Suddenly in Love (Lake Haven#1) (12 page)

“You’re mixing up your phobias, Mom,” Emily said.

“Maybe he’s just a jerk,” Aunt Bev said with a shrug. “It’s probably nothing more complicated than that.”

“He also could be recovering from something. A death in the family?” Mia’s mother suggested.

“Oh, poor baby,” Derek said. “It’s like, if you have money, you have the luxury of wallowing in heartbreak. The rest of us have to get back to work.”

“Well if
that’s
it, he’ll probably take off on one of those eat, pray, love things before long,” Aunt Amy said. “And then you won’t have to worry about it, Mia. Listen, one thing is for sure—he’s not going to hang around boring East Beach. Pass the ham, please.”

“Why don’t you just befriend him, honey?” Mia’s mother asked.

“Better yet, invite him into town so we can all get a really good look at him,” Emily said brightly.

“No,”
Mia said flatly. “You’re all making a big deal out of nothing. You know how Wallace embellishes anything said to him. The truth is I hardly see the guy. It’s not that bad.”

“Hey,
you’re
the one who complained about how rude and smelly he was,” Skylar reminded her.

Well thank you, Wallace, for leaving no word of the story untold.

“I don’t care how
smelly
he is, I need you, Mia. Nancy really likes you. I am not going to lose this deal because you think her son stinks.”

“She
likes
me?” Mia said, mystified by that. She’d spoken to Nancy only a handful of times.

“Yeah,” Mike said. “Has she noticed what Mia wears?”

“She likes it,” Aunt Bev said to Mike. “She understands that Mia marches to the beat of her own drummer.”

“Hello, I’m right here,” Mia said, gesturing to herself.

“I march to my own beat, too,” Skylar said, unwilling to share everyone’s attention with Mia. “But I am going to use
my
individuality to get a gig with the music festival.”

“Good luck with that,” Aunt Amy said.

“What about transportation?” Mia asked her aunt. “Wallace doesn’t want to take me every day.”

“Ride the bike,” her brother Mike said. “It’s only a mile from your new apartment, right?”

“Apartment? What apartment?” Mia’s father demanded.

“Mia’s moving out, Dad. Can’t take the heat.”

“Since when?” her dad demanded of her mother.

“We’ll work it out, Mia,” Aunt Bev said imperiously. “In the meantime, ride the bike.”

“No one said anything to
me
about an apartment,” Mia’s father groused. “I don’t know why I’m always the last to know anything.”

“Would everyone just pipe down?” Aunt Bev demanded. “I just got a
huge
job. Can we worry about bikes and cars and who is moving where later? I think a toast is in order.”

“Beverly is right,” Mia’s mother said. “We should always celebrate the good and cling to that when the bad comes around. Cheers, Bev!” she said, and lifted her wine glass to her sister-in-law.

“Cheers!”
everyone chimed in.

“Cheers,” Mia said, a little less enthusiastically.

Twelve

That weekend, Mia’s brothers and parents helped her move into her garage apartment, which was completely unnecessary, given that she had only two suitcases, a few boxes, and her easel. She could have handled everything but the ancient sewing machine she’d bought with the money she’d earned working at the bistro in high school.

“Pretty isolated out here,” Mike said, looking around after he tossed a box onto the bed.

“Yes. But it’s peaceful,” Mia pointed out.

“You’re not very far from the north beach here, are you?” her mother asked as she stepped inside from the balcony, and exchanged a look with her husband.

Mia’s face flushed with the reminder of that awful summer. “I don’t think about it,” she said, averting her gaze from everyone.

Her mother apparently thought about it. She hugged Mia, then patted her cheek. “I don’t like you being out here by yourself, sweetheart. I wish you’d stayed at home. We loved having you and it’s not the end of the world to need to lean on your parents for a little while.”

Mia felt like a kid just then, a fragile little flower they were all worried about. When had that happened? When had they gone from not worrying about her while she was living in a dicey part of Brooklyn to worrying that she couldn’t cut it on the north end of East Beach because of what happened nearly ten years ago?

On Monday morning, Mia reported to work, riding up the hill to the Ross house on the bike Mike had found her, huffing and puffing until she reached the gate and could coast down to the house.

The first wave of demolition and tear out was to begin that morning. “You keep a close eye on those crews,” Aunt Bev instructed her. “You call me the moment something doesn’t go right, and trust me, something is not going to go right. I told Dave Karpinski he better not send up a bunch of day laborers who don’t know what they’re doing.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Mia pointed out.

“That’s different.” Aunt Bev waggled her bejeweled fingers at her. “
You
know when to call me. Say that you know when to call me.”

“I know when to call you,” Mia had said dutifully.

Shortly after noon, Aunt Bev phoned. “You haven’t called me.”

“Because no one has come,” Mia said.

Aunt Bev responded with a string of expletives and hung up.

Not only had no one come, no one seemed to be around. Mia was a little nuts, because every sound she heard brought her head up and a flutter in her veins, thinking it would be Brennan. Unfortunately—or fortunately?—she never saw him.

No one showed up the next day, either. Nancy left bright and early with a cheery
ta-ta.
And still, no Brennan, which, surprisingly, disappointed Mia more than she cared to admit. She was intrigued by the man she’d seen at Eckland’s and the one who had looked at her storyless, bland wall painting. Forget the painting, she wanted to know more about
that
guy. But if he was lurking around, he was doing a good job of hiding from her. She was certain she would have run into him at some point, especially since all she did was wander around from one room to the next. Once, she thought she heard the strings of a guitar drifting out of a window, but when she went outside to listen, she couldn’t hear anything and supposed she’d imagined it.

Maybe he was camped out upstairs. Nancy had expressly asked her not to go up to the living quarters. “That will be our third phase of renovation,” she’d said. “But I’d like to keep it off-limits for now.”

“I can only imagine the hoops I’m going to have to jump through to get
that
redo,” Aunt Bev groused when Mia told her about it later.

Mia had taken her frustration out on her lifeless wall mural. She mixed more blues and applied more paint, but that didn’t fix it. So she loaded some paints in the basket of her bike and brought them up, her lungs and legs heaving the last few yards to the gate.

The new paints didn’t help. It seemed like no matter what she tried, the painting looked increasingly amateurish. It began to take on that desperate look of an artist trying too hard to be relevant. Whatever that meant, really, but if Mia had to define that look, she’d say that stupid wall was it.

She abandoned the painting and took to wandering around the grounds.

On Thursday, Mia reached the gate, perspiring quite nicely in the humid air. As she rolled through the gates, she saw a truck waiting in the drive and Drago talking to the driver. She almost leapt off her bike with joy—at last, something to
do
. She rolled past Drago and hopped off her bike. Four men were crammed onto the single bench inside the truck.

The driver’s gaze flicked over her, casually taking in the dress she’d made with one sleeve, a gathering on one side of her waist, and the asymmetrical hem. She was wearing a sun hat, too, which she’d festooned with flowers from Dalton’s garden.

“It’s the demo crew,” Drago said.

“That’s great!” Mia said cheerfully. “Follow me.” She wheeled her bike to the guardhouse and picked up her lunch bag from the basket. When she turned back to the truck, she saw that the men inside the truck were laughing. At her.

Mia’s face turned hot. There was a time in her life, in the not-too-distant past, where that sort of laughter had hurt her. Not anymore. Mia knew who she was.
Screw them
, she told herself.
They don’t appreciate an artistic view of proportion and volume in plaid
.

The men’s first task was to strip the wallpaper, which the men piled on the broken-up terrace. They worked through the morning, and when they took a lunch break, settling down under a big sycamore tree, one of the men said, “You wanna sit with us?”

The other men seemed amused by that, and it made her uncomfortable.

“No thanks. I have some things I need to do,” she lied. She held up her sketchbook as if it was an important item, then set off with it and her thermal lunch bag. She went around the corner of the house and took a newly cleared path down to the bluffs.

When she reached Lookout Point, she dropped her things on the bench, then walked to the edge and stood there, enjoying the feel of the breeze lifting her hair and her skirt. She idly wondered if she would ever have the guts to jump into the lake like she had when she’d been a fearless kid. Probably not. Jumping hadn’t scared her then. Now, different things scared her. Like broken limbs. Broken hearts. Broken dreams.

She was hungry. Mia returned to the bench, tossed her hat onto the grass, and set her lunch bag next to her. She opened her sketchbook and began to draw.

“Mind if I join you?”

The sound of Brennan’s voice startled her so badly that Mia almost fumbled her sketchbook right off her lap as she leapt to her feet. “Yes!” she said quickly.

He hesitated.

“Wait,
no
. I mean,” she said, making herself take a breath, “please do.” She swept her hand gregariously toward the bench.

“Are you sure? I’m not interrupting you, am I?” he asked, nodding at her sketchbook.

“What, this? Not at all. I was just doodling.”

“I didn’t think you used that word.” He walked around to the bench, and sat down. Mia did, too. She tried not to stare at him, but she couldn’t help herself. He was clean shaven today, the beard gone, and his jawline was much squarer than she had realized. He was wearing jeans and sandals, and a shirt he’d only partially tucked into the waist. He’d pulled his hair back into a little ponytail at his nape. He looked hip. Hip and
hot
. And Mia was alarmed by how ridiculously delighted she was to see him.

He tilted his head to one side, smiling with curious amusement at her study of him. “What’s up? Do I have something on my face?” he asked, and touched two fingers to his cheek.

“Nope,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Sandwich?”

He looked startled. Well, of course he was—who offered a sandwich like that? But he glanced at her industrial-sized lunch bag and said, “So you’re brown bagging it.”

“This,” she said, pointing at the bag, “is a time-tested money-saving technique. That, and I don’t have a car, so it makes going into town for lunch difficult.”

“What about the van guy?” he asked as he opened the top of her bag to peek inside.

“Who, Wallace? He has clients. And he’s kind of persnickety about driving people around.”

“So I’ve heard through an open window or two. I guess that makes you the owner of the purple bike.”

“That would be me.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said with a crooked grin. “I was having a hard time picturing Drago on it.”

She grinned at the image of Drago’s beefy form on the bike.

“You’re riding up from town?” he asked. “That’s a long hill.”

“Actually . . . I took that apartment,” she said, avoiding his gaze as she dug in her lunch bag. “The one by Eckland’s?”

“I remember.”

She glanced up; his navy eyes were studying her.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

“Yeah?” He shifted around so that he was facing her and draped one arm over the back of the bench. “What am I thinking?”

“That I should have gone back to the city. That I won’t find my groove here.”

“I wasn’t thinking that at all,” he said, and smiled in a way that waved through Mia’s belly. “I was thinking how rude it would be to take your sandwich. And I know how strongly you feel about rude.”

Something warm began to wrap itself around Mia’s ribs and hold tightly. “It’s not rude if I offered it. And besides, I have two.”

His eyes widened with surprise.

“You know . . . in case I’m stuck here.”

“Stuck?” His eyes shone with amusement.

“Delayed?” she amended. “Between you and me, that crew doesn’t seem like they’re in a very big hurry to strip all that wallpaper.”

“Ah. How about I make you a deal,” he said, peering into the contents of her bag. “If you get stuck, I’ll make you a sandwich.”

How odd that only a week ago, she would have been appalled to touch anything he’d touched, but today, his offer of a sandwich sounded like a five-star dining experience. “What kind?”

“What kind do you want?”

“Gourmet,” she said. “What I’m giving you can’t be replaced by just any old bologna.”

“You have a deal, Aunt Bev’s helper.”

Mia grinned. She reached into her lunch bag and pulled out the sandwich and handed it to him.

Brennan unwrapped it and gave it a look.

“It’s multigrain bread, sprouts, ham, and cheese. And the ham is uncured and local. I mean, if you’re into that sort of thing.”

“Are you kidding? My favorite kind of ham just happens to be pig, in all its forms.” He took a bite of it and nodded. “It’s good. Thank you. I hope I can live up to this. My idea of gourmet is PB and J.”

“You tricked me!”

He shrugged. “I was hungry.”

Mia knew she was smiling like a girl who’d just won a giant teddy bear at a county fair. She wasn’t falling for this guy, was she? No, no, absolutely not—had she forgotten he’d been a royal jerk just last week? Not only that, he was summer people. Girls like her didn’t fall for guys like him. Period.

“By the way, I owe you another kind of thank you, I think,” he said.

Unless he turned out to be a nice guy. Then maybe. But surely this couldn’t be the same man she’d met at the beginning of this job. “Another thank you? This is my lucky day.”

“You woke me up. I owe you for that.”

A tingle of self-consciousness slipped through her. “You heard me shouting at Wallace. I’m sorry about that. He just makes me so
mad
—”

“The van guy?” He laughed. “No, I’m speaking in more cerebral terms. You woke me up from a major funk. And if you hadn’t, I don’t know how far into that funk I would have gone.”

“I did?” That was an amazing admission. And a little unbelievable, given how she’d tried to avoid him completely in the beginning.

“You did.” He eyed her as he took another bite of sandwich. “I think it’s safe to say that for the last few weeks, I haven’t been myself. But I think I’m back in the land of the living, and I owe that, in part, to you.”

“No way. I hardly spoke to you.”

“I know.” He bumped his fist against her hand. “You very plainly pointed out what I was becoming, and I didn’t like it. So . . . I started to get my act together.”

Mia blushed self-consciously. “You mean, you didn’t smell yourself?” she asked teasingly.

A laugh burst from his lips. “No,” he said. He touched the earring dangling at her lobe. “I needed someone to tell me.”

Now she was feeling all fluttery and pleased with herself . . . but she was also curious as to why he’d been in such a major funk. “Of course now I’m dying to know why you were so . . .” She made a whirling gesture with her hand at him.

He flicked the little teardrop of her earring. “It wasn’t any one thing. Sometimes, life gets you down.”

“Right.” She knew that feeling. Life had certainly gotten her down in the last few months. Life had put her on the floor the summer of her senior year.

“A couple of things happened,” he added with a halfhearted shrug. “One of my best friends died of a drug overdose, for one.”