Chapter 2
NOLAN
“So who is this Alexa person anyway?” Marielle asked as she slipped curtain rings over a rail. A pile of teal velvet sat on a chair beside her.
“An old friend. I haven’t seen her in years, but when she offered to come and take a look at that broken laptop, I couldn’t turn her down.”
Which was why Nolan de Luca was currently stress-painting the bedroom wall in Guest Cottage Number One.
Last time his laptop needed fixing, he’d taken it to Robbie Teller in town, and Robbie had replaced the screen.
But Robbie’s mom was sick, so he’d gone home to Utah to help his dad, and nobody knew when he’d be back.
“Isn’t that weird, her offering out of the blue? How did she even know it was broken?”
“I mentioned it to a mutual friend, and he must’ve told her.”
In truth, Nolan had been shocked when Brax offered Alexa’s services, given the way she’d skipped town after she left Blackstone House without so much as a goodbye.
Before she disappeared, he’d planned to talk with her after she calmed down and explain why the situation wasn’t as simple as “I like you, you like me.” Almost two years of living together, and he still hadn’t known who she was.
Not really. Oh, he knew plenty about her—she was a tech genius, she hated the great outdoors, food was the way into her good books, and she bore a grudge like no other—but the basics?
Where she came from, how she ended up in Virginia, her family history… All a mystery.
And then there was the big one…her age.
How old was Alexa Stone? Nobody truly knew.
When she arrived late one night with Dawson, she’d claimed to be sixteen, but everyone knew that was a lie.
She’d looked more like twelve. Grey, always the voice of reason, wanted to call the cops, and Justin had sided with him.
So had Nolan and Brax. Blackstone House was a construction site, both the building itself and the friendships and alliances developing within it.
They didn’t need to add a kid into the mix.
But Dawson told everyone how terrified she’d been when he found her hiding out in a crypt—a fucking crypt—and he didn’t think it was just because he’d hunted her down after she stole his laptop.
Ruby said she knew what it was like to run from a difficult situation, that she’d left home at seventeen and never regretted it, and Zach had struggled through a series of foster homes before finally finding one that fit.
Jerry, the wild card, agreed with Dawson and Ruby, which left Levi.
And in the early hours when they held a vote in the musty living room of the old mansion they’d once called home, Levi had shrugged and said he’d rent Alexa the basement box room for fifty bucks a week.
Was it just about the money?
Possibly not. Levi’s relationship with his family had been a complex one, but most all of those details had only come to light after Ruby’s death.
Now, balanced precariously on a ladder with a paintbrush in his hand, Nolan pinched his eyes shut and reeled from the memory of the knife in Ruby’s chest, from the blood, from the smell.
That stink…a wave of it had hit them after they broke down her door.
Justin had run to the bathroom to puke. Alexa didn’t even make it that far.
He’d never forget how pale she’d been that day.
How childlike. Over the time they’d lived together, he’d come to realise she was an old soul in a young-looking body, and when he glimpsed the passport on her desk one day, the passport that said she’d turned eighteen two months previously… He’d begun to wonder what if.
What if he stopped thinking of her as a little sister?
What if he risked the friendship and asked for more?
Then the cops arrived, and it turned out Alexa Stone wasn’t eighteen, she was more like sixteen, and she wasn’t even Alexa Stone. And it was Nolan’s turn to puke in the bathroom because he’d been having entirely the wrong kind of feelings about a kid.
A damn child.
A child who’d lied about her age and much more besides.
And now she was coming here.
To California.
To the small town of Mason’s Hill, named after Mason Calder, an ancestor of Nolan’s who’d once lived on the same land Nolan had inherited just over nine years ago.
Alexa would be in her mid-twenties now; he’d turn thirty next month.
Maybe the age difference wouldn’t get him arrested anymore, but the rest of the stuff was still a problem. The misrepresentations, the sneakiness, the money she stole…
Several million bucks’ worth of tainted cash.
Fuck, now there was a purple splodge on the ceiling.
“I guess that’s nice, that she’d offer to help out an old friend,” Marielle said. “Can you take the weight of the fabric while I hook on these drapes?”
“Sure.”
Nolan blew out a breath as he climbed down the ladder. “Nice” wasn’t a word anyone would use to describe Alexa. Fascinating? Yes. Cunning? Absolutely. But she wasn’t good-natured. Brax used to refer to her as “that little sociopath in the basement.”
Was Marielle nice? Sure. Sometimes too nice.
Nolan wasn’t a complete fool—he knew she was interested in more than a client/contractor relationship with him—but after the breakup with Lisanne last year, he wasn’t interested in jumping into another relationship.
Lisanne had shattered his heart and nearly tanked his business too, and he needed time to fix up both of them.
But Marielle had offered to help out with the cottage this evening, and Nolan couldn’t turn her down either, not after he’d told Brax the place was slightly more finished than it actually was.
Brax. That smooth fucker didn’t mean to make Nolan feel inadequate, but since their Blackstone House days, Brax had used his share of the blood money to earn a damn fortune while Nolan made less than minimum wage and drove a pickup older than Alexa.
What had she done with her share of the cash?
Back then, she’d spent her money on two things—food and computer hardware.
Had she changed? When she first moved in, she’d paid her fifty bucks each week, then given Nolan or Dawson or Justin a shopping list for Walmart along with whatever cash she had left over.
Noodles, chocolate, potato chips, not a vegetable in sight.
Nolan had started cooking for her because he was genuinely worried she’d get scurvy, and it had become their thing.
He’d make dinner, and she’d huff and eat it.
By the time they left Blackstone House, she was getting fresh organic produce delivered weekly, chilled fish and meat couriered in from fuck knew where, and macarons shipped from Paris.
Nobody knew exactly where her money came from, and she barely left the house.
She told Dawson she was moderating chat rooms, and Brax said she’d mentioned coding work.
The only thing Nolan knew for sure was that she kept adding servers to her computer collection, and she’d gotten a guy in to install a cooling system so they didn’t overheat.
Oh, and she’d convinced Justin to put a satellite dish on the roof so her internet would go faster.
Nolan didn’t much like computers. All those letters on a screen made his brain hurt.
Lisanne used to tell him he was dyslexic, that there were special fonts to make reading easier and he should go to a doctor and get diagnosed properly.
But grapevines and dirt didn’t judge, and he made wine by instinct rather than some fancy formula, so what did it matter?
Then in her breakup letter, she’d said maybe he wasn’t dyslexic, maybe he was just stupid and stubborn, and he could go join Santa in hell.
Alexa might have the personality of a porcupine, but she’d never once made fun of his struggles with reading.
No, she’d sent him voice notes instead of texts, played secretary when he needed to reply to emails, and later, gifted him a fancy tablet that read his messages aloud in her own snarky voice.
Then, after he accidentally backed over it with his car, she’d bought him another one and refused his offer of repayment.
Obediently, Nolan held the velvet while Marielle attached the top to the pole.
Alexa had never been a fan of daylight, so leaving the windows bare wasn’t an option, and he didn’t have a basement for her to sleep in.
Okay, so there was an old gold mine on the property, but there was no bathroom and no bed, plus she’d need three hundred power outlets for her computers, and— Had he lost his fucking mind? Alexa wasn’t sleeping in a cave.
He didn’t hate her.
He missed hearing her voice, even the electronic version, but when the tablet died three years ago, Robbie Teller had said the parts to fix it weren’t available anymore.
And in some ways, he missed the girl herself.
When she wasn’t working for ten hours straight, she used to sit and talk with him while he cooked, and far beneath the oh-so serious exterior lurked a dry but very dark sense of humour.
Plus she was smarter than he’d ever be, and determined too.
After he’d gotten fired from his landscaping job for insulting a client—apparently, refusing to get up close and personal with a bored housewife’s bush was rude—she’d rewritten his résumé and helped him to find a new position that paid more.
Why was she about to walk back into his life after all these years?
Had she finally decided to apologise for the lies?
Unlikely—Alexa never apologised for anything.
Nolan had always defended her when Brax called her a sociopath, but deep down, he wondered if there was an element of truth to the allegation.
Alexa didn’t feel guilt the way other people did.
Marielle finished with the drapes and Nolan let the velvet fall, smiling to himself. It looked good, and teal was Alexa’s favourite colour. At least, it had been ten years ago. Teal, deep plum, gold… Jewel colours, she called them.
“Are you nearly done with the painting?” Marielle asked.
“I just want to finish this wall.” And fix the splodge on the ceiling.
“You want to get dinner afterward?” She checked her watch. “The Doodlebug is still serving food for another half hour, maybe a little longer if I sweet-talk Ed.”
When Nolan moved to the Calder Ranch—now renamed Dionysus because he didn’t need that reminder of his father—there had been two places to eat in town: the Golden Nugget and the Doodlebug.
Today, there were still two places. The Nugget was temporarily closed, due to either the owner’s sickness or one too many health code violations, depending on which rumour you believed, and at the start of last year, two rich out-of-towners had opened a fancy new place on Main Street, all twiddly food and beige decor.
Sanguine, that’s what they’d called it. Nolan gave it six months.
Folks around here wanted beer, fries, and a good steak, not twenty gourmet options and a wine menu.
Thankfully, the Doodlebug always delivered when it came to a medium-rare T-bone, and their fries were crispy too.
Janice Whitman complained that they never changed the oil in the fryer, but the high temperatures would take care of any bacteria, right?
So why did Nolan hesitate to accept Marielle’s invitation?
The last thing he felt like doing tonight was cooking, but he also worried about giving her the wrong idea.
No, he just wanted to focus on the business for now.
Needed to focus on the business. And dammit, he needed those accounting records.
Lisanne used to look after that side of things, and after she left, he hadn’t given the admin side as much attention as he should have done.
“I have leftovers in the fridge,” he told Marielle. “And a bunch of emails to send.”
“Anything I can help with? I’m great at paperwork, and I’d be happy to help you catch up.”
So he could end up deeper in the same hole? Where a woman integrated herself into the business and then almost succeeded in ruining everything he’d built because rural living wasn’t as much fun as she thought it would be?
“You’ve helped plenty tonight already, and I appreciate that. Make sure you bill me for the extra hours,” he added, not because he could afford the additional cost but because he wanted to make their relationship clear.
“Oh, don’t you worry about that. What time is your friend arriving?”
Nolan shrugged. “She’ll get here when she gets here.”
Which was a vague way of saying he had no clue. Brax—who did still speak with Alexa and was acting as go-between—had just said “tomorrow.”
Nolan didn’t even know how she’d get here.
Would she fly in and rent a car? Or drive from wherever she lived?
In their Blackstone House days, she’d shied away from getting her driver’s licence and relied on rides from him and the others, claiming she had zero spatial awareness so it would be dumb to try.
But was that just another lie to conceal her true age?
“You want me to come over in the morning?” Marielle asked. “I can bring those extra pillows we spoke about and welcome—what was her name again? Alexis?”
“Alexa.”
“Oh, like the gadget?”
A know-it-all with a habit of eavesdropping on conversations? “Yes, exactly like that.”
“So I’ll swing by around nine thirty. I’d come earlier, but I have to go to the grocery store first. Can you believe I ran out of coffee?” Not really. Marielle was permanently caffeinated. Still, she didn’t seem to expect an answer. “You need me to pick up anything?”
Yeah, an economy-sized bottle of acetaminophen, he thought, but what came out was, “A package of macarons if they sell them.”
Marielle screwed up her face. “Those coconut things? Don’t the bits get stuck in your teeth?”
“Not macaroons. Macarons.” Alexa could go through two dozen a day when she was focused on a problem. Coffee, macarons, and club soda. Never tap water—she claimed it tasted weird. “They’re like tiny almond meringues.”
“I’m not sure the Spend ’n’ Save sells those.”
She was probably right, and Nolan shouldn’t be encouraging Alexa to make herself at home anyway.
“Never mind. And don’t worry about the pillows either; Alexa won’t be staying for long.”
“You really think she’ll be able to fix the computer?”
If anyone could, it would be her, which was the only reason Nolan was entertaining Brax’s crackpot idea.
“Yeah, I really do.”