Suddenly in Love (Lake Haven#1) (4 page)

“Be my guest,” he said easily. “And when they get here, you can explain what you’re doing in my mother’s house. Just out of curiosity, I’m going to try this again.
What
are you doing here? Other than trying to brain someone with a frying pan?”

It took a moment for those words to sink completely into Mia’s brain. This guy with the glassy gorgeous blue eyes was Nancy Yates’s
son
?
Nancy
had a son? Nancy, in her palazzo pants and the gray-streaked hair in a ponytail had a son who looked like a bum?

No, that couldn’t be. First, Nancy would have mentioned him.
By the way, my son is visiting. By the way, he’s a street bum.

The bum waited for an answer as his coffee brewed. He seemed not the least bit self-conscious about his appearance. Mia was self-conscious for him. So much so, in fact, she couldn’t look away.

He noticed her looking at him and his expression changed from mildly annoyed to definitely pissed. “Ah, I get it,” he said sharply, and shifted toward her. Mia instinctively leaned back, ready to employ rusty karate moves learned at the age of eight. “Yeah, go ahead,” he said, gesturing to himself. “You want to touch this?
Do
it.”

There was a coldness in his navy-blue eyes, a strange look of resignation that was so weird, and so out of place. “The last thing I want to do is
touch
you.”

He looked skeptical, the pompous prick. Maybe, Mia thought wildly, he didn’t know how bad he looked. He moved again, and Mia bumped up against the kitchen island. But Nancy’s son was already there, and he planted his hands against the island on either side of her, his body dwarfing hers. He stared down at her with those incongruently gorgeous eyes and said, “What do you want, baby? If you want to play, go ahead. I’m game.”

“You cannot be
serious
,” she said, her voice full of amazement. Maybe he was handsome beneath this outer layer of hobo, and maybe he didn’t always smell like a sock forgotten in the bottom of a gym bag, but he had to be kidding. She leaned away from him. As far back as she could. “This may come as a shock to your seriously fat ego, but you are absolutely the
last
person I’d want to
play
with.” She put her hand up between them to stop him from leaning any closer.

He smirked a little, and his gaze settled on her mouth. “You sure about that?”

Mia snorted. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. Now would you please step back?” she asked, gesturing for him to move. He didn’t move immediately, and Mia couldn’t help wrinkling her nose and turning her head. Her gaze fell to his arm; he had the dark stain of a tattoo that went around his pronounced bicep. It looked like Sanskrit.

Nancy’s son chuckled low at her obvious disgust, and Mia could feel it reverberate in her. But he pushed away from her and turned back to his coffee. “How’d you get in here, anyway?”

“
How?
The door!” she said, wondering now if he was slow.

“Just walked right through it, huh?”

“No, I cartwheeled through it, I was so happy to be here.”

He glanced up, looking almost as if he believed it.
Oh, for the love of Pete
. “Look,” Mia said, “there’s obviously been some misunderstanding here.”

“Fantastic,” he said, and opened up a sugar bowl and turned it practically upside down into his coffee, adding enough to trigger an instant diabetic coma. “Go ahead, clue me in.”

“I’m
supposed
to be here. I’m working for your mom.” She grabbed up a brochure from John Beverly Home Interiors and Landscape Design on the kitchen counter and held it up to him.

Something changed in his expression. He closed his eyes.
“Shit,”
he said. “The
decorator
.”

He might as well have said
the grim reaper
. A bit of heat rose up in Mia’s cheeks. He made no move to take the brochure she was holding out, so she laid it back on the counter. “I’m not the designer. My Aunt Bev is.”

His gaze flicked over her again, assessing her, lingering a little on her tights and boots. “Okay.”

“O-
kay,
” she shot back.
Okay, okay
—what did
okay
mean?

“So what are you if you’re not the designer?”

“Her . . . her helper,” Mia said with a shrug.

“Ah, so
you’re
the decorator’s helper. Well then,” he said, and swept his arm toward the rest of the house. “Knock yourself out.” He picked up his coffee and slurped loudly.

“Are you high?” she demanded.

“Nope. But I’ve had a couple of drinks.” He paused and squinted at the
window a moment. “More than a couple if we’re going to add them up.”

Well that certainly explained it. It was hardly past noon.
Summer people
.

He put the coffee down, and opened the fridge. “Are the cookies any good?”

Mia’s face flushed with embarrassment. She abruptly moved around the kitchen island and reached for her messenger bag, preparing to make a quick exit, maybe even walk down the road with the hope of meeting Wallace when he came to pick her up. Go anywhere but here with this weird guy with the blue eyes.

He was still studying the contents of the fridge. Now that she knew who he was, she was revising her assessment of him. She could see that he actually looked unsettlingly hip in a very dirty way. His clothes were expensive. But he looked like he’d stepped off the plane from the West Coast and then gotten roughed up in a dark alley. Maybe that was where he’d had his few drinks. She wondered what kind of girl he went for. Stripper?

“What happened, Chatty Cathy, cat got your tongue now?” he asked, and looked over his shoulder at her. “I asked about the cookies.”

Mia snapped out of her rumination. “I don’t know.”

“Then you should have one,” he said, sounding magnanimous. The smartass practically tossed the plate of cookies onto the kitchen island. He then tossed sandwich rolls, cold cuts, cheese, and mustard onto the island, too. “So what’s your name, Aunt Bev’s helper?”

“Mia.” She folded her arms. “What’s yours?”

He arched a brow and gave her the slightest hint of a wry smile. “Like you don’t know.”

The
ego
on this guy! “How would I know? Your mother didn’t tell me you were here. I didn’t even know she
had
a son. Believe me, if I’d known you were here, I would have . . .”

“What would you have done, Aunt Bev’s helper?” he asked, sounding bored.

“I would have waited outside.”

He grunted his opinion of that. “Brennan.”

“Sorry?”

“My name. It’s Brennan.”

That was a summer person name if Mia had ever heard one. Whatever happened to Tom and Harry?

He turned back to the fridge and opened it, holding it open with his foot as he put the sandwich rolls inside. “Now that formal introductions have been made, are you going to just hang around? Maybe you want me to make you a sandwich.” He picked up the package of cold cuts and opened it.

“No thanks—”

“Yeah, that wasn’t really an offer.” He let the fridge door close. “I don’t know what arrangement you have with my mom, but I’m guessing it’s not standing around watching me make sandwiches or swinging pans at people’s heads.”

Mia had never wanted to take a swing at someone as badly as she did right now. She swiped up her bag. “I’m just going to do what I need to do here and get out,” she said tightly.

“That is a
great
idea,” he said.

Unbelievable
. Mia rolled her eyes and marched out of the kitchen before she said something that would lose Aunt Bev the job.

Four

Brennan was in a foul mood, especially once he realized who the woman was with the honey eyes and the auburn hair and the smell of spring around her. Because he didn’t need a woman banging around the house. He needed—
really
needed—peace and quiet. Solitude.
Silence.
He didn’t need any more colors than those that were already splashed haphazardly around the interior of this goddamn house. He especially didn’t need colors wrapped around the very delectable curves of a woman’s body. He needed time to think and ponder. He did
not
need smiles or bright eyes, goddammit.

This was exactly why he’d sworn off women . . . Well. That resolution was beginning to wear a little thin. He wanted sex. He
needed
sex. But he didn’t need or want women. Needing or wanting anyone was a waste of time, and women especially were too complicated, too needy. And sometimes, too fucking vindictive if things didn’t go their way.

Brennan had also sworn off booze, but he’d had to reconsider that out of necessity because of his resolution to swear off women. He had to do something to dull the lust.

Yeah, well, obviously he was going to have to redouble his resolve.

Brennan had no idea how many beers he’d had by the time his mother
returned home, but when she finally pulled into the drive, he was drunk enough to be irritated with the world in general and her in particular.

She seemed very pleased with herself when she swept in and carelessly dropped several shopping bags on the kitchen table. “Do my eyes deceive me?” she asked jubilantly. “My son is
aliv
e
!” She threw her arms around Brennan, rising up on her toes to kiss his cheek before she dropped her arms and swanned past him.

“You went into the city?” Brennan asked, looking at the bags.

“Yes, I did!” She walked to the wine cooler and bent over to have a look at the bottles inside. “Such a beautiful day for it, too. How was
your
day, sweetie?”

“Not as good as yours, apparently.” Brennan moved her shopping bags around, all of them emblazoned with logos likes Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman. His mother could spend money, and she especially liked to spend it when she was trying to get his attention. Brennan wouldn’t be surprised if there was ten thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise in those bags.

“At least you’re out of bed,” she said. “And while the sun is still up! We’re making progress!”

Jesus, he hadn’t lived with his mother in seventeen years and had forgotten how annoying she could be. “Mom,” he said wearily. “I work late. I sleep late. You
know
that. So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t send Magda up at the crack of dawn with her industrial vacuum cleaner.”

His mother laughed as if he were trying to be funny. He was not.

“Magda does like to get an early start on some days,” she said breezily as she selected a bottle of wine. “Now, don’t look at me like that, Brennan. Am I supposed to tell her to come back at three o’clock in the afternoon when you’ve managed to drag yourself out of bed?”

He didn’t sleep until three, but he wasn’t going to argue with her. He was an experienced hand on that front—it led to nowhere.

She opened a drawer and rummaged around for a corkscrew.

The beers weren’t doing Brennan any favors on the patience front, and he halfheartedly attempted to tamp down his irritation. But was it really asking too much to let him decompress here, in his mother’s new home, away from the world? In the house that he’d bought for her? This had been a rough year for him, a rough awakening, and he didn’t need his mother’s judgments or her timetables for when he should pick himself up and dive back into the world.

He sat on one of the kitchen table chairs, his weight causing it to sway a little. “So what’s with the girl?” he asked curtly.

“What girl?” His mother gave him a feigned smile of innocence as she put the corkscrew to the wine bottle.

“Mom.”

“Ooh,”
she said, as if a light had just dawned. “You mean the one from John Beverly Home Interiors.”

“Yeah, that one. I thought she was a damn groupie. I thought she’d climbed the fence.”

“A
groupie
!” She laughed roundly. “Brennan, for heaven’s sake. Not every girl you meet is a
groupie
.”

Easy for her to say. His mother had not had the pleasure of finding an inebriated woman sitting on the toilet like he had at his home in LA. Or women hanging around the door of his hotel room. Or women appearing like magic on his tour bus offering to do things to his body.

“She’s really different than the rest of the East Beach crowd, I think. Not so resort-y, like the rest of them,” his mother said. “She has a strange sense of fashion, but I
like
that, don’t you? It’s refreshing. You wouldn’t believe how many girls are wandering around New York in those desperately short shorts and cropped tops. Like that’s a look. But Mia? She’s unique and she’s
adorable
.”

Brennan didn’t know if he would ever use the word
adorable
to describe anything. But he could agree, at a distance, that the woman was appealing in a very unconventional way. He couldn’t quite put his finger on how, exactly. She wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t a sex kitten or a ball-busting model. And while Brennan knew absolutely nothing about women’s fashion, she had been dressed in a very strange combination of prints and colors. He honestly didn’t know what she was, besides argumentative. That was all beside the point, anyway. “Why was she even here? She had the run of the house while you were gone. She could have taken something or broken into your computer.”

“She would never!” His mother laughed, as if the notion of a stranger stealing was absurd. “I know people, and she’s not like that. She was here because we are going to renovate this musty old house, remember?”

There was the liberal use of the pronoun
we
again.

“Oh, I remember,” he said drily. Brennan had paid three million for this house, and had agreed to pay another million for the renovation. And that was on top of his mother’s impulsive shopping sprees. Sometimes he wondered if his mother understood how hard it was to come by the sums of money he routinely paid out on her behalf. Brennan was generous with his mother, and he didn’t begrudge her a cent of it. She’d provided for him when there was no support from an absent father, managing to keep a roof over their head and food on the table while working two jobs, then adding a third job to pay for his guitar and music theory lessons when he’d developed an interest as a boy. So yeah, he was happy to do his part for her now. He just wished she had a healthier respect for the money she blew through.

“And besides,
you
were here, sweetie. You would have kept her from making off with the awful fixtures in this house, right?”

Don’t engage
. “I’m not the best babysitter of workers. And didn’t we agree you wouldn’t start that project until the end of summer? You agreed to give me time and space for a few weeks, Mom.”

“Well,” she said, her voice lilting. “
You
agreed. I didn’t. Not really.”

“What are you talking about? You said—”

“I can’t live in a house that looks like this. I mean, my God, there’s a Buddha in the sunroom that has
plaid wallpaper
! Who
does
that? The interior of this house is a train wreck, and I can’t live like this.”

Brennan groaned. He ran his hands over his face and scrubbed his forehead with his fingers. His skin felt gritty to him. “I get it, Mom, the house needs to be redone. I’m all for it—but I need a break. I need a
break
,” he said again, and abruptly slammed his fist down on the kitchen table, startling his mother and himself. “From you, from work, from music, from renovations, from strange women in the kitchen when all I want is a cup of coffee! So just . . . just lay off of it for now, will you? Will you do that for me?”

His mother looked slightly wounded. “Here’s the thing, Bren,” she said, speaking coolly, formally. “You’ve
had
your break. You’ve been here a month and all you’ve done is buy yourself a new car and sleep and drink. Am I supposed to tiptoe around you forever? Am I supposed to pretend your manager isn’t calling every other day? What made you lose your way? Is it Jenna?”

“Jenna?”
Brennan struggled to keep from exploding. He wanted to put his fist through a wall, rip the fridge out of its cubby and hurl it across the room. His anger—undefined, always simmering-below-the-surface anger—was mixing toxically with the beer. “I’m not asking you to pretend or to tiptoe or to psychoanalyze me, I’m asking you not to renovate right
now
.”

“It’s not going to bother you,” she insisted.

She was trying to manipulate him, but she was no match for the many people in his life who had sought to manipulate him. Managers, producers, bandmates. “Do you want me to leave? Is that what you want? Because I will.”

“Don’t be so touchy,” she said. “Why would I want you to leave? You’re my son, I love you, I love having you near me, and God knows that I haven’t seen much of you in years. And you obviously need your mother now more than ever. I don’t like how you sleep all day and go on benders,” she said, gesturing at the empty beer bottles on the kitchen bar. “I don’t like how you ignore phone calls that must be important, and I don’t like the way you are hiding from the world. That’s not you, Brennan. You’re the strongest, most determined, smartest, most gifted person I have ever known. But look at you!”

“I
am
hiding!” he shouted. “I am hiding from managers and bands and paparazzi and everything else. Jesus, I’m thirty-three years old—do I really need to explain myself to you?”

“Hey!”
she said hotly. “Watch how you speak to me. I am your mother and I am worried about you. I earned that right when I gave birth to you.”

Brennan sighed. It was like talking to a rock. “Yeah, well the only thing wrong with me today is that I’m starving.”

His mother pressed her lips together and walked stiffly to the table. “I was going to wait for a better time to do this, but . . .” She reached in her purse and withdrew a brochure and handed it to him. Brennan glanced at it. Valley Vista Recovery and Rehabilitation Center. He didn’t understand it at first, didn’t get the hint. But when he did, he sagged back in his chair, away from it. “What the hell is that?”

“Exactly what you think it is.”

He stared at her. “Are you kidding, Mom? You think after what happened to Trey that I could possibly be into drugs?”

“No, of course not!” she said, sounding slightly wounded. “I know you better than that. But you’re drinking too much.”

“So
what
?” Brennan exploded, this time unable to keep his anger in check. He shoved against the table and out of the chair and moved away from her. “I’m a grown man! I can drink a river if I want!”

His mother did the wrong thing—she gave him a patient, motherly smile. “Brennan . . . don’t you see? You’re drinking too much because you’re depressed.”

“Don’t even try,” he snapped. “I’m not
depressed
. I’m tired. I’m
exhausted
,” he said, sweeping his arm wide. “Do you have any idea what my life has been like?” His life had hit a wall head-on, and he couldn’t seem to peel himself off of it. No one could peel him off of it.

The world knew him as Everett Alden, the lead singer and cofounder of Tuesday’s End, the chart-topping band of the last decade. Brennan Everett Alden had been Brennan’s name for the first twelve years of his life. But then his mother had married Noel Yates and Noel had adopted him, and Brennan had become Brennan Yates. Brennan Yates was a nobody in the music industry, but Everett Alden was about as red-hot as rock stars came. And right now, at this point in his life, for a few weeks, Brennan desperately needed to be nobody but Brennan Yates.

So what if he was a little depressed? He’d just finished a 150-city tour on the heels of a new album that had gone platinum. He’d ended a yearlong relationship with Jenna O’Neil, one of the hottest young actresses filling movie theaters, because she couldn’t keep her pants up in the company of her costar—a fact that was displayed on every magazine on every newsstand, lest Brennan forget. He’d dealt with a batshit crazy forty-year-old woman who kept breaking into his house in LA and stealing his boxers. He’d had a major artistic disagreement with Chance, the guitarist of the band, and Brennan’s best friend since they were two fourteen-year-old outcasts in a California middle school. They’d formed Tuesday’s End in Chance’s garage. And oh yeah, the big one, the topping on his cake: their other best friend, Trey—who had been there in the beginning, too, who had been their drummer until his heroin addiction got so bad they couldn’t rely on him—had overdosed and died a few months ago.

Or committed suicide. Depended on who you listened to.

Brennan had tried to reach him, had tried to pull him out of his own ass, but Trey was so messed up. He’d flown out to Palm Springs to see Trey the day before he was found dead. Trey had just come out of his third stint in rehab and he swore he was clean. He’d looked gaunt and a little yellow. He’d said, “Look at all we’ve got, Bren,” and had cast his arms around his big house.

“We’ve done pretty well for ourselves,” Brennan had agreed.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying
look
at what we’ve got. We’re at the top of the world. So . . .” He’d leaned forward, peering at Brennan. “Is this all there is?”

“Buddy, I don’t—”

Trey had grabbed his wrist and gripped it tightly. “No, man, I need to know. Is
this
all there
is
?”

The next day, Trey was dead.

I don’t know, Trey. I don’t know. Maybe it is. Maybe this exhaustion I feel is all that there is at the end of the day.

So yeah, Brennan was tapped out, and okay, he was a little depressed. He’d had enormous success, beyond his wildest dreams. But somehow the grueling road tours, the selfish beauties, the constant stream of women wanting to suck his dick, the artistic differences with someone whose opinion he highly valued, and the loss of a good friend to drugs were not exactly how he’d imagined his career unfolding.