Page 34 of The Hot New Bachelor in Town

I stare at Carter with disbelief. “Hello,” I say again.

“Hello,” he says.

“What are you doing here?”

He tilts his head, amused. “I bought the inn. Didn’t you hear?”

“Uh-huh. I heard that. Why did you buy the inn?”

Carter closes the ledger and safely tucks it away behind the front desk. “Come with me.”

He walks out the open front door.

“Carter,” I say, following a step behind him, full of shock. “Hold on.”

He descends the porch stairs, then spins around to walk backward along the path toward the lake. “Remember how I told you what I did?” he asks.

“You tell rich guys what to spend their money on,” I say.

“Correct. Imagine my surprise the other day when I reached Big City and met with a prospective client about a property in Small Town.” He points behind me. “This property.”

“This property?” I ask nervously.

“He wanted to buy it,” he says. “No, not just buy. He wanted me to come back and find out the lowest amount this place was worth and find flaws he could exploit to make that number as low as possible.”

I stop walking, the confusion in my chest shifting toward tepid rage. “Why would he ask you to do that?”

He stops, too. “Because that’s what I do, Mika,” he says, his eyes pinched with shame. “And I’m very good at it.”

“Congratulations,” I spit.

Carter continues down the path. I reluctantly follow him past the boathouse to the dock, crossing my arms as I take heavy steps.

“He wanted the inn, but...” His jaw flexes. “He wanted to strip out everything that made it beautiful. He was going to level this place, expand the inn to a stupid amount of rooms, destroying the land and making it a shadow of what your family built.”

My gut churns at the thought. “So, you bought the inn for him?”

“No,” Carter says. “I bought the inn for you, Mika.”

“Me?”

Carter continues forward down the dock and stops at the end. For a moment, he does nothing but stare across the lake, taking it in. “The other night when you brought me here,” he says, “I felt something.”

I pause beside him, needing him to explain.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he says, reading my expression. “It was like something awakened in me, or like I’d finally come home after being away for so long.” He looks at me, his blue eyes reflecting the lake. “When I left the other day, I could feel this place pulling me back. I wasn’t sure why, but when that asshole was talking about all the things he planned to do here, I realized why.”

Carter reaches for my hand. I give it to him, trembling as his strong fingers wrap around mine.

“Carter...” I say, full of doubt.

“I know it’s ridiculous,” he says. “But maybe there is something about this place. About Kiss County.”

“It’s just marketing,” I say.

“I didn’t just buy an inn because of marketing, Mika.”

“What do you even know about running an inn?”

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