Simply Irresistible

“A big one.”

“Come back before one of them falls on your head,” Tara called out.

Maddie kept going until she stood where the very top of the fallen pine tree had landed, trapping a scrawny baby pine tree beneath it. And damn if the sight didn’t break her heart. It took her a moment to free it, and then she hoisted the tree into her arms, turning back to the porch, where both her sisters still stood.

“Found us a Christmas tree,” she said.

Chapter 6

“Obeying the rules might be smart,

but it’s not nearly as much fun.”

PHOEBE TRAEGER

They decorated the tree with what they had on hand, which turned out to be some kitchen items and a string of chili pepper lights left over from what Chloe claimed to remember as a wild block party in the nineties.

Tara found a stack of twenty-year-old National Enquirers. “Phoebe’s gospel,” she said with a fond smile, holding up one with Mel Gibson on the cover. She cut out the picture and hung it on a branch. “What?” she said when Chloe and Maddie just stared at her. “I’d do him.”

“You do realize he no longer looks like that, right?” Chloe asked.

“Hey, my fantasy.”

They spent the next half hour drinking another bottle of wine and cutting out pictures of all the guys they’d “do.” Turned out there were quite a few. Maddie claimed Luke Perry and Jason Priestley-pre all their horrible movie-of-the-week specials. Chloe went for the boy bands. All of them.

“It can’t be just a hottie tree,” Tara decided.

Chloe nodded and hung a serving spoon, then cocked her head to study it critically, moving it over an inch like she was creating the Mona Lisa. “I once dated a guy who had a face like this serving spoon. He was ugly as hell, but man, oh, man, could he kiss. He gave me a nightly asthma attack for the entire week we dated.” She sighed dreamily. “Ugly men make good lovers.”

“Logan’s gorgeous and good in bed,” Tara said. “What does that mean?”

“Um, that you’re lucky to be married to him?” Chloe asked.

“No.” Tara shook her head with careful exaggeration. “Gorgeous men are flawed. Seriously flawed.”

“Not all of them,” Chloe said.

“All of them.”

Maddie found a doily. “My ex is good-looking. And good in bed. And…” The shame of it reached up and choked her as she carefully folded the doily so it looked like a star. “And, as it turns out, violent.” She nodded to herself and set the “star” on top of the tree. Yep. Perfect. Especially if she scrunched up her eyes. “Which I guess makes him pretty damn flawed.”

There was a long beat of loaded silence. When she managed to turn to her sisters, both were looking at her with shock and rage and regret in their eyes.

“Is that who hit you?” Tara finally asked quietly. “Your ex?”

Maddie nodded, and Chloe let out a breath. “You hit him back, right?”

“And then called the police,” Tara said. “You called the police on him, didn’t you, sugar? Put him behind bars so he could be some big bubba’s bitch?”

No, she hadn’t. And it was hard to explain, even to herself. But it’d happened slow, the gradual teardown of her self-esteem until she’d no longer felt like Maddie Moore. She’d felt awkward and stupid and ugly.

Alex had done that.

No, scratch that. She’d let Alex do that to her, one careful, devastatingly cruel comment at a time before she’d walked out on him.

Without her confidence, without her savings, without anything.

It sounded so pathetic now, which she hated. “I dumped his coffee on his family jewels,” she said. “Ruined his new Hugo Boss suit, which was pretty satisfying, since he looked like he’d peed his pants.” Too bad her bosses hadn’t appreciated her show of feminism and she’d gotten fired.

Details. But for the first time, she shared them over a third bottle of wine, while they cleaned and decorated the cottage into the night.

And much later, lying under the tree together, the three of them stared up at the chili pepper lights and grinned like idiots.

Or that might have just been Maddie.

She couldn’t help it. The top of her head was bumping up against the scrawny trunk of the tree, and she was breathing in the scent of pine. Above her, she could see a set of barbecue tongs dangling off the branches next to a picture of Jon Bon Jovi, a whisk, a Tupperware lid, and a near-naked shot of a very young Johnny Depp. “I’ve never had a more beautiful tree,” she whispered reverently.

“That’s because you’re drunk, sugar. Drunk as a skunk.”

Chloe sighed dreamily. “I haven’t had a tree in years. Not since I left Mom’s when I was sixteen.”

Maddie sighed, too. They were as much strangers to each other as she was with Jax, really, and yet since arriving in Lucky Harbor, she’d never felt less alone. “I know you guys are out of here as soon as possible, but-”

“Maddie, darlin’,” Tara said softly. “No buts.”

“Just hear me out, okay? What if we refinanced? We could hire someone to renovate, and we could run the inn the way it should be run. And we have a part-time employee already in Lucille! Sure, she’s ancient, but Mom trusted her.”

“Mom trusted everyone.”

“My point is, we could probably even make decent money if we tried.”

“Do you have any idea what it takes to refinance these days?” Tara asked, ever the voice of reason. “We’d need a miracle.”

“Then we try to find out who Phoebe left all her money to in that trust. Obviously, it’s someone she cared about, which means this person cares about her in return. Maybe they’d be interested in investing in the inn. We could-”

“No,” Tara said harshly, and when both Maddie and Chloe stared at her, she closed her eyes. “Think about this logically, okay? Running an inn is a lot of work.” She waved her arms and nearly knocked the tree over. “And the marina, good Lord. Do either of you even know the first thing about boats or the ocean or-” She stopped because a spoon had fallen from a branch and hit her in the nose. “Ouch.”

“Mom wanted this.” Maddie reached up and removed a fork from the branches before it fell, too, and maybe poked out an eye. “She wanted this for us.”

Tara and Chloe lay there, silent. Silent and contemplative. Or so Maddie hoped. Exhausted, she let her eyes close, her thoughts drifting. She wanted this to work. She wanted it bad. So maybe her mother hadn’t tried to get close to her. Maybe her sisters hadn’t, either, and maybe, possibly, she’d even allowed her mother to rebuff her because it’d been easier. But now, right now when she’d needed an escape, one had appeared. “It’s meant to be,” she whispered, believing it.

For a long beat, no one said anything.

“My life is crazy,” Chloe said quietly. “And I like crazy. It doesn’t lend itself to responsibilities, and I’m sorry, Maddie, so very sorry, but this is a pretty big responsibility.”

“And my life is in Dallas,” Tara said. “I’m not a small-town girl, never have been.”

“I get that,” Maddie said. “But maybe we can put it all into motion, and I’ll run the place. Maybe I’ll send you both big fat checks every month. Maybe by this time next year, we’ll be celebrating.”

“That’s a lot of maybe-ing.”