Chapter 4
FOUR
The cart was towed from the ditch and transported to my house, where the mechanic checked it over. Surprisingly, there were no new dents. It did need a new top, which he had to place an order for, but the current one was serviceable for the present. The replacement would be in the following week.
So basically, everything was fine. That didn’t mean I was okay with Bree James moving to my neighborhood.
Nathan found the whole thing funny because, of course, he did.
I refused to talk to him for the ride back to my house.
Instead of leaving, he helped himself to my beer and then invited himself to sleep in the guest room.
I wanted to kick him out—I was so not in the mood for Nathan—but I couldn’t very well send a drunk guy out and tell him to drive back to his Airbnb forty minutes away. So I sucked it up and even made him an omelet the next morning. It always irritated me that he never showed signs of a hangover.
“So, what are you going to do?” he asked as I cleaned up the breakfast dishes.
“About what?” I kept my back to him. I always scrubbed the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. Anal-retentive? Yes, at least according to everybody I’d ever met. I liked routine.
“About Bree.”
I’d assumed he was asking about my writing. It didn’t even occur to me that he was asking about Bree. “Oh, um, nothing.” I shrugged. “I’ll forward her the bill for the cart repairs. I’m assuming she’ll pay it without complaint. If she fights back, I’m not sure what I’ll do.”
“Oh, she’ll pay the bill.” Nathan was grinning when I turned to look at him. “I mean, what are you going to do about her? I thought I sensed some sparks there last night.”
He had to be joking. “There were no sparks.”
He arched an eyebrow and waited.
“There were no sparks,” I repeated, fully annoyed.
“I saw sparks.”
“You saw fury. I can’t stand that woman.”
“Are you sure?” Nathan cocked his head, doubt lining his features. “Because—and I’m not trying to get you going here—I definitely saw a spark.”
“She ran us off the road!” I exploded. “She could have killed us.”
“It was very clearly an accident.”
He was obviously more comfortable with almost dying than I was. “That doesn’t matter. She was being reckless.”
“Okay.” He held his hands up in supplication. “I’m just saying … there was a spark.”
I wanted to wipe the smug smile off his face with an ice scraper. “Stop saying that. You know how I feel about that woman.”
“Yes. You feel as if she purposely baited you two years ago.”
“Not baited.” That was ludicrous. “She knocked me into Amy Ryan’s table.”
“Yes.”
“She let me take the blame.”
“Amy isn’t still holding a grudge about that.”
“Yes, she is.”
“Okay, maybe a minor one,” he conceded. “It’s not a big deal, though.”
“She stole all the attention at the panel.”
“You didn’t want to talk anyway.”
“That’s not the point. She made fun of my readers. She called them nerds.”
“Are you mad because she called your readers nerds—something that’s debatable—or that she called you a nerd?”
“I’m fine being a nerd.” My voice was suddenly Woody Harrelson high. “I wear my nerdiness with pride.”
Nathan held my gaze for what felt like a really long time. “Okay,” he said finally. “She’s a menace. Why do you think she’s here?”
“I don’t know.” I leaned against the counter and folded my arms. “I’ve been wondering about that too. I just can’t fathom why she would be here in the first place.”
“Maybe she’s stalking you. She could be like the shark in the fourth Jaws movie. It stalks a family from Maine to the Bahamas.”
I scorched him with a look. “That is … ridiculous.”
“Then maybe it was a coincidence.”
“Do you even believe in coincidences?”
He considered it for a beat. “Not really. I guess you’ll have to feel her out.” He stood as if he was finished, but then a wicked smile overtook his features. “Or you could feel her up because there was definitely a spark.”
I extended my finger toward the door. “Get out.”
He laughed. “Try to get some writing in, huh?” He was amiable as he ambled toward the door. “Maybe the spark is what you’ve been missing.”
“You’re delusional.”
“Yeah, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
MY GOAL WAS TO WRITE. NO MATTER what, I had to write two thousand words. After two hours, I only had forty. Frustrated, sick of the entire mess, and mad at myself, I abandoned my laptop and grabbed the bill the golf cart mechanic had left on my counter.
I couldn’t concentrate with this hanging over my head, so I headed to Bree’s house. I didn’t have her exact address. I did, however, know she was on Yam Gandy Road.
I used Zillow to see which houses had been recently purchased.
There were only two. The first had a toddler playing in the front yard, and as far as I knew, Bree was not a mother.
The second house, however, had a scooter out front.
Bree might not have been able to ride it through the community, but apparently, she had no problem putting it on display.
The moment I saw the scooter, I second-guessed myself and swung back around, determined to walk home and send the bill. Then I got angry at myself for being a coward and turned back.
I was going to do this. I wasn’t afraid of her. She owed me for the golf cart, and she was going to pay up.
I stalked up the front steps to her house, raised my hand, ready to knock loud enough to wake the dead, then frowned when I heard a voice. Not a voice. Her voice. She was talking nonstop, which made me think she was on the phone.
I had manners, even if she didn’t. Interrupting her phone call wasn’t good.
Then I realized she wasn’t talking on the phone.
She was dictating a book. I could tell because she was using punctuation cues.
She would say a sentence then add “insert period” or “close quotation marks.” I listened for several minutes, marveling at the words she seemed to have no problem conjuring.
It made me irrationally angry. Sure, I had a right to be mad at her—she’d almost killed me, after all, and she was not a very nice person—but this was something else entirely.
I was a brutally honest guy, which meant I had to acknowledge that it wasn’t really anger I was feeling.
It was jealousy. Here she was, mere hours after she could have killed Nathan and me, dictating a book as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
Why wasn’t she at least shaken? I didn’t expect her to be prostrate with apology, although that would have been a nice touch, but an errant tear or two would have helped.
Without thinking, I opened the screen door without knocking and stepped onto her sun porch. It was stacked with boxes. It looked as if a library had thrown up, there were so many books scattered in every direction. There seemed to be a lot of shoes too. How many shoes is too many?
From my position on the porch, I could see into her kitchen. That only served to make me angrier. Not only was she dictating—and like a rockstar—but she was multitasking and unpacking at the same time. She seemed to be a whirlwind. Sometimes life just wasn’t fair.
“Hey,” I said to draw her attention.
She didn’t look over, just continued to talk about vampire fangs and … wait, vampire fangs and what? Oh, geez. She was dictating a sex scene.
Everything went ramrod straight. I looked down at my crotch. Don’t even think about it.
“Hey,” I said a little louder, determined to get the words out.
Still nothing but fang talk.
“Hey!” I yelled.
That was enough to catch her attention. She turned quickly, her eyes going wide, and dropped the items in her hands. All I saw was bright bits of fluttery lace and satin. The lingerie hit the ground in front of me. It took everything I had not to look at it.
Okay, I might have looked a little.
“What the hell?” she screeched.
I just stared at her. When she reached toward her ears and came back with AirPods, I felt like an idiot.
“Hey,” I said, softer this time. “Um … hey.”
She cocked her head. “You’re in my house.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“You’re in my house, and I didn’t invite you inside.”
“I knocked.”
That was a lie. I’d heard her dictating and let myself in. She was wearing headphones, though, and she clearly didn’t hear well with them in. She wouldn’t know I hadn’t knocked.
She eyed me for several beats then ran her tongue over her lips.
“Can I help you?” she asked when I continued to hold her gaze. There was no warmth to her tone. I really couldn’t blame her. I had broken into her house.
“I…” Honestly, I’d forgotten why I was even there. “You dropped something,” I said finally, pointing toward the pile of lingerie on the floor.
She looked down, then back up. “That’s why you’re here? To tell me that you were going to frighten me into dropping my pajamas?”
Pajamas? Is she being serious right now?
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m here to give you this.” I fished out the estimate from the mechanic.
She kept her eyes on me before looking down at the paper. “That’s not some weird naked drawing of me, is it?”
That was enough to sharpen my focus. “Why would it be a naked drawing of you?”
“You look like an artist. Like… I imagine you sitting around at home, drawing pictures. Not with crayons or anything because that would be weird. I bet you have nice colored pencils, though.”
“And you think I use them to draw naked pictures of you?”
She shrugged, unbothered by my tone. “Yes.”
I scowled. “It’s the estimate from the mechanic.”
“Oh.” There was no embarrassment to be found on her features. “Awesome.” She took the sheet of paper and looked at it. “Just the top thing, then?” she said after a beat.
I nodded.
“Okay. Um … do you want to wait and just have me pay the final bill, or would you like me to write you a check now?”
She was being far too reasonable. That wasn’t what I’d expected.
“You can just pay the final bill.” I sounded sulky for some reason.
“Okay.” She smiled blandly.
I continued to glare.