Coastal Views to Die For (Oliver Popp’s Travel Guides to Murder #2)

Chapter 1

I didn’t expect it to be a trap.

Lunch dates with my managing editor, Drea, are rare since I generally work from home, but they’ve been known to happen when I have a need to be at the Offbeat Traveler editorial offices in San Francisco.

What should have tipped me off, in hindsight, is that I wasn’t in the office on this particular day.

I had been invited, and gone into the city, specifically for lunch, at a trendy Mexican spot with patio seating that served so-called street food at expense account prices with full service.

This was a little more luxe than our usual run down to the sandwich-and-salad joint on the ground floor of our office building. Tip-off number two.

Alarm bells would have really gone off if I’d seen the distinctive, copper-colored car circling on the street, looking for parking, but by that point, Drea had already started to drop her bombshell, so I was distracted.

I was dipping a tortilla chip into some salsa when the campaign against me began. Drea had the nerve to make it sound like she was paying me a compliment, which I would discover was merely a clever cover for her ruse.

“So, Oliver,” she began, “you’re officially in print as a feature writer! Your piece on DC came out so great. Has your mom sent copies of this month’s issue to everyone she knows yet?”

“I might have seen a few extra copies lying around the last time I was up in her place,” I said, smiling shyly.

“Oh, yeah, that’s right! How’s the apartment?”

I had recently moved into the downstairs unit of the old high-water house I had grown up in. My mom still lived upstairs, so as independence went, it wasn’t a huge step, but I was enjoying it. “It’s great. It’s still mostly empty, but it’s nice to have all that space just for me.”

Her eyes sparkled. “We might be able to help you afford to fill up your apartment a little more. I have another feature assignment for you, and if it goes as well as the last one, you might be in line for a promotion soon—if you’re interested, that is.”

Oh, boy. That was a loaded question. I was proud of the article I’d been able to put together out of the wreckage of my trip to Washington, DC, in April, but the experience had been stressful and chaotic and strange—all words that my Autistic soul liked to avoid as much as possible.

I had been almost immediately thrown off my itinerary, had ended up taking on a second, unplanned assignment, and had witnessed—and solved, I had to modestly remind myself—a murder.

I had also left a big chunk of my heart with a guy I had met there, which had left me grappling daily with my biggest pet peeve: unresolved feelings.

If that was what becoming a full-fledged travel writer entailed, I was fairly sure my answer was No, thank you. But I knew that not all assignments could possibly be like that one. I swallowed my nerves and some more chips and salsa, and said, “What’s the assignment this time?”

“It’s a little closer to home,” Drea said. “We’re putting together a package on road trips, and I had you in mind for our Pacific coast piece—specifically, the Oregon coast.”

“Road trips? But, Drea, I can’t drive.”

Her eyes lit up again, though it felt like she was looking past me. “That’s no problem. I’m pairing you up again, so you don’t have to.”

“Pairing me up—?” I was cut off, and my question answered, as a figure came up the sidewalk behind me to the patio railing and swooped in over the rail to plant a peck on Drea’s cheek before swiveling in close to aim the most devastating, dimpled smile at me.

“Hi,” he said, waggling his thick, mischievous eyebrows.

Ricky Warner. Drea’s old college pal, the most beautiful man I had ever met, the freelance photographer who had been my guide to Washington and the devil on my shoulder goading me to follow him into mischief and mayhem.

The one I had fallen hard for, but had pulled away from when it was time to go home because I couldn’t imagine how to sustain a relationship from opposite coasts.

Or maybe I had been terrified of the idea of my first real relationship. Maybe I had been terrified of him.

I flushed red to my toes, watching as he rounded the railing to come join us at our table on the patio.

Seeing him again filled me with a heady mix of mostly unfamiliar emotions: happiness—no, giddiness, maybe—and excitement and maybe a hint of lust. Sneaking through these, though, were also a few more familiar friends: shame and embarrassment and anxiety.

Did he know how strongly I felt about him?

Had he felt the same way? Did he still? Was he happy to see me?

I knew that I hadn’t been as diligent about keeping in touch with him since I’d been home as I should have been, as he’d wanted me to be.

There had been a few flirty text exchanges that I’d tried my best to keep up with, but felt inadequate to, and a couple of missed calls—which, if I was being honest, had really been calls that I could have answered, but had been too afraid to.

I could barely bring myself to look at Ricky as he dropped into the chair next to Drea and lazily draped an arm across the back of her chair before reaching in for a tortilla chip.

But besides the easy comfort he seemed to feel in any environment, which I deeply envied and had sometimes leveraged to my advantage in DC, his body language and expression betrayed little that I could decipher of what he thought of our reunion.

When he finally caught my eye, he grinned and winked—again, a baseline level of flirtiness for him that told me little.

“I’m putting my favorite team back together!” Drea could hardly contain herself. “I wanted to surprise you, Oliver, but you’ll be working with Ricky again! And he can drive you guys to Oregon. It’ll be perfect. I have a great hook I’d like you to use for the piece, too.”

“You can’t help yourself, can you,” I said to Drea, raising an eyebrow.

She had concocted my trip to Washington at least partly in an attempt to set me and Ricky up, and as her new trap snapped closed around me this time, I could see that she wasn’t prepared to accept failure. “What’s this great hook of yours?”

“You’re gonna love this.” Ricky grinned. “It’s so desperate and obvious.” He nudged her back. “Go on, tell him.”

“You two are no fun, but you’re taking my direction on this, and it will work, so help me. The hook for your piece is ‘Find romance on the Oregon coast!’” She finished with a flourish of her hand.

I blushed again, and goggled my eyes at her, not daring to look at Ricky.

“I’ve got you booked into a couple of really sweet B and Bs along the 101, and a couple of spas that offer couples packages, some romantic restaurants.

There are some hikes to really beautiful spots in nature—it’ll be so pretty and relaxing and fun, you’re going to love it.

And, you know,” she said, lowering her voice to a mumble, her words almost running together, “maybe you’ll love each other, too, I dunno. ”

“Wow,” I said.

“Shameless,” Ricky said. “But worth a shot, no?” He shot me a mock-seductive look, one eyebrow raised, his dark brown eyes melting a little.

Drea pushed back her chair, forcing Ricky’s arm away. “I need to powder my nose before our food gets here,” she announced. “And you two have some catching up to do.”

We both watched her go, and then Ricky turned back to me. “She’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer, isn’t she?”

“How long have you been here?” I blurted, still confused by Ricky’s sudden reappearance.

His golden cheeks flushed slightly, and for a second his eyes darted away in embarrassment. “Yeah, I’m sorry to surprise you like this. It was Drea’s idea, but I should have reached out sooner. I got into town last week.”

He’d been here a week and hadn’t said anything?

“I wish I’d known,” I said, surprising myself with my frankness. “It would have been nice to see you in a … less … trappy-feeling context, but it looks like we’ll be seeing plenty of each other anyway. Did you come out specifically for this job?”

Ricky seemed to be studying me. “No,” he said finally, shrugging. “I felt the need for a change of scenery. I left DC about three weeks ago—drove down to see my dad in North Carolina for a couple of days, then headed west and just kind of ended up here.”

“So you and Drea cooked this one up together?” I cocked an eyebrow and grinned at him, to let him know it would be okay if the answer was yes.

“Not exactly,” he said, smiling a little. “We can give her more or less all of the credit for this little scheme.”

At that, Drea returned from the bathroom as a server arrived with our food, and we moved on to eating and talking logistics, and Ricky and me being embarrassed by Drea’s obvious delight in her machinations and mildly, curiously uncomfortable to be back in each other’s presence.

My anxiety edged steadily upward for the few interminable days between the lunch attack and our planned departure on Sunday morning.

It didn’t much help that all I heard from Ricky in that time was a brief text on Saturday to confirm my address and the time he’d be coming to pick me up, meaning that the rest of our communications were all in my head, and kept getting more and more dramatic as they alternated between bitter recriminations about my failure at friendship and desperate attempts at declaring undying love, or at least a healthy case of like a lot.

I’d packed my bag on Saturday night, then lay awake for hours, thrashing around my bed in a mixture of dread, hope, excitement, and despair at the prospect of spending the next several days alone with Ricky.

Finally, I got up and spent the remainder of the night in an increasingly cold bath, stewing through my second and third winds as I played movies at low volume on my laptop, ignoring them as I tried to figure out what “finding romance” looked like, and what romance even meant.