to accommodate two normal-size adults and one man-god-size adult. He must have read the skepticism on her face, because he said, “What? I like Mick. He’s low maintenance. He napped in the shade all day today.”
“I can’t just ask you to take my dog.”
Could she? Then again, what choice did she have? A hotel, she supposed, but could she find one that would take Mick?
“What are you asking for it?” she asked Eve.
“Oh, nothing. It’s just sitting empty anyway.”
“What is it with you Moonflower Bayers refusing payment?” It was slightly maddening. She twisted around to shoot Jake a look.
“How about this?” Eve said. “I’ve talked Sawyer into taking our first-ever vacation—in a couple weeks. It’s hard to get away because of both of our jobs. I’ve got one of the cleaning staff lined up to manage the place during the day, but I haven’t yet figured out what to do for the evenings. I need someone here. It probably won’t be any actual work beyond checking people in if they arrive late in the evening and just being around if there are any issues. I was going to hit up Maya, but if you’re here anyway…”
Nora still didn’t feel like that was a fair swap, but she wasn’t in a position to argue. “You got yourself a deal. I’ll look for a new place and try to be out of your hair as soon as I can, but either way, I’m happy to cover your holidays.”
“Great. Let me give you a quick tour. Bathroom is shared and down the hall, unfortunately. I’ll show you the kitchen, and laundry is in the basement.” She walked over to a small window. “This sticks a bit. You have to really lean into it if you want to open it.”
Jake stepped into the room to peer at the window, which put him right behind her. She could have sworn she could feel heat radiating from his body, but that was crazy.
“I’ll fix this,” he said.
Of course he would.
Chapter Ten
It turned out Nora liked living downtown. She could even see the lake from her tiny window.
She couldn’t hear it like at the old house, but she could see a thin slice of it if she craned her neck, and that seemed like an even trade.
And she’d gotten her wish about walking to work. In fact, she could walk to get pretty much whatever she needed. Since she wasn’t a cook—Eve had told her to treat the inn’s kitchen as her own, but she had yet to take her up on that offer besides by keeping a stash of Diet Coke in the fridge and a box of granola bars in the cupboard—she had taken to walking around town and cobbling together meals from Jenna’s General and from Law’s.
And she could walk to the little beach, which she was planning to do this evening, in fact, with Maya and Eve, to take part in the town tradition of throwing moonflowers into the lake on a full moon.
Yeah, it was weird, but it was Friday and it had been another satisfying but long week, so she was just going to go with it. Apparently it was some kind of rite of passage: you couldn’t really be a Moonflower Bayer until you threw a moonflower into the bay—which made an odd sort of sense, she supposed.
There was only one thing she missed about her old house: Jake.
Without a falling-down dump, she had no need for his handyman services.
It wasn’t like she didn’t see him, though. They had fallen into a habit whereby if he was on a job in town or wasn’t working or out on the boat, he would bring Mick by the clinic at lunch and she would step out for ten minutes. It was like supervised visitation with her dog. Although she missed Mick, neither he nor Jake seemed to mind the new arrangement. They seemed genuinely fond of each other, and it had become normal to see Mick lumbering along behind Jake as he strode through town. Whereas Nora always kept him on a leash—he tended to wander off on her otherwise—Jake didn’t seem to need to. She supposed that was one of the perks of being a man-god: small dogs instinctively obeyed you.
Her ten minutes at lunch were sort of like supervised visitation with Jake, too. They’d walk Main Street or sit in the gazebo on the town green, but there were always people around. They never talked about anything real like they