Bohemia Chills
Lucy Lakestone
Velvet Petal Press
Copyright ©2019 by Lucy Lakestone
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the writer and publisher.
Published by Velvet Petal Press, Florida
Learn more about the author at LucyLakestone.com
Cover design and lightning photography by Sky Diary Productions
Couple photo by g_studio, DepositPhotos
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-943134-21-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-943134-20-5
First edition
Contents
About the Common Elements Romance Project
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
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Preview of BOHEMIA BEACH
Books by Lucy Lakestone
About the Common Elements Romance Project
While Bohemia Chills is the seventh book in my Bohemia Beach Series of hot romances — all of which can be read on their own — it’s also a Common Elements Romance Project novel. The idea of common elements intrigued me, so I couldn’t resist adding one more book to my series and joining this nifty project, which features dozens of romance authors writing in a variety of subgenres.
Each of our books has to have five elements: a lightning storm, a person named Max, a stack of thick books, lost keys, and a house that may or may not be haunted. What all of these said to me was: Halloween romantic comedy! I hope the story of Kayla and Landon and their Florida town’s most famous haunted house gives you the best kind of chills.
Chapter 1
You don’t know what it’s like to be haunted by failure until you use your master’s degree in film production to shoot video dating profiles.
Today’s batch was a case in point. There was a guy with the personality of a turnip who told the camera he only dated blondes who talked like Marilyn Monroe.
And another one who liked “light beer and, you know, skating, dude. And gangster movies. Dude, chick flicks give me hives.”
And the engineer who wanted a serious girlfriend but only if her body was “tight” and she was available Tuesdays and Thursdays, because his other nights were committed to his no-girls-allowed gaming sessions.
At least he was committed to something. Dude.
It was a job, sure. Shooting dating videos paid the rent for the apartment I shared with the most irritating man on the planet.
But really this job was my punishment for screwing up my life.
I was supposed to be telling stories with my degree — beautiful, visual stories. I couldn’t coax a story out of these guys (today it was only guys, for some reason) with a book of Mad Libs and a bottle of tequila.
But props to them for getting out there. This job wasn’t just a reminder of my career failures. It was a reminder of my amorous ones, too.
Because after the romantic and vocational disaster that was my first job, I was not putting myself out there, looking for love like these guys were, until I figured out what the hell my next move was.
OK, let me be honest. I was never putting myself out there, not after a burn so bad, smoke was still rising off my heart.
Maybe I wasn’t shopping for guys, but I still wanted a new job. I’d applied for a cool video gig with the new joint Bohemia-Bohemia Beach tourism office. I hadn’t heard a squeak from them after a month. Not a good sign.
So here I was, trying to make Casablanca out of crap.
I finished going through the standard personality questions with the guy who only dated on Tuesdays and Thursdays and handed him off to the photographer.
Just how long would this job last? More to the point, how long would I last in it? It was the brainchild of a startup jumping into the dating app market with video-heavy profiles. The concept was retro, but they gave it a twenty-first-century spin. After these studio chats with our alpha testers, we’d shoot them in the wild — the skater skateboarding, the engineer gaming, that kind of thing. The pro videos would turn the daters into mini movie stars. And, lucky me, I would get to film them.
But first, I needed to figure out the highest point on the causeway bridge so I could jump off it.
Who was I kidding? I never even jumped off the high dive during swimming lessons. Too scary.
What I needed was other options.
The clock on the wall said it was four. Good. No more appointments today.
I wandered into the bullpen, where the half-dozen coders and data people were having an end-of-shift Nerf gun war. Even the managers from the glass offices that overlooked the river were fully engaged. I ducked a foam bullet and crouched behind my desk.
“Kayla!” called Maria, our office manager. She hid behind a cushy chair in the “chill” area until she jumped up with her weapon and let fly a hail of bright yellow foam missiles. “Your damn phone has been ringing every fifteen minutes.”
“Sorry. Thought it was on silent,” I said as she ducked again. I couldn’t bring my phone into the studio during filming, so I missed a lot of calls. Or I would if I actually got calls, which were sort of rare these days.
I opened my bottom drawer, pulled out an orange, squishy stress-relief ball with the company logo on it and hurled it at Rick, the founder and CEO. He was so busy firing little balls out of his big Rival Prometheus weapon that he didn’t see it coming, and it beaned him right on the head.
“Argh!” he exclaimed.
“Yes!” Maria cheered, her brown eyes flashing in excitement.
Sensing weakness, the others turned their weapons on Rick, and he went down in a hail of bouncy ammo, effectively ending the battle for the day. I settled in my chair and dug my phone out of my backpack.
My mom.
Shit. Six calls from my mom. No messages.
I hoped they weren’t about Grandma Helen. Her health was mostly good, but she was also pretty old. Mom and Grandma lived together in a bungalow in Bohemia Beach that they rented for a pittance from my Aunt Ginny and her newish husband, Jay, who lived right next door. Mom couldn’t afford anything else, and it was cozy to be near family. But the little house was way too cozy for me to live there, too.
I hit the callback button.
It barely rang before she picked up. “Kayla! Honey, can you come over for dinner?”
“Uh, this is why you called me six times?”
“Well.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “You can bring Landon.”
My obnoxious roomie? “Why would I bring Landon?”
“He has to eat, especially after working construction all day.”
“I’m sure he has other plans, Mom.” And I was sure they involved a woman. He always goaded me with vague references to his endless cavalcade of dates.
“Ask him, OK?”
I sighed and rolled my eyes. “OK.” My
mom had this idea that Landon and I had some kind of secret crush going on, when it was more like the relationship between a cat and a dog. I tried hard to ignore him, so I guess I was the cat.
It’s not that he wasn’t attractive, because he was — broad-shouldered with short, dark hair, a killer smile I called the Fireworks, and the kind of twinkly brown eyes that slayed women left and right. I could see how a guy with Landon’s looks could make my mom fantasize that he was some sort of handsome prince who would be perfect for her daughter.
But I didn’t know why she was so eager to push me into a relationship when, to my knowledge, she hadn’t had male company in years. Maybe not since she had me, and I was still waiting to find out who the Sperm Donor was. She’d been burned worse than I had.
“Six o’clock at your Aunt Ginny’s house,” she said.
“Wait, what? I thought you were hosting dinner.”
“You know our kitchen isn’t big enough for everyone, and I only want to say this once.”
Uh-oh. “Say what?”
“Just be there, OK?”
It’s kind of cool growing up in a house full of women. First it was just me and my mom in Bohemia, and then we lived with Grandma in Cocoa Beach, and then all three of us moved in with Aunt Ginny in Bohemia Beach after Ginny got divorced. My cousin Gary lived there, too — Aunt Ginny’s son — but he was usually surfing or bicycling or hanging around the art lab at Bohemia High.
I worked it out so I could keep going to high school up the road in Cocoa Beach, because that’s where all my friends were. But at the end of every day, there was this welcoming nest of love and understanding at the huge beach house that fooled me into thinking the world was a nice place where I could actually realize my dreams.
Ha.
Now the beach house was owned by the Bohemia School of Art and Design, and Ginny was married to Jay, a kind accountant she’d met through her work with the art museum. He gave her the respect and love her shitty, cheating ex didn’t. Aunt Ginny and Jay had a pretty, new house in Bohemia Beach that had been built on one of the few vacant lots left in a neighborhood that dated from the 1960s, and Mom rented their charmingly dated bungalow next door.
The driveway at Aunt Ginny’s was full of cars under the palm trees, so I parked my seasoned sedan at Mom’s house and strolled over to the modern pile of cream-white stucco with the light green metal roof, wondering what Mom wanted to talk about.
“Oh, shit.” Next to Gary’s beater van was a pickup truck I knew well, loaded with ladders and tools and stuff, the Putter Homes logo on the side. It showed a guy wearing a hard hat, golfing with a hammer.
Landon.
My mom had done an end-run around me. I was fully prepared with a story about Landon being too busy to come. Truth was, I’d called him — at his office number, where I knew he wouldn’t be — so I could say I tried.
OK, I was a bad person. A failure and a bad person.
But I shouldn’t have to put up with my roommate outside of time actually spent at my Bohemia apartment, especially when sharing the rent with Landon was a symbol of just how far I’d let my life slide in the past year.
I knocked at the door for form’s sake and then pushed it open to the cacophony that was my family. Their noise level had gone up a notch since Gary had gotten involved with Ez Falcon, a songwriter who played wicked piano with a rock band, Ez and the Emeralds. At least it was good noise, though the music coming from the living room seemed to bounce off the tiled floors and ricochet around the cathedral ceilings.
I wandered into the room, which had comfortable, modern furniture and big, bright art on the walls. Ez was wailing on the keys to “Come Sail Away,” the old Styx power ballad, her short, dark hair flopping around, and Gary was playing — bongos? He was a potter most of the time and did some foam sculpting on fancy trim work on McMansions, but he also had a thing for music, especially drums. And he was the nicest guy around.
Gary and Ez belted out the lyrics, and to my surprise, Jay played along on electric guitar. Or maybe I should say he just tried to keep up. The overhead lights glinted off the silver in his brown hair.
Grandma, a bony spark plug with a white-haired pixie cut, sat on the couch with her two redheaded daughters, my mom and Aunt Ginny. Grandma banged her cane on the floor to the beat as Ginny played a tambourine and Mom rapped a cowbell with a drumstick, all of them grinning.
Leaning against an open doorway on the other side of the room, arms crossed in a way that showed off every muscle under his white T-shirt, was Landon. He smiled and nodded along to the song. He was the first to notice me, and that’s when he blasted me with the full Fireworks, enhanced by dimples and deliciously formed lips surrounded by just the faintest hint of scruff. No wonder women fell all over him.
I mean, not that I’d been paying that much attention.
He nodded at me, then nodded toward the musicians.
I shook my head. He’d witnessed my drunken banjo playing once. Now he asked me every chance he got whether I’d been to the holler lately.
I’m from the swamp, thank you very much, like everybody else who grew up in Florida. Not the holler.
And he grew up in a big house on a golf course, in a development created by his dad. To me, that’s a step down from a holler or a swamp. At least hollers and swamps still have remnants of nature and don’t suck all the water out of the aquifer.
Sorry. I get a little worried about the water sometimes.
The song came to its pounding conclusion, and everyone clapped and laughed.
“Kayla!” Gary called. “Did you bring your banjo?”
“Nope,” I said, then shot a glower at Landon. As if he’d psychically planted the idea in Gary’s head.
“Too bad,” said Ez, whose moods had lightened since she’d taken up with Gary. She smiled up at him from the piano bench, then grabbed a handful of his curly hair and pulled him toward her for a kiss.
My heart squeezed for just a second. I’d never have that, that thing they had. I was stupid to even think I should try. I’d been even more stupid not to foresee how my bad judgment would crash my career before it even got started.
“I have to interrupt the music anyway,” Aunt Ginny said. “Gary’s going to grill the burgers for me.”
“Oh, that’s right! Sorry, Mom,” he said, and he dashed off to the kitchen, followed by his mother and Jay.
Ez shrugged. “I’ll play background music, then. Carry on.” Her fingers floated over the keys, coaxing out one of those melancholy ballads she was so good at writing.
Mom stood, patting Grandma’s shoulder so she wouldn’t feel obligated to get up, then came over to me and gave me a hug. “I’m glad you’re here. And it’s so nice Landon could come.”
I wanted to ask, Why do you care if Landon is here? But I just smiled at her and asked, “What did you want to tell me?”
A little wrinkle of concern appeared in her brow for a moment. “It’s nothing to worry about. I’ll tell everyone over dessert.”
“Are you sick? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, sweetie.” She smoothed back her red hair, her tell. I knew she was anxious about something.
“Don’t make me worry all through dinner.”
“I promise it’s nothing to worry about. OK?”
“OK.” My tone was dubious at best, but she just gave me another quick hug and headed to the kitchen.
“Thanks for inviting me to dinner.”
I whirled at the voice behind me. It was Landon, of course, and now his smile was full of mischief.
I swallowed. “I — I called your office.”
“You know the office closes at four.”
“If I’d tried to call your cell, you wouldn’t have been able to hear it over the mating cries of the hoochies at whatever happy hour you usually frequent.”
He slapped a hand to his chest and made an expression of pain. “You wound me. Is that what you think of me? And do you see me at happy hour? No, I’m here,
about to enjoy a delicious family dinner.”
“Because my mother invited you.”
“She might’ve called. And she didn’t even have to shout over hoochie mating cries to be heard.”
Now my face heated a little. Was I projecting a little when it came to Landon? Maybe not every guy was as crappy as my former boss. But then again, Landon seemed to be on the bar circuit a lot, even if he never brought his conquests home to the apartment.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, looking down at my chunky black Skechers. When I looked up, his smirk had softened.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Mom has some kind of surprise announcement. She won’t tell me what it is.”
“If she told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise.” Now the twinkle was back.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Yeah, shut up,” Ez called from across the room. “I’m making art here.”
Chapter 2
The burgers were accompanied by Aunt Ginny’s homemade potato salad, grilled corn on the cob, my mom’s fruit salad — heavy on chunks of watermelon — and wilted spinach with garlic and butter. I didn’t care if I’d be breathing garlic fire later. I was crazy about spinach and garlic and plus, I needed my vitamins, especially since I was more of a forager than a cook. I dug in like Popeye and tried not to think about whatever Mom was going to tell us.
She’d made the dessert. Another bad sign. She always baked as therapy. Only this wasn’t exactly baked.
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