Her Favorite Fumble (A Wayward Harbor Romance #1)

Chapter One

You can’t get there from here.

—old Maine colloquialism

Lucy rounded it up to an even three thousand miles, though, because some of those services weren’t right off the highway exits as the signs led her to believe they’d be. There was a lot of backtracking.

Also, she’d panicked and gone the wrong way at a confusing interchange, ending up in Chicago traffic—a trauma already so embedded in her DNA, her future grandchildren would have a deep fear of the city they wouldn’t be able to explain.

Three thousand miles was also about 2,990 miles too long to have nobody but herself and some easily tuned out podcasts for company. She had no job, no home, and everything that mattered to her was packed in her car.

It wasn’t a great headspace to be in.

She wasn’t broke, though. Thanks to a financially insecure upbringing driving her to squirrel away her money, and her former living arrangements not giving her the space to accumulate a lot of purchases, her savings account was healthy.

It was earmarked for her dream of moving to Miami, though, so she’d rather not dip into it.

Lucy was turning thirty next month, and her current predicament was not where she’d seen herself when imagining that milestone. It wasn’t the number she objected to, but the realization she had nothing to show for almost three decades of existence.

It wasn’t something she’d thought a lot about until her life totally unraveled in the flash of a telephoto camera.

She’d met a nice, down-to-earth guy in a coffee shop, which wasn’t all that easy to do in Las Vegas, and they spent a lovely hour sitting at one of the tables in the window, getting to know each other.

Lucy had dared to hope she might have finally found the one.

The next day, her face was all over the tabloids and social media. It turned out her nice guy was a football quarterback named Reese Noonan—he’d introduced himself as Andrew, which she later learned was his middle name—who was engaged to beloved actress Faith Lincoln.

Just like that, the “Fairee” fandom came for her, and Lucy became the most hated woman in the world.

And it reached a fever pitch when, a few days later, Noonan’s football team lost the championship and Lucy got blamed for that, too. Apparently having coffee with her made him forget how to play the game he was paid nine figures to play.

Over the next several weeks, she lost her very lucrative cocktail waitressing job due to the attention, and then her roommate and landlord teamed up to tell her she had to leave because everybody in the building was being harassed.

She tried hiding out in the home her mom shared with her next potential stepfather, but some destructive behavior from the quarterback and teary interviews from Faith Lincoln kept the attention from dying down.

It only took six weeks before her mother watched in silence while the boyfriend told her she had to leave.

So now she was driving to the only place she remembered ever being truly happy—Wayward Harbor, Maine. She would get a strong, comforting hug from her grandmother and then she’d figure out what came next.

First, she had to figure out how to find Gran’s cottage in the dark. Nostalgic childhood memories of a place didn’t translate to navigating roads many years later. And dense cloud cover meant there was no moonlight, so she could only see what her headlights illuminated.

Luckily, her phone’s navigation led her straight to the turn she needed, and tears prickled Lucy’s eyes. Even though they were still bare from winter, the bushy tangles of beach roses along the white fence were finally a familiar sight.

A dark-colored pickup was parked in the driveway. Lucy had no idea what she’d expected her grandmother to drive, but a truck wouldn’t have been high on the list. Lucy parked behind it and killed her engine. When her headlights clicked off, the world plunged into darkness.

That was what she got for not telling Gran she was coming. She should have. It was probably rude to show up unannounced, even for a granddaughter, but deep down, she’d been afraid Gran would have told her not to come. She wasn’t sure she could handle another door being closed in her face right now.

After making sure the basics—phone charger, wallet, brush and a toothbrush—were in her tote, she slung it over her shoulder and grabbed her phone and keys.

Then she got out of the car, closing the door as quietly as possible.

Cold, damp air enveloped her, and she sucked in a breath as a chill immediately seeped into her bones.

Okay, so spring on the coast of Maine and spring in Las Vegas were apparently two entirely different seasons.

Using her phone’s flashlight to navigate the uneven stones of the walkway, Lucy made her way to the front door and breathed a sigh of relief when she found it unlocked.

Setting her tote by the door and slipping off her shoes, she tiptoed by flashlight through the living room, searching for a free outlet for her charger.

While she looked, she wondered whether waking Gran now or letting her find her granddaughter on the couch in the morning would be the least alarming way to make her presence known.

“If you’re one of those Airbnb folks, you’ve got the wrong—”

Lucy’s high-pitched scream drowned out whatever else the deep, gruff voice was saying, and she whirled to throw her keys at the intruder as light flooded the room. She remembered too late she was supposed to clutch them in her hand with the keys between her fingers like metal claws.

The man caught her keys as easily as if she’d lobbed them to him so he could borrow her car. He was frowning, but his overall expression was more confused than menacing. “Are you okay?”

“No.” That was an understatement. She looked around, panic rising. “Gran?”

“She’s not here.”

Lucy stared at the dark-haired man, registering his size first. He was tall, with broad shoulders and incredibly muscular arms. And those abs. All of which she could see because he was naked except for a pair of alarmingly low-slung gray sweatpants.

Even as some inner voice tried to reassure her it would be a ridiculous wardrobe choice for a home invasion, panic was coursing through her body. “What did you do with my grandmother?”

“She’s traveling.”

“Oh, she’s just traveling? An elderly woman alone has gone running amok, just like that?”

“Elderly?” He barked out a laugh before shaking his head. “She’s only sixty-nine, and she finished in the top ten of the food bank’s 5k run last fall. Something you would probably know if you were really her granddaughter because it was the only thing she talked about for a solid two months.”

“Of course I knew about the 5k run. We joked about how I can spend twelve hours walking in heels, but would only run if somebody was chasing me—and, honestly, maybe not even then. I’d probably give up. And Gran can run a 5k, but can’t walk ten feet in high heels.”

He stood there, arms folded across his chest. His eyes, which looked almost as dark as his hair, were narrowed, and he didn’t seem to have anything else to add.

Lucy knew Gran had talked about the run on Facebook, though, which was as good as making it public knowledge. Did he really have proof of what he was saying? “Did you murder her and hide her body so you could squat in her home and tell anybody who asks that she’s traveling?”

His eyebrow arched, and he scrubbed one hand over his scruffy jaw. “You might want to lay off the true crime podcasts.”

Lucy opened her mouth to argue, but she had just driven three thousand miles with true crime podcasts playing as the background noise.

She hadn’t intended to tune them out, but even murder and mayhem couldn’t distract her from thinking about the tattered mess her life had become practically overnight.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “I’m somehow over-caffeinated and utterly exhausted at the same time. I’m Lucy Macauley. Helen’s granddaughter.”

The man nodded. “I’m Nick Slater. Helen didn’t want the cottage sitting empty while she was away and I needed a place to stay, so I’m staying here in exchange for doing some work around the property.”

That made sense, and Lucy’s pulse slowly settled into an only slightly higher than normal rhythm. “For how long?”

“She’s visiting some friends in Florida, and then they’re going on a cruise, and then she’s staying with some other friends in one of the Carolinas on her way back through. She said it would be a couple of months, at least. And she just left four days ago.”

“Two months?” Her heart rate kicked back into high gear. “I drove all the way from the West Coast, and I was planning to stay here with Gran.”

“I’m staying here.”

“I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Neither do I.”

Her head tilted. “Are you from here?”

“Born and raised,” he said.

“Then why don’t you have anywhere else to go?”

When his annoyed expression deepened into an actual scowl, she realized that was a rude question. But she was exhausted and wanted him to go away so she could face-plant on that couch.

“Somebody else needed to use my place for a while, so this arrangement worked out for everybody.”

“Except me.”

“Except you,” he admitted gruffly.

Lucy wasn’t sure what the best move was, but she knew two things.

When she’d said she was Helen’s granddaughter, he hadn’t mentioned the incident in Las Vegas, so maybe he didn’t know the entire world hated her right now.

And also, it was very late and she didn’t have the physical or emotional strength to get back in her car and find someplace else to go.

“Maybe I can just stay here,” she said. “I really need some sleep.”

“There’s only one bed.”

“Of course there is. I read that book, mister.”

The scowl deepened even further. “That is definitely not where I was going with that. What I meant was that the second bedroom’s emptied out so I can work in there, but you can crash on the couch.”

“That’s very chivalrous of you,” she said, relief fanning the dying embers of her sense of humor.