engaged some sort of video game on a huge, wall-mounted flat-screen. A baseball game was on a couple of other screens on the opposite side of the room.

What happened to quaint and Victorian?

Then she glanced to the left of the door. Painted across the large, shop-front window, in huge script, were the words Rick’s Cafe: An All-American Bar.

And then underneath that, A Harbor Falls Landmark.

Landmark? What in the world. How can you become a landmark in three weeks?

Gracie grimaced. The man had stinking lied to her. He had turned the other half of her building into a bar? What the hell?

Then she heard her name shouted from somewhere beyond her vision. She searched the crowd in Rick’s “cafe,”

trying to figure out who in the world did she know that would be in there.

****

“Gracie!”

Rick glanced sharply up from where he was pulling a draft beer when he heard Amie yell out Gracie’s name. The moment of truth was upon him. Thank God he’d had the where-with-all to invite Amie. She was a party demon and already in love with the concept of Rick’s Cafe. He was sure he’d already wooed her to his side.

Watching as Amie made her way through the crowd, drink in hand, he knew Gracie wouldn’t be as easily convinced. In fact, he’d been dreading this encounter the entire evening. From the looks of things, Gracie wasn’t too keen on what she was seeing.

Gracie gestured and glanced agitatedly from side to side as she spoke to Amie, her faced animated. The body language wasn’t positive, that was for sure. Amie, in turn, smiled and excitedly pointed at this and that around the room, as if doing a hard sell on her friend.

“C’mon, Amie,”

he whispered under his breath.

“Convince her.”

He wasn’t quite so sure of the reason he wanted so badly for Amie to convince Gracie that Rick’s Cafe was on okay thing, he just knew that it mattered. The most likely reason, of course, was because he wanted to stay here. Subconsciously, he thought there might be another reason he wasn’t quite as quick to explore.

So, he stayed put behind the bar, watching for an adverse reaction from Gracie. She didn’t look much past Amie, who was talking fast and furiously now, it appeared. Then Gracie looked up and her gaze met hard and head-on with his.

Busted.

The next instant she made a beeline directly toward the bar, suitcase still in tow, dodging partygoers as she made a slow, half-limping progression across the room.

Why was she limping? Oh hell… The toe?

When she reached him, she narrowed her gaze, tilted her chin in an effort of authority, threw back her shoulders and shouted over the music and laughter.

“Mr. Price, may I have a word with you?”

She glanced from right to left then, and continued.

“In private.”

Mr. Price.

So, they were back to that. He decided to just go with it. Nodding, he returned.

“Of course, Ms. Hart. This way.”

He reached for the handle to her bag, but she snatched the thing away from him and sneered.

Rick stepped back and swept his arm toward the rear of the building. So that’s the way it’s going to be, huh?

When she didn’t budge, he led the way and didn’t look back as Gracie, eventually, followed. When they reached the storage room-slash-office, he turned to let her pass then closed the door behind the two of them.

The music was muffled but the atmosphere inside the small room was still charged. It had nothing to do with the party.

“How was your trip?”

He thought he’d try to get things off on a positive note.

“Lousy,”

she bit back.

“I got food poisoning. I had a four-hour layover in Atlanta. I lost a contract. And my toe is black.”

That wasn’t the note he wanted to start off with.

“I’m sorry to hear—”

“And then, Mr. Price, I come home to find out I can’t park in my own, privately marked parking space because someone, some stranger, had the audacity to park in my reserved spot. And, not only that, after hobbling three blocks with a black toe—dragging my suitcase, which has a wobbly wheel by the way—I find that my tenant is a liar and has pulled a fast one on me by turning my building into a bar. A bar! My God, what kind of low-life do you expect to drag in here?”

Tenant. Liar. Low-life. Wow.

He didn’t like the sound of those words, either.

Rick put up his hands.

“Whoa. Wait a minute. Slow down, Gracie. Let’s talk about this.”

“Ms. Hart to you.”

She harrumphed and crossed her arms over her chest.

Rick ignored that and continued.

“I have no intentions of pulling in degenerates off the street. This is as much of a family thing as it is a bar.”

“Family thing?”

she screeched. Her arms fell to her side and her eyes widened as if in disbelief of his words.

He was beginning to think this wasn’t a good time to talk to her about it.

“Yes, family thing. It’s just a sports bar, with food, a bit of a glorified arcade, Gracie, with option of a drink and a sandwich while you’re here. Kids can go off and do their thing while parents relax with a glass of wine or a beer and watch the game. We can have birthday parties and music on the weekends. Family entertainment, Gracie. That’s all it is.”

“That’s certainly not what it looks like tonight.”

“Well, tonight is just some of my friends and their friends...”

“And their friends,”

she continued, glancing back at the door. Rick had to admit more people came than he’d expected.

“I certainly hope,”

she continued.

“that you’re not intending to be up making this racket all hours of the night because I, for one, am extremely tired and would like about ten hours of sleep.”

She turned toward the door, and then whipped around again.

“Please remember that there are apartments above most of the downtown shops. And, that there is a noise curfew. I do hope you adhere to that because I would hate to have to call the Harbor Falls police department.”

He stepped forward.

“Now Gracie…”

“Ms. Hart! We’ll talk about this tomorrow, Mr. Price. I’m not in the right frame of mind to discuss business. But I want to tell you one thing, I’m not pleased about this. Not one bit.”

Business.

With that, she turned and left, dragging her suitcase and slamming the door behind her.

Rick stared at the door.

“That certainly went well.”

****

Gracie told herself that she was simply going to block it all from her mind, consume a fistful of ibuprofen, and pray that sleep would not elude her this night. Tomorrow, when her head was clear and she could think rationally, she’d deal with Mr. Richard Price.

Yes, that is what she would do.

First, she had to get her ducks in a row. There was no way she was going to let this so-called business next door ruin her business—the business she’d worked so hard to build. Punching her pillow and wadding it up until a tight little ball, she shoved it under her head, closed her eyes, and tried to erase the scene still etched in her mind.

A bar. No way.

Richard Price was insane.

There had to be some way out of that lease. Tomorrow, she would find it.

****

“What do you mean there is nothing we can do?”

Gracie paced from one corner of Jim Gray’s massive oak desk to the other, her head shaking, and her arms firmly crossed over her chest.

“There has got to be something, some loophole. Look again.”

“Nope. Gracie, look, I told you. It is clean as a pin. No loopholes. Everything above board, no tricks, no fine print. Nothing to make the lease null and void. Your signature clinched this deal. I’m sorry but he’s got the place for a year. If you breach the contract, you are going to owe him a lot of money.”

Gracie stopped pacing and turned to look at Jim, her father’s childhood friend and her attorney. He had never once steered her wrong. There was no reason not to believe him now.

“I was so stupid to sign the lease that he drew up. He is an attorney, after all.”

“Wouldn’t have been any different had he signed the one you drew up, Gracie. A signed contract is a signed contract. You willingly put your signature there. He just tightened up a few things and made a couple of others a little broad, all to his advantage, of course, but nothing out of the ordinary.”

“So, it’s legal.”

“Every bit of it.”

“But he said he was going to open a cafe.”

“And he did.”

“But he didn’t!”

“Oh, yes, Gracie, he did.”

“But not the kind I thought he was going to open!”

“That’s your perception, sweetheart, not his. He did what he said he was going to do. Even wrote into the lease that he planned to apply for a liquor license.”

Gracie threw up her hands.

“Well, I assumed he was going to serve wine with cheese or something!”

“Well, he decided to serve or something,”

Jim replied.

Gracie wanted to scream and shout and stomp her feet and throw a temper tantrum—but that was really unlike her. She didn’t throw tantrums. She just hated being frustrated. And she really disliked being duped more.

Finally, she plopped onto the leather armchair across from Jim’s desk and slumped into a most unladylike posture.

“I give up.”

“You could fight it.”

She arched a brow and sat up a little straighter. “I could?”

Maybe there was hope.

Jim nodded.

“Yes. But you’d lose and it would be expensive. I wouldn’t advise it.”

Her arched brow fell.

“Besides, he’s an attorney, and a damned good one to boot. I don’t think either one of us want to cross him.”

Gracie deflated back into the chair and frowned. Money was not something she was rolling in, and she really didn’t want to make an enemy of Rick. She just didn’t want a bar next door.

“I guess I cooked my own goose, didn’t I?”

Jim leaned closer.

“Not necessarily. If I know you, Gracie, you’ll find some way to make all this work for you, and not against you.”

“Hmpht,”

she replied and glanced away. How in the world would a bar next door work positively for a place like Romantically Yours? She couldn’t think of one single advantage.

****

Rick looked sharply up from his work at the bar and stared out the shop window toward the street. What was that noise?

Listening, he cocked his head to one side.

Silence.

After a minute, he glanced back down at the paperwork spread out before him.

Crash!

He glanced back up. Yes. That was something. Definitely something.

“Izzie?”

He looked to the ceiling, wondering what the child was doing upstairs.

At that point, he heard another crash. Then a shriek. And he knew both noises weren’t coming from upstairs. They were coming from next door.

“Ah, hell,”

he muttered and quickly rose.

“Please don’t let that be Izzie.”

He rushed out his front door and into Gracie’s shop, not having to stop to open her door because it was wide open. The scene that met him made his stomach plummet to the floor.

First, he had never seen a cat as large as Gracie’s old shop cat Claire, move as quickly as she was moving at that precise moment. It appeared she was doing three-hundred-and-sixty-degree rotations inside the shop, under tables, over chairs, leaping onto display cabinets, sliding over polished hard wood floors, tipping crystal goblets and knocking over brass candlesticks. All the while she was making hissing noises that he’d never heard come from any earthly cat before.

But that was probably since Izzie’s nymph of a Shit-Zhu pup, was hot on Claire’s heels, nipping and yipping, ears flying and toenails clicking, leaping and sliding and knocking things over right behind her.

On her tail was Izzie. A shoeless Izzie who in the process of chasing both cat and pup, managed to slide with an excited yelp into a table display full of Victorian cards and papers. The table skidded into a mannequin draped with a satin robe. The mannequin teetered, papers flew high into the air and then landed haphazardly around all of them like a game of fifty-two pickup, while Izzie sprawled out spread-eagle on the floor, finally coming to rest beneath the table.

All in two seconds flat.

A small oomph came from Iz as she hit the wall. Rick grimaced.

Then, bringing up the rear, her long skirt flowing, several tendrils of hair escaping from her French roll, her high-heels clicking on the floor, was Gracie. Just before she reached his daughter, he heard her cry out as one of her heels caught on the edge of an oriental throw rug, which sent her tumbling under the table with Izzie.

A larger oomph reached his ears. He grimaced again.

Then in silent slow motion the mannequin wavered, tipped, and fell with another loud crash. The entire scenario must have happened in no less than three-point-five seconds flat.

Hell. This wasn’t good.

Not good at all.

He raced toward the woman and the girl. The cat and the pup had vanished. And at this moment he didn’t care to where they had gone.

“Are you two all right?”

Reaching under the table, he grasped Gracie’s forearm, trying to ignore that her skirt had rode up to her thigh, and helped her into a sitting position. She thanked him, rubbed an elbow, and then helped him go after Izzie. Together they pulled her from underneath the table until she, too, was sitting before them.

Izzie rubbed the back of her head.

“Are you two all right?”

Rick repeated.

“Yes,”

Gracie finally said, a hint of a scowl on her face.

Izzie nodded. “Yep.”

He watched as Gracie lifted a hand to her hair and attempted to smooth back the wayward strands into her clip as she glanced about the room, covertly surveying the damages.

“Don’t look,”

he told her.

Heaving in a big sigh, and then exhaling in a short huff, she looked back to Rick.

“And why shouldn’t I look?”

“Because it will only depress you.”

“But I have to—”

“In a minute.”

She stared at him.

“In a minute, what?”

“In a minute you can assess the damages and add up the bill and start cleaning up. And I’ll help you.”

He looked down at his daughter now, who had remained extremely quiet the past few minutes.

“And so will Izzie. We’ll gladly pay for the damages.”

Izzie frowned and looked to the floor.

Rick let it go for now. He looked back to Gracie.

“I have a good idea what happened. I hope that this—”

Gracie waved him off and stood. Rick stood with her.

“Mr. Price, it’s not her fault. Really. I let Izzie bring the pup in. I didn’t think Claire would react like that. It’s not the child’s fault. It’s mine.”

“But—”

Gracie smoothed her skirt and straightened her sweater. Tilting her head back, she looked him square in the eyes.

“Don’t blame her. Please, just go find your pup. I think both animals ran out the back door. Don’t worry about Claire. She’ll find her way home.”

Rick glanced down at Izzie then, her eyes wide.

“Bandit went out the back door?”

Gracie crouched down to speak to her.

“I’m not sure. Why don’t you go look?”

Izzie glanced to her father and he nodded his permission. The child shouted for her pup. After she was gone, Rick looked back to Gracie. Hell, he didn’t need this today. She was mad enough at him already. One more incident like this and she might have grounds to boot them out.

“You don’t have to take up for her if she did something wrong, you know,”

he told her.

“I want her to learn to own up to her mistakes.”

Gracie just stared at him.

“Mr. Price, she’s a beautiful child. A mischievous child, yes. But this one was not her fault. I’m not blaming you. Or her. It was me. So, go help your daughter find your pup and quit worrying.”

It was blunt, but he wasn’t really surprised. She’d been blunt the past couple of days. Still, he expected that she’d want them to take the blame. Seems he was wrong.

Rick stood for a moment longer looking at Miss Grace Hart. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure the woman out. First she ran hot, then cold. First she’s mad, then she’s not.

Kept him damned confused.

Too damned confused.

That’s what worried him.

Women.