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“Then, I suppose I’ll go clean up the kitchen since I won’t be needing to cook for any crowds this weekend.”
With that, we both excused ourselves. Mr. Delaney went outside, apparently to work on preparing the lodge for the storm.
I wandered back to the kitchen. I didn’t want to spend a few days alone in the lodge with Mr. Delaney, but I knew that Bailey lived too far from the lodge to justify her coming to the lodge for a couple of days to stay. And I couldn’t ask her to drive in this weather.
If I had asked her a few hours ago, perhaps she could have, but not right now. Not with the clouds looming ever closer.
I shook my head. I’d have to find a way to deal with the uneasiness and make the best of it.
Chapter fourteen
Luke
It didn’t take long for the snow to start coming down, fast. I checked the closet in the front hall for a snow shovel and found two. I could keep the front steps clear, but if we actually got as much snow as anticipated, we’d need to wait for the snowplows to make the parking lot accessible again.
I closed the closet and wished Rick was here. Neither of us had expected the storm to roll in so quickly. He’d probably be stuck in Boise for a few days before the roads were clear enough for the drive back.
Now that it was just Laurel Pennington and me in the lodge, I hoped that it would give us the space we needed to work through everything that had caused tension.
She was a beautiful woman, and as much as I was clashing with her over the food, I couldn’t hide the fact that I appreciated her passion for the job. Part of the reason I had been worried about hiring Moroni originally was because I didn’t think he would be passionate about the job. Now that the sandwiches and easy to eat things were what our customers expected, I still wasn’t sure how they would react to having Laurel behind the kitchen counter.
Most of our regulars came during the summer, and they didn’t know yet that there was a new chef at the lodge.
As for Laurel, I’d have to find a way to get over the embarrassment of her hearing my band play at the bar. She’d heard my songs more than once, and she seemed okay with it. I just needed to figure out how to also be fine with that vulnerability
However, after glancing out the window, I realized this might have been more than Laurel was used to in the spring. In Chicago, I believed it was starting to warm up and stay warm right now. If they had ever had a freak snowstorm like this, she hadn’t let it bug her then or now. If not, she was doing a good job of hiding that she might be freaking out a little bit about everything going on.
I decided to go see if she was in the kitchen. To my surprise, she was finished in the kitchen. Perhaps it was because she had done most of the cleaning after breakfast. However, I decided to make some hot cocoa. Since it was always snowy here, when the lodge was closed and I was doing upkeep during offseason, I kept a good stash of hot cocoa in the pantry.
She had not touched it.
I made two cups of cocoa and took them up to her room. If nothing else, I hoped that she would consider it something of a peace offering between us.
I knocked on her door.
“Yes?”
“Would you like some hot cocoa?”
The words felt odd coming out of my mouth, but I knew that it was always better to be on my employee’s good side. So far, I’d really messed that up with Laurel. We’d started out as enemies, and I was surprised to realize just how much I wanted her to forgive me for that.
“Hot cocoa?”
She opened her door just enough to peek out and see that I had indeed brought hot cocoa.
“Oh. No, thank you,” she said awkwardly.
She shut the door without another word. I heard the automatic click of the lock followed by the sound of the manual chain being slid into place.. Both of my hands were full with the mugs. What did she think that I could do?
Puzzled, I returned to my room. Perhaps she just wanted some time to herself and had done what she thought was the politest version of telling me to not-so-subtly go away and leave her alone. Regardless, I decided that if she didn’t want to spend time with me, then I would respect the space she needed.
As I started to sip on one of the cocoas, I decided that today would be a good day to try and channel more frustration into songwriting.
Frustration from feeling uncomfortable thanks to Laurel’s presence at the bar offered me a chance to write a song about feeling inadequate, as if there was nothing to make up for what I had done inadvertently.
However, the more I worked on this song, the more I wondered what Laurel was up to. She may not have wanted to see me at all today, but was she still feeling the discomfort and awkwardness of what I thought we had cleared up that morning? Or had the hot cocoa been a smidge too far for her?
Instead of going to see her at her room, I decided I would text her. It was less immediate and left her room to craft a response instead of having to find something to say on the spot. The last thing that I wanted to do right now was make her feel as though there was no respect in the lodge for her feelings.
