by Linda Seed
Which it did, once.
“What the hell’s goin’ on with you?” Jackson asked after Ryan completely missed a ball Jackson had passed to him. “These two jokers are kicking our asses.”
“Sorry,” Ryan said. Will and Daniel shouldn’t have been kicking their asses; it should have been a pretty fair game. Ryan had played varsity basketball in high school, and Will was an excellent baseball player, which seemed to translate to basketball better than one might expect. With one jock on each team, it should have worked out, and it would have if Ryan hadn’t been so distracted.
“Seriously, man,” Jackson pressed. “Your head’s not in the game. What’s going on?”
They’d been playing for about a half an hour, and they were all starting to breathe hard and sweat. They moved over to a bench next to the court, where they toweled off and drank some water.
“I went over to the gallery yesterday morning,” Daniel said mildly, running a small hand towel through his hair. “Gen wasn’t there. Alex said she was at the ranch.” He said nothing more, but he looked at Ryan and raised his eyebrows in question.
“Aha,” Will said. He hadn’t worn his glasses during the game because of the safety hazard, so now he was squinting a little as he looked at Ryan.
“What the … there’s no ‘aha,’ ” Ryan insisted. He busied himself with rooting around in his gym bag.
“That’s not what I heard when Kate had Gen and the others over for breakfast the other morning,” Jackson observed.
Will and Daniel made a variety of hooting and catcalling noises that Ryan would have found more appropriate if they were fifteen.
“Okay. Look.” Ryan faced the three of them. “I’m not going to talk about Gen like that. About … what might or might not have happened between us.”
Jackson nodded appreciatively. “Respectful. I can admire that. Especially since she’s my sister-in-law. Practically.”
“And my friend,” Daniel put in.
“Yeah, well,” Ryan said, “whatever she told her friends, that’s hers to tell. But I will say this. We’ve got a date this weekend and I don’t know where the hell to take her.”
“Hm. You’ve already been to Neptune,” Jackson said.
“Right. A town this small, it’s hard to think of a place she hasn’t been a thousand times. And I want … I need … to impress her.”
“Aha,” Will said again.
“Shut up,” Ryan told him.
“There’s The Sandpiper,” Daniel offered, suggesting a restaurant with a view of Moonstone Beach.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ryan said, blowing off the idea as too ordinary, too pedestrian.
“You could do something outdoorsy,” Jackson suggested. “Go kayaking over at San Simeon.”
“Hm. Maybe,” Ryan allowed.
“Or you could just bring her to the Cooper House,” Will said.
All three heads turned toward him.
“The Cooper House?” Ryan said.
“Sure.”
Will was the caretaker of an enormous estate just up the coast, not far from the ranch. The Cooper House, a twenty-two-room behemoth atop a hill with a stunning view of the Pacific, was named for Eustace Cooper, the logging tycoon who had originally built the place in the late 1800s. Now it was owned by a tech billionaire who only used the place two or three weeks of the year. The rest of the time, Will tended to the property, bringing in gardeners, painters, plumbers, housecleaners, and others as needed. He lived in a small guest house there while he worked on his dissertation—a study of a particular type of bird that made its home on the Central Coast.
“Are you allowed to let him do that?” Daniel asked.
“Would there be sneaking involved?” Jackson wanted to know. “Not that that would be a bad thing, necessarily. Could add to the overall flavor of things.”
“No sneaking.” Will shrugged. “Christopher says I can use the main house every now and then. Might as well. It’s just sitting empty.”
The “Christopher” in question was Christopher Mills, whose invention of a wildly popular dating website had rendered him so obscenely wealthy that it allowed him to be indifferent to what people did with his coastal mansion. Will had met him when they were both undergraduates at Stanford. They’d become friends, and that was what had led to Will’s admittedly cushy position at the Cooper House.
“Huh,” Ryan said. “Well … how would that work?”
Daniel was warming to the idea. “You get Jackson here to make the two of you a picnic dinner. You take that and a nice bottle of wine or two up to the Cooper House, set it up at a table next to the infinity pool, have a nice intimate meal …”
“There’s no infinity pool,” Will said. “There’s a regular pool.”
“Well, that’s disappointing,” Daniel said.
“But there’s an observatory,” Will offered.
“The guy’s got his own observatory?” Jackson wanted to know.
“Yep. Top-quality telescope, retractable roof, the whole bit.”
“Holy crap.” Jackson looked impressed.
“Okay,” Daniel said, warming to a new and improved script for the evening. “You take a picnic dinner, you eat it by the regular, non-infinity pool. Drink some nice wine, maybe sit in front of the fireplace. Then you go upstairs and retract the roof.”
“You made that sound obscene,” Ryan said. “Retracting the roof. What’s that code for, exactly?”
“You’ll have to figure that out for yourself,” Daniel said.
Ryan thought about it and nodded. “That sounds great. Thanks, Will.”
Will waved him off. “Somebody ought to use the place. Christopher hasn’t been there in months.”
“Any chance he might drop in unannounced?” Ryan asked uncertainly.
Will scoffed. “When he’s coming, he lets me know a week in advance so I can have people clean stuff that’s already clean, bring in groceries, things like that. He’s not coming. At least, not this weekend.”
“Okay.” Ryan nodded. “Okay. This could be really good.”
“Jeez. Now I want to ask somebody out so I can take them up there,” Daniel said.
“Who’d go out with you?” Jackson demanded.
“That’s an excellent question,” Daniel said. “Sadly.”
“Can we play now?” Will insisted. “I think you guys are stalling because you’re losing.”
“We’re not losing,” Jackson said. “We’re giving you guys a false sense of security.”
“Well, it’s working,” Daniel said. “I feel secure.”
Jackson did agree to make a dinner that Ryan could pack up and take to the Cooper House. He also suggested a particular wine that he thought would go well with the food. Well, he might have done more than “suggested.” Jackson pretty much informed Ryan that he’d be a wine-ignorant fool to serve anything else.
Ryan bought the wine Jackson told him to get, arranged with Will to get a key to the place, and talked to Will about a few of the particulars of the Cooper House. Ryan asked Will again if he was sure this was okay; he worried that he was pulling something underhanded by using some other guy’s house for his own romantic ends. Although Will had gotten his job through his friendship with Mills, Ryan knew he took the work seriously, and he didn’t want to get Will in trouble.
“Yeah, it’s fine,” Will reassured him. “I emailed Christopher and asked him. All he said was, don’t touch his action figures.”
“His action figures?”
“He’s got a collection. Early Marvel Comics, mostly focused on the Stan Lee characters. You’ll see.”
“Huh.”
With all of that worked out, there was nothing to do but worry about the whole thing until date night. Ryan didn’t think of himself as someone who worried about dates; he didn’t date much, but when he did, he was usually fairly confident. If a woman liked him, she liked him, and if she didn’t, then she probably wasn’t the right one anyway. His longstanding crush on Lacy—now thoroughly exti
nguished in the wake of his earth-shattering lovemaking with Gen—had been an exception.
But this was different somehow. He worried about what impression he would make on Gen. He worried about whether she would have a good time, whether she would think it was odd to be using the Cooper House, whether she would like the food Jackson made for them. Essentially what it all boiled down to was that he worried about whether she would want to see him again. Because he needed to see her, not once, not a few times, but over and over again.
When Friday night came, he picked up the food from Neptune—Jackson had packed it carefully in an insulated carrier—and went down to Marine Terrace to get Gen. He’d dressed carefully for the evening, in charcoal slacks, black leather loafers, and a blue cashmere V-neck sweater with a hint of a white T-shirt peeking out from underneath. He went down the steps to her door feeling butterflies. It had been a long time since he’d felt butterflies. He liked it.
On Friday night, Gen was a little bit frustrated because Ryan wouldn’t tell her where they were going for their date. How was a girl supposed to pick out clothing for a date if she didn’t know where they were going or what he had planned? Of course, last time, her date clothing had been wildly inappropriate for what they’d actually ended up doing—rolling around on the floor of the barn—so she supposed she could argue that it didn’t make any difference.
It made a difference to her, though, because she wanted to feel pretty and confident, sexy and self-assured.
She surveyed the contents of her closet, and then, having decided that she didn’t have anything suitable for a date of indeterminate destination, she went up the stairs to Kate’s place and banged on the door.
“What? What?” Kate threw open the door. “Is the house on fire?”
“Sorry. I may have pounded.”
“You did. What’s going on?”
“I’m going out with Ryan, but I don’t know where we’re going, and how the hell am I supposed to plan what to wear when it might be a nice dinner or it might be … camping! Or … or fishing!”
Kate opened the door wider to let Gen in.
“Did he tell you he was taking you camping or fishing?”
“No! That’s the problem! He didn’t tell me anything!”
Kate closed the door behind Gen and leaned back against it, her arms crossed over her chest. “If he takes you on a surprise date and it turns out to be camping or fishing, you’ve got bigger issues than your wardrobe.”
“Well. That’s true.”
“You’d better have a glass of wine,” Kate said, heading for the kitchen. “You’re freaking out.”
“I’m not …”
“You are.”
“Okay. Maybe. A little bit. I might be freaking out a little bit.”
Kate pulled a wineglass from a cupboard over the sink and poured Gen a glass of pinot noir. “Here. You need this.”
“Okay. Okay.” Gen took a deep breath, had a sip of the wine, and closed her eyes for a moment in an effort to find her inner serenity. When she opened them again, Kate was looking at her with a combination of amusement and sympathy.
“I don’t know why I’m freaking out,” Gen told her. “I mean, Ryan and I have already slept together. The hard part is over, right? It should be easy now.”
“Except that you like him,” Kate observed.
“Well, of course I like him. I wouldn’t have had barn sex with him if I didn’t like him.”
“You know what I mean,” Kate said.
And she did. She meant that this was more than like, more than attraction, more than something fun and easy that could be dismissed quickly when it was over. It was too early to think in terms of the future, too early to think in terms of love. But this was more than like. They both knew that.
“Yeah,” Gen admitted. “Could you maybe help me?”
If they’d been closer to the same size—if Kate hadn’t been four inches taller than Gen with what the designers would call a straight figure in comparison to Gen’s hourglass—they might have shared clothing. As it was, they had to settle for Kate coming downstairs with Gen to root through her closet.
“This is nice,” Kate said, pulling out a red sheath dress that would emphasize the color of Gen’s hair.
“It’s nice for a fancy dinner or a cocktail party or something,” Gen complained, “but this is a mystery date! How can I know if it’s nice for a mystery date?”
Kate replaced the dress in the closet and gave Gen a stern look. “You’ve got to wear something. Unless you intend to greet him at the door naked. Which, now that I think of it, might be a good plan.”
“Ugh.” Gen groaned and flopped down on the bed.
“Okay, look. What’s your happy outfit?”
Gen looked at her blankly. “My happy outfit?”
“Yeah. You know. The one outfit that, whenever you wear it, you feel good and you know you look good. We’ve all got one.”
Gen thought about it, and then her face lit up. “I’ve got a top that makes my boobs look great.”
“Good. Get it.”
They paired the top with jeans and boots, and a leather motorcycle jacket Gen loved but that she hadn’t worn in a long time because she usually dressed more formally for work.
When they were done, Kate kissed Gen on the cheek and gave her a companionable pat on the shoulder. “You look great. I’m gonna get out of here before he shows up.”
“Okay. Kate?”
“Hmm?” Kate looked back on her way out the door.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She started to go out, and then hesitated. “It’s kind of awesome that he’s worth freaking out for, don’t you think?”
Gen thought about that. “You know, it really is.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ryan came to the door on time, to the minute. It made Gen wonder whether he’d arrived early and then waited out the clock before knocking. If so, that was pretty cute; it indicated that he was as nervous as she was.
She opened up and let him in, and he looked so handsome she would have swooned if that sort of thing were still done by smitten women. Kind of a shame that it wasn’t.
It would have been so tempting to scrap this whole date business and just pull him inside and tear his clothes off, but, with some variation, that’s what they’d done last time. This time they were going to have a real date, by God, one not interrupted by drunk artists or made somehow lesser by the suggestion that someone was thanking someone for something.
And, she wanted to know what the big secret was.
“So? Spill. Where are we going?” Gen asked as soon as she got him through the door.
“It’s a surprise,” he said with that sexy grin.
“Well, jeez. At least tell me if I’m dressed okay.”
“You’re perfect,” he said, and she had an idea that he might have meant something more than her clothes.
As they drove north on Highway 1, the Cooper House appeared atop a rolling hill that was carpeted in green grass. It was early evening, but the sun was still fairly high in the blue, cloudless sky. They turned into the driveway in Ryan’s truck, and Gen wiggled in her seat in curiosity and excitement.
“What are we doing here?”
“We’re having our date.”
“At the Cooper House?”
“Yeah.” He shot her a look and grinned at her.
Gen tried, for a moment, to make sense of it, and then she realized what was going on. “Wait. Will Bachman works here, right? That friend of yours who was at Kate’s party?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Will’s the caretaker. Christopher Mills is a friend of his from college. Will arranged for us to use the house for the evening.”
Gen squealed. “That is so cool. What are we going to do up there?”
Ryan shrugged. “I brought some food that Jackson made for us. Some wine. We’ll just get up there and see what happens.”
Gen drummed her feet against the floor of the truck in e
xcitement. “This is so much better than dinner and a movie.”
“I’d hoped you would think so.”
The driveway was a long and meandering affair that went past a stand of pine trees, over a low hill, and past a creek before leading them to a tall, wrought-iron gate. Ryan stopped at the gate, leaned out the window, and pushed a security code into the keypad. The gate slowly rolled open.
“You’ve got the security code?” Gen wanted to know.
“Will gave it to me.”
“So you could just drive in here anytime you feel like it? You could burgle the place if you wanted?”
Ryan laughed. “Nah. Will recodes the gate every week or so.”
Gen nodded sagely. “Me too. I recode my gate every week or so. It’s one of the burdens of wealth.”
The flavor of the place changed once they were inside the gate. Manicured lawns stretched for what appeared to be acres. A formal garden stood to the right, with a marble fountain, rose bushes, and towering trees that bathed it all in shade. Off to the left and down the hill a short distance were two fenced tennis courts with a lighting setup that looked like it belonged on a Major League Baseball field. A little farther up, they passed a cottage that Ryan identified as Will’s guest house before they came to rest in a big circular driveway in front of the main house.
Gen had seen the Cooper House in magazines and on the Internet, and of course she’d seen it from Highway 1 as she’d passed on the way to Hearst Castle or Big Sur. But seeing it in pictures or from a distance was very different from seeing it in person.
The house was a hulking, three-story Victorian with gables set into a steep roofline, a large, wrap-around porch, gingerbread trim in shades of blue and red, and a circular turret topped with a roof shaped like an onion dome. The highest point of the third-floor roof was crowned with a widow’s walk, its iron railing pointing to the heavens.
Stepping out of Ryan’s truck, Gen craned her neck to look up at the house. “There should be a horror movie set here.”
“You think?” Ryan came to stand beside her. “I kind of like it.”