She opened her mouth to explain there would be no morning-saving coffee, but then the whole altercation in front of Wake Up would just confirm what he already feared, alreadyknew, really.
Jordan Everwood was a walking catastrophe, and she needed careful handling.
“Yeah,” she said. “Great idea.”
Then she ended the call and shifted Adora’s gear into drive.
TEN MINUTES LATER,Jordan turned onto a single-lane gravel road. Officially, the Everwood Inn belonged to Bright Falls’s zip code, but it was actually just outside the city limits in no-man’s-land, tucked away in the evergreens like a secret. The Queen Anne Victorian home was an Everwood original, built by Jordan’s great-great-great-grandparents, James and Opal Everwood, in 1910, with elegant spires and gingerbread trim and half a dozen hidden passageways inside she loved exploring as a kid with Simon during the summer and other holiday visits.
Their grandmother, Prudence Everwood, was the one who’d converted it into an inn in the 1960s, along with her younger sister, Temperance. It was an instant success, first for its beauty and idyllic location, and second for its famed Blue Lady.
Or maybe it was the other way around. Everyone loved a ghost story, that connection to the Great Unknown. Jordan certainly couldn’t resist the tales when she was younger. Pru hadn’t lived in the main house since the inn opened, choosing instead to reside in the carriage house just behind the property that had been converted into a charming—if very tiny—three-bedroom cottage. Whenever Jordan and Simon visited, they would stay up late and sneak into the inn, desperate for a peek at the ghostly visage of their long-dead ancestor, Alice Everwood, the infamous Blue Lady.
They never got one. But they did have plenty of moments when a squeak on the stairs or a whip of wind through the eaves caused the young twins to scream their bloody heads off, resulting in irate guests and their extremely annoyed elders.
Jordan couldn’t help but smile at the memories as she rounded the corner and the Everwood Inn towered into view. She loved this place, loved that it was her family’s, that she could always count on it to open its doors to her. When she and Simon were kids, their mother, Serena, had dealt with undiagnosed depression, so the twins had spent most summers with their grandmother while their father tried to help Serena “get it together,” as they always called it. Jordan would usually arrive at Everwood in a tangle of knots, but between her grandmother and the soft Oregon rain, she slowly unfurled, resembling the carefree person all kids were meant to be by the time August rolled around. Eventually, when Jordan and Simon were sixteen, Serena was properly diagnosed with major depressive disorder. She went to therapy and got on the right medication, and things improved, but the twins kept up their Oregon summers until they went off to college.
While Jordan wasn’t quite sure about being in Bright Falls in and of itself, had no clue what the hell she was going to do with her life considering she couldn’t perform even the most basic of carpentry skills right now, this place was still magical for her. Always would be.
Granted, the house had seen better days. The exterior wood and stone, once a gleaming ivory, were now the color of dull, yellowed bone. Paint peeled from the gingerbread trim around the windows and porch, and the turret’s tiny balcony was sagging on the left side. Rosebushes, once lush and perfectly pruned, blooming into a riot of color every summer, were scraggly and overgrown, threatening to take over the porch. The inside wasn’t much better, thehauntedelement unintentionally taking precedence overcharming Victorian innin the last few years or so, all dark corners and uncomfortable, creaky furniture. Jordan was pretty sure the four-poster beds in each of the guest rooms were original to the very first owners.
Including their mattresses.
She shuddered at the thought.
When the people atInnside Americacontacted Pru a few months ago about a possible renovation episode, their grandmother had only hesitated for a moment. She was old, approaching eighty. Aunt Temperance had died back in the nineties, so Pru had been running this place largely on her own for the better part of twenty years. Serena was Pru’s only child, born out of a torrid affair Pru had in her late twenties with a semi-famous painter who’d lived in Bright Falls for a time. He’d never been part of their lives, and Pru had never married. Jordan and Simon’s parents were still madly in love and now ran a tiny, struggling vineyard in Sonoma County, a project they dived into headfirst just ten years ago after they both grew dissatisfied with their corporate jobs.
As a result, there was no one to help Pru manage this beast of an inn as it fell down around her head, much less the stress of a televised renovation. No one except Simon, who could work remotelyand live anywhere. And who better to help with a huge project, providing free labor and insight, than Simon’s lost and brokenhearted twin sister?
She heaved a sigh as Adora bumped into the circular front drive. Simon and her grandmother were standing on the front porch. He was pointing to this and that, while Pru nodded along and sipped on what Jordan assumed was a strong cup of English breakfast. They’d closed the inn to guests just last week and didn’t plan to open up again until the reno was done, which, by Jordan’s estimation, would take at least six weeks, and that was at a fast clip. Because they planned to keep most of the bones of the house intact—as an inn, open floor plans were not only unnecessary but detrimental to guests’ comfort—a lot of the work would be cosmetic, with some structural issues to deal with on the exterior. Granted, she wasn’t sure how much slower things might go with a film crew constantly in the mix. Preliminary emails had indicated Natasha Rojas strove to keep things as authentic as possible, but Jordan had no idea how all this would really go down. Natasha was due to arrive with her crew any minute now, so Jordan supposed they’d go over the details then.
“There you are,” Simon said, bounding down the rotting steps as she stepped out of the truck. He wore dark jeans and a maroon T-shirt, his feet shoved into a pair of worn gray Vans. Jordan and Simon were twins, but they looked nothing alike. While she had her mother’s bronze hair, her brother’s inky locks were all their father’s, messy on the top and short on the sides. Their eyes were the same though, the Everwood eyes, hazel with more gold than brown streaking through the green.
Now, those eyes widened behind Simon’s black-framed glasses.
“I know, I know,” she said, presenting her coffee-less hands. “I’m sorry, but—”
Simon grabbed her arms and peered into her face, cutting her off. “What happened? I thought you said you were okay.”
She frowned at his worried expression, but then remembered she’d spent a good twenty minutes sobbing in Adora on the side of a road. Apparently, she’d forgotten to clean up the evidence. Her beloved winged eyeliner and vegan mascara were probably tracking down her cheeks as though she’d done her makeup for a Halloween party.
“Oh.” She touched her face. “That.”
“Yes, that.”
“Darling, what happened?” their grandmother said, heading toward them from the porch, her short silver hair gleaming under the sun. She was dressed in a green-and-black color-block sweater, dark blue jeans, and white Keds. Her glasses were grass-green today, perfectly matching her top. For as long as Jordan could remember, her grandmother’s glasses had always complemented her clothes. God only knew how many pairs the woman owned at any one time. At least two dozen, Jordan would guess.
“Nothing,” Jordan said.
“You didn’t ruin that gorgeous eyeliner over nothing, love,” Pru said, swiping some black smudges from her granddaughter’s cheek.
Jordan sighed, leaning into Pru’s touch. She really didn’t feel like getting into the whole mess—the collision with Little Miss Bitch, the dressing down she received as a result, the crying. Her entire family already thought she was barely able to function. The last thing she needed was to admit a little social altercation had her hiccupping like a hormonal preteen.
“I spilled all the coffee as I was leaving the shop,” she said. “Some splashed on my face and I didn’t pay attention to how I was wiping it off.”
“Shit, did you burn your face?” Simon said, now grabbing her cheeks and scanning for burns.
For Christ’s sake.
