Page 4 of Finding Home at Hearts Hotel

Isabel brought a hand up to cover her mouth, her eyes widening in sheer vindication. "You're joking. You actually have the proof of their industrial sabotage?"

"Every single byte of it," Darius confirmed, a sharp, triumphant edge to his voice. "Baxter had the complete dossier ready. But that wasn't even the best part."

Linda stepped closer, unconsciously reaching out to rest her hand against the sleeve of his tailored suit jacket, feeling the hard, coiled tension in his muscles. "Darius... what else happened?"

Before Darius could answer, a loud shout rang out from the volleyball courts near the lake.

"Hey! Hearts Hotel! Are you forfeiting the first round, or do we need to come over here and drag you to the net?" It was the captain of the Eagle View Guest Lodge volleyball team, waving a regulation ball in the air with a smug, arrogant grin, surrounded by his towering teammates who looked like they had been bred in a collegiate athletic lab.

Maggie cracked her knuckles, a dangerous, competitive glint flashing in her eyes. She turned to Penny, a slow grin spreading across her face. "Are you ladies ready to take down Eagle View?"

“Oh, heck yeah,” Isabel said with gusto.

“Count me in,” Linda called, her heart going wild, not just because she was standing so close to Darius but also because of the news about the hotel.

Maggie immediately snapped back into full drill-sergeant mode, her attention divided between the incoming volleyball challenge and the massive victory Darius had just dropped into their laps. She blew her shrill whistle twice, silencing the entire picnic area.

"Listen up, Hearts Hotel!" Maggie roared, clapping her hands together. "We have two wars to win today. One of them is happening on the sand, and the other one is happening in the corporate courts of the state of Florida!"

The group broke out into a spontaneous, roaring cheer that echoed across the entire shoreline, drawing curious, startled glances from the neighboring families and tourists.

Darius looked down at Linda, his fierce, stormy expression melting away into something more gentle, and deeply affectionate. He covered her hand where it rested on his sleeve, his thumb gently stroking her knuckles.

"Am I to assume the injury excuse didn’t work?" he asked, his eyes dancing with amusement as he took in her dripping wet clothes and messy hair.

"Something like that. Isabel and I had to do the relay race on those floaters of death out there on the lake,” Linda retorted with a breathless laugh, leaning into his touch despite being soaked through to her shorts. She tilted her head, searching his face. "So... the Winebergs are finished? Really finished?"

"Really, truly finished," Darius murmured, his voice turning intimate just for her, beneath the background noise of Maggie's whistle and the crashing waves of the lake. "Between Baxter's evidence, Rory's confession, and what Gill brought into that conference room with the federal agents..." He shook his head, a look of profound respect crossing his features. "Let's just say Debbi and Hyrum Wineberg are going to spend the rest of their natural lives explaining their fraudulent behavior to federal judges instead of ruining independent hotels and other developments."

Linda felt a tremendous, breathless weight lift off her shoulders, a crushing, suffocating pressure she hadn't even fully realized she was carrying since she arrived home for the summer. The dig, the financing, the threats, the constant cloud of sabotage hanging over Hearts Hotel. It was all finally, legally, irrevocably shattered.

"We won," Linda whispered, the reality of it washing over her in an excited wave.

"We won," Darius agreed, pulling her just a fraction closer, ignoring the fact that her wet clothes were dampening his. He pressed a light, lingering kiss to the top of her head beforestepping back as Martin and Owen practically dragged him toward the volleyball court.

"Come on, champion!" Martin yelled over his shoulder, tossing an extra volleyball through the air. "The Sanibel team isn't going to humiliate themselves from our women’s team, and we need to cheer them on!"

Linda stood under the canopy tent, wrapped in her towel, watching Darius jog out toward the sunlit sand court with a swagger in his step and a victory already secured in his pocket. Beside her, Isabel let out a long, deeply contented sigh.

“So, I guess that’s our cue to go play some ball,” Isabel said, linking her arm through Linda’s.

The festival games were still raging, the music was booming, and the air was thick with the scent of barbecue and salt water. But as Linda looked out at the sparkling expanse of the lake, surrounded by her family, her closest friends, and a future that suddenly looked brighter and clearer than she had ever dared to dream, she knew one thing with absolute certainty:

Hearts Hotel could be safe at last.

LINDA

The charcoal smoke from the evening grill drifted low across the grass, mixing with the cool salt air rolling off the lake as the last orange light of the Florida sunset bled into the tree line. Down by the shoreline, the frantic whistles, shouting megaphones, and blaring loudspeakers of the Summer Lake Games had finally faded into a distant murmur. The festival grounds were emptying out, leaving behind a damp, trampled lawn and the hum of cicadas starting up in the marsh grass.

The kids had long since vanished into the gathering dusk, swallowed up by a massive, shouting pack of local children and visitors for an impromptu twilight game of capture the flag near the edge of the woods.

For the first time all summer, the adults finally had a minute to sit down unburdened by the panic of Hearts Hotel being pulled out from under them.

The long wooden picnic table beneath the Hearts Hotel tent was draped with a faded red-and-white checkered cloth and piled high with paper plates, plastic cups, bowls of potato salad, and open bottles of cold beer and sweet tea. Linda sat near themiddle of the bench, a paper plate with a half-eaten burger resting on her knees. The physical and mental exhaustion that had clamped down on her chest since she’d arrived back home, the constant, grinding dread of the Winebergs, the forged audits, the endless fight to keep the hotel from being stripped away, was finally gone.

Isabel sat to Linda’s right, looking comfortable with her bare feet propped up on an empty wooden crate, her sandals tossed aside in the grass.

"I keep waiting for someone to jump out from behind the coolers with a clipboard," Isabel muttered, staring down into her plastic cup of iced tea and wiggling her toes. "Some new regional zoning inspector telling us our deck chairs violate three different municipal ordinances."