Chapter 4
ALEXA
“Damn, he’s hot. Those old pictures in no way do him justice.”
Chase stared at Nolan’s departing ass until I dragged him into the guest cottage.
“Stop it. We’re here to work and then leave, not ogle real-life thirst traps.”
“So you admit he’s a thirst trap?”
“I admit nothing. And he’s straight, so you’re out of luck. I mean, probably. He seems to be dating that uptight brunette with the driftwood. Why the fuck are there so many pillows? Can you get rid of them? They’re annoying me already.”
“Are you annoyed because you hate pillows? Or because you hate the idea of Nolan having a girlfriend?”
“The first one.” Mostly. “Nobody needs more than two pillows on a bed. The rest just get in the way.”
“Speaking of beds, where am I supposed to sleep? Are we sharing, or…?” Chase lifted a cushion on the couch in the living area. “Okay, this is a pull-out.”
As bed-buddies went, Chase wasn’t a terrible one. He didn’t snore or spread, but he did give off heat like a furnace, which was fine in colder climates but unnecessary in California. For the most part, we booked two-room suites when we travelled.
Our relationship hadn’t always been so easy.
When I first hired him, Chase had slept in a separate room along the hallway and adhered to a strict list of instructions.
Source breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ensure laundry is done.
Arrange transportation to each of our destinations.
Sit by my side in public, and if anyone approaches, get rid of them.
But over the years, he’d earned my trust and become more of a friend than an assistant, and we acted far more casual around each other now.
My biggest fear? Other than dogs, knife-wielding maniacs, and earthquakes? That Chase would get sick of our life together and leave me. That I’d be alone again. Yes, I had Jez and the girls, but they had their own commitments, and none of them would drop everything to eat macarons in Paris with me.
I paid Chase well, let him pick half of our destinations, and holed up in hotel rooms while he hooked up with random men from dating apps, but what if the wanderlust faded?
What if he met The One and decided to put down roots?
I couldn’t imagine being tethered to a physical location.
Even now, the urge to run and keep running was strong enough that I began looking at our next stop as soon as we arrived at the last. Other than the hellish years with my family, Blackstone House was the longest I’d stayed in one place, and look how that had turned out.
“Great. You want six extra pillows?”
“No, but I will need bed linen.”
The obvious answer would be to ask Nolan, but I hesitated.
I’d seen the way Marielle practically salivated over him.
He obviously didn’t have any issues making “friends,” while I was an abject failure in that department.
But I did have Chase. And Chase was, by all normal measures, devastatingly handsome.
He’d been working part-time as a model when we met, albeit not a particularly successful one—not gaunt enough for the runway, not bulky enough for the fitness industry, too restless to stick around in LA or New York where the work was.
He turned heads everywhere, mostly female ones, unfortunately for both him and them.
Anyhow, I figured I’d let Nolan get entirely the wrong idea about us. Being pushed away had hurt quite enough without him thinking I’d failed at life in the years since as well.
“Forget the linen; we’ll share the bed.”
“Oh?” Chase raised one perfect, annoying eyebrow.
“I mean, where would we even find Egyptian cotton out here? This place is in the middle of nowhere.”
“I’m sure for a week, I could cope with whatever Nolan has in his linen closet.”
“A week? You think we’re going to be here for a week?”
“Okay, two weeks.”
“Try two days.” I’d fix the damn laptop, and then I’d hightail it out of here, far away from Nolan and Marielle and the damn dog. “Just keep that mutt away from me.”
“The dog’s cute,” Jez said as she wheeled the last of my suitcases through the door. “If Sin was here, she’d be trying to smuggle Juno onto the helicopter.”
“Urgh.” I shuddered. Sin was our resident bleeding heart. She fostered dogs for the local shelter whenever she wasn’t busy deleting assholes, and she was forever trying to convince me that her three personal pets weren’t razor-toothed menaces.
“Only seven bags this time? You’re travelling light.”
“Well, I left Vegas in a hurry, didn’t I?”
“Whose fault was that?”
“You could be just a tiny bit grateful.”
“And you could be just a tiny bit less meddlesome.”
“Meddlesome? Did you take a wrong turn out of eighteenth-century England?”
“Okay, fine, you could try being less of an annoying little witch.”
“Ladies…” Cole stepped inside, and although I’d only met him a day ago, the weeks I’d spent monitoring him and Jez as they travelled from Nevada to the Caribbean made me feel as if I knew him so much better.
He was perfect for her. Calm, steady, willing to accept that she shot people on a regular basis…
And apparently happy to indulge her freaky side too, if the bruises on her throat were any indication.
Having a man’s hands wrapped around my neck was my worst nightmare, but she got off on it. Go figure.
Then Nolan decided to come join the party.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, and honestly, was he really that dense?
“There are six pillows that I don’t need, and no desk, which I do need.”
“Ah, yeah, we had to finish the cottage in a hurry when we heard you were coming.”
“The word ‘finish’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.”
He ignored that. “I thought you could set up in my grandfather’s old study. There’s a desk in there.”
Nolan wanted me over in the house with him? Talk about awkward. “Can’t you bring the desk from the study and put it in here?”
“No, it’s enormous. I don’t even know how Grandpa got it through the door. He must have had a carpenter build it in the room.”
Chase was standing behind Nolan, his lips twitching, and I shot him a glare.
Nothing about this was funny. I hated it.
Hated it. Hated the fact that I had two choices—either sit on the floor and give myself a backache, or share space with Nolan again—and neither of those choices was palatable. Now Jez was snickering too.
Keep your eyes on the goal: getting the hell out of here.
“Fine, I’ll work in the study. Tell me there are plenty of power sockets?”
Nolan’s “yikes” expression made me grind my teeth, a habit I’d been trying to get out of for years. I went through a mouthguard every month, if it was a good month. In a bad month, I went through two.
“Just help me carry my stuff.”
I nodded toward the four heavily padded bags that contained my work equipment. Nolan picked up two, Chase picked up two, and I huffed and picked up my purse. Then we all trooped out of the cottage and headed up the path to the house. The loooooong path.
“Why did you have to build the cottages so far away?” I grumbled.
“Because I like my peace.”
“Aw, do you want me to find a golf cart?” Chase asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not going to. Exercise is good for you.”
This time, it was Nolan’s lips that twitched.
“I do exercise.”
“Lifting croissants to your mouth doesn’t count.”
Bad enough that Jez was being a pain in my ass without Chase ganging up on me as well.
It wasn’t as if I’d made him take a plane ride with the hot beach bum he’d just ditched.
Okay, so maybe our trip here was interfering with his latest Grindr hookup, but he could easily arrange another.
Even in this godforsaken wilderness, there had to be at least one vaguely attractive horndog up for a good time, and he wouldn’t say no to Chase. No man ever did.
I glanced behind me, wishing I could scuttle back into the cottage.
In the distance, a rustic-looking monitor barn, part stone, part wood, sat farther up the hill, and I knew from nosing around on the vineyard’s website that it housed the winery.
Okay, perhaps I’d found a few satellite photos too, which was how I knew the main house lay along the track ahead of us.
Everything was so far apart. Nolan must do ten thousand steps a day just walking around his own property.
“We had to more or less rebuild the winery,” he said, breaking the uncomfortable silence that had descended. “Half the timbers were rotten, and the inside was full of roaches.”
“You’re not exactly selling the place,” I replied, but maybe that was the idea? Maybe he wanted me to go as much as I wanted to leave? But seeing as I was the only convenient nerd willing to fix his stupid mistakes and his laptop for free, he had to suck it up and be civil.
“How about the house?” Chase asked. “What kind of shape was that in? You’ve been here for what, ten years?”
“A little over nine. Originally, I moved to North Carolina after…after…”
“After you left Blackstone House?” Chase filled in.
“You know about that?”
“Of course. Alexa and I tell each other everything.”
“Right.” Nolan paused, biting his bottom lip. “I inherited the property from my grandfather, which was a shock, to be honest. We weren’t close.”
“Generous guy.”
“Not much of a businessman, though. I figured I’d stay a couple of months while I sorted through his things and put the place up for sale, but the more time I spent here, the more at peace I felt.”
“I can understand that. The view is spectacular.”
“Yeah, it is. Two weeks in, I signed up for a winemaking course, and when the pieces fell into place, I decided to stay here and make a go of things.”
“One of the pieces being Alexa’s million-dollar gift, I should imagine?”
Chase tossed out the words casually, but Nolan jolted as if he’d stuck his finger into a live socket, then glanced wildly around to see who else was within earshot. Jez and Cole were twenty yards behind with Marielle bringing up the rear. Didn’t she know where she wasn’t wanted?
“I…” Nolan started, then trailed off. Chase had understood my unspoken brief, which was to emphasise our closeness, to make our relationship seem like something it wasn’t. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d faked it, and it wouldn’t be the last.
“As I said, Alexa and I tell each other everything.”
Not quite everything. Nobody knew what had happened between Nolan and me on our final night in Blackstone House, and nobody ever would. Some secrets were better left buried.
Nolan cleared his throat. “So, to answer your question about the house, it wasn’t in great shape either. I fixed up one wing, but the other is still a work in progress.”
“Which wing is the study in?” I asked, my stomach sinking an inch lower because I suspected I already knew.
Nolan gave a sheepish smile. “It’s not that bad.”
“On a scale of one to Blackstone House?”
“Let’s say a five?”
Fuck.