Losing Penny (7 page)

Penny looked down at her nightie. In the
moonlight it was completely see-through. She bunched it up in front
of her and glared at the Lurk. Pointing at the beach house with a
trembling finger, she asked, “What are you doing here?”

The Lurk looked over his shoulder. “I was
making a sandwich. What are you doing here?”

“I live here.”

“Since when?”

“Since…wait, that doesn’t matter!”

“Yeah, I think it does. I have a signed lease
for the summer.”

Penny slowly shook her head. “That’s not
possible.”

The Lurk motioned toward the house. “Do you
want to go inside? We can talk where it’s not cold.”

“No!” Penny scoffed. “I am
not
going
inside that house with
you
.”

“Are you sure?” His gaze traveled to her
chest. “You look cold, and you’re not wearing… any shoes.”

Penny straightened her shoulders and did her
best to be modest in her see-through nightie. “This is my family’s
beach house.”

“Is there a little old lady named Mae Lee in
your family?”

“How do you know my aunt?”

“I rented this house from her for the
summer,” he said in an ultra patient voice, the type school
teachers use with obtuse students.

“Are you a teacher?”

He laughed. “What does that have to do with
anything?”

“So, you are. What do you teach?”

“The Romantics and American Lit. Why?”

So, he knew Atticus as well as Emerson,
Thoreau and Twain.

“Are you sure you don’t want to have this
conversation inside?” he asked.

Penny shook her head.

The Lurk shrugged and turned away.

“Where are you going?” Penny called after his
retreating back.

He turned to face her, but continued walking
backwards. “I’m going to fix a sandwich then I’m going to bed. It’s
late.”

Penny looked down at her bare feet rooted in
the dirt. She would not put one foot in that house.

“Are you sure you don’t want sandwich? I’ve
got some gouda cheese and some croissants.”

Croissants. A butter croissant, depending on
its size, easily had two to three hundred calories. Penny shook her
head.

“Coffee?” He watched her face. “No, not me,
either. It’d keep me awake. Cocoa?”

She felt like a fly being enticed into a web.
Penny sniffed and considered her options. The closest hotel was
thirty miles away. “I didn’t see any of your things inside.” She
didn’t like how small and uncertain her voice sounded. Reminding
herself of her self-defense training, she straightened her spine,
drew herself up to her full height—easily a foot shorter than the
Lurk. He had at least a hundred pounds on her, but she had
Wolfgang. She rested her fingers on top of the dog’s head.

“I’m very tidy,” he said.

A tidy, beautiful, man offering her a
croissant with cheese. And cocoa. She did love gouda, even at a
hundred calories per ounce. And cocoa, depending on the brand, had
twenty-five calories to two hundred and forty calories, without
whipped cream. She looked into Drake’s gorgeous, smiling blue eyes.
He didn’t seem like a twenty-five calorie cup of cocoa type…or a
Lurk. He looked like bona fide whip cream—not one of those oily,
in-your-dreams Cool Whips.

There could be worse ways to die.

“I am a keeper,” she told him. “Commissioned
by my grandmother to protect the sacred text.” “Then we shall carry
it with us to my homeland,” Hans told her.

“You do not understand,” she told him with
sadness filling her eyes. “The text must stay here, on my
ancestor’s land, where my fathers are buried and our future is
born. As keeper, I too must stay.”

From
Hans and the Sunstone

Thirty minutes
later, Drake removed the cup of lukewarm cocoa from Penny’s hand.
The cream had melted to a mocha color. He set the mug on the coffee
table and tucked a quilt over her sprawled legs. The dog lying at
her feet lifted a corner of his lip in an exhausted growl, and
Penny mumbled something and nuzzled into the quilt. Drake stood
above her, feeling like an intruder in his own home.

Well, it really wasn’t his home, it belonged
to Penny’s aunt. He’d liked Mae Lee. Despite her age, she hadn’t
seemed like the sort to make such a horrible mistake. Maybe she
hadn’t. Maybe Penny was the intruder.

With this uncomfortable thought lodged in his
mind, Drake picked up the mug, rinsed it out in the sink, and
placed it in the dishwasher. He threw Penny a worried glance. He
had shown her the rental agreement and the slew of texts and e-mail
exchanges he had had with Mae Lee, which had pacified Penny, but he
really didn’t know anything about her.

He crept up the stairs to find some sort of
identification. Her things lay scattered over the floor and bed of
the red room. Drake sniffed and picked his way across the floor. He
was careful not to step on her things, but something smashed
beneath his shoe anyway. A bottle of pills. Antival, for anxiety.
May cause drowsiness. He tried to push the plastic bottle back into
cylinder shape, but the lid no longer fit. He placed the pills on
the nightstand and sat down on the bed, wondering why Penny needed
benzos.

Maybe her purse would tell him. Her purse was
as jumbled as her things scattered over the bedroom floor.
Receipts, candy wrappers, tampons. Geesh. Finally, he found her
driver’s license. This couldn’t be her. This woman had strawberry
blond hair and an extra fifty pounds. Penny Lee—the name and face
rang a bell. He knew her somehow. She shared Mae’s last name, but
it was more than that. He was sure they had met. They were the same
age and she had said that she used to spend her summers here.

Curious, Drake headed into the kitchen and
turned on his laptop. Penny didn’t stir as his computer whirred on.
Since he’d been upstairs, she’d curled up onto the sofa. A tiny
thread of drool stained the throw pillow beneath her head. He
pulled a blanket around her shoulders.

Drake typed her name into the search engine
and was instantly rewarded with thousands of hits. He scanned over
her blog,
Losing Penny and Pounds
. Penny, the chubby,
strawberry blond Penny, had chronicled her weight loss journey
online, and now she had thousands of followers and her own cooking
show,
Penny’s Pantry
. That was how he knew her.

Last year, shortly after the Magdalena
debacle and long after Blair, when he’d been in such a funk, he’d
taken to watching hours and hours of The Food Channel. He loved
Penny’s Pantry
. But what was she doing here outside of her
pantry looking nothing like the Penny the world knew and loved,
especially when she was supposed to be traveling the world?

He did some more online research and finally
found something he could use. Smiling, he closed the computer and
went to lie on his bed. For once his imagination brewed over
something non-Viking related.

Drake had an amazing idea that had nothing to
do with Hans and his sunstone.

For a good night’s sleep, say no to caffeine.
Some people can drink a coke at 10 p.m. and still fall right to
sleep, but if you’re an insomniac, it’s just not worth the risk.
Plus, if you do eliminate or cut back on caffeine, your body will
become more sensitive to it. And don’t forget that caffeine lurks
in chocolate and many teas.

From
Losing Penny and Pounds

Penny woke to the
smell of French toast and bacon. How could she have fallen asleep
with a strange man in the house? She remembered the medication.
Feeling isolated and frightened, she had taken the pills sometime
before dinner. Penny sat up to watch the man in the kitchen. He had
an ugly, fat and purple lip. Thank you, kickboxing class. He wore a
giant lobster apron and bent over a pan sizzling with snapping
grease.

“Good morning,” he called out to her.

Penny ran a tongue over her fuzzy teeth and
tried to formulate a game plan. Of course, the prudent thing to do
was to contact her aunt who happened to be on a transatlantic
cruise, but Mae’s phone wouldn’t work at sea. Penny could e-mail
Mae, but the police had warned Penny off e-mail and social media
sites to help her avoid the Lurk. Penny cleared her throat.

The man slid a perfectly formed slice of
French toast onto a plate and topped it with a pat of butter and
few fresh raspberries. He smiled as he watched her eyes widen.

“You recognize your own creation,” he
said.

“French toast and berry butter,” she
breathed. “BFDF.”

Confusion crossed his face.

“Before diet food,” she clarified.

“Aren’t there too many F’s?” he asked,
looking down at the plate.

“No. If anything there should be more
F-words.” Penny planted her feet on the ground and straightened her
spine. Even if she didn’t know this man, even if she didn’t know
where she was going to live, she knew better than to eat French
toast and berry butter.

He laughed. “I knew I liked you.”

“You know who I am.” She watched him and the
dreaded plate of food cross the room. He sat down beside her and
the sofa cushions sunk beneath his weight, pulling her his way. She
tightened her grip on the quilt and edged away.

“If it helps, I never would have guessed if I
hadn’t found your driver’s license.”

“That was rude—going through my things.”

He shrugged. “You would have done the
same.”

Penny lifted one shoulder to acknowledge this
simple truth. “Now that you know who I am, who are you?”

“Just one of your humble followers.”

She flinched, suddenly uncomfortable, and he
noticed. “I’m not your stalker,” he said. “I’m actually a very
decent guy. I would never try to frighten you.”

“You know about the stalker.” Penny pulled
the comforter around her shoulders. “And I still don’t know what
you’re doing here. I don’t even know your name.” He had told her,
and she had read it on the rental agreement, but his name didn’t
really matter, because he had to leave. She didn’t have anywhere
else to go, but he probably did. He looked like the kind of guy
that anyone would love to have as a houseguest. He probably had
parents, siblings, and tons of friends, so if he didn’t have his
own place, he could stay with one of them.

“I’m Drake Islington, remember?” He set down
the plate of food, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out his
wallet. He handed her his driver’s license, his ID from Western
Washington University, and a season pass to a theater called the
Rose Arbor Repertory. “I teach American Lit, and I’m also a
ghostwriter—”

“A ghostwriter?”

“I’ve been hired to write Don Marx’s
biography by his children.”

“Melinda and Trevor hired you?”

Drake’s eyebrows lifted. “You know
Melinda?”

Penny swallowed and nodded. “I used to spend
my summers here with my aunt.”

“Were you friends with Melinda?” he asked,
and his voice said her answer mattered, but Penny didn’t know why
it would.

She shrugged. “Not really. We were…” on
different planets. She cleared her throat.

“But you two know each other?” he
pressed.

“I know her, but I’m pretty sure she never
noticed me.”

“Good.” Drake’s shoulders relaxed. “I have an
idea, but you might not like it.”

Penny frowned at him as he handed her the
plate of French toast. She shook her head.

“Are you sure?” he asked, looking down at the
food. “I followed the recipe exactly—it’s fabulous.”

“Oh, it is fabulous. But remember, fabulous
is just another F-word.”

“I made it for you.” He sounded hurt.

“You’re trying to fatten me up.”

“Don’t be silly. I like the new Penny, not
that I didn’t like the old—”

“The heavy Penny.”

“I didn’t say that.” Drake swallowed and then
balanced the plate in his lap. “I guess I’m trying to butter you
up.”

“Why?”

Drake picked up the fork and cut into the
French toast. Satisfaction flashed across his face. “I have an
idea.”

“You mentioned that. You also said that I
wouldn’t like it.”

“But you might. You might like it a lot.”

There was a light tapping at the screen door.
“Hello? Anyone home?”

Melinda.

Penny sat frozen, struck with horror as
Melinda breezed into the room. Drake hurriedly set down the plate
and fork and stood as if to protect Penny. Melinda had been her
neighbor every summer for nearly twenty years, but she had never
spoken to Penny. Melinda’s beauty and sparkling confidence had
always dumbstruck Penny. Next to Melinda, Penny had felt about as
witty and charming as a flatulent elephant.

She hadn’t seen Melinda in years, but surely
Melinda would recognize her. Melinda’s gaze fastened on Penny’s
face with disbelief, and something like horror, before her eyes
flashed to Drake. “Oh! What happened to your face?”

Drake touched his fat lip and smiled faintly.
“Domestic violence, I’m afraid.”

“Do-mes-tic—” Melinda slowly drew out the
three syllables.

Drake nodded slowly and glanced at Penny.

She frowned at him, trying to read him,
trying to predict what he would say next.

“This is my wife—”

“Your wife?” Melinda asked at the same time
Penny asked, “Your what?”

“My wife, Magdalena.”

Hurt and confusion filled Melinda’s eyes. “I
thought you had a thing with Blair.”

“I did. First there was Blair—I was with
Blair for a very long time,” he said to Melinda, but also to Penny.
“And then, briefly, Magdalena.”

Melinda crossed her arms. “So you’re not
together now.”

“Oh no,” Penny said, standing.

Drake laughed. “Well, obviously, we are.” He
turned to Penny. “We’re both here, right now.”

“And she
hit
you?” Melinda talked as
if Penny wasn’t there.