by Amelia Wilde
“I don’t tend to look for signs from the universe.” Though if I were that kind of person, one of them would be standing in front of me right now. If that were possible. If that were a thing.
But it’s not a thing. It’s all just a grand cosmic coincidence. The last thing I should be doing is splitting my focus between the past and the very present threat to the Bliss Resort…which is me. It’s my own damned inability to figure out this problem, no matter how many hours I spend looking at spreadsheets and accounting systems and everything else.
“I know.”
“Did you honestly think I became a different person after college?”
Her expression turns sly, the moonlight reflected in her pale blue eyes. It makes them look almost colorless, but I can’t bring myself to see them that way. It’s a strange double vision. “You know, for somebody who wants to nope their way out of this situation, you have a lot of questions.” She raises her other hand to the front of her robe and draws it another inch closed. The robe must be huge, to have that much give, but I can’t get around the fact that I want it off of her. I want it on the floor. It’s a base, animal urge, and no matter how hard I try to push it away, it yips at my heels.
Or maybe that’s the sleep deprivation kicking in.
Either way, I can feel my resolve chipping away at the edges. I built this wall around myself brick by brick, one for every day I was apart from Leta, and now ten minutes in the silvery light streaming in through my windows is taking it down in layers of grit and stone.
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I always thought the middle of the night was the best time to talk.”
“I know you did.” There’s so much I know about her—so many bits and pieces of information that I’ve tried to forget—and it’s like the deluge is exploding the metaphorical wall that is my brain. God help us all if a toilet crashes through the mess of emotions sloshing around in my skull.
The imagery is getting too graphic for the middle of the night.
“I get it.” Leta does a slow turn. “Do you have a spare bedroom, then?”
“You’re not going to insist that we sit down and talk it out?” Part of me is genuinely shocked. I never knew Leta to halfass anything, and she seemed pretty committed to rehashing the yawning void between college and now.
Or all the life that happened in that void.
It’s not a void. Not really.
“Not tonight. I don’t know. Maybe not ever.” She laughs, a light and airy sound despite the disaster that might currently be unfolding at the house where she was staying. I need to get a handle on that, too. Plus, thinking about the breakup is like staring into the sun.
You can’t stare into the sun in the middle of the night.
“Okay.” Focus. There are problems to be solved, things to deal with, and standing here staring at Leta in her bathrobe is not going to make a dent in the list. “I have a spare bedroom.”
I lead her up the stairs, painfully aware of every creak in the steps. Leta would probably think that noise was charming, but I have the sudden sensation that I should have had the steps torn out and replaced in case of this exact scenario.
At the top of the stairs I wait for her to make the last step onto the landing and point down the hallway.
“The last door on the left is mine. The first one on the left is an office. And on the right, spare bedroom, bathroom, spare bedroom.”
Leta pats my shoulder. “Good tour. I pick the one across from yours.”
“You really didn’t hesitate.”
“Look, if another freak accident happens tonight, I want to be able to run right across the hall.”
The whole conversation feels surreal, and I half-expect to wake up out of the dream at any moment. “Why wouldn’t you run outside? Or anywhere else?”
She shrugs. “You always have a plan.”
I didn’t have a plan for her. Up until two days ago, I would have agreed that I’m the kind of guy who has two feet planted firmly on the ground.
I’m staring at her.
Leta glances at me out of the corner of her eye. “You’re staring at me.”
“I—” I want to say, I think my brain is shutting down from the sheer coincidence of you being in Ruby Bay, and I desperately want to know why, but if I sit down and ask you about it we’ll find ourselves re-tracing old paths. And we both know where those lead. I can’t go there again. What comes out is. “It’s been a long night.”
“Is everything…normal in the spare bedroom?” Leta laughs again. “Of course it is. I’ll see you in the morning.” She pads down the hall and steps across the threshold into the second spare bedroom.
“Goodnight,” I call after her.
“Goodnight.”
Before I go into my room I take out my phone. I’m going to have to summon at least one person from emergency maintenance to assess the situation at Leta’s and figure out the extent of the damage. And make sure the water is, in fact, shut off. The rest of the block is going to lose water pressure if the situation isn’t contained. I’m not going to make that call up here, where she’ll hear me through the walls. That wouldn’t be professional. It wouldn’t make for a great member experience.
That’s hilarious—Leta as a permanent member of the club at Bliss. No. She would never.
I run through the list in my mind, pull up the first guy’s number, and turn toward the stairs.
“Charlie?”
“Yeah?”
Leta is silhouetted in front of the window.
“Do you have some clothes I can borrow.”
“Of course.”
I already know which ones.
6
Leta
Click.
Scrape.
Tap, tap, tap.
It’s not a toilet falling through a floor, that’s for sure. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that sound.
No—it’s cooking, I think.
I turn over in the bed, keeping my eyes shut.
I know exactly where I am.
I’m in Charlie Bliss’s house.
Back in the day, he took me to visit the resort on one of our weekends away from college. He didn’t have the house back then. He owned it, technically, but it was still a shabby cottage on the club side.
That’s what the told me.
He didn’t tell me it was a huge house with three bedrooms, and he didn’t tell me he had meticulous plans for renovating the entire thing. This is no shabby cottage. It’s all gleaming wood and earth tones. I was shocked to find that the stairs creaked, knowing Charlie.
Even past Charlie.
It’s different, in the morning light. Last night it seemed like a totally reasonable idea to come stay in his house. Where else was I supposed to go after Aunt Mari’s bathroom gave up the ghost?
My bathroom. It’s still tough to think of it that way.
When I can no longer ignore the need to pee I get out of bed and sneak down the hall to the bathroom. There’s no need to sneak but I do it anyway, shutting the door behind me and flipping the lock with a pounding heart.
Thank god. Charlie did not see me walking down the hall to the bathroom like a totally normal person.
The bathroom, by the way, gleams.
Every surface shines, even the paint on the cabinets. He’s also put out a toothbrush, still in its package, and a new tube of toothpaste. The toothpaste has never been opened.
I have so many questions. Does he have this stuff in here because he helps run a resort, or because he wants to be prepared for any contingency? Did he get them specifically for me?
I splash water on my face and put that idea out of my mind. Of course he didn’t buy these things for me. That’s just Charlie. He’d do as much for anyone else, probably. I do a turn in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the door. The pajama pants and t-shirt he lent me last night fit fine now that I’ve rolled the waist.
“Courage,” I tell myself in the mirror, then go out and
go down the stairs.
Staying the night at someone’s house is always a weird, isn’t it? Especially when you’re not dating and definitely won’t date in the future. Especially if the person in the kitchen is as hot as you remember him being last night.
I get to the kitchen.
He’s just as hot.
Hotter, even, because he’s standing over the stove, cooking with easy, methodical movements.
He must sense my presence, because he turns his head. “Good morning.”
“Morning!” I sing. I am not the kind of person who sings morning! I’m the kind of person who says “hey” in a foggy monotone and reaches for coffee with my eyes closed. Being near him procures so much adrenaline that I’m wired already and I haven’t even smelled caffeine.
What I have smelled is…
Eggs.
My stomach recoils. I hate eggs in the morning specifically. I guess there are other times when you could eat them, but I find them abhorrent before noon. The kitchen island is the perfect place to lean and brace myself for the inevitably. He’ll offer me an egg, I’ll decline, and then he’ll usher me to the front door.
“I’m almost done.” Charlie opens one of the cabinets without looking and tips the eggs onto a fresh plate. Two of them, over easy. I turn my head away. “I hope you’re hungry.”
“Oh, I—” I pat my stomach, then raise my hand to wave off his completely true statement. “I’m good. I’ll find something to eat later.”
Charlie shoots a look at me over his shoulder. “I’m not giving you any eggs.”
I sag forward with relief. “Oh, thank god.”
He goes over to the microwave, opens the door, and takes out a bowl. Charlie balances the bowl in one hand and rubs the back of his neck with the other, and my heart spins around like a barber pole. “Oatmeal.” He holds out the bowl so I can see what’s inside.
It’s perfect oatmeal.
From the looks of it, and how it smells, I can tell he’s added brown sugar and a dash of cinnamon. I want to shove the entire bowl into my mouth at once, almost as powerfully as I want to kiss the back of his neck. For some reason, that’s a part of Charlie Bliss’s body I’ve always been head over heels for.
Not much has changed, except for that we broke up and haven’t spoken since. Not really.
Charlie sets the bowl on the island in front of me, then follows it up with a spoon. “You’re being seriously attentive.” I pick up the spoon and dip it into the oatmeal, then take a tentative taste with the tip of my tongue. His eyes follow my every movement, so blue in the morning light you could mistake them for sapphires. “Do you do this for everybody?”
The corner of his mouth lifts in a smile. “We like to take care of our members and guests.”
There it is—that rock to the chest. That heavy weight on my sternum. I’m a guest here, a guest of the resort, and nothing more.
“Are you sure you didn’t eat a brochure for the resort for breakfast?”
It’s for the best.
It is.
The pipe dream I had last night—the one about finally having a reckoning with Charlie after all these years—is revealed to be a total pipe dream.
Charlie narrows his eyes. “I did. It was extremely filling.” He turns and rinses his hands in the sink, then dries them on a towel hanging from the handle of the stove. “I’m going to go check in with our maintenance person. Take your time getting ready. I—” His hand lands on the back of his neck again. “I had some clothes sent from the gift shop.
I raise my eyebrows. “How’d you know my size?”
Charlie shoots me a look that says how could I not?
My throat goes tight.
He grabs his phone from the counter and slips it into his pocket. “Take your time getting ready. No rush to get out.”
So casual, and then he’s gone.
I take another bite of oatmeal.
He’s gone, and he left behind a whole plate of eggs.
Charlie
“It’ll be about a week.” Pete Bower, owner of Bower’s Construction and Renovation, crosses his arms over his chest and looks up at Leta’s house. He gives one final nod. “I don’t trust the rest of the flooring, after what happened. We’ll have to rip up the hallway and bathroom, minimum, and see how it goes. These old houses—you just never know.”
“A week,” I echo.
“You can get back in here after that, but it’ll need some new paint. From what I can tell, there was an office below the bathroom. Most of the stuff in there looks okay, but the toilet came down on a bookshelf that’s pretty well smashed. I’ll have the guys bring out as much as they can and put it on the front lawn.”
“The bookshelf?”
“The books,” says Pete. “I figure you’ll want to go through them. You and your brothers took this over, didn’t you? I was out here about a year back for a problem in the kitchen, but it was another lady’s then.”
“Right.”
I don’t have the information to fill in the gaps in the story, and frankly I hate that. I’ve been holding the details at arm’s length. I could have pulled up the records on this property yesterday in my office, but I didn’t.
Now I wish I had.
Or…I wish I’d asked Leta.
I wish it didn’t feel like holding my hand to a hot stove.
Pete and I gaze up at the building for another moment, and then I extend my hand so we can shake. “I’ll let you get back to it.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
Next on my agenda: a room for Leta.
I find Roman in his office, frowning at his computer screen. He looks a lot like our father, only our father was not a man for computers. He was fond of scribbling things in record books, then having his office staff put them into various systems. A fresh wave of suspicion rises, thinking about him doing that. Who wants to blame their own father for money going missing? Who wants to blame their dead father?
“I need a room at the resort.”
Roman keeps typing. “Hello to you, too. There aren’t any rooms.”
“One of the smaller ones would be fine, I just need—what?”
“We’re booked up.”
“It’s Sunday.”
Roman finally meets my eyes, his eyebrows raised. “Yes, it is Sunday. And we’re full up. What’s going on?”
I tell him the abridged version of the Leta Saga and watch him struggle to keep his questions in his mouth.
“—so she spent last night at my place. I just met with Pete and it’ll be a week before she can go back to hers.”
Roman slaps one hand down on the desk. “Damn it, Charlie, you can’t leave me hanging like that. She stayed at your house? And you’re standing here like that’s a totally casual coincidence?”
“It was a totally casual coincidence,” I say through gritted teeth. “What else was I supposed to do? She only had a bathrobe.”
My brother’s eyes dance. “Only a bathrobe, huh? Did you confirm that for yourself?”
I let out a long-suffering sigh. “Did you become Beau overnight?”
“Did someone say my name?” My twin brother Beau waltzes in, a giant cocktail in his hand. I shoot him a look. “What?” He glances down at the cocktail. “It’s virgin, as usual. I like the umbrellas. But the more important thing is—” Beau sits down in one of the chairs across from Roman’s desk and puts his feet up on the other. “—I heard you had a woman at your place last night?”
“Jesus Christ.” I put a hand over my eyes. “How could you possibly know that?”
“You just said it.” Beau sips the cocktail. It’s a startling shade of pink, not so different from Leta’s hair. “I heard spent last night at my place, and I want to know who it was.”
There’s no point in putting him off. “It was Leta Quinn.”
Beau’s eyes bug out. “What? Why didn’t you text me?”
“Why didn’t I text you at three in the morning to tell you she was spending the night? Gee. I can�
�t imagine why.”
“She came over at three in the morning?” Beau’s voice rises in a harsh whisper. “Man, we were just—”
“Don’t.”
“We were just talking about her the other night.”
“Is this a conversation we need to have in my office?” Roman asks.
“What about the employee bungalows?” Beau tips his head back against the chair and stares at the ceiling.
“Two of them are being renovated and the rest are full.” Roman shrugs. “It’s the way of the world.”
“I thought we had an empty one.”
“Nope.”
“Since when?”
“Since Huck got in this morning. Did you say you’ve got Pete working on the house?” Roman frowns.
“Yes. Why?”
“He’ll be happy to have the Sunday overtime.”
“What happened?” asks Beau.
“A flood.”
Wow, he mouths, then sips his drink.
“Keep a close eye on the repairs,” Roman says. “If that’s where the leak is…”
“It’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s not. The work is subcontracted, but I already double-check invoices. That’s not where the money is going.”
“Are we ever going to figure this out? I thought Charlie’s genius brain could’ve handled it by now,” Beau says.
“Why don’t you get your genius brain into my office and help me?”
Beau raises his free hand. “Oh, no. I’d only get in the way.”
“Watch for it anyway,” says Roman. “Have either of you heard from Asher lately?”
“No,” we say at the same time.
“Jinx.” Beau stabs a finger in my direction. I raise another finger to him. But beneath the pleasant back-and-forth, worry settles into my spine. Asher’s never around. I haven’t checked on his expense accounts in a while. How long.
