Suddenly in Love (Lake Haven#1) (6 page)

“Gee, thanks.”

“I’m telling you this as a friend. Did you find an apartment?” he asked. “Or have you been too busy with your
job
?” he drawled.

“Not yet.”

“All right, that’s it. I’m taking you to see an adorable garage apartment my friend Dalton has for rent. And you better snatch it up, girl, or you’ll be living with your parents for the rest of your life and painting in the utility shed.”

Mia didn’t need Wallace to tell her that she’d ended up a wannabe artist living with her parents, and not a celebrated artist living in New York and dining in swank restaurants and entertaining Important People. Nope, she would be doing her painting in a repurposed yard shed. And Wallace couldn’t seem to stop mentioning it.

Oh yeah, this had all the markings of a
great
summer.

Six

The slam of a car door startled Brennan awake. He opened one eye. Maybe two. His vision was so blurry he couldn’t be sure. As he was still slightly drunk, he had to think where he was. He winced at the dull throb behind his eyes and blinked until he could focus on the plaster medallion on the ceiling of his room.

Right. Mom’s new house.

Another car door slammed.

Shit.
Brennan desperately wanted to get out of bed and close the damn window—he’d opened it at three this morning, hoping the cool
night air would keep him awake, keep him going. He’d been writing lyrics, and for the first time in months, they’d gushed from him with
uncharacteristic ease and a flow he’d not felt in years. Were they any good? He was afraid to look. That was the thing about drunken creativity—what seemed brilliant in the moment turned out to be crap by the light of day.

He would look, he would . . . but at the moment, Brennan couldn’t dredge up the will necessary to actually get out of bed.

“I’m just saying, you can’t live with your parents forever. You’re going to have to work enough hours to pay rent. Hello, it’s called adulthood,” a man’s voice said, drifting up to him from somewhere down on the drive.

“Why, thank you, Wallace. I didn’t know what it was called until you came along to enlighten me.”

Brennan knew that voice—it was the groupie girl. No, no, not a groupie. The decorator. What was her name again? Mary?

“You’re going to have to move along now, Mr. Pogue.”

He knew
that
male voice. That was the dude his mother had hired for security. Some great security—people were in and out of here all day long.

“Yeah, Wallace, you’re going to have to move along,” said the woman, who was maybe Mary, maybe something else. He couldn’t remember.

“Perfect. I have the two misfits of East Beach telling me what to do now.”

She laughed, and the sound of it was lilting and sweet. It made Brennan horny, made him think of hearing that laugh when he was inside her. Now he was hard. Great—he’d been reduced to getting hard at the sound of a woman’s laugh.

“Please, sir, I need you to move the van now,” said the security guard.

“Whatever,” the other man said. “Apparently I have to do everything, don’t I? I’m calling my friend Dalton, and then I’ll be back to pick you up
as usual
, Miss Mia-I-don’t-drive.”

Mia.
That was it. Mia, Mia, with the cinnamon hair. Brennan suddenly imagined her on top of him, on his cock. He imagined pert breasts, dark areolas, and him,
pumping, pumping . . .

A door slammed again, and Brennan winced as the force of it reverberated through his head.
“Damn,”
he muttered. There went the fantasy.

“Thanks for the ride, Wallace!” she called out. She sounded a little too singsongy. As if she were trying to provoke the man who didn’t want her living with her parents. Wait . . . she lived with her parents? She’d seemed too old for that . . . but then again, he’d been a little drunk when he’d met her, so who knew how old she was.

The vehicle started up with a grind that didn’t sound right. It moved away from the house, the sound of the rattling engine lessening the faster the van went.

“How are you, Drago?” she asked when the van had gone out the gate.

“Good. Did you try that spin class yet?”

“I have not,” she said solemnly. “But it’s definitely on my to-do list this weekend. Is Mrs. Yates here today?”

“Yep. She’s inside,” the security guy said.

So Mom was home. Brennan was not up for another conversation with his mother. He listened as the decorator walked across the drive and up to the front door directly beneath him. He heard the door open, the dogs attacking her feet, and the door closing.

Silence.

He rolled onto his back and pushed two empty beer bottles off of his bed. They landed with a clatter on the wood floor. He grabbed a pillow and pulled it over his head, closed his eyes, and let sleep take him again.

He next awoke to the sound of sheet music rustling and falling from his bedside table, moved about by the breeze that had come in through the open window. Brennan groaned, tossed the pillow aside, swung his legs over the bed, and sat up. He rubbed his face with his hands. His eyes felt scratchy—he’d slept fitfully, which seemed to be the norm these days. Sleep refused to come on any normal schedule, sometimes passing an entire twenty-four hours before blessing him with its presence. And when sleep did come, it rolled over him in great crashing waves, forcing him down into its depths.

He yawned, scratched his bare belly. He was hungry. And he needed to piss. He stood up and walked unsteadily into the en suite. He took care of business, washed his face and scrubbed the sleep from his eyes, brushed teeth that felt like tiny fur babies in his mouth. He wandered back into his room and glanced around dispassionately. God, it smelled in here. He went to the windows and opened them wider to air the place out, then bent down, swiped up a T-shirt and some jeans off the floor.

The T-shirt was one he’d used to work on a car he’d had in LA. It had some serious axle grease stains that his housekeeper had never been able to get out. And . . . something else. Brennan didn’t know what that stain was, but it didn’t look too offensive. His jeans had seen better days—or at least a washing machine at some point. He buttoned them only enough to stay up. He couldn’t even be bothered to finish off a row of five buttons now. Yeah, well, whatever.

He padded downstairs in bare feet, pushing his overgrown mop of shaggy hair back from his face and scratching at his beard stubble.

Just as he reached the foyer, the front door swung open and his mother’s housekeeper, Magda, stepped in with two stuffed tote bags, one over each arm. From the kitchen, the tiny demons his mother called dogs came yapping and scampering down the hall.

“Out!”
Brennan said sternly, and pointed toward the kitchen. The dogs reversed course and ran back to the kitchen. They didn’t like him any more than Magda did.

Magda dislodged one tote, then the other, and set them down before reaching around to shut the door. She straightened up and allowed her disapproving gaze to flick over Brennan.

“Hello, Magda,” he said. He was used to her disdain now. “Little late for you, isn’t it? I thought you preferred the five a.m. start time.”

“Hello Mr. Yates.”

“You know, I’ve been here for almost three weeks now. Just call me Brennan.” He’d said the same thing almost every day since he’d arrived, but the woman refused to call him anything other than Mr. Yates. Even now, Magda responded to his request in whatever language it was that she spoke. He thought it might be Hungarian, but until she called him by his name, he was tacitly refusing to ask.

She leaned over, picked up both tote bags and walked past Brennan on her way to the kitchen.

“I guess this means no breakfast,” he said drily.

“No breakfast, Mr. Yates. No lunch. It’s after noon.”

Was it? Brennan hadn’t bothered to note the time.

She lumbered on to the kitchen, favoring her right side. He sat down on the bottom step and listened to the sound of things being moved around the kitchen, cabinet doors slamming, and water running. The water reminded him that he was hungry. Hunger won over reluctance, and Brennan went into the kitchen. But as he entered, Magda went out another door, carrying a bucket and a bottle of some type of cleaner.

“Is it me? Is it something I said?” he asked after her.

She didn’t respond.

Brennan opened the fridge. He stood there, staring at the contents, his visual search turning up nothing that interested him. He looked at the coffeemaker. He wasn’t interested in that, either. What he really wanted to do was get in his new car—talk about an impulse buy—and head up to one of the quaint little villages around here and find something to eat. That was actually easier said than done, as it would require some exertion on his part and he still hadn’t determined if he could make even the slightest effort today.

He walked out onto the back terrace and looked around. The day was turning gray, fingers of rain clouds slowly sliding across the sky. A flock of birds glided across the southern end of the lake, ducks or geese or, hell, even ostriches for all Brennan knew.

It was peaceful here around Lake Haven. Just like he’d wanted. He’d thought that was all he needed, but now he knew there was something else lurking in the shadows of his soul that he needed. If only he knew what the hell it was. Whatever it was, it went deep. Marrow deep. It was an itch turned inward that he couldn’t figure out how to scratch.

Yeah, he’d get out and drive. Have a drink somewhere. Eat something that wasn’t out of a bag. He’d risk discovery, but what the hell, he didn’t care. His manager said everyone was looking for him. “There’s going to be a huge bidding war for whoever gets that first shot of you,” Gary had said. He’d called a couple of nights ago to deliver a general diatribe about Brennan having dropped off the face of the earth and not making the decisions he needed to make. For leaving when Gary and Chance were so eager to change directions that they reeked of it.

“That means you’ve got a bounty on your head,” Gary had said. “It’s better if we control the story.”

Brennan knew that was true. He’d once found a TMZ guy hiding under the table at the studio. Those guys would do anything for a scoop, and the sooner he put something out explaining his absence, the better.

But right now, he didn’t care what anyone thought. Or wanted. Right now, the only thing he cared about was a burger.

Brennan walked back inside, and as he passed the kitchen table, he happened to notice a canvas messenger bag in a chair and a sketchbook on the table. He paused—that was new. The sketchbook was covered with stickers: Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop. A peace symbol. The apple that came in the box of every Apple product ever sold. Some of the pages had gotten wet at some point and paper had swelled, making the cover a little wavy.

He picked up the book and opened it. He looked with surprise at the drawings, made both in pencil and ink, and covering a wide variety of subjects: three musicians in a park. A skyline he guessed to be New York. A vase of flowers.

Brennan flipped through, only mildly interested until he reached those that obviously depicted this house. He recognized some of the empty rooms, but things had been added in the sketches. In the living room, which was currently empty, the sketch included a couch and a woman dressed in a period costume. He recognized the dining room by the strange wallpaper, but not the table around which several people sat. That sketch reminded him of an old Norman Rockwell painting—people laughing, leaning over one another.

The Palladian-style windows on the front of the house had been drawn with shutters instead of the actual thick drapes that seemed to catch dust. Azaleas lined the house where there were no shrubs. Nor were there goats foraging in the grass as the next sketch suggested, and Brennan highly doubted the security guard ever stretched out on a lawn chaise to catch some rays.

He turned the page. The next sketch was of the kitchen. The dogs were curled into little balls on their pillow next to the cheap table and chairs his mother had picked up somewhere. Atop the kitchen island was an ape. The ape was hunkered down, his arms scraping the counter top. And he had a surprisingly familiar face. Not identical, but close enough—

“Hey!”

The sound of the girl’s voice startled Brennan so badly he almost dropped the book. He jerked around; she was standing in the door of the butler’s pantry. And she looked furious.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded as she strode forward, her hand outstretched.

Brennan looked at the sketchbook. “Is this yours?” he asked dumbly.

“Give it back.” Her brows had sunk into a dark vee, and her amber eyes turned stormy. She managed to get her hand on the book, jerking it out of his hands.

Brennan lifted his hands, surrendering. “Sorry.”

“
Sorry?
Do you often go through people’s things without their permission?”

“You’re right, I shouldn’t have done that,” he conceded. “I saw it lying there and I . . .” Well, he’d picked it up, obviously. He shouldn’t have. But he did. He shrugged. Was it really such a big deal?

Apparently so, because if looks could slay, he’d be lying in a bloody pool right now, gutted and left to die. He put a hand to his nape and rubbed it. “Who’s the ape?”

“Who do you think?” She turned away from him.

Wow. Brennan had absolutely no idea what to say to that. Part of him wanted to laugh. Another part of him thought he ought to be mad about it, but he couldn’t really get there. “What are the drawings for?” he asked.

“For
me
. I like to draw. What else would they be for?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you mean to show them to someone.”

She turned around and looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “To
who
? Who would care about your kitchen? It’s a diary, obviously.”

Not so obvious to him, but he believed her. “Your diary includes a drawing of me as an ape in this kitchen?”

“Well, yeah,” she said, and looked down at her book. “It’s not every day I run across someone like you.”

“That doesn’t sound like a compliment in any way,” he said.

“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

“Huh,” he said, because Brennan was beginning to believe that this woman really had no clue who he was. God, he could be an idiot sometimes. He ran his hands over his head. He hated always being on edge.

Worse, his body was beginning to take notice of her. He could smell her again, this woman in the wild clothing. She smelled sweet, like fresh cotton sheets. That was a female for you—so soft, so fragrant. Venus flytraps, luring men into their jaws with beauty. Only this one wasn’t luring him into anything. She looked like she wanted to shoot him. With a bazooka.

As she picked up her bag and stuffed the sketchbook into it, he noticed she was wearing a skirt today, one made with a lot of different fabrics. She also wore a long-sleeved silk top that was open at the neck and revealed a glimpse of a purple bra beneath. She had on kneesocks and oxford shoes, and was wearing a knit hat over her hair. If he didn’t know that she worked here with some designer, he’d wonder what the hell her story was—had her house burned down and these were all the clothes she had left? Was she a performer? Maybe blind to color and different fabrics? But at the same time, there was some conformity and cohesiveness in the different articles of clothing. It was weird, but he could see how they went together. He liked the way she looked. It was very cool in an off-the-reservation kind of way. Moreover, he liked her curves, her big, expressive eyes. The same eyes that were viewing him with not a little bit of loathing right now.