“How should I know? I haven’t seen him in nearly ten years. But he’s a debt-free homeowner with a reasonable personality, and if he still cooks every night…”
“Shut up.” If the girlfriend lived with him at Dionysus, I’d have to get a hotel room somewhere. The thought of watching him with another woman left me cold.
“And he was always hot in a scruffy way. Not my type, obviously, but I can see why a girl would swipe right.”
I threw a fidget spinner at Jez, but she caught it and tucked it into a pocket.
“Aw, you’re cute when you’re angry.”
I tried to slam the bedroom door behind me, but it closed with a quiet click instead. As Jez laughed to herself, I leaned against the polished wood, sank to the floor, and sobbed softly as my life spiralled out of control yet again.
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.
