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I jerked opened the fridge and grabbed one of the meals Sal had sent yesterday—she sent them every few days, rotating thoughtfully between my favorite restaurants in New York City. And every few days when the housekeeper came, they’d get thrown out. I hesitated before pulling up the camera in the hallway outside the bathroom. I watched for a moment, waiting for the woman to storm out. But the door stayed closed.
I don’t know why I cared. I didn’t want anyone anywhere near me. It was insane of me to ask her to stay. Finally, with a grumble, I thumbed it off, grabbed the box of food, and went back out to the pool house.
This whole incident had thrown everything off. Not that I’d been on at all this morning—or hell, for the past two weeks. All around the desk in the pool house suite were crumpled wads of paper, testament to how fucking badly things were going.
I could not stick this landing, no matter what I tried. I knew it was all in my head—I knew I was putting off the inevitable, my return to real life. But worse, the fact that when I was done, I suspected I would feel no different than when I started.
That my father wouldn’t give two shits that I’d succeeded in the one thing he’d always told me I couldn’t do.
I slumped into my chair, tossing the box of food next to the typewriter, which I used instead of a computer to avoid distractions. I kept no phone, camera, or connection to Anita out here, either.
The book was why I was hiding in Quince Valley. I was here to write a novel, like I’d been desperate to since I was a boy, when I filled notebooks with stories of aliens and monsters, dragons and secret agents, and later, as a teen, more contemporary stories inspired by my favorite writers in the books I kept hidden in my room. I’d built a billion-dollar company from nothing. I’d dated successful, beautiful women. I’d traveled the world, launched a foundation, given millions to research and charities. I’d succeeded at everything and still felt like a goddamned failure. It was at an awards dinner last year, when I was accepting yet another prize for my innovative tech, that I realized I’d never find the success I sought in my business, patents, or bank accounts. It wasn’t any of the homes or towers or boats or planes, or women I’d tried so hard to love.
I knew, standing up on that stage, accepting the most prestigious award in the industry aside from the goddamned peace prize, that nothing would make me feel like the success my father never thought I could be. Except the one thing he disapproved of.
The only way I could truly show my father how little he mattered was to write that book he thought was a fool’s errand. To show him those words he’d discovered years ago in my notebooks—and subsequently tossed in the fire—meant something to me. And that he couldn’t take those away no matter how much he burned.
Fuck my father. He still ran his little business back in Seattle, long after he divorced my mother. He didn’t seem to care that both me and Blake had eclipsed his net worth by several zeroes. He still existed, smug and shitty, and that was enough to fuel my waking at dawn every morning and squeezing out a few more lines of this book every fucking day.
But it was hellish going. Each word was an agony.
I yanked out the piece of paper I’d been agonizing over before that little blonde interruption showed up and tossed it to the floor with the others. I was working on the ending of the book, and while the whole process had been the most painful thing I’d ever done, the ending was where I’d been stuck for weeks. I needed to write a woman who’d turned up in my main character’s life who would give him hope for the future. Who’d show him he already knew the way.
I hadn’t been able to get a grasp on her at all. But now, for the first time, a picture of her formed in my mind.
She’d have blonde hair. A mouth I wasn’t sure how she could kiss her mother with. A fire in her eyes and little hands balled into fists.
Ignoring the food I’d left the room to get, I shoved a new piece of paper in the machine. Then I began tapping on the keys.
To my astonishment, the words came. They gushed, like water from a broken pipe, until before I knew it I’d filled three pages with text.
I looked up only when I sensed movement. There, through the plate glass window, the woman walked briskly to the front door. She paused at the doorway, looking over her shoulder. She was too far away for me to see her face from here, but I could sense the way she was still angry from the set in her shoulders. Then she left, slamming the door behind her.
Or trying to—the soft hinges wouldn’t let her, and I actually felt my lip curling up in a smile picturing how that would probably piss her off even more.
Winona.
When she was gone, I gathered the sheets of paper and re-read what I’d written.
Unlike everything else I’d spat out in the past several weeks, I was astonished to discover they were actually… good. Or at least, not horrifically awful.
I looked up, as if Winona was still there.
Fuck me. That little firecracker was a good luck charm.
Chapter 3
Winona
I didn’t go back to the Rolling Hills for the rest of that week. As it turned out, I was called away to a handful of other urgent jobs and it made sense to leave Cher to oversee things at the renovation for the rest of the week.
Work should have sufficiently distracted me from the strange man in the mansion. It really should have. But like a boomerang, my mind kept going back to that bearded, overgrown asshole and those disturbingly striking dark green eyes, poking out from the fringe on his forehead, with their thick, dark lashes boring into me.
And each time it did, a jolt of something hot went through me.
It was disturbing how much I’d thought about that monster. And it was worse at night, when I was too tired to work on business plans and normally slipped into a book. I found myself going back to that moment on the floor, when we’d faced off, and he hadn’t let me take my flashlight back.
His robe had fallen open wide enough that I could see the smooth plane of his chest; the sharp cut of his collar. Something had shifted in his eyes when he held the flashlight away a second time. I knew he was just being a dick, but for a moment, I’d thought I’d caught a glimpse of something… playful. Something that made sparks flutter in my belly.
