and gap-toothed smiles. Five lots of gangly limbs and sun-streaked hair. Five hands sticky with half-melted ice creams.
A perfect memory captured forever.
The paper disintegrated under his touch, a piece of it tearing right off and splitting Trent away from his siblings. Thank god Liv hadn’t used all originals. They were photocopies that could be replaced, but hours of flipping through albums, photocopying and cutting and pasting and drawing decorations, were now for nothing.
“Do you think we can save it?” Cora asked hopefully.
“If by save you mean start the whole thing completely from scratch, then yeah.” He tossed the ruined gift onto the ground, and it landed with a moist splat. “But my more immediate concern is where you’re going to sleep tonight. We need to get the water sucked out of this carpet and bring the dehumidifiers in. You can’t breathe this damp air all night. It’s not safe. And we’ve got to prevent mold from growing. My brother and his wife run a bed and breakfast—”
“I’m staying here to help,” Cora said, folding her arms over her chest, a determined set to her jaw. “I made this mess, and I’m going to clean it up.”
Trent raised a brow. Cora didn’t look like the kind of person who’d done manual labor a day in her life. “This is a job for the professionals, I’m afraid. I’ll need to call my crew in.”
“Then I’ll make coffee and snacks. I can go through the scrapbook and make a list of everything in there so we can start putting it back together.”
He laughed. “We?”
“The only reason water came out of the pipes was because you didn’t turn off the main before you took the bathroom apart,” she pointed out.
Well, touché. Maybe Little Miss City Slicker wasn’t so clueless after all. “I didn’t anticipate having a stranger in the house who’d mess up all my plans.”
“And yet, here we are.” She looked him dead in the eye, and Trent had to admire the woman’s resolve. She was stubborn; he’d give her that. It wasn’t a quality that had a good reputation, but Trent liked stubborn people. People who stuck to their guns and followed through on their promises. People whose words meant something.
“You’d better be willing to put your money where your mouth is,” he said, shaking his head. “You really want to help?”
Her pale gaze held him captive, unwavering and daring him to challenge her. “I really do.”
“Then I hope you know how to use a glue gun.”
Chapter Three
Spoiler alert: Cora did not know how to use a glue gun.
Because glue guns were for people with normal childhoods that involved regular-kid things like arts and crafts, video games, and playing hide and seek. It went along with homemade Halloween costumes and school plays where kids fumbled their lines without consequence and sleepovers spent swooning over Zac Efron.
Cora’s childhood could be best summed up as: may result in therapy.
Instead of mud pies and Scrabble, it was dressage and cotillion. Instead of movie nights with popcorn, it was a rotating army of nannies and cooks and maids. For someone who’d grown up completely surrounded by people at all times, she’d been so lonely that her only solace was hanging out with fictional characters. Ah, but to the glamorous Mrs. Catriona Cabot, having a socially awkward bookworm for a daughter was not acceptable. God, what her mother would think of her writing a book.
Fiction is for people whose real lives provide no excitement, her mother had said. How will you ever get married if you’re so boring, you have to hang out with imaginary people?
Cora shoved the unpleasant thoughts aside. The whole point of coming here was to get distance from her mother’s derision, not to spend time thinking about it. Besides, Cora liked having an imagination. As far as she was concerned, it was one of her better qualities.
And sure, her vacation hadn’t gotten off to the most amazing start—understatement of the century—but she was going to make the best of it. Because in crappy times, the only thing in her control was her attitude. It was an important lesson she’d learned, and one that held her in good stead. Her life might be in shambles right now, but that didn’t mean she had to let her mind be the same.
While Trent’s friends worked on the house, getting the water sucked out of the carpet with some noisy vacuum-type thing and finishing off the plumbing so this disaster would be a one-time-only deal, she sat