by Lucy Score
She nodded. Yeah, she could do this. She’d worked so hard. She wasn’t going to let one unfortunate, handsome, sexy, jerk of a man derail her.
Eden signaled and turned into her tree-lined drive. She was deep in thought and had to slam on the brakes when she came around the bend. There was a moving van stuck in the middle of the lane with flares behind it. The driver gave the offending flat tire a good kick.
Eden eased into the grass and pulled alongside the truck. Another figure tucked a phone into his pocket and leaned through her open car window.
Davis Asshat Gates gave her an apologetic grin. “Hi, neighbor.”
Oh, no.
7
Present Day
He was going to drown in acrid smoke.
He’d been upstairs in the tiny spare room he used as a makeshift studio working up a palette of acrylic paints when he’d heard the thud in the kitchen. By the time Davis had made it downstairs, the first floor of his house was engulfed in yellow smoke that smelled as if an entire junior high basketball team had sweated to death in a dumpster without ever learning what deodorant was for.
He gasped in a breath. “God! What is that smell?”
He’d made it into the kitchen, but the smoke was too thick to see the walls. Or the chair he’d neglected to push in after breakfast. Davis pitched forward, meeting the cold metal of his refrigerator with his face. “Son of a bitch!” He clutched at his temple, feeling dizzy and sick. He slid the rest of the way to the floor and lay there for a minute trying to remember where the door was.
It smelled a little less bad on the floor. Through swimming vision, Davis noticed flames licking at the wall in the far corner of the kitchen. With an aching head and burning lungs, Davis belly crawled in the direction of his back door.
He miscalculated and smacked the other side of his head off of the sharp edge of a cabinet. “Mother—” his rant was cut off by a choking fit. Dazed and gasping, his searching hands finally found the wood of the door.
He felt like he was swimming through the innards of a volcano. Davis reached up and gripped the knob. His lungs were turning to ash in his chest, his cells recoiling from the smell and the smoke. The fetid scent was smothering him from the inside out.
On his second desperate try, the knob twisted in his hand and he collapsed on the threshold as the door flew open giving the smoke an escape route into the chilly November air. Weak and dizzy, he dragged himself out onto the back porch by his elbows. He collapsed on the wooden planks and coughed until his eyes watered.
His head felt wet and when his fingers came away from his forehead, they were red with blood. “Well, hell,” he rasped. His phone rang in his jeans. With the last of his strength, he wrestled it from his paint splattered pocket. He rolled over onto his back.
“Yeah?” he wheezed.
“Boss, there’s a lot of smoke coming from your house,” his vintner, Anastasia, blandly stated the obvious.
He lifted his head and watched flames licking up the inside of the kitchen windows. “I think my house is on fire.” One more thing that would piss off his next-door neighbor.
Davis huddled under the alpaca wool safety blanket one of the firefighters had draped over his shoulders before attacking his kitchen with axes and hoses. He clutched the cup of warm liquid between his hands, not sure if it was hot chocolate or coffee or just hot water. His head ached, his vision was iffy, and he smelled like a parking lot portable toilet after the Super Bowl. And the ambulance tailgate felt like a frozen pond under his ass.
“Davis, are you okay?”
He lifted his head and through blurry eyes spotted Ellery Cozumopolaus-Smith and Bruce Oakleigh jumping out of a jacked-up black SUV. It looked like a hearse with a lift kit.
“’Zat a hearse? Am I dead?” he slurred.
“You’re bleeding,” Ellery said, rushing to his side in her midnight black wool coat. “Bruce, he’s bleeding,” she said again.
Bruce bumbled over, looking nervous.
“Just a bump,” Davis said, weaving away from Ellery’s gloved fingers.
Ellery leaned down and peered into his eyes. “His eyes look funny. Does he have a concussion?” she asked, grabbing an EMT who hurried past with an oxygen mask.
The EMT gave Davis the eye. “He slapped the flashlight out of my hand before I could check his pupils, called me Sally, and told me to get out of his face.”
“I thought you were going to give me a shot,” Davis mumbled.
“With a flashlight?”
“It looked sharp!” His head hurt. His body was cold. And his house was on fire. And it wasn’t quite noon. This was not a great start to the day.
“How bad’s the damage?” Ellery asked, chewing on her purple painted lip and scanning the scene. There were four fire trucks, a police cruiser, and two ambulances in the winery’s drive. More than a dozen people in uniform were running all over the property.
“Why’s it smell so bad here?” Davis wondered. “It’s like a dog barfed up roadkill that died eating garbage.”
Ellery cut a hard look at Bruce who squinted up at the sky. “I don’t smell anything,” Bruce insisted.
“Sweet Jesus. I’ve never smelled anything that bad in my life,” a firefighter said, removing his mask to throw up in the flowerbed.
Bruce began to whistle tunelessly. Ellery pulled out a dainty handkerchief embroidered with skulls and snakes and held it over her nose.
“What are you guys doing here?” Davis asked, curling up on the floor of the ambulance. He wasn’t sure what a goth princess paralegal and the town real estate agent/resident gossip were doing in his front yard on a Sunday morning while part of his home burnt to a smelly crisp behind him.
Ellery and Bruce shared another long look.
“Oh, well. We heard that there was trouble out here, and we wanted to see if we could help,” Ellery said.
Davis’s head hurt too much for him to further question their presence.
“Yes! Neighbors helping neighbors,” Bruce agreed. “We’re here to take you some place warm.”
“Oh. That sounds kind of good.”
“Davis!” Anastasia, the winery’s vintner and resident pain-in-the-ass, crossed the driveway. “The winery is fine,” she announced running a hand through her short shock of gray hair. “Looks like it’s just your house.” She was sixty-two and had worked in the wine industry for almost forty years. His parents had hijacked her from a Napa Valley winery on one of their last trips west. They’d convinced her to give up the California climate for New York’s frigid winters and Blue Moon’s quirky weirdness.
“Winery good,” Davis summarized. “That’s good.”
“I think he’s got a concussion,” Anastasia said in a stage whisper to Ellery and Bruce.
But Davis didn’t care. A kitchen he could rebuild, but burning his family’s winery to the ground only two years after he took over managing operations? That would have been significantly more painful.
“Anastasia, we’re going to take Davis somewhere to get warm and…” she sniffed Davis’s general direction and winced, “maybe a shower.”
Anastasia’s nose crinkled as she caught a whiff of him. “I’ve literally never smelled anything this bad in my entire life, and my dad used to clean septic tanks for a living,” she told them.
Bruce shoved his hands in his pockets. “I still don’t smell a thing,” he insisted.
“Uh-huh,” Anastasia grunted. “Well, get him someplace warm and not smelly. I’ll call when the fire crews have any news.”
“Will do,” Bruce said, springing into action. He pulled Davis into a sitting position and grabbed him by the elbow. “Let’s get him to the car.”
Ellery tugged at Davis’s other arm and together they got him to his feet. “I think the smell is hurting my head,” Davis mumbled.
“He’s going to make my car smell like baby puke and Brussels sprouts,” Ellery hissed at Bruce.
“A small price to pay to help our neighbors,” Bruce s
aid cheerfully, half-towing, half-pushing Davis toward Ellery’s funeral mobile.
“Where are your shoes?” Ellery asked in horror.
Davis looked down at his feet. There was a blue drip of paint across the top of his bare foot. He shrugged. “In there?” He pointed at the small, two-story farmhouse with black smoke pouring from the gaping hole.
Davis leaned against Ellery while Bruce wrestled the rear door open. The SUV was even taller than it had looked at a distance. Davis eyed the distance between the ground and the running board.
He closed one eye as his vision swam and picked up his foot. “Am I close?” he asked, feeling blindly with his foot.
“You might need another inch or twelve,” Ellery said.
“Let’s give him a boost,” Bruce suggested. Together, they interlaced their fingers and made a foothold for him. “Now just put your foot in here, and we’ll gently toss you onto the seat.”
Davis did as he was told and found himself hurtling through the air. He landed face-down on the black vinyl seat. “Ooof.” He thought about sitting up and then decided he was just better off here. He pulled the blanket over his head and closed his eyes and pretended that he was safely tucked into his own bed and this whole thing had been a terrible dream.
The roar of the engine cut off a minute later. “Where are we? Did I fall asleep?” he asked sitting up and peering through the window. Fanciful turrets in navy blue and purple rose toward the smoky sky. The front doors were painted canary yellow. It was three-stories of color and whimsy topped with a crescent moon weather vane.
“Oh, hell no,” he muttered. Even concussed and confused, Davis Gates knew he couldn’t cross that threshold.
8
The commotion from the lobby cut through Bruno Mars crooning in Eden’s earbuds. She plucked them out of her ears and covered the pie crust she’d been working with a tea towel. Wiping her hands on her apron, she headed in the direction of the noise. She wondered if it had anything to do with the weird jets of yellow smoke that were wafting over her backyard. Probably that pain in the ass at the winery trying to annoy her. She felt like Davis Gates went out of his way to ruffle her feathers just so she was forced to send him frosty, professional emails.
By the time she got to the lobby, her dogs—the big, fluffy monstrosities, Vader and Chewy—were alternately barking and hiding behind the settee near the Lunar Inn’s front desk.
Ellery Cozumopolaus-Smith and Bruce Oakleigh were holding up a third barefoot person wearing a blanket between them. “Eden!” Ellery said, with a big smile that immediately made Eden suspicious.
“What’s going on?”
“Is the smell following me?” the blanket asked.
Something was rotten in Blue Moon, and it was standing in her lobby. Eden put her hands on her hips. “Who is that?”
Ellery and Bruce were members of Blue Moon’s infamous Beautification Committee, a not-so-secret matchmaking society that tortured couples into falling in love. If they were both standing here in her lobby, someone was in a lot of trouble.
“We’re happy to announce that you have the golden opportunity to fulfill your civic duty as a Mooner,” Bruce announced grandly. He opened his arms with a flourish a beat too late.
The blanket-clad figure swayed, and Bruce steadied it.
“My what?” Eden asked. There was a smell in the lobby. One that was systematically strangling out the lovely scents of coffee and fresh biscuits she’d served only a few hours before.
“Your civic duty,” Bruce repeated. “It seems that one of our dear Blue Moon neighbors has suffered a small, insignificant mishap that requires a place to rest for a few hours until things are sorted out.”
“Uh-huh.” Eden didn’t like where this was going. Yes, she was the proprietress of an inn. Hospitality went bone deep in her. But she had a very bad feeling about this particular human blanket.
The blanket stumbled forward, and when it righted itself, Eden got her first good look at the face beneath it. A dazed Davis Gates squinted at her from beneath a layer of drying blood.
“Oh, hell no!” Eden shook her head so vehemently it made her dizzy. Blue Moon had just survived an astrological apocalypse during which nearly everyone had lost their damn minds. She, in the throes of said astrological insanity, had chopped off her long hair into a spunky, chin-length bob. Thankfully, she liked the look. The fallout was supposed to be over and done with as of yesterday, but with the Gates she despised more than pumpkin-flavored everything showing up in her sanctuary, she could only assume this was the result of apocalpytic machinations.
Vader barked at her human mommy’s reaction. Meanwhile, Chewy buried his nose in Davis’s crotch.
Bruce held up his hands. “Now, Eden, I know that you and Davis here have had a rocky relationship, but he is your neighbor, and he did suffer a small accidental fire.”
“A fire?” she repeated. “Is everything okay?”
“It’s fine. Everything is just fine,” Bruce crooned. Eden didn’t believe him for a minute. He sounded as if he were calming a nervous crowd before an asteroid hit the earth.
Davis tottered over to her glass display case of made-in-Blue Moon products. He rested his forehead against the glass, smearing blood and face across the freshly cleaned glass.
“Oh, come on!” Eden grabbed his arm and shoved him down into one of the upholstered chairs under the bay window. “Why is he bleeding, and why does he smell so bad?”
“I don’t smell anything,” Bruce insisted.
Eden glared at Ellery, her friend who should have known better than to show up with a Gates in tow. Maybe Bruce and Ellery had suffered head injuries, too.
Eden grabbed the first aid kit from behind the front desk and returned to Davis.
“My house is burning down,” he announced cocking his head so far to the side that his ear rested on his shoulder. Eden held him by the chin and swiped alcohol over the cut on his forehead.
“He’s mildly concussed,” Ellery reported. “There was a fire in his kitchen, and he fell and hit his head escaping.” She said all of that while staring holes in Bruce who didn’t seem the least bit perturbed.
The front door opened, and the chime tinkled announcing Deputy Layla’s arrival. The dogs, ardent fans of Layla, made a mad dash to welcome her. She strolled inside in uniform. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a severe bun under her hat. Swiping her sunglasses off her pretty face, she surveyed the lobby.
“Crap. It even smells in here,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
Eden slapped a patch of gauze on Davis’s forehead and ripped the tape with her teeth. “Can I help you, deputy?” Friends since junior high, they were both respectful of each other’s careers. Eden called Layla deputy around the guests, and Layla never mentioned their sleepover shenanigans from junior high where they practiced kissing pillows that they pretended were boy band members.
“You’re really pretty,” Davis whispered, making puppy dog eyes at Eden.
“And you smell like a urinal that someone vomited burritos into,” Eden shot back.
“Isn’t she pretty, guys?” Davis said flopping to the side of the chair to stare blearily at Ellery and Layla.
“Beautiful.”
“Gorgeous.”
“She has a very symmetrical face,” Bruce agreed.
“So, what’s the situation?” Ellery asked Layla.
Layla consulted her notebook. “Well, Davis, I’m sorry to tell you that the kitchen’s a total loss. The fire crew was able to confine the blaze to just that section of your house, but you’re looking at forty-some thousand in damages.”
Bruce went pale and swallowed hard. “Forty-thousand dollars?”
“Bruce, can I see you outside?” Ellery hissed, dragging the older man out the front door by his sweater vest.
Davis closed his eyes and nuzzled his cheek against Eden’s hand. She snatched it away. Not only did she not want to touch Davis, but she didn’t want that smell rubbing off on her. She was already
going to have to torch the chair he was sitting on.
“When can he go home?” Eden asked Layla.
Layla pursed her lips, knowing exactly how her friend felt about said stinking mess of a man. “Not anytime soon. The inspector’s gotta check the rest of the house for damage. And Davis isn’t going to like this, but it looks suspicious at this point.”
A trio of female guests wandered into the lobby. They were part of the Frances party of six, in town to do some holiday shopping and relaxing sans husbands and children. Eden flashed them a strained smile and gave a little wave. She was propping up a bloody man who smelled worse than asparagus pee while a deputy discussed the possibility of arson. This wasn’t the kind of hospitality her five-star Travel Diary-rated hospitality business provided.
“Who in the hell would set his house on fire?” she asked, dropping her voice to a low whisper. As far as she knew, she—and her parents—was Davis’s only enemy.
Layla cleared her throat. “About that—and I hate to do this, Eden—but what were you doing about an hour ago?”
Eden’s outraged gasp nearly took her knees out. “I beg your pardon?”
“Look, with your history with Gates here—The Incident and all that—I have to ask.”
Davis opened his eyes again and stared up at Eden like a baby deer in headlights.
“I was here making breakfast, cleaning up from breakfast, and baking,” Eden said in a chilly voice. “I have about a dozen witnesses that can place me here all morning.” Vader plopped down at her feet and leaned heavily against her leg for moral support.
“That’s good enough for me, for now,” Layla said, all business. She flipped her notebook closed. “But you might want to compile a list of your guests and a way to contact them… just in case.”