Beauty's Kiss(14)

But he was a fighter and nowhere ready to give up on the hotel.

The hotel had only been reopened for six months, after the two and a half year restoration. It’d been a huge job restoring the hotel because it’d been abandoned, boarded up, for over forty years before that. But you wouldn’t know it looking at the hotel today. The Graff’s grand lobby glowed with rich paneled wood, marble, and gleaming light fixtures, while the grand ballroom and smaller reception rooms sparkled with glittering chandeliers.

And yes, the hotel had virtually zero occupancy since early January, but December had been a good month, with the introduction of festive afternoon tea and company holiday parties on the weekends. But what they needed to do was fill the rooms all the time, because even empty, there were still salaries and bills to pay.

But the hotel was special. She was one of a kind. And while he regretted that restoring her might cost him his company and financial security, he was glad he’d saved her.

Someone had to.

Now he just needed to turn things around, and he could. It was a matter of increasing tourism to Marietta, and getting some publicity for the hotel, the kind of publicity that would make the Graff appealing to meeting planners and wedding planners, making the Graff the destination of choice for conferences and special events.

“You’re in pretty deep, aren’t you?” Dillon said, as Troy left the stall and latched the door closed behind him.

“Yeah.”

Dillon sat down on a stack of hay bales against the wall, extending his legs. “So just how deep?”

Troy reached for his coat hanging on a peg about Dillon’s head. “Deep enough that if things go south, I’d be the one living here, working the ranch, leaving you free to return to Austin.”

“That’d be a relief for me, but hell for you.” Dillon folded his arms across his chest. “You hate the ranch.”

Troy’s lips compressed. He wasn’t going to even dignify that with a response because yes, he did hate the ranch. He hated everything about it, and always had, which is why whenever he came home he stayed in town at a hotel.

“But then, you don’t like Marietta, either,” Dillon continued, watching Troy button his heavy sheepskin coat. “Which is why none of us can figure out why you’d hitch yourself, and your future, to that damn hotel. You’re the smart, successful Sheenan—”

“You and Cormac haven’t done too badly for yourselves.”

“Because you invested in us.”

“I believe in you.”

“And the hotel?”

“Not ready to throw in the towel. I’ve spent ten years investing in startups. I believe we can still turn things around.”

“But why The Graff, when you know it kills you to come back to this town?”

Troy had started walking to the barn door, but he stopped and turned to look back at his brother, and then somehow, just like that, his mother was there. Her ghost. He could feel her at the ranch... in the house, the barn... and her sadness haunted him.

She should have had daughters.

She should have had girls for company. Girls who’d bake with her or sew with her. Girls who’d laugh and giggle and talk to her. Listen to her.

Men weren’t good at listening.

He shook his head once, chasing away the past, and the memory of his mother who had loved The Graff. He hadn’t restored the hotel for her. That would be idiotic because she was gone. But she had been the one to make him understand that beauty was transformative, and there was value in beautiful things. “Sometimes we do things because we think it’s the right thing to do... even when everyone else tells you you’re wrong.”

Dillon’s eyes, a tawny gold, narrowed. He studied his older brother a long moment. “Mom would want you to be smart.”

“Too late,” Troy answered. “Looks like I’ve inherited her crazy.”

Dillon’s eyes narrowed another fraction of an inch. “Mom wasn’t crazy.” He hesitated. “She wasn’t happy. But that’s different from crazy.”

Troy said nothing. This was not a subject he liked discussing.

“Mom and Dad had problems. But we were too young to sort out their marriage, and now it’s too late to do anything about it,” Dillon added. “But even if we had been older, it wasn’t our job to fix things—”

“But if we had, maybe she’d still be here.”

Dillon sighed. “I’m sorry you had to be the one that found her.”

Troy shook his head. “Let’s not go there.”

“But you do. Constantly.” Dillon’s voice hardened. “It’s time you let it go. There’s no point in torturing yourself, or ruining your future, over something that’s in the past.”