Her Unexpected Detour Read Free Page B

would go stir-crazy in a place like that her first day there. Hell, her first hour there. No, buying this grade of paint was the right thing to do. He would make the Checkerberry shine like new and pray his grandmother’s guests would somehow find their way back. They had to.
    “Oh, Ruby’s a tough old bird.” Tom’s face softened as he set the paint beneath the color dispenser. “I’m sure she’ll be fine. Plus, she’s got you and Miles to look out for her. And a dedicated staff.”
    Brent shook his head. “ Had a dedicated staff. Her chef is on the fence about whether or not to return this season, and our groundskeeper turned in his resignation last month. Ruby just can’t afford to pay them what they’d be making at the casinos in town.”
    “Now that’s a stroke of bad luck. Has she found a new groundskeeper?”
    “You’re looking at him.”
    Tom gave him a fatherly frown. “What about your business, Brent?”
    “Things were slow, anyway,” he lied. “And who can tell Ruby no?”
    Tom chuckled as he replaced the paint can’s lid and moved the pail over to his well-worn mixer.
    The machine jerked to life, and Brent’s collision with the hot little brunette in the diner sprang to mind. All soft, curvy, and completely wrong for him.
    He was a local, and she was anything but.
    If Legs was smart, she’d get back on the road and leave this godforsaken town in her rearview mirror before it tried to sink its claws into her, too.
    “Things will work out, son,” Tom said. “‘Round here, they always do.”
    Brent answered with a grunt.
    Maybe for Tom that’d been true. But for Brent? Not so much.

Chapter Three
    A s she stepped from her car and struggled to find solid footing, Kayla took a quick scan of her frozen surroundings. One minute it’d been plain old rain falling from the sky, the next a curtain of ice. Bolting from Indiana before checking the forecast hadn’t been a very wise decision on her part. Neither had been her assuming Tommy would let her stay over tonight.
    Her second terrible assumption of the day.
    But really, what were the chances of his roommate having a terrible case of the flu at the same time as her visit? She couldn’t blame Tommy for planning a weekend trip over to Windsor with Heather to get away from the germs, but it’d killed Kayla’s plans to crash there for the night.
    Okay, so maybe crash wasn’t the best choice of words right now. Not after her Impala had hit that slick spot in the middle of the intersection, slid into the ditch, and then ate a fence post. Between the ice now coating her windshield and that stupid construction detour, she’d somehow missed her turn to get back onto Business 127. Now she was stuck out here, in the middle of nowhere. In high heels. With zero bars on her cell phone.
    Why did it feel like the whole world had it in for her today?
    She half crawled, half scrambled up and out of the side ditch and squinted through the rain of ice pellets, looking for a passing motorist to flag down. But there were no cars in sight. Apparently, she was the only idiot on the road right now. Or at least, she had been.
    Kayla hitched her purse higher onto her shoulder, eeny-meeny-miny-moed, and then stepped off in the winning direction to search for a house with a functional landline. Hopefully she’d find one before she slipped and broke her neck. Though with the way her day had gone so far, it wouldn’t surprise her if that happened, too.
    This run of bad luck can stop any time now…

    N ormally, the trip between Granville’s Hardware and the Checkerberry Inn took Brent all of seven minutes. Eight, if one of Mr. Billings’s alpacas got loose and wandered out onto the road again. But today’s late spring storm had slowed his travels to an annoying crawl. Everything as far as the eye could see was slowly being suffocated by a layer of ice. Salt might have kept the roads from freezing, but unfortunately any of it left on the roads from last winter had