by Amelia Wilde
Crazy On You
A Bliss Brothers Novel
Amelia Wilde
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
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Also by Amelia Wilde
1
Charlie
The silhouette is the last straw.
If it weren’t for the long and frustrating day I spent in my office, which is supposed to be a place of relative refuge from the incessant hum of Roman’s main office, I might have been able to sleep.
I might have been able to shut my overpowered and yet somehow still-stupid brain off, close my eyes, and drift into temporary oblivion.
Instead, the sheets wrap themselves around my knees like there’s someone else in the bed with me—cruel fucking joke, sheets—and every time I get the urge to turn over I’m fully awake.
Roman thinks the mystery of the missing money, which sounds like a Nancy Drew novel in the worst possible way, is keeping him up at night.
He has no idea.
We’ve been back and forth on this at least a month now, with me printing him endless spreadsheets and him frowning in that fatherly way that says I’m disappointed that you haven’t done better, even though he’s not the one sifting through financial records every day of his life. Oh, no. Roman’s the one striding across the office every morning after his workout. Sometimes it wakes him up an hour early, he told me last week. So he…visits the gym. Visits his girlfriend in the bed next to him, more like.
Not that I blame him for that.
Much.
I do, however, blame the world right now for making me the one on call for club-side emergencies tonight. Roman likes the personal touch, but it means one of us is always at risk of getting woken up in the middle of the night by an old woman wondering about a cat scratching at her door or some such.
I have one trick in my arsenal for trying to fall asleep, and it’s the one our mother gave Beau and I when we were younger. Just pretend to be asleep, she’d say. Right now, she’s probably somewhere in the Bahamas, but it’s anyone’s guess. She’s got Driver’s obsession with travel and Asher’s obsession with being a missing person. I don’t know which one of us heard from her last.
And I’m not going to think about it. I will let my mind go blank. I will relax all of my muscles. I will—
Hear the faint echo of one cheer bounce off my wall, then become painfully aware of the ghost of a beat dropping over and over and over and over and over again.
I whip the covers off and hurl myself out of bed, finally transformed into a crotchety old man. I stalk across the bedroom and wrench the curtain back. It’s pointless, because I already know where the sound is coming from—a party on the beach. Heart pounding, I served the empty street with a vicious glare.
Directly across the street is Roman’s house. The house of the silhouette.
A light on the second floor is on, and he and Jenny are outlined in shadow against the curtain. And from what that shadow is doing—
“Disgusting.” I slam my own curtain back into place. At least I try to slam it, but it slides across the curtainrod with a disappointingly gentle whisper.
I used to have a person like that. She was nothing like Roman’s Jenny. But our silhouette would have looked similar.
You know—in terms of the passion.
I have to get out of here.
On the porch I take stock. The first week of September means that it’s still warm, but the air has lost some of the oppressive humidity of August, and I take a big breath of the clear night air and bend to tie my shoes.
Over on the club side, the neighborhood is quiet. The wind breathes. The houses breathe. The streetlights give off an electric hum. And my mind circles around the missing money another pointless time.
The Bliss Resort is bleeding money. That’s what Roman would say, and that’s what Roman has said. To me. Every day for a month. He sees the same spreadsheets I do, and those columns and rows should make everything clear.
Except they don’t make it clear. They make it patently unclear, and that’s not how I want to live my life, second-guessing everything. I want to be able to trust the numbers, but the numbers, as I’ve discovered, are not trustworthy. There’s a flaw in the system. Hell, maybe there’s a flaw in the whole setup of the resort. Roman can see the big picture, but I’m the only one who can see all the underpinnings. Because my finance department—all three of us—are the ones with our hands in the endless stream of numbers. Expenses out. Profit in. And somewhere, a leak.
It would be easier, I think, if reservation records randomly disappeared. That’s something you can fix with a profuse apology and a promise to reschedule. But missing money?
Missing money means there’s someone taking the money. Money doesn’t just disappear from my ledgers. It has to go somewhere, and it has to go there at a person’s bidding. Or maybe a conspiracy of people. A vast shadow network of…
Of nothing. I shake my head to clear the thought. It’s not supported by data, and anyway, it’s the middle of the night. No problem-solving ever takes place in the middle of the night.
I jog down the steps of my cottage on the club side and ease into my pace. I run in the middle of the road, in the September moonlight, and pay attention to the rhythm of my footsteps. It works. For five seconds.
Roman’s not happy about the resort, but then again, I don’t know how he could be. With every day that goes by that we haven’t solved this, it gets worse.
That I haven’t solved it. The weight is on my shoulders this time.
Down toward the corner, Driver’s house is dark. His girlfriend Holiday is pregnant, which I gather makes a person ungodly tired, even at the very beginning. I don’t know what’s weirder—the fact that he changed his life to be with her, or the fact that they’re asleep by ten most nights. Beau and Claire’s house is dark, too. But that silhouette in Roman’s window still stings for a variety of stupid reasons.
I start down the hill toward the gatehouse. I wasn’t imagining the beach party. With every step I take the sound gets clearer—the throb of the music. The scattered cheers. It’s like the lake takes the noise and tosses it back onto the club side. It’s a miracle more people don’t complain about it. Or maybe they do—Roman would know. A few months ago, before everything happened with Jenny, I might’ve seen the light in his window and knocked on his door. He would have come out onto his front porch to listen for signs of trouble with one of Beau’s events. Roman always blamed it on Beau’s party attitude, but he was rarely as drunk as he seemed. Everybody has their secrets. Beau’s weren’t mine to tell, twin brother or not.
I skirt the gatehouse and run across onto the official resort property. There’s one gate between me and the beach and I leap over it, proving once again that the gate is pointless. Not that anyone particularly cares.
The sand sinks under my feet and my calves burn, but there it is, out on the accessible surface of the beach: the party that’s being reflected back at my house by the water and the sky.
I slow to a stop and take it in.
The entire scene is bathed in firelight from a massive beach bonfire that’s half burned out and a
ridiculous number of tiki torches. Everyone’s dancing. Somehow, the crowd looks almost united. This should be wrapping up any moment now, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at them.
I move closer, a human moth to a flame.
It’s creepy.
I know it’s creepy, standing here in the sand, looking at a party. It’s not up tot the standards of the Bliss Resort. And I turn away.
At least, I start to turn away, and that’s when I see her.
It’s a flash of hair flying behind someone, stirred up in the breeze, and the only thing I can really discern about it in this light and at this distance is that it’s not a natural color. There’s something about the way the firelight and the color meet, a split second, and I’m back there.
I’m right back there, back at the end of college, sitting in the warmth of a bonfire with a beer in my hand. I don’t even like beer, but that’s what was always available, and Leta loved to go to parties. So we went to parties.
Leta.
I’d say I haven’t thought about her for years, and maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s true that, on some level, I haven’t let her enter my thoughts. I’ve kept the ghost of relationships past at least the length of the beach away. But it doesn’t matter if it was true before this moment. In this moment, I’m sitting by the bonfire again, watching the light play over her blue hair and memorizing the way she looked when she laughed. The heat of the firelight on her skin was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, back then. It might still be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I sat near her at so many parties, in the light of so many fires, and it never got old. My heart races. My head struggles to catch up. It could be her, my mind whispers.
No, it could not. Leta’s not coming back to Ruby Bay. She has no reason to come back here.
“Did you come to babysit me?” Beau’s voice cuts into my thoughts. It doesn’t exactly startle me. I must have sensed that he was nearby. “Because if so, Charles Bliss, you screwed up. I’m not in charge of this party.”
“Hilarious. And no, I didn’t come here for you.” I cut a glance at him across the sand. He’s barefoot in the sand, his hair pressed up on one side like he’s been sleeping. “What are you doing here, if this isn’t your party?”
“I let Claire do this one,” he says. “She brought on some more staff to shut it down in…” He pulls his phone from his pocket and checks the time on the screen. “…fifteen minutes.” He shoves his phone back into his pocket and throws an arm around my shoulders. “What are you out here for, my man?”
I shrug his arm off and roll my eyes. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Still working on that mystery shit?”
“It’s serious, Beau. The resort is losing money, and I don’t know why.”
He nods. “I wasn’t trying to make light of it. I’m still half-asleep.”
“At least you could fall asleep in the first place.”
“Well, I had help.”
I hold up a hand. “I don’t want to know.”
“See, when a man and a woman love each other very much, the way I love Claire and she returns my affections—”
God, he is so loud. “Are you sure you need to be out here? I don’t think this crowd is interested in an impromptu sex-ed class.”
“I wanted to make sure it went okay.”
We both consider the crowd. “That’s the most responsible thing I’ve ever heard you say. What happened to you?”
“The miracle of love,” Beau says. “But seriously. Does it look like a decent party? Nobody’s blackout drunk. No insane incidents. The security Claire hired looks like they can handle it.”
I didn’t notice them before, but now I see them—matching polo shirts and dark pants, at the edge of the light.
“Yeah. They do.”
Beau falls silent as the music shifts and changes into another song. It’s faster, more frenzied, and my heart beats along with it even though I don’t love this kind of club beat. It reminds me of a time I did love club beats. It reminds me of a time I didn’t grimace when I thought of the phrase club beats.
“You thinking about her?”
Beau isn’t looking at me as he asks the question. He looks straight ahead, his arms crossed over his chest.
I take him up on the invitation. Beau and I could not be more different personality-wise. He spent several years pretending to be a drunken jackass, but in reality he’s a mostly sober jackass. I take things seriously. But right now, in the middle of the night, he’s my twin brother. And he’s the only one of my brothers who happens to be standing here on the beach with me.
“I saw her hair.”
He nods sagely, as if this makes any sense whatsoever. “I thought it might be the tiki torches. You guys were into those.”
“She was into bonfires, not tiki torches.”
“Same thing.”
“They are not the same thing.”
“Tiki torches are tiny bonfires, Charlie. You know that as well as I do.”
I laugh in spite of myself. “Did you seriously wake up in the middle of the night to do a job you don’t have to do?”
Beau covers his mouth and faces me, eyes getting wider and wider until he looks like a caricature of the leading lady in a horror movie. “This is awful,” he whispers. “I’m becoming…you.”
“I hate you.”
He drops his hand and shakes his head. “I didn’t wake up in the night to do a job that isn’t mine. Claire woke me up in the night and asked me to check on things. She’s as bad as you are.” He frowns. “Maybe you’re the twin she was meant to be with, and I’m—”
“Still fifteen years old?”
“Excuse me,” says Beau, hand on his heart. “I’m at least twenty-one.”
I give him a mock-salute and take a hard turn down toward the water, running faster with every step.
As if I can run away from thinking about the ex-love of my life, Leta Quinn.
Shit.
2
Leta
When I die, I hope to go out with a bunch of fantastic secrets that will slowly be revealed to my relatives. I mean, right? Who wouldn’t want their niece or nephew to get a very officious letter on the kind of letterhead that makes you think you’re being sued?
Not that I’ve been sued, although I’m sure it’s not totally outside the realm of possibility.
Once I stopped panicking I actually read the text of the letter. I got a house, which is basically the opposite of getting sued.
I come through the kitchen and turn up the music on the speaker system. The sun is up, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m ready to kick ass on this, the latest plot twist in my life.
Inheriting the house did come with some stipulations, namely that I take possession of the house within thirty days. What does take possession mean, you’re probably asking? Being in the house, as far as I can tell, and…going through my aunt’s stuff.
There is a lot of stuff. She wasn’t a hoarder, or anything like that. Everything’s tucked into places that look meticulously chosen. There’s not even dust. But this is not a show home. She lived here, that’s for certain, though I don’t know when that would have happened. I always thought she spent all of her time in California. That’s where her parents moved when she was sixteen, along with the rest of the family, and that’s where we all stayed. I stayed right up until I went to college.
And then I started my own studio/gallery, which is in a promising neighborhood—it’s not far from Margot Piazzi’s gallery, and she is a huge name on the scene. One day, maybe she’ll notice me and we can become friends. I have wine nights every Tuesday at my studio just in case she needs a glass.
It was on a wine night that I got the letter. And then, because I believe in letting the winds of life direct some of my sails, I got on a plane and came to Ruby Bay, New York.
“Stay cool,” I say out loud over the dulcet tones of the lead singer of Pilot Five. Some people don’t like “new music,” which I think is bullshit. A lot
of new music is specifically engineered to be pleasing to our brains, and whoever is in charge of the Pilot Five band knew that and capitalized on it. To that I say, bravo. The latest album is addictive with that alternative rock sound we’ve all come to know and love.
Just kidding. I think it’s alternative rock, but musical genres are not my strong suit. I like what I like.
I survey the kitchen cabinets, hands on my hips.
My plane landed late last night, coming in over a darkened New York. I took a cab from the little regional airport outside of town expecting…I don’t know what I was expecting. A cul-de-sac, maybe. A quiet little neighborhood next to a park. My aunt was the kind of person who kept a neat, unassuming house in an unassuming neighborhood. It was the same design as every other house in the neighborhood, as proscribed by the homeowner’s association.
Needless to say, I wasn’t expecting the Bliss Resort & Club.
The cab driver dropped me off on the club side. It was obvious even in the dark that this is a club for rich people. Maybe not mega rich people, who probably all have their own private islands, but rich enough to live in a club with a gate and a guard. He raised his eyebrows at my carpetbag. It’s an antique that I found in a thrift shop back home, and it’s cavernous enough to fit a mix-and-match wardrobe that’ll get me through my first week here.
I walked up the hill in the glow of old-fashioned looking streetlamps, my phone guiding the way, and found the house.
I did not have time to go through any of the things inside.
Fine. I did have time, but something else called to me as I stood inside the living room—the sound of a party.
