Just My Luck (Accidentally Yours #2)

Chapter 1

Lincoln couldn’t quite remember how he’d gotten here. He was standing in the dining room of his home on Mulholland—thirty-point-two-million dollars, six bedrooms, four baths, views to the Pacific Ocean. He knew that much; but wasn’t he supposed to be somewhere else? Why had he woken up here?

And why was he barefoot? Where were his shoes? His phone? His household staff?

“Vernon!”

“Yes, sir.” His butler stepped forward from the shadows.

Lincoln wanted to hug him with relief, but that dignified fellow would frown on such a breach of etiquette.

He wore a dark suit with a crisp white shirt underneath.

He had the bearing of a king. Even though Vernon had grown up a dirt-poor kid from Alabama and Lincoln in the lap of Savannah luxury, they’d always connected with each other.

“Vernon, do you ever wonder why it is that you serve me instead of the other way around?”

It was an odd thing to say, very out of character, but Vernon barely blinked. “I believe it’s due to the fact that you pay my salary.”

“Right. Good point.” Why had he even asked that? He pressed his hand to his forehead. Was he feverish?

“Are you ready for dinner, sir?”

Was it dinnertime? Hadn’t he just woken up?

He looked toward the far end of the dining room, where the French doors were open to allow the warm Southern California breeze to waft into the house.

Sure enough, it was dark out there. Far below, the twinkle of city lights spread across the vast basin of the city of Los Angeles.

“Sure. Dinner sounds good.” Maybe his blood sugar was low.

Vernon pulled out his chair for him. “Have a seat, young sir.”

Young sir? Vernon hadn’t called him that since he’d first hired him fifteen years ago. He’d never liked being called “sir” anyway. He wasn’t a “sir.” He was a pretender. An outsider. An unwelcome disrupter.

He sat down in the chair—a Eero Saarinen midcentury classic—and discovered that his feet didn’t touch the floor. His legs were too short, and his hands were those of a kid, with dirty fingernails and scratches from climbing a tree and…

He blinked and the illusion was gone. He felt the polished rosewood floor settle under his bare feet. Stretching out his hands, he saw they were normal again. Good lord, he needed some food, right away.

Just outside the open doors, the blue glow of his swimming pool looked almost otherworldly thanks to its recessed lighting.

Lush vegetation surrounded it, as if he lived in a rainforest instead of a place that only got fourteen inches of rain a year, most of which came all at once during mudslide season.

Rainforest…jungle…something danced at the edges of his mind.

Vernon reappeared with a dinner plate, which he positioned in the place setting that was already set up—linen napkin, gleaming silverware.

“Thank you, Vernon. This looks excellent.”

“Maximum nutritional benefit guaranteed, as ever.”

“What would I do without you?”

“Lose muscle mass, I fear.”

“The horror.”

They shared a smile, then Vernon receded toward the edge of the room. He disappeared so quickly that Lincoln peered after him, trying to make out his form in the shadows. But he couldn’t.

Strange. Why was it so dark? The pool of light from the overhead chandelier—an unusual one carved from onyx—lit up the table, but nothing else. Maybe his housekeeper had switched up the lighting controls.

Giving up, he focused on the contents of his plate. As per his instructions, the meal was a perfect balance of protein and vegetables. The nature of the protein didn’t matter much to him, as long as it was high-quality, but this evening, it looked to be veal.

A printed menu card was propped to the left of his plate.

New Zealand Veal Piccatta with Spinach and Strawberry Salad, it read, along with a list of every ingredient and a breakdown of its nutritional content.

His chef worked closely with his nutritionist and his team of longevity experts to craft each meal.

He looked at the card again. It read, Sesame Wakame Salad. Hadn’t it said Strawberry Salad a moment ago? Maybe he hadn’t read it closely enough the first time. Peering at the salad nestled next to the veal, he saw glistening strands of seaweed instead of juicy red slices of strawberry.

That was it. He’d read it too quickly the first time.

A silver dish of supplements sat to the right of his plate.

They were part of his longevity regime, and so far, it was all working well.

Lincoln was thirty-seven years old but his body was functioning like that of a twenty-five-year old.

Peak fitness. Peak performance. That was what he was aiming for.

He swallowed down the pills and cut himself a piece of veal.

He had the impulse to scroll on his phone, but ignored it.

Multitasking was bad for the brain. If there was one thing he feared more than anything else, it was loss of cognitive function.

Losing his ability to think quickly. Losing his mind. Losing control. No.

Besides, he didn’t know where his phone was. Had he left it somewhere? He couldn’t remember.

He dug his fork into a plump bit of strawberry from the salad. His mouth watered as he anticipated the tartness on his tongue.

Wait. Strawberry? He looked at the menu card again and, sure enough, it read Spinach and Strawberry Salad.

He stared at the piece of strawberry on his fork as if he’d never seen one before. Vivid red on the outside, shading to pink and then pure white at the core.

“Vernon?” he called to the shadowy figure waiting by the wall.

“Yes, sir?”

But he couldn’t think what to say about the salad confusion.

If he admitted that something was strange about this salad, that it kept changing from strawberry to seaweed, Vernon might take action.

He might call his father. His father would come and give him that look, that “you shouldn’t even exist” look. He might take all this away.

“Tell Chef Hong this meal is excellent,” he said instead.

“Yes, sir.”

Lincoln put the fork into his mouth. Strands of slippery, salty wakame writhed against his tongue as if they were alive. He spit a mouthful onto his plate and jumped to his feet. His chair crashed onto the dining room floor. And then he too was falling, down, down, down…

He jerked awake. His heart was racing and it was pitch dark. Where the fuck was he? Not in his king-size bed with the coverlet hand-stitched by Italian artisans, that was for sure.

He reached for his phone. Instead of the expensive iPhone he was used to, his hand touched the cheap plastic of a burner phone. His actual phone, he remembered now, was temporarily out of commission. No one knew the number to this one. He barely knew it.

He used the dim screen to light up his surroundings. Instead of a four-poster bed, he was sleeping on a pile of thin blankets. They were nice enough—this was a high-end resort—but they weren’t very plush. This was Hawaii, after all. The tropics.

His dream was fading quickly. Before it could disappear completely, he took out a little notebook and jotted down the details.

For the past few weeks, ever since he’d survived two separate plane crashes in the Hawaiian jungle, he’d been having frequent and vivid dreams. They often involved falling.

In all of them, he was a boy again. Maybe he should discuss them with a therapist, but he had no time for that.

He had a mission to complete first. Would James Bond take time out from chasing international evildoers to talk to a counselor?

Maybe later, when this clusterfuck had been sorted out, he could waste time talking about dreams and trauma or whatever. That was why he was recording them. For now, he had more important things to worry about.

When he’d finished jotting down the details of the dream, he lay back and stared up at the ceiling of the storage room where he’d spent the night.

Yes, Lincoln Kerr, billionaire and world traveler, was sleeping on the floor of a linen closet at the Royal Leilani Resort on the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii.

If only Vernon could see him now.

“Your green smoothie, sir,” he’d say with a bow, as he presented Lincoln’s first drink of the day on a silver platter. “We’re calling this one ‘Moss for the Boss.’”

They’d chat for a few moments, then as soon as Vernon left, Lincoln would push off his blankets and stroll naked across his bedroom to the balcony. He liked to feel the sun on his skin first thing in the morning. One of his longevity coaches had recommended it, and then he’d discovered he liked it.

But that wouldn’t be possible here at the Royal Leilani. If he walked naked onto the grounds of the resort, he’d at the very least get fired. And he couldn’t let that happen, not until he found the billion-dollar piece of missing tech he was looking for. It had to be here.

He checked the time on his burner phone.

Six-thirty in the morning. The housekeeping staff didn’t start their work until nine-thirty, since checkout was at eleven.

But his own shift started at nine. He had two and a half hours to erase all traces of his presence from this storage room, find some breakfast, and poke around before he had to start mowing and weeding and deadheading and whatever else the head gardener asked him to do.

If only he’d paid more attention to what his groundskeeping staff on Mulholland Drive did. He had a new appreciation for that kind of work, now that he’d been doing it for a couple of weeks.

He rolled out of bed—well, off the blankets—and rose to his feet. Time to forget he was Lincoln Kerr and plunge back into the life of Jim Brennan, manual laborer.

As he was folding up his blankets, he froze. Voices carried from the path outside the storage room. No one ought to be coming this way at this time of the morning. All the pool supplies were kept in a different room, kitchen goods in yet another. That was why he’d chosen this one to camp out in.

He shrank into the corner of the room and wedged himself behind a pile of boxes of mini-shampoo bottles. That was another reason he’d chosen this room. It gave him comfort to be surrounded by cleaning products.

Forbes Magazine had included that tidbit in their profile of him.

Even though he’s known for his obsession with sanitation, Lincoln Kerr rejects comparisons to Howard Hughes.

“I’m not nearly that rich,” he joked when we sat down for lunch recently.

As if to prove his point, he shook my hand.

He probably didn’t realize that I saw him diligently Sani-wiping his own hand afterwards.

Lincoln had detested that profile, possibly because it was uncomfortably accurate.

He held his breath as the door opened, sending a slice of bright light across the floor. A throaty female voice said, “Wait here or no popcorn for you tonight.”

A shapely form dashed into the room, snatched up a pillow, and retreated. The door closed again. Footsteps hurried away, down the path. He let out a breath of relief.

She’d only been visible as a silhouette, but even so, he replayed the moment a few times in the quiet of the storage room.

He knew her, he realized, though they hadn’t met.

She worked at the concierge desk, Zara something.

Wavy brown hair in a topknot, a wide smile, pretty in a sun-kissed kind of way.

Laughed easily and often, even though she was always dealing with the constant demands and complaints of the guests.

Something about the way she’d breezed in and out came across as…carefree. As if everything was an adventure, even grabbing a pillow.