CHAPTER 2

 

Zach looked at the enormous, dark house in front of him, whistled under his breath, and wondered who owned the Prius he’d parked beside. Unlikely it belonged to the handyman John Lewis had mentioned. Maybe a very environmentally conscious maid? He shrugged, letting himself out of the car and stretched his arms over his head. He could smell the sea, and it smelled like . . . freedom.

“Excuse me?”

He looked to his left to see a shadowy figure approaching from the deck. It was hard to make out her features in the darkness, but he could tell from her voice she was a woman. She stopped about ten feet away from him, lingering in the shadows at a safe distance.

“Sir?” she asked.

“Yeah. Hey, there. I’m the houseguest.”

She didn’t move forward, so neither did he, sensing her wariness.

“What did you say?”

“‘Hey, there?’” he repeated, feeling like an idiot.

“No. The next part.”

Zach always looked for tells in people’s voices, but hers was strange: quiet and refined, like it had been wiped clean, without a hint of an accent that might give him a little information about where she was from. It was carefully modulated, almost as though she’d watched a lot of Grace Kelly movies and taught herself how to talk that way.

“Oh. I’m the, uh, the houseguest. I’m the guy staying here for the next few weeks.”

She laughed, and the timbre pinged in his head, strangely familiar.

“What are you talking about? You’re staying here? I’m staying here. I’m staying here for the next two weeks.” Her voice ratcheted up a notch and lost just a touch of its refinement.

“I don’t think so. John told me it was free for the entire month of October and that I could use it for as long as I like.”

“John?”

“John Lewis. The owner.”

“Well, Lena Lewis said I could stay here,” she said tightly.

“Oh, man.”

Lena Lewis. Loony Lena, John’s estranged wife who’d sometimes show up at the Cornerstone offices, carrying on publicly about her shitty divorce settlement. John had bragged to Zach just last week that while Lena had ended up with their condo in Greenwich, he hadn’t had to pay her another dime. Zach remembered his exact words: “A solid prenup’s worth its weight in gold, Z.”

“Oh, man . . . what?” asked the woman.

“You probably already know this if you’re friends with Lena, but John and Lena Lewis are at the end of a pretty nasty divorce. I’m positive John owns this house. And I’m pretty sure Lena’s hard up for cash.”

“No. No no no. You must be wrong! Lena Lewis is—well, we’re in a ladies club together. She said I could use this place rent free. I just needed to pay her a thousand dollars for the utilities.” She whipped her iPhone out of her back pocket and started typing quickly. “I have an e-mail.” She kept typing, the phone’s screen casting a slight bit of light on her shadowed form. She tilted her head back, glancing up at the starry sky in frustration. “There’s no signal here. But, believe me, I have an e-mail giving me permission to be here.”

Zach cocked his head to the side, squinting to see her better in the dim light, but she stood several feet away. He could barely make out her silhouette.

“Well, John said I could use it. Said it was empty and vacant. Said I should use it to get away for a few weeks and work.” He rubbed the inside of his wrist before flicking his lower lip with his thumb.

The moon shifted from behind cloud cover and for a moment he could make out the shininess of her eyes. She probably didn’t mean for them to drop and linger on his lips for the second they did, but he noticed. She shifted slightly, catching some moonlight, and he could see her chest was proportionally larger than the rest of her slight frame. Zach was a fan of big tits on small women and felt his body tighten a little.

“But I have e-mails,” she insisted again. “Lena said I could . . . You cannot stay here.”

“Huh. Okay,” Zach said. He saw what was going on here. He had been invited to use the house by the actual owner, cleared his incredibly busy calendar, pissed off Malcolm, rented an SUV for two weeks, and brought his guitar, keyboard, and two weeks’ worth of Scotch on an eight-hour excursion north only to be kicked out before he got in the door.

Not so fucking fast, fake-voiced, Sister-Big-Boobs.

“Looks like you’ve got a little problem,” he said as he backed up against the side of the SUV, crossing his arms.

“Looks like you’ve got a problem. I have permission to be here. I paid to be here.”

“You may or may not have permission to be in a house that doesn’t belong to the person offering it. And all you probably paid for was Lena Lewis’s ticket to Cabo,” he said, walking around to the back of the SUV and popping the trunk, the dome light shining down on his various bags and cases.

“What are you doing?” she demanded in a light shriek, and something about her voice made him pause again. When she dropped the bullshit mid-Atlantic accent, even for an instant, her voice was oddly familiar. New England, maybe? Someone he’d known at Yale? His brows furrowed, and his heart kicked up a notch. He jerked his head out of the brightly lit trunk and glanced at her again. After the glare of the trunk light his eyes had to readjust to the darkness, so he couldn’t make out a thing.

Write me something beautiful, Zach.

 The words floated through his head but he clenched his jaw in annoyance. This chick wasn’t her, and he wished to Christ his mind would quit doing this to him, looking for her everywhere. After nine years, it was exhausting.

Annoyed with himself, he turned back to the trunk.

“What am I doing? Unpacking.” He lifted a guitar case out of the trunk and set it against the bumper while he hefted a backpack onto his shoulder.

“Are you deaf? This is my house! I have permission to use it!”

That imperious fucking tone was getting under his skin. “Actually, princess, I don’t think you do. But hey, I’m easy. It’s a big house.”

“And?”

He turned to face her, adjusting the backpack and putting his hands on his hips. “What’s your name?”

“What? Why do you want to know?”

He could just make out her crossing her arms over her chest in the darkness. He’d met all types, but she was giving new meaning to high-strung.

“Well, if we’re going to share a house, we should probably be on a first-name basis, don’t you think?”

“Share? Are you crazy? You’re a stranger! A t-tattooed stranger!”

He looked down at his arm, illuminated by the dome light. Yep, a high-strung snob. The girl she reminded him of wasn’t a snob. Never had been.

“My tattoos have been known to bite, so it’s a good thing you’re keeping your distance.”

“Oh! I—”

He really wasn’t in the mood to deal with dramatics. He gestured to his guitar case, trying for a gentler tone. “Listen, I’m a musician and I live in Manhattan. I’m just here to work. I’ll stay out of your way if you stay out of mine, Greenwich.”

He pulled a heavy duffel bag onto his other shoulder. She stared at him from the respectable distance she still maintained, apparently speechless.

“Now I’m not a stranger,” he added.

“How did you know I’m from Greenwich?” she asked softly to his back.

“Lena lives in Greenwich,” he said, remembering John’s comment about the settlement and the condo. “Not that I know her personally.” 

He made his way up the front walkway, adjusting the bag to bend down and feel under the welcome mat for the key that John said would be waiting. He picked it up, unlocked the door, and walked into the entry, flicking on the light switch to his left. The lights didn’t go on, so he put his bag on the floor by the door. With the house in disuse for several months, he probably needed to trip the circuit. When he turned around, she was standing a little closer to the house, at the foot of the steps in the dark behind him.

He could feel her discomfort, and some part of him was glad. She was starting to come into focus for him now: a rich, entitled, snob who was probably using Daddy’s money for a two-week getaway to find herself. Well, she could find herself in one half of the house while he wrote music in the other. Hell, on tour, he’d happily stayed in hotel suites a tenth of the size with three times as many people, some perfect strangers. There was no reason they couldn’t share the house. And if she didn’t like it, she could go find somewhere else to stay. He had just as much right to be here as she did. More right, really.

As he turned to head back to the trunk, she backed up. “The gentlemanly thing to do would be for you to find a motel.”

“I guess. But we haven’t established that I’m a gentleman.”

“You’re well-spoken.”

He scratched his jaw. That observation sort of surprised him, especially coming from her. He was used to people like her taking in the tattoos and shaggy hair and piercings, and drawing conclusions about the rest of him. He tugged his keyboard case out from the back of the trunk.

“I’m sorry I said that about your tattoos,” she added softly, still hovering near the steps in front of his car.

“Look, I’m not trying to be a jerk by staying. I drove a long way to be here, and I really do have a lot of work to do. John said this place has four bedrooms. There’s really no reason we can’t share it. In fact, I’ll take one bedroom, and you can have the other three. In the basement there’s a soundproof listening room and studio, and I plan to spend most of my time there anyway, so I’ll stay out of your way. You won’t even hear me. You can just . . . find yourself or whatever it is you came here to do.”

“Find myself?”

“Isn’t that what you rich girls from Greenwich do? Open your trust funds so you can go to spas and rent vacation mansions and find yourselves?”

“Now who’s the snob?” she asked, and for a second he thought he detected a slight accent in her amused voice, and the sound pinged in his head again. He squinted, trying to see her better without approaching her. Her face fluttered through his mind again, but he pushed it away. That girl and this girl were nothing alike.

“Whatever,” he said, reaching for the paper grocery bag that held three bottles of very good Scotch that clanked together as he nestled them against his hip. “I’ll lay low. My tattoos will barely pollute your rental space.”

“I already said I was sorry about that.”

“It’s fine.” He swung another duffel bag onto his shoulder and took the handle of the keyboard bag.

She had taken a few steps closer to the trunk and stood a couple feet away from him now. Her head was bent as she looked down at the ground, nervously shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

“We can’t stay here together,” she said softly. “Y-you can’t stay here.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not sleeping in a house with a total stranger—”

“With tattoos, no less!”

“—who I don’t know at all.”

”Look, I told you, I’m a musician. My name is Zachariah Aubrey, and—”

She gasped, which grabbed his attention. Still in the shadows, she stared at him, gaping, and he stared back, startled by her reaction. A cross between a whimper and a cry escaped from her throat as she reached up to cover her mouth. His heart seized in his chest, pumping like crazy as a wave of realization crashed on the shore of his consciousness.

“Oh my God,” she murmured in a shocked, shaky voice against her fingers, her snooty accent entirely replaced with a heartbreakingly familiar Maine lilt. “You’re Zach Aubrey.”             

He nodded, his brain fighting to fit everything together—her voice, posture, expression, and those dark, glistening eyes—just in time for her to confirm it.

“Zach,” she whispered, stepping forward into the pool of light by the open trunk. “It’s Violet.”