by Julia London
It would be wrong to take a cookie from Nancy’s fridge.
Good thing Mia had never claimed to be perfect, and hooray, there were so many cookies that Nancy would never notice one missing—she didn’t strike Mia as the cookie counting type. She held the fridge open with her elbow, and worked the corner of the plastic wrap up off the plate, slipped a cookie off of the pile, held it between her teeth while she returned the plastic wrap to its full upright and locked position, and shut the door.
And then promptly dropped her cookie with a shriek of fright.
The man from the bluff was standing on the other side of the door in his bare feet. His hands were on his waist and he was glaring at her. “What the fuck?”
Her heart began to race painfully, making it difficult to catch her breath. Mia liked to think she was fairly street smart. That if she was ever confronted by a criminal, a terrorist, or a guy like this, she’d think quickly and act smartly. She did neither of those things.
If she’d thought a moment before she reacted, she might have questioned just how dangerous a barefoot man with a glassy look could truly be. But in that moment, Mia knew only that she was alone in Nancy Yates’s house, and she hadn’t let him in.
She whirled around and grabbed the first thing she could lay her hands on—a frying pan. She swung it out in his general direction but didn’t come remotely close to him, but somehow managed to hit one of the pendant lights hanging over the kitchen island.
“Hey!” the man said. He lunged forward, grabbed the frying pan from her in one easy yank, and set it down on the counter. “Be careful with that thing before you break something.”
“Okay, who are you?” Mia demanded hotly.
“I think the better question is, who are you?” he asked irritably as he stepped around her to the coffee brewer. He pulled open the drawer beneath it where Nancy kept the coffee pods. “What’d you do, climb the fence? Is that how you got in? Because I don’t believe you walked up from the parking lot—I would have seen you.”
Fence? What fence? She’d told Drago a crazy man was down on the bluffs—how could Drago miss him? She was going to kill him when she saw him, assuming this guy didn’t kill her first. After he made his coffee, which, inexplicably, he was now doing.
The dogs. Why weren’t they helping her?
She whirled around to the pillows before the hearth. The bedazzled little yappers attacked her feet every time she walked through the door, even if only a few minutes had passed, and yet they hadn’t moved one inch since this guy had come in. Only one had even bothered to lift its head. What the hell was happening?
The man pushed hair from his face, held up the coffee pod, and said, “Totally bad for the environment,” then shoved it into the portal. He turned the brewer on and looked at Mia.
In the kitchen, under the lights, Mia noticed the dark circles under his eyes. His feet were dirty, his jeans unwashed—he looked even more like a bum in the soft light of the kitchen. But there was something about his eyes that seemed wrong with this look. They were so arresting.
Something was off, something was wrong. Mia suddenly had that weird, parallel universe feeling, much like the time she arrived at Karen Elliot’s Oscar-viewing party with her seven-layer dip that was actually only three layers, and had walked in like she always did to find two strange men sitting on a strange couch playing video games. Several stunned, heart-pounding moments later, Mia remembered that Karen had moved the previous month.
But this wasn’t the result of her being overstressed and preoccupied, which was definitely the biggest contributing factor in the Karen incident. This time, Mia was in the right house, and she had to act. “I don’t know what is going on here, but I’m calling the police,” she said firmly, and stepped over the pieces of cookie, as if a home invasion would be made worse if she ground cookie into the tile.
“Be my guest,” he said easily. “And when they get here, you can explain what you’re doing in my mother’s house. Just out of curiosity, I’m going to try this again. What are you doing here? Other than trying to brain someone with a frying pan?”
It took a moment for those words to sink completely into Mia’s brain. This guy with the glassy gorgeous blue eyes was Nancy Yates’s son? Nancy had a son? Nancy, in her palazzo pants and the gray-streaked hair in a ponytail had a son who looked like a bum?
No, that couldn’t be. First, Nancy would have mentioned him. By the way, my son is visiting. By the way, he’s a street bum.
The bum waited for an answer as his coffee brewed. He seemed not the least bit self-conscious about his appearance. Mia was self-conscious for him. So much so, in fact, she couldn’t look away.
He noticed her looking at him and his expression changed from mildly annoyed to definitely pissed. “Ah, I get it,” he said sharply, and shifted toward her. Mia instinctively leaned back, ready to employ rusty karate moves learned at the age of eight. “Yeah, go ahead,” he said, gesturing to himself. “You want to touch this? Do it.”
There was a coldness in his navy-blue eyes, a strange look of resignation that was so weird, and so out of place. “The last thing I want to do is touch you.”
He looked skeptical, the pompous prick. Maybe, Mia thought wildly, he didn’t know how bad he looked. He moved again, and Mia bumped up against the kitchen island. But Nancy’s son was already there, and he planted his hands against the island on either side of her, his body dwarfing hers. He stared down at her with those incongruently gorgeous eyes and said, “What do you want, baby? If you want to play, go ahead. I’m game.”
“You cannot be serious,” she said, her voice full of amazement. Maybe he was handsome beneath this outer layer of hobo, and maybe he didn’t always smell like a sock forgotten in the bottom of a gym bag, but he had to be kidding. She leaned away from him. As far back as she could. “This may come as a shock to your seriously fat ego, but you are absolutely the last person I’d want to play with.” She put her hand up between them to stop him from leaning any closer.
He smirked a little, and his gaze settled on her mouth. “You sure about that?”
Mia snorted. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. Now would you please step back?” she asked, gesturing for him to move. He didn’t move immediately, and Mia couldn’t help wrinkling her nose and turning her head. Her gaze fell to his arm; he had the dark stain of a tattoo that went around his pronounced bicep. It looked like Sanskrit.
Nancy’s son chuckled low at her obvious disgust, and Mia could feel it reverberate in her. But he pushed away from her and turned back to his coffee. “How’d you get in here, anyway?”
“How? The door!” she said, wondering now if he was slow.
“Just walked right through it, huh?”
“No, I cartwheeled through it, I was so happy to be here.”
He glanced up, looking almost as if he believed it. Oh, for the love of Pete. “Look,” Mia said, “there’s obviously been some misunderstanding here.”
“Fantastic,” he said, and opened up a sugar bowl and turned it practically upside down into his coffee, adding enough to trigger an instant diabetic coma. “Go ahead, clue me in.”
“I’m supposed to be here. I’m working for your mom.” She grabbed up a brochure from John Beverly Home Interiors and Landscape Design on the kitchen counter and held it up to him.
Something changed in his expression. He closed his eyes. “Shit,” he said. “The decorator.”
He might as well have said the grim reaper. A bit of heat rose up in Mia’s cheeks. He made no move to take the brochure she was holding out, so she laid it back on the counter. “I’m not the designer. My Aunt Bev is.”
His gaze flicked over her again, assessing her, lingering a little on her tights and boots. “Okay.”
“O-kay,” she shot back. Okay, okay—what did okay mean?
“So what are you if you’re not the designer?”
“Her . . . her helper,” Mia said with a shrug.
“Ah, so you’re
the decorator’s helper. Well then,” he said, and swept his arm toward the rest of the house. “Knock yourself out.” He picked up his coffee and slurped loudly.
“Are you high?” she demanded.
“Nope. But I’ve had a couple of drinks.” He paused and squinted at the window a moment. “More than a couple if we’re going to add them up.”
Well that certainly explained it. It was hardly past noon. Summer people.
He put the coffee down, and opened the fridge. “Are the cookies any good?”
Mia’s face flushed with embarrassment. She abruptly moved around the kitchen island and reached for her messenger bag, preparing to make a quick exit, maybe even walk down the road with the hope of meeting Wallace when he came to pick her up. Go anywhere but here with this weird guy with the blue eyes.
He was still studying the contents of the fridge. Now that she knew who he was, she was revising her assessment of him. She could see that he actually looked unsettlingly hip in a very dirty way. His clothes were expensive. But he looked like he’d stepped off the plane from the West Coast and then gotten roughed up in a dark alley. Maybe that was where he’d had his few drinks. She wondered what kind of girl he went for. Stripper?
“What happened, Chatty Cathy, cat got your tongue now?” he asked, and looked over his shoulder at her. “I asked about the cookies.”
Mia snapped out of her rumination. “I don’t know.”
“Then you should have one,” he said, sounding magnanimous. The smartass practically tossed the plate of cookies onto the kitchen island. He then tossed sandwich rolls, cold cuts, cheese, and mustard onto the island, too. “So what’s your name, Aunt Bev’s helper?”
“Mia.” She folded her arms. “What’s yours?”
He arched a brow and gave her the slightest hint of a wry smile. “Like you don’t know.”
The ego on this guy! “How would I know? Your mother didn’t tell me you were here. I didn’t even know she had a son. Believe me, if I’d known you were here, I would have . . .”
“What would you have done, Aunt Bev’s helper?” he asked, sounding bored.
“I would have waited outside.”
He grunted his opinion of that. “Brennan.”
“Sorry?”
“My name. It’s Brennan.”
That was a summer person name if Mia had ever heard one. Whatever happened to Tom and Harry?
He turned back to the fridge and opened it, holding it open with his foot as he put the sandwich rolls inside. “Now that formal introductions have been made, are you going to just hang around? Maybe you want me to make you a sandwich.” He picked up the package of cold cuts and opened it.
“No thanks—”
“Yeah, that wasn’t really an offer.” He let the fridge door close. “I don’t know what arrangement you have with my mom, but I’m guessing it’s not standing around watching me make sandwiches or swinging pans at people’s heads.”
Mia had never wanted to take a swing at someone as badly as she did right now. She swiped up her bag. “I’m just going to do what I need to do here and get out,” she said tightly.
“That is a great idea,” he said.
Unbelievable. Mia rolled her eyes and marched out of the kitchen before she said something that would lose Aunt Bev the job.
Four
Brennan was in a foul mood, especially once he realized who the woman was with the honey eyes and the auburn hair and the smell of spring around her. Because he didn’t need a woman banging around the house. He needed—really needed—peace and quiet. Solitude. Silence. He didn’t need any more colors than those that were already splashed haphazardly around the interior of this goddamn house. He especially didn’t need colors wrapped around the very delectable curves of a woman’s body. He needed time to think and ponder. He did not need smiles or bright eyes, goddammit.
This was exactly why he’d sworn off women . . . Well. That resolution was beginning to wear a little thin. He wanted sex. He needed sex. But he didn’t need or want women. Needing or wanting anyone was a waste of time, and women especially were too complicated, too needy. And sometimes, too fucking vindictive if things didn’t go their way.
Brennan had also sworn off booze, but he’d had to reconsider that out of necessity because of his resolution to swear off women. He had to do something to dull the lust.
Yeah, well, obviously he was going to have to redouble his resolve.
Brennan had no idea how many beers he’d had by the time his mother returned home, but when she finally pulled into the drive, he was drunk enough to be irritated with the world in general and her in particular.
She seemed very pleased with herself when she swept in and carelessly dropped several shopping bags on the kitchen table. “Do my eyes deceive me?” she asked jubilantly. “My son is alive!” She threw her arms around Brennan, rising up on her toes to kiss his cheek before she dropped her arms and swanned past him.
“You went into the city?” Brennan asked, looking at the bags.
“Yes, I did!” She walked to the wine cooler and bent over to have a look at the bottles inside. “Such a beautiful day for it, too. How was your day, sweetie?”
“Not as good as yours, apparently.” Brennan moved her shopping bags around, all of them emblazoned with logos likes Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman. His mother could spend money, and she especially liked to spend it when she was trying to get his attention. Brennan wouldn’t be surprised if there was ten thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise in those bags.
“At least you’re out of bed,” she said. “And while the sun is still up! We’re making progress!”
Jesus, he hadn’t lived with his mother in seventeen years and had forgotten how annoying she could be. “Mom,” he said wearily. “I work late. I sleep late. You know that. So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t send Magda up at the crack of dawn with her industrial vacuum cleaner.”
His mother laughed as if he were trying to be funny. He was not.
“Magda does like to get an early start on some days,” she said breezily as she selected a bottle of wine. “Now, don’t look at me like that, Brennan. Am I supposed to tell her to come back at three o’clock in the afternoon when you’ve managed to drag yourself out of bed?”
He didn’t sleep until three, but he wasn’t going to argue with her. He was an experienced hand on that front—it led to nowhere.
She opened a drawer and rummaged around for a corkscrew.
The beers weren’t doing Brennan any favors on the patience front, and he halfheartedly attempted to tamp down his irritation. But was it really asking too much to let him decompress here, in his mother’s new home, away from the world? In the house that he’d bought for her? This had been a rough year for him, a rough awakening, and he didn’t need his mother’s judgments or her timetables for when he should pick himself up and dive back into the world.
He sat on one of the kitchen table chairs, his weight causing it to sway a little. “So what’s with the girl?” he asked curtly.
“What girl?” His mother gave him a feigned smile of innocence as she put the corkscrew to the wine bottle.
“Mom.”
“Ooh,” she said, as if a light had just dawned. “You mean the one from John Beverly Home Interiors.”
“Yeah, that one. I thought she was a damn groupie. I thought she’d climbed the fence.”
“A groupie!” She laughed roundly. “Brennan, for heaven’s sake. Not every girl you meet is a groupie.”
Easy for her to say. His mother had not had the pleasure of finding an inebriated woman sitting on the toilet like he had at his home in LA. Or women hanging around the door of his hotel room. Or women appearing like magic on his tour bus offering to do things to his body.
“She’s really different than the rest of the East Beach crowd, I think. Not so resort-y, like the rest of them,” his mother said. “She has a strange sense of fashion, but I like that, don’t you? It’s refreshing. You wouldn’t believe how many g
irls are wandering around New York in those desperately short shorts and cropped tops. Like that’s a look. But Mia? She’s unique and she’s adorable.”
Brennan didn’t know if he would ever use the word adorable to describe anything. But he could agree, at a distance, that the woman was appealing in a very unconventional way. He couldn’t quite put his finger on how, exactly. She wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t a sex kitten or a ball-busting model. And while Brennan knew absolutely nothing about women’s fashion, she had been dressed in a very strange combination of prints and colors. He honestly didn’t know what she was, besides argumentative. That was all beside the point, anyway. “Why was she even here? She had the run of the house while you were gone. She could have taken something or broken into your computer.”
“She would never!” His mother laughed, as if the notion of a stranger stealing was absurd. “I know people, and she’s not like that. She was here because we are going to renovate this musty old house, remember?”
There was the liberal use of the pronoun we again.
“Oh, I remember,” he said drily. Brennan had paid three million for this house, and had agreed to pay another million for the renovation. And that was on top of his mother’s impulsive shopping sprees. Sometimes he wondered if his mother understood how hard it was to come by the sums of money he routinely paid out on her behalf. Brennan was generous with his mother, and he didn’t begrudge her a cent of it. She’d provided for him when there was no support from an absent father, managing to keep a roof over their head and food on the table while working two jobs, then adding a third job to pay for his guitar and music theory lessons when he’d developed an interest as a boy. So yeah, he was happy to do his part for her now. He just wished she had a healthier respect for the money she blew through.
“And besides, you were here, sweetie. You would have kept her from making off with the awful fixtures in this house, right?”
Don’t engage. “I’m not the best babysitter of workers. And didn’t we agree you wouldn’t start that project until the end of summer? You agreed to give me time and space for a few weeks, Mom.”