Seven Books for Seven Lovers

by Molly Harper, Stephanie Haefner, Liora Blake, Gabra Zackman, Andrea Laurence, Colette Auclair

  Ivy sighed and turned off the main highway to the lakefront drive, cursing the day she decided to go out with Sterling Marshall. She had toured with his boy band, Perfect Harmony, the previous summer. Every teenage girl in America was begging her parents for tickets to the show. Sterling was after her from the beginning, and eventually, she gave in to him. He wasn’t exactly her type—too young, too clean-cut Tiger Beat for the bad-boy angst she craved. At least, that’s what she’d thought. Despite his flawless smile and dreamy pictures on every teen magazine cover, Sterling was bad news.

  For one thing, he was a skeevy little tweaker with a heroin problem, but no one knew about that. He was also an ass when he was sober, prone to lashing out physically at anyone in his path. His every indiscretion was swept under the rug by his commando management team. Dating him exposed her to the gritty truth they kept hidden. He’d been in rehab twice. He was arrested at least three times for assault and possession. He had to wear long sleeves on tour and have his track marks Photoshopped in pictures. But by the time his public relations squad was done with him, Sterling was shiny and new, ready for his close-up in the next music video.

  It was hard to believe she’d actually dated him, but Ivy hadn’t known any of this up front. She liked her boys bad, but she drew the line at toxic. She just wanted the kind that would charm her and break her heart. That’s what she went for in men. She supposed it was her own fault for dating bad boys with no serious relationship potential. It wasn’t the best way to settle down, but she wasn’t interested in all that. She’d had her heart broken once, and that was enough for her. Her one true love was her music. She just needed the men for inspiration. Only firsthand heartache would do for great singles, so the more unsuitable, the better.

  When her relationship with Sterling imploded and their tour ended, she had enough material to write a whole album. But she settled for one song. Just one—“The Sweetest High.” It cut to the bone, though, accusing him of loving his drugs more than her and calling him out for singing to little girls while he was high. It was the first piece of bad press to get past Sterling’s handlers.

  At this point, she almost wished they’d been able to stop the song from coming out. It had done well at first, but when people realized who it was about, the backlash had been brutal. Instead of seeing her as a truth teller, his legion of tween fans revolted against her. They would never believe such vicious, bitter lies about their dear, sweet future husband.

  Sterling’s management jumped on the bandwagon. They put him on every talk show they could to proclaim Ivy lied about him because he broke up with her and she was madly jealous. It snowballed from there. His eleven million Facebook fans were calling for a boycott of her album. Some bookies were taking bets on how long it would be until she had a breakdown and checked into rehab.

  It’s said that there’s no such thing as bad press, but she’d lost a good chunk of her fan base when they chose sides. #TeamIvy had a lot fewer supporters than #TeamSterling.

  Ivy understood where Kevin was coming from. She needed to lie low for a while and let everyone forget about the thing with Sterling. She needed to go back to dating her usual crop of unsuitable men—rock stars, actors, and athletes. If she wrote a song about one of them using and dumping her, no one would bat an eye.

  She wanted to just hole up in her Malibu beach house for a while and work on her new album, but it was impossible with paparazzi camping in her driveway, harassing her every time she went outside. With the state of her career, she couldn’t risk pulling a Britney and having a meltdown as the cameras captured every moment. She needed to get away to someplace no one would expect.

  “Is it really so bad, Ivy? You just arrived.”

  “It took three minutes for someone to mention Blake. Three. You wanted me to write some new music with a more sophisticated sound and emotional depth. How am I supposed to do that when people are constantly bringing up the thing with Blake?”

  Her manager had challenged her to write some new songs for her next album that weren’t the perfect soundtrack for a woman scorned. She was getting older, and so were most of her remaining fans. She may have lost her younger audience, but this was her opportunity for her sound to mature.

  “How is that any different than here?” Kevin asked. “You haven’t been able to write the last few weeks anyway. A new environment, a new routine might shake up your creative energy.”

  Ivy pulled up outside her parents’ cabin and put her car into park with a heavy sigh. She hated when Kevin was right. He was always so smug about it. She had been struggling to write songs for her new album. She’d stared at blank notepaper, banged her head on the piano keys, crumpled wadded pieces of musical crap and tossed them in the trash. Nothing. Her mind was totally blank. That usually called for a new relationship to refill the well, but she didn’t dare start up something new with all this media scrutiny.

  “I’ll do my best, Kevin. I don’t know how much free time I’ll have with this charity circus you signed me up for, though.”

  “There’s no circus,” he insisted, literal as ever. “Just a county fair, a concert, and some other things Mrs. Chamberlain didn’t elaborate on.”

  “I wonder why.”

  At first, Ivy had thought she could get out of this thing. She had been too busy to come to Alabama for the charity concert when they first called. Then Sterling Marshall’s army of adolescents had cleared her calendar. When the grand matriarch of the Chamberlain clan, Adelia Chamberlain, called Kevin and personally requested Ivy, she knew there was no saying no. Ivy explained to Kevin that it would be like turning down a personal invitation to the queen’s garden party.

  “Going to your hometown to help out your community looks great. You’ll get a lot of good press for it. It will raise a lot of money. You’ll be a local hero.”

  “I want to help. I really do. I’m glad that I can put my music to good use here, but I’m pretty sure the entire town would just as soon spit on me, Kevin.”

  She heard him sigh heavily into the receiver. “They might. But they have no room to be picky. They need your help and they know it. If they treat you badly after you help them raise the money, shame on them.”

  “I’ll be certain to feel superior as they hurl insults and rocks in my direction.”

  “I thought southern people were supposed to be warm and welcoming.”

  “Only to your face.”

  “Ivy, I guarantee you the two weeks will fly by, your image will be repaired, and we can take your brilliant new songs into the studio when you get back to record your fourth and greatest album yet.”

  Well, that was a lot of smoke to blow up her ass. Today, she needed that reassurance. “When is the fund-raiser committee meeting again?”

  “Monday morning. That gives you all weekend to relax, work on some songs, and screw on your smiley face for the duration of your stay.”

  Ivy faked her best, brightest smile as she eyed the cabin that would be her home for the next two weeks. Hopefully her mama bought wine.

  Lots and lots of wine.

  Chapter Two

  “I knew you were gonna break my hear-r-rt.” Ivy sat at the kitchen table and sang her new lyrics to the empty cabin. She had to hear it out loud before she could really decide if she liked it. So far, she didn’t.

  “You were . . .” She paused. “You were the worst song I’ve ever written in my li-i-i-ife.”

  She ripped the page from her notebook and tossed it with the others. A small pyramid of crappiness was forming in the corner. “Well,” she sang, “not the worst, but almost as bad as the last one.”

  That was her fifteenth do-over since she’d started working on her new album. She was second-guessing every word. Questioning every turn of phrase. Did this song sound like one she’d already written? Yes. A million times yes. There was only so much a girl could get out of man-hating, heartbreak, and electric guitars.

  Frustrated, she got up from her chair and walked over to the wide-open back door.
The patio was screened in, which kept out the bugs and, today, a group of ducks that had gathered on the wooden steps to take advantage of her free performance.

  “Hope you enjoyed it, guys. That song was an exclusive, never to be performed again.”

  Ivy stepped out onto the porch and the birds scuttled off to the lake. They protested loudly at the sudden end to the concert, quacking and honking as they waddled into the water and skimmed out of sight. She watched until they had all disappeared, then flopped down into an old rocking chair and looked out across the still green water of Willow Lake.

  Maybe the fresh air and sunshine would help her think. People always lectured her about the benefits of clean air and sunshine when she was in California, which made her indelicately snort with amusement. For one thing, there was no such thing as clean air in the megalopolis of Los Angeles. And for another, she burned faster than gasoline with her fair skin. Loitering outside too much would earn her nothing more than emphysema and melanoma.

  But here, in the tiny town of Rosewood, she could sit in the shade and enjoy clean air scented with honeysuckle and freshly mowed hayfields. That was the outdoors she could get behind.

  This was peaceful, but nothing was going the way she had planned. Her manager had sent her here to write some new songs and clean up her reputation. Hopefully the reputation part went better, because right now, everything she wrote sucked.

  Perhaps it was Kevin’s challenge to her. He wanted a more mature sound. No man-bashing. No angry female power rants. The problem was, she couldn’t think of anything else. She had struggled in college to write songs with heart. Her professors had pushed her to dig deep and draw on her emotions. While she’d grown up fairly poor, she’d had a good childhood and was still in love with her high school sweetheart. She hadn’t had much angst to draw on. At least until she caught Blake with that Auburn cheerleader.

  From then on out, she’d been very in touch with her emotions, primarily the heated and hostile ones. She’d launched a great career based on them. But she’d trained her creativity to work a certain way. Now, every time she put her pencil to the page bitterness spewed across it like she’d shaken a bottle of Coke. This wasn’t even high-quality bitterness.

  If she could go back to Kevin with an album of her best woman-done-wrong songs ever, he’d probably be happy. This, however, was not her finest work.

  Looking across Willow Lake, it occurred to her there might be another issue. On the far side, beyond the rolling green hills and the weeping willow trees the lake was named after, stood a tall white antebellum mansion. It damn near glowed against the bright blue backdrop of the sky. The house stood two stories high with towering columns, wraparound porches, and stark black window shutters. It was a classic plantation home straight out of a Civil War novel.

  As a child, she’d fantasized about owning a house just like that. Or at the very least, getting the opportunity to see if this one was as beautiful on the inside as it was on the outside. When she was older, she got the latter wish. The first time she stepped inside, her jaw dropped open like a striped bass’s. The polished carved wood, the marble floors, the grand piano in the music room . . . It had a music room! It had exceeded her every expectation.

  Now, however, it was like a dark cloud looming on the horizon. It taunted her. She couldn’t enjoy her beautiful lake view because of that blazing white eyesore. Why had her father chosen this cabin? Surely there had to be others that had a better view than this. She wanted to demand her money back from the Realtor.

  The Chamberlain mansion. Of all places.

  How was she supposed to write something emotionally poignant with that house blinking like a neon sign out her window? Blake Chamberlain had crushed her heart like a bug beneath his cleats. He’d begged for her trust and then tossed it away at the first opportunity. He’d deserved every bit of pain and embarrassment that her song put him through. If it had shortened the line of cheerleaders outside his dorm room just a little bit, it was worth it.

  She hadn’t intended to get her revenge by writing a hit song and signing with a record label, but it had done the trick quite nicely. She also hadn’t intended to tell anyone who had inspired the song, but a tabloid reporter dug around and found out she’d been dating a famous college quarterback. The next thing she knew, Blake’s embarrassed face was plastered on every trashy gossip magazine lining the checkout stand.

  Irritated with herself for reminiscing about the past, she leaped out of her chair and went back inside. She didn’t need to be sitting around, anyway. She needed to be working.

  Ivy plopped back down at the table and stared blankly at the paper. Periodically she would have a case of writer’s block. It had happened after her first album was so successful. She’d spent weeks feeling the looming pressure to not become a one-hit-wonder and end up on some As Seen on TV music compilation. Her sophomore album had to be a success to cement her place in the music world. But she’d had nothing. If she tried to hum a new melody, she’d realize it was to the tune of “Old MacDonald.”

  She’d cured her ailment with a three-week fling with a sitcom heartthrob. That was enough to inspire four new songs, one of which became her next hit. She quickly learned that a bad relationship was certain to earn her enough angst to stimulate her creative juices and inspire the type of music her fans liked.

  But part of her lying low in Rosewood included avoiding all types of men, especially the kind she liked best—the ones who would break her heart and inspire great lyrics. Ivy couldn’t afford any relationship scandals right now, so she had to find another way to break through this dry spell.

  Whenever she ran into a sticking point with her lyrics, Ivy found that water helped her think. Maybe it was because she was born under a water sign. Maybe it was all the summers she’d spent at the community pool. Either way, it often did the trick. Back in Malibu, she’d saunter right out into her heated, illuminated infinity pool overlooking the Pacific Ocean. If she was in New York, she’d climb into her spa tub.

  Here, she could either take a hot shower or swim in the lake. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Willow Lake it was.

  Ivy dug her swimsuit out of her drawer and eyed it with concern. The dark blue string bikini with cherries on it looked good on her, but it was a little skimpy for her hometown. Her mother would probably have a stroke if she saw it, especially since the tiny bottoms had the tendency to ride up and get even tinier.

  Back in California, the paparazzi would snap her picture and plaster her on the cover of a gossip magazine. It would either be a “Depressed Ivy Puts On the Pounds” cellulite shot or a “Brokenhearted Ivy—Skin and Bones!” rib cage shot, depending on the angle. But since she hadn’t seen a single soul on the lake, she figured she’d be safe for a swim.

  Ivy slipped into her suit and gathered her accessories. She made a neat pile by the door with her towel, her phone, and a book she’d bought at the airport. She slathered on sunblock and was starting out the door when she realized she didn’t have her sunglasses. It took a quick hunt through the cabin, but she found them.

  She stepped outside, swinging the door closed behind her. Taking half a step forward, she came to an abrupt stop. Something suddenly jerked her backward until her shoulder blades slammed into the cabin door. She couldn’t step away.

  Aha. The strings on the bikini top were too long, and they’d caught in the door when it shut. Ivy turned around and grasped the handle only to feel the tight resistance of a locked door.

  Ivy groaned and tried leaning forward to look into the nearby window. Her keys were on the kitchen table. Right where they belonged. Awesome.

  Ivy pulled hard against the door, tugging and groaning, but she wasn’t going anywhere. The only option left was going around to try the front door.

  It might still be unlocked from when she had unloaded some things from her car earlier that morning. The only catch was that she’d have to leave her bikini top behind.

  No big deal, right? It would just
take a few seconds. And she could use her beach towel to . . . Ivy paused and looked around. Her towel was inside, too. With her phone. Folded neatly by the door, just as she’d left them. Now she couldn’t call her father to come with the extra keys.

  She’d have to man up and do this. Ivy untied the strings around her neck. Using one hand to hold the top up, she wiggled out of her confining swimsuit like she was tangled in a shrimp net. She tugged and twisted, squirmed and bent. Things seemed to be working.

  Until they weren’t. At the critical moment when the suit was wrapped around her head and arms, leaving her blinded and completely topless, she got stuck. Feeling the warm summer breeze on her bare breasts while she stared at the navy fabric covering her face like a giant eye patch was extremely disconcerting. With her luck, a local Boy Scout troop would march by. Or her daddy would come to check on her.

  With renewed fervor, she flopped and wiggled frantically until she finally got loose. Free at last, she brushed her hair out of her face, covered her breasts with her hands, and looked around for witnesses to her undignified dance.

  So far, the coast was clear.

  Ivy bent down to open the door to the porch while still keeping her lady parts covered. She moved quickly down the wooden steps to the mix of grass, mud, and sand that surrounded the lake. As she tiptoed delicately through the grass, the rougher blades and the occasional rocks reminded her she was a little more tender-footed than she used to be.

  At the front of the cabin, she climbed up the stairs, fully exposed to the road, the sun, and anyone who might roll by in their pickup truck. Ivy reached desperately for the knob and—

  Nothing. It was also locked.

  Ivy was barefoot, topless, keyless, phoneless, and standing in the yard in a cheeky pair of string-bikini bottoms with cherries on her ass. “Well, shit!” she yelled, stomping her bare feet on the wood and lodging a splinter in her big toe.

  “Ow, dammit!” Ivy howled, unable to pull out the splinter without exposing herself to the road. “You have got to be kidding me!” She hobbled down the stairs, walking on her heels back around the cabin.