Suddenly in Love (Lake Haven#1) (5 page)

Brennan didn’t know who he was anymore. He didn’t know where he was supposed to be going with all of this. He couldn’t even say with any confidence what sort of music he wanted to make at this stage of his life. He needed some peace and quiet away from it all to
think
.

He needed to be here, in this little town on a peaceful lake, in his mother’s house, because no one here knew Brennan Yates.

But his mother seemed determined to get deep into his business. “Think about how much you sleep,” she said, apparently thinking his silence was an invitation to keep talking. “Think how much you’ve been drinking lately, how you have no enthusiasm for
anything
. Not music, not girls. You aren’t working—when is the last time you picked up a guitar?” she stubbornly continued. “I get it, I do,” she said, pressing a hand to her heart. “I was
very
depressed when you were born.”

Brennan snorted. “Gee, thanks.”

“And there have been other times, if you want to know the truth. But
you
, Brennan! You’ve never been depressed. You’ve always been my rock. You’ve had such a brilliant career and a life I could never have imagined for you and I am scared to death you’re going to let it all slip away because you’re depressed. Your father was like that, but he—”

“Don’t bring him up,” Brennan said curtly.

His mother sighed heavily. “Will we
ever
be allowed to talk about him?”

God, how could she gloss over it? He felt a painful prick every time she mentioned his dad, like an old wound that appeared to be healed over, but was easily opened with the wrong move. “I don’t know, Mom. Seems like the time to talk about him was before he died.”

She colored. She sniffed. “All I want to do is help,” she said.

“Don’t help me, Mom,” Brennan said. “I came here because I thought, for once, I could have a little refuge from all the bullshit. I thought this would be the one goddamn place on earth I could be
me
. Not Everett.
Brennan
. But you’ve been dogging me since the day I showed up.”

“That’s not true. I know you must be hurting. I know you loved Jenna—”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about!” he said angrily. “Mother, listen to me. I was not in love with Jenna. I may have loved her at some point,
maybe
, but I doubt it, and if I did, it was a very long time ago. I haven’t felt anything but resentment for months. I knew what she was doing. I knew she was using me for publicity and sleeping with her costars. And you know what, Mom? I could have ended it last fall, but it was a hell of a lot easier just to finish the fucking tour and then dump her. I’m glad to be rid of her.”

Her eyes widened with surprise. She chewed on the inside of her mouth a moment as she considered him. “Then what about your music?” she asked, her voice softer. “What about the gift God has given you and no one else? The world is waiting. Your
band
is waiting.”

Brennan suddenly felt bone-weary. As if he’d been carrying a boulder on his back for a very long time. “The world and the band can go to hell,” he said low. He swiped up his beer and took a long swig.

The truth was that Brennan didn’t know about his music. Chance and he weren’t seeing eye to eye on the artistic direction. Chance and the band’s manager, Gary, were angling for more commercial music. They’d included some on the last album, against Brennan’s wishes, and the album had gone platinum. Give the masses what they want, Chance said. But Brennan couldn’t feel it—it wasn’t in him. He truly felt heart-blocked from that sort of music. He felt truly heart-blocked in general. That style of music felt like a sellout, a moral corruption of his soul. His music—it was all he had when he got right down to it. It was the only thing in his life he could depend on, the only thing he could completely trust. Without it . . . was this all there was?

His mother reached for his hand and covered it with hers. “I know you’ll figure it out, honey. But maybe you need some help.”

She didn’t understand the stakes for him. Brennan needed help, all right. But it wasn’t the help of a doctor and antidepressants. It was more spiritual than that. He needed help finding his path. He pulled his hand free of hers and turned away. “I’m good, Mom. I’m just asking you—nicely, now—to postpone the renovations a couple of months,” he said tightly. “I don’t need people in my space right now.”

He could see the tension in his mother’s jaw as she poured a healthy serving of white wine. She was biting her tongue. “Sure, honey. If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want.”

She shrugged and drank from the glass. “Okay then. No renovations inside the house for a couple of months.”

“Thank you.” Brennan moved to the fridge and withdrew three beers. He grabbed a bag of chips from the counter and walked out. He ignored the muttering he heard under his mother’s breath, and made his way upstairs to his room.

Maybe he needed to get out of here, go someplace overseas, away from his mother and the tabloids. That wasn’t a bad idea, he thought as he took the stairs two at a time. Someplace remote where he could molt in peace. A tropical place, maybe. With a girl. Any girl. He could use some good, wall-banging sex about now.

Brennan walked into his slightly reeking wreck of a room and paused, looking around.

He had taken the second master suite with a stunning view of the back lawn and Lake Haven on one end, and the front drive on the other. Too bad the walls were painted lime green and the bath was done in pink tile. He threw the bag of chips on a bed that had gone unmade for two weeks now, put down his beers next to an army of empty bottles on the dresser and the nearby windowsill. He walked past his guitar and paused, looking down at it.

His mother was right. He couldn’t remember when he’d last picked up an instrument of any kind. Madison Square Garden?

Brennan picked up his guitar now and took a seat on the edge of the bed, balanced it on his thigh, and struck a minor chord.

Since a time he could no longer recall, he’d had the ability to hear a chord and instantly hear a melody in his head. He could easily imagine the bare bones of a song, the chorus, the bridge. But in the last two months, he’d imagined . . . nothing.

Everett Alden, the lead singer of Tuesday’s End, heard nothing.

Brennan put his guitar aside and fell onto the bed beside the bag of chips. He closed his eyes, saw himself on stage, heard the melody of one of their greatest hits, “Dream Maker,” as an acoustic number in his head. He’d written every bit of that song—the melody, the lyrics. Chance had tweaked the rhythm of it, but mostly, it was Brennan’s creation. It had stayed at the top of the charts for more than a year. He was the architect of that massive hit, and now, he couldn’t even dredge up a few chords.

Yeah, he was going to get the fuck out of here.

He was going to find his laptop in this mess and Google the Canary Islands. He turned his head on the pillow and looked across the room. He didn’t know where the laptop was, actually.

He’d do it tomorrow.

Brennan sat up and looked down at his disgusting bed. It just seemed like everything required so much
effort
. He drank more beer, brooded more. He wrote a few things in a notebook, tried to read.

He didn’t know when sleep drifted over him, but it was the sound of a buzz saw that startled him awake. He sat up with a jolt; weak sunlight was drifting in through the windows. His room smelled like dirty socks and beer, and he blinked, looking at the clock next to the bed. It was seven in the morning. He shoved his hair out of his eyes and stumbled to the windows. Below him, a ground crew was fanning out around the thicket his mother was determined to cut back.

And there was Mom, pointing to things to be cut and edged and generally made loud.

Just to annoy him.

Five

Aunt Bev had called at o-dark-thirty this morning, and it had scared Mia to death. She’d assumed something had happened to Grandpa, but it turned out that it was nothing more alarming than some of the pictures Mia had t
aken at the old Ross house had gone missing in Aunt Bev’s cluttered office.

“I know what happened,” Aunt Bev said. “That goofy kid at Cranston’s
screwed it up. He’s one pair of boxers short of a full load of laundry.”

“I don’t think that’s a saying—”

“So here’s what you do, kiddo,” Aunt Bev said, pushing on. “Go ahead and stop by Cranston’s and ask that goofy kid to check again.”

“Okay, but Cranston’s doesn’t open until nine—”

“Just do it as quick as you can. I need to get this bid up to the Ross house as soon as possible. Oh, and pick up some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups while you’re there.”

Quite honestly, before this gig, Mia had never truly appreciated what a head case Aunt Bev was. Sure, Bev’s daughter, Skylar, had always complained about her, but Skylar was one of those troubled teens who ran away and smoked dope and generally could not be trusted to be accurate about anything. Once, Skylar had breezed in unannounced to Mia’s place in Brooklyn. Mia hadn’t even known Skylar was in the city; the last she’d heard, her cousin had taken off in the night with some guy she’d met in Black Springs and had ended up on the West Coast. That was Skylar, always taking off for something bigger and better, preferably something that didn’t require her to work. Inevitably, she had to come home when the bottom fell out of whatever scheme she was involved in and try again.

She’d shown up in Brooklyn with an overnight bag and a joint that she’d smoked at the open window. “My mom is bananas,” she’d said. “She’s disorganized and thinks everyone else is to blame. And I’m an easy target for her.”

“Really?” Mia had asked, shaking her head to Skylar’s offer of the marijuana. Mia never went near drugs after what happened to her that summer. It was one of those family stories that everyone tacitly agreed not to mention again, but Mia had never felt the same about Skylar since.

“I know, I know, Mom seems so nice,” Skylar had sighed. “And she runs a very successful business, so you wouldn’t think she’s that disorganized. But she’s a mess.” Skylar had lifted her chin and blown smoke out the window. “She drives me crazy.”

The next morning, Skylar was gone, off to bigger and better things.

Turned out, Skylar was right—Aunt Bev was a little nutty. For the last two days, she’d been locked in her office at the storefront, finishing up the bid for the Ross house. Mia had heard nothing but the whir of the adding machine and Aunt Bev muttering under her breath.

Mia had manned the counter. Which meant she’d been reading a lot of magazines. It was excruciatingly boring.

Anyway, Mia got herself up and made her way to Cranston’s. As the kid with the bobbing Adam’s apple and big brown eyes went in the back to look for the missing photos, Mia perused the magazine rack. “William Steps out behind Kate’s Back!”
screamed the
National Enquirer
, complete with a picture of the Duchess of Cambridge looking like she might be ill at any moment. “Why Everett Alden Disappeared from the Alternative Rock Scene,”
said the top of the cover of
Rolling Stone
. Mia couldn’t see the picture that accompanied that headline because in the slot below it was
Us Weekly
, and Chris Pine was on the cover. “Chris Revealed,” the title read.

The kid returned. “There’s nothing back there,” he said. “I put them all in the envelope. You were there.”

“Yes, I know. Just checking.”

“Need anything else?” he asked, rubbing his hand under his nose.

She grabbed the
Us Weekly
and put it down next to a pack of peanut butter cups. If she had to spend another afternoon writing the prices of decorative items in calligraphy onto thick vellum tags, she was going to need a reward, and that reward was a revealing look at Chris Pine, thank you very much.

She walked down the street with her purchases to the John Beverly
storefront wearing a knit hat and oversized sunglasses. She had hardly stuck
her oxford shoe in the door when Aunt Bev was rushing at her, red-faced.

“You will not believe what happened,” she snapped, taking the plastic bag from Mia’s hand. “That woman is certifiable! You know she loved
everything
,” she said angrily, one hand swinging freely, punctuating her speech. “
Everything!
And then she tells me, well not right now.”

“What?
Who
?
” Mia asked, grabbing her magazine before Aunt Bev disappeared with it.

“Who! Nancy Yates, that’s who! You know what she’s done, don’t you?
She’s hired
Diva Interiors
! But I have spent a
lot
of time working on this,
and so have you, Mia! She said she
loved
this, she
loved
that, she wanted to
do it all—but not now. Not now! What the hell does that mean,
not no
w
?”

“I guess it means not—”

“You don’t think I’m giving in, do you?” Aunt Bev all but shouted. “No sir! First of all, I told Nancy to at least wait and see what I could propose to do and for how much. And I told her that you lost the dining room photos—”

“
I
didn’t lose—”

“And that you’d be up there first thing this morning to take them again, and that by the close of business tomorrow, she would have a proposal to turn that pile of shit into a show palace! Okay, so
go
. Go get those photos! Take them on your cell phone and I’ll print them here.”

“I don’t have a car—”

“Wallace will take you. Wallace!” she bellowed toward the back. “Take Mia to the Ross house!”

Mia heard a groan from the back. Aunt Bev tore into her package of peanut butter cups as she stalked off toward her office.

“Well come on then, toots, I don’t have all day!” Wallace shouted from somewhere behind the carpet samples.

Wallace Pogue, the self-proclaimed Bitch of East Beach, was an interior designer. He was also a floral designer of some repute. He made such stunning arrangements with artificial flowers that the shop’s clients often ordered them to be shipped to their Manhattan lofts. Wallace had a thriving career in East Beach, and yet, he’d been very obviously perturbed that Mia had come to work for Aunt Bev. Mia had been forewarned by Aunt Bev that Wallace was in a snit about her working in the shop. She’d confided to Mia that he felt displaced by her unexpected arrival on the scene. “It’s just been the two of us for so long, you know,” she said. “And he can be kind of sensitive.”

That was an understatement.

Mia thought Wallace was being ridiculous. He knew very well Mia had very reluctantly moved home to live with her parents and had very reluctantly accepted the offer to work in her aunt’s shop until she found her footing.

To make matters worse, Wallace had been tasked with driving her up to the Ross house and picking her up when Aunt Bev couldn’t. And Wallace was not one to let his emotions stew. He liked to release them to the wild the moment they popped up in him.

The motor on the shop van was already running when Mia walked outside. “Hurry
up
,” he said as Mia put her messenger bag on the bench behind the passenger seat. “I have a
lot
to do today, which does not include driving
you
.”

The moment she closed the door, he gunned it, sailing out of the gate and onto Juneberry Road. Why was everyone in this town determined to die on Juneberry Road?

“Honestly, I don’t know why I am putting up with this,” he said. “The last thing I need is to be driving Miss Mia across town.” He jerked the wheel around the curves. “Why don’t you have a car, anyway? If you’re going to live and work in East Beach, you’re just going to have to get a car. It makes absolutely no sense that you’re working up here. It’s not like you
know
anything,” Wallace continued ranting. “But try telling that to Beverly. I swear if that woman listened to one word I said, she’d double her revenue, but no. She brings
you
in and you’re completely useless.”

“Hey, I’m not completely useless,” Mia said breezily. In spite of all his bluster, Wallace couldn’t get to her—she found him quite amusing. “I bring you coffee, don’t I? And I can measure a room as well as any trained monkey.”

“Oh, you’re useless,” Wallace reaffirmed. “I know what you think, toots. You think you’re going to grind out the summer, then go back to the city,” he said, fluttering his fingers at her. “And in the meantime, I have to put up with you, and then I’ll probably have to clean up your messes when you’re gone. The least you can do is get a fucking
car
.”

This was exactly the reason why Mia didn’t feel very awful for poking Wallace when she could. Like right now. “I don’t believe in cars.” That was not even remotely true. Mia had exactly zero emotions surrounding cars.

“What?”
Wallace peered at her through his Dolce & Gabbana tortoiseshell frames. He was wearing a Ralph Lauren button-down shirt and coordinating crewneck sweater, 7 For All Mankind skinny jeans, and Rocket Dog sneakers. The man was into labels. “What do you mean you don’t believe in
cars
?” he demanded irritably. “What does that even
mean
? What
do
you believe in, a horse and buggy?”

“Emissions are dangerous and destroying our environment,” she said gravely.

“Oh, of course, the
emissions
!” Wallace said grandly with a roll of his eyes. “That’s right, no one likes
emissions
until they need to be somewhere, and then suddenly, emissions are okay, aren’t they?”

Mia looked out the passenger window and bit her lip to keep from smiling. It was almost as if he wore a big, red Alice-in-Wonderland-type button on his chest that said
Push Me
. “
Someone
has to care.”

“Well, if I were you, I’d care about the clothes you have on. That is the most disturbing conglomeration of fabrics I have ever seen in my
life
. I assume you made it,” he said with a sniff. “I’m sure you think it’s high-concept art that none of us mere mortals can grasp, but
that
my dear, is a
disaster
.”

Mia glanced down at her leather and red brocade skirt. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did make this. And I designed the brocade. See the floral pattern?” she asked, pointing out a panel in the skirt. “If you like, I could make you some pants from this.”

Wallace snorted. “Stick to painting.”

Wallace knew very well that Mia wanted nothing more than to stick to painting and to “high art,” but had failed miserably at it. So now, she’d have to make him some pants, if for no other reason than spite.

“In the meantime, what are you going to do about getting to work every day? Or am I to assume that this morning jaunt is going to continue into infinity?”

“I could walk,” she said helpfully, but Wallace looked almost alarmed by that.

“Walk?”
he echoed in disbelief, as if the concept was foreign to him. “What, you’re going to walk three miles all uphill in your strange little frocks?”

“Why not?” Mia asked with a shrug. “At least I won’t have to listen to you, and you won’t have to be annoyed by my breathing the same air.”

“Your breathing is
not
what annoys me,” Wallace corrected her. “Walking. Well
that’s
great advertisement. John Beverly Home Interiors—walking uphill to you on a steamy summer day.”

“Okay, all
kidding aside,” she said, twisting in her seat toward Wallace. “I don’t want to work up here. Get this—turns out, Nancy Yates has a son she’s been hiding.”

“Reall
y
?”
Wallace said, perking up, looking at her with renewed interest. “Please tell me he’s hot. I swear to God, I haven’t had a decent date in a year.”

“He’s not hot,” Mia said. “And I don’t think he’s gay.”

“That’s what they all think. Is he hideous?”

“Semi-hideous,” Mia said. “And obviously high and incredibly rude.”

“That’s the summer crowd for you,” Wallace said, his interest gone with a flick of his wrist. “They think everyone else exists to serve them.”

“Exactly. I don’t want to be around that all summer.”

“Oh no. You’re not going to try and shove this job off on me now that I know there is a heathen involved. Don’t worry about it, toots. He won’t be here long. They
never
stay here, why would they? There is nothing
here
. And even if he did stay, you’ll be walking up in your peculiar little frocks. Trust me, he won’t bother you.”