Changes

by Judith Arnold

  Chapter One

  “We’ve got a problem,” Monica said.

  Emma set down her paintbrush and blinked herself into the here and now. She’d been lost in her work, dabbing shadings into the stone façade of the castle behind Ava Lowery’s half-finished face. To Emma’s left stood an easel holding a pin board that displayed twenty close-up photographs of Ava, a five-year-old bundle of energy who hadn’t wanted to sit still while Emma had snapped the pictures, so some of them were a little blurry. To Emma’s right stood another easel holding images of medieval castles, unicorns, jewel-encrusted tiaras and satin gowns. Directly before Emma stood the easel containing the painting she was working on—her very first Dream Portraits commission since her arrival in Brogan’s Point four months ago.

  A warm wash of sunlight flooded the loft through the glass wall behind her stool. If she turned around, she would be rewarded with a spectacular view of scattered trees and rooftops and outcroppings of granite sloping down toward the heart of town, and beyond it the ocean. But she needed that wonderful natural light behind her, spilling onto her canvas, way more than she needed the distractions of a beautiful view.

  Immersed in her painting, she hadn’t heard Monica climb the stairs to the loft. The stairs and loft were floored in white wall-to-wall carpeting—what sane person covered the floor with white?—but Emma had spread a patchwork of canvas drop cloths across the floor of the loft to protect the ridiculously impractical carpet from paint spatters. She should have heard Monica’s shoes scratching across the canvas. She would have, if she hadn’t been so intensely focused on the castle she was painting.

  Despite that intense focus, she’d heard Monica’s voice. In particular, she’d heard the word problem. “I’ve already used up my allotment of problems for this year,” she said. She was smiling, but it was true. Things had finally turned around for her—thanks, in huge part, to Monica—and she really wanted to enjoy a few problem-free months before the next onslaught of problems crashed over her.

  She’d been sleeping on her ex-boyfriend’s cousin’s couch in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn when Monica had phoned last November and said, “Look—you and Claudio are history and you’re living out of a suitcase. And I’m living in this fabulous house for dirt-cheap. There’s plenty of space here, and a sun-filled loft where you could paint. Three and a half bathrooms. Kiss New York goodbye and come to Brogan’s Point.”

  Emma had come. She’d scrounged up a few local art students. She’d knocked herself out promoting her Dream Portraits business, and she’d finally gotten her first commission. She wanted only good news from now on.

  Maybe the problem Monica had mentioned was something simple. A clogged toilet? Emma knew how to use a plunger. A blow-up between Monica and Jimmy? Emma had survived her own blow-up with Claudio. She could nurse Monica through a heartbreak. Jimmy wasn’t good enough for Monica, anyway, although Emma was wise enough to keep that opinion to herself.

  Monica didn’t look heartbroken, however. Emma tore her gaze from the painting she’d been working on and scrutinized her friend’s expression. As an artist specializing in portraiture, she knew how to read faces. Monica’s face was not sad or dejected. It was concerned and annoyed.

  Clogged toilet or the equivalent, Emma thought with relief.

  “Our asshole landlord wants to sell this house,” Monica said.

  That was not the equivalent of a clogged toilet. “What do you mean, sell it?”

  “Sell it. Find a buyer and unload it. Stop renting it to us.”

  That was a problem. In fact, it was a problem. Emma had no idea what property values were in this picturesque seaside town an hour north of Boston, but she could guess that any house as spacious and new as the one she and Monica were renting, with a gorgeous ocean view and three and a half bathrooms, had to be worth some serious money. “I don’t suppose we can buy it from him,” she said.

  Monica laughed bitterly. “If someone dies and leaves us a million dollars, maybe. I just got a call from Andrea.”

  “Andrea?”

  “My mother’s friend. The realtor who got me this deal. The landlord—Max Something, I can’t remember his last name—lives out in California or somewhere, and he’d asked Andrea to rent this house out until he figured out what he wanted to do with it. He didn’t want it sitting empty while he did whatever the hell it is he does in California, or wherever the hell he is. I got a year’s lease—way below market value, because he thought I was doing a favor for him, occupying the place, turning lights on and off and scaring away potential vandals.”

  “You’re so scary,” Emma joked.

  “Well, not me in particular. A tenant, any tenant, as long as I was responsible. Which I am,” Monica insisted, evidently in response to Emma’s smirk. “I got this deal because my mother knew Andrea, and she knew I didn’t want to live down the hall from her and my dad at the inn. Anyway, our landlord—Max Whatever—can’t evict us until June, because of the lease. But he might want to start showing the house now, which means we have to give Andrea access and keep the place tidy.”

  “Oh, God,” Emma groaned. “Tidy? Anything but that.”

  “It isn’t funny.”

  “I know.” Emma drummed her fingers on one denim-clad knee. Her overalls were speckled with paint. So, she noticed, were her fingers. She would probably have less difficulty keeping the house clean than keeping herself clean, but either way, tidy didn’t come naturally to her.

  Monica was much tidier than Emma. Right now, on a day off from her job, she was wearing stylish skinny jeans, a fitted blouse, and ballerina flats that didn’t have a single scuff on them, let alone freckles of paint like Emma’s battered canvas sneakers. Monica often worked weekends at the Ocean Bluff Inn and got a couple of weekdays off in exchange, but her schedule varied so much, Emma couldn’t keep it straight. Fortunately, she didn’t have to. When Monica had a day off, she did her best to stay out of the loft, leaving Emma in solitude to paint, staying out of the way when Emma was working with her art students. Emma sometimes heard Monica downstairs, unpacking groceries, running the vacuum cleaner over the ridiculous white carpet, or chatting on the phone, but Emma had the ability to submerge herself so deeply in her work that she was hardly aware of whatever was going on in other parts of the house.

  Creating art in this house, in this loft, was so much easier for her than her situation in Brooklyn had been. There, she’d been forced to paint while sharing space with three other artists in a converted factory broken into floor-through lofts. None of them could afford to rent a studio alone, so they’d pooled their resources and split the rent on a loft in the building. They’d each claimed a quarter of the loft space and did their best to ignore one another while they were working. Not ideal, but the arrangement had worked well enough as long as Emma had been living with Claudio.

  But then she’d caught him screwing around with a naked model in his much grander, unshared studio—that would teach Emma to surprise him with a spontaneous visit in the middle of the day. He’d owned the co-op apartment they’d been living in, so she’d been the one to move out. Fortunately, his cousin Marie had insisted she liked Emma better than Claudio—“Can I get custody of you?” she’d asked—and Emma had wound up on her couch for a few months, until Monica had bailed her out by inviting her to move to this house in Brogan’s Point.

  Which was leased in Monica’s name. The story of Emma’s life, she thought with a sigh. Maybe someday she’d earn enough money to be able to sign her own name to a lease.

  Actually, if their landlord insisted on selling this house out from under them, someday might have to come soon. “If he evicts us, you’ll move back to the inn, right?”

  Monica nodded grimly. “I’m not moving in with my parents. No way. But they’ve got an efficiency apartment there I can use.” Monica’s parents owned the Ocean Bluff Inn, a landmark hotel nestled against the shoreline just north of downtown Brogan’s Point, and Monica was apprenticing her way into the management
of the inn. She’d been working there since high school, first as a chamber maid, then as a waitress in the inn’s assorted dining rooms. During college, when she and Emma had met and become best friends, she’d worked summers as a desk clerk in the lobby. Her parents insisted that she experience every job at the inn so she’d learn the business inside and out.

  Emma didn’t just adore Monica; she was intrigued by her. Emma was an artist, and she’d grown up in a ramshackle old house in Vermont, where her parent grew their own food, her father did carpentry and her mother snagged part-time jobs when money grew tight. Business people—people who got steady paychecks, people who paid their income taxes on time, people who dressed stylishly even on their days off—were like another species to Emma.

  In college, she’d met plenty of members of that species, but she’d mostly hung out with her fellow art majors. Pure chance had assigned Monica as her roommate. However, in spite of their differences, they’d instantly become fast friends. Maybe it was a case of opposites attracting. Or maybe it was simply that Monica was smart and kind and loyal—and as intrigued by Emma as Emma was by her.

  “I really don’t want to move back to the inn,” Monica confessed. “Not into that tiny apartment, anyway. My parents have a gorgeous suite there, six rooms, eighteen hundred square feet. I guess that’ll be mine if they retire and I take over management of the place. But that’s a long way off. And I can’t stay there with them now, not with Jimmy.”

  Emma considered pointing out that, as a twenty-six year old woman, Monica was certainly entitled to invite her boyfriend into her bed—even if he wasn’t good enough for her. But she recognized the awkwardness of doing that in her parents’ home. There simply wasn’t enough privacy.

  At least Monica had access to the efficiency apartment she’d just mentioned. Emma would have to make her own living arrangements if she got evicted from this house. Brogan’s Point wasn’t exactly overflowing with rental housing, let alone rental housing affordable to an artist just getting started. She could move to another, cheaper town, but then she’d lose her students, the main source of her income.

  And she’d need a studio, too.

  Shit. This wasn’t just a problem. It was a problem.

  “All right,” she said, determined to remain optimistic. “We’ve got until June. He can’t kick us out before then. Maybe something will happen in two months.”

  “Yeah.” Monica was clearly the less sanguine partner in their friendship. “Someone can die and leave us a million dollars. Better yet, Max the landlord can die.”

  “Or change his mind,” Emma said diplomatically. “Maybe he’ll find out that the real estate market is really depressed right now, and he’ll decide it’s not a good time to sell.”

  “Or he can die,” Monica argued. “That would work for me.”

  Emma laughed. Reluctantly, Monica laughed, too.

  “It’ll work out,” Emma assured her. “Things always do work out the way they’re meant to.”

  “Except when they don’t,” Monica said darkly. She turned toward the stairs down to the first floor. “Get back to your painting, girl. You’re going to need the money.”

  ###

  True Colors – now available!

  And don’t forget the next books in the Magic Jukebox series:

  Wild Thing

  Monica Reinhart is a good girl. A hometown girl. After college, she’s returned to Brogan’s Point to help run the family business, an oceanfront inn. She’s never done a wild thing in her life. When Ty Cronin sails into town, his wildness intrigues her. When the jukebox plays “Wild Thing,” that wildness infects her, and soon she finds herself doing things she never would have imagined. But Ty could be big trouble. She hardly knows him. She mustn’t trust him. Yet once she’s taken a walk on the wild side with him, how can she go back to being a good hometown girl?

  Heat Wave

  Caleb Solomon’s office air conditioner is on the fritz. Although not his choice, he winds up meeting with a difficult but profitable client in the pleasant chill of the air-conditioned Faulk Street Tavern. It’s there that high school teacher Meredith Benoit finds him. Due to a silly prank, her job and her reputation are in jeopardy. She needs a lawyer, fast. But the Magic Jukebox starts playing “Heat Wave,” and a hot wave of passion crashes over Caleb and Meredith, catching them in its undertow and carrying them off.

  Moondance

  Cory Malone and Talia Roszik married as teenagers after Talia became pregnant. Their marriage didn’t last, but their love for their daughter did. Fifteen years after their divorce, Wendy Malone is graduating from high school, and Cory has traveled to Brogan’s Point for the occasion. But Cory’s and Talia’s plans—and their emotions—are thrown into turmoil when they hear the Magic Jukebox play “Moondance.” Can a single song make them forget all the hurt and rediscover the love that once brought them together?