One Snowy Night (Sweet Home, Alaska #1) - Patience Griffin Page 0,109

Ella needs you. And I need you, too. She couldn’t draw enough breath to walk away and regroup. As if regrouping was really going to fix her breaking heart.

Donovan cleared his throat. “Just tell me that the proceeds from the lodge and hardware store will be enough.” His words sounded like they were strangling him.

“Sure, it’ll be enough.” Rick paused. “But is that what you really want to do?”

“Just sell the condo.” There was a scraping noise.

Hope didn’t realize until too late that it was Donovan pushing back his chair. He bumped into her outside the office and had to grab her arms to steady her.

He looked more upset than she’d seen him since returning. “What is it that you want?”

She might have answered with her immediate desire: for him to admire the quilt in her arms—but all she could think in that moment was her secret desire: a happily-ever-after . . . with him. And that she could never say.

She shook her head and walked away, willing her wobbly legs to get her to the kitchen, and hoping he couldn’t tell from her gait that she was dying inside.

Donovan is leaving. True, he’d never told her different, but she’d started to hope he’d change his mind. Now she was devastated. Hope’s heart was breaking all over again, for herself and this time for her daughter, too.

Ella needed to know, to be prepared. And Hope had to tell her.

She’d raised Ella to live in the real world, with all its hardships, disappointments, and heartaches. This would truly test her daughter’s abilities. Hope knew . . . because it was testing her own.

* * *

• • •

DONOVAN WATCHED HOPE walk away. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember where he’d been going when he bumped into her. He went back into the office, trying to stop his pounding heart. But it was impossible. Hope made him weak. He couldn’t wait to get out of Sweet Home.

“Did you forget something?” Rick asked.

Yeah. My good sense. But he didn’t say so. “No.”

“Listen,” Rick said, “I want to talk more about this, but I told Sparkle I’d run into town and get her so she can sew with the Sisterhood of the Quilt tonight.”

“Okay.” But it wasn’t okay. Donovan was between a rock and a hard place. What was he going to do about his dad? What was he going to do about Ella? And what the hell was he going to do about his pounding heart?

Donovan waited until Rick vacated his office before he slumped into his chair. He pulled open his grandfather’s desk drawer and took out the envelope with For Donovan written in Grandpa’s handwriting. Donovan had only opened it once and had ignored it since. He pulled it out now and looked at his grandmother’s engagement ring and wedding band. What the hell was he supposed to do with those? He shoved the envelope back in the drawer and shut it.

What he had to do was stay busy. He scooted his chair up to his laptop to do the final upload of Home Sweet Home Lodge’s website. He needed reservations—lots of them—to make the books look good before he put the lodge up for sale. And to make all of this worth it.

Rick was right; the lodge could once again be profitable, and the hardware store, too. The sad truth was that the new owner would reap all the benefits of the hard work that Donovan and the town had put into the establishments.

On the computer, Donovan finished his last round of tests and then published the site to the web.

He wished real life were more like programming. Coding was straightforward—either right or wrong, it worked or it didn’t—whereas life was just messy and complicated. He had no idea how he was going to continue his relationship with Ella and still keep his commitment to his dad. Maybe fly back once a month to see Ella? But he knew enough now about teenage girls to realize that even if he did come back, Ella might be too busy with her friends to spend time with him. He was in a no-win situation. And that wasn’t even putting Hope into the equation, or the rest of the people of Sweet Home. He’d loved working alongside the people he’d known when he was a kid, his old friends . . . with the exception of Jesse Montana, who was way too friendly with Hope for Donovan’s liking. He wondered if Jesse