Finder's Keeper (2 page)

Determined to succeed at speed-dating, Mia slapped on a smile and reached for her Chardonnay as lucky number Thirteen plunked down across from her. Emulating the simpering blonde, she leaned forward, widened her eyes until she could feel her IQ points dropping off in protest and faked a smile so brittle it was a miracle pieces didn’t chip off. Taking a page from the blonde’s overheard script, she cooed, “Kevin, wow, what a great name. Mortgage lending? What a fascinating career. I bet you have lots of stories.”

Thirteen instantly flushed with pleasure and began to hold forth about the thrilling world of mortgages.

Really, Bachelor Number Thirteen wasn’t that bad. Balding, moderately overweight and directing everything he said to the hands he had folded in his lap—yes. But a thirty-four-year-old workaholic who had suddenly decided she wanted to marry and breed wasn’t exactly the pick of the litter either.

As Thirteen droned on, Mia envisioned the day her unborn children would ask how she met their father.
Well, snookums, Auntie Gina blackmailed Mommy into going speed-dating and Daddy, you know, he really wasn’t that bad. No, it wasn’t love at first sight, but Mommy’s uterus wasn’t going to last forever. Menopause waits for no woman.

She cringed internally. Not exactly the fairy tale, but Mia had never been the princess type anyway. That was Gina…and every other female in her family. Mia was the one with her head screwed on straight. The scientist. Analytical.

Somehow that seemed to disqualify her from being swept off her feet. Was that fair? Just because she wanted to know the chemical reactions caused in the brain by the emotion labeled
love
didn’t mean she was allergic to romance.

The bell rang, startling her out of her musings, and for once the man across from her didn’t launch himself out of the chair like he was spring loaded. Thirteen—
Kevin
—smiled and shook her hand and looked straight into her eyes as he said he hoped she would pick him for a second date.

Mia didn’t know which was worse—her guilt that she’d barely listened to a word he’d said, or her mortification that she’d had to pretend to be the blonde for five minutes to get a guy to like her. But it wasn’t even
her
he liked.

Thirty more minutes. Did she continue to pretend to be the blonde or just make a break for the door? Why was it so impossible to find a guy who
liked
the fact that she was pathologically direct, socially awkward and scientific to the point of neurosis? Wouldn’t the right guy find her faults charming?

Mia gazed longingly across the lounge through the archway to the main dining area of Enzo’s. It was a half-assed excuse for an Italian restaurant, but the people on the restaurant side looked so smugly happy—probably because they weren’t speed-dating. They most likely already had spouses and children, not having waited to the eleventh hour of fertility to begin the process.

The bell dinged again as Bachelor Number Fourteen settled himself in the chair. Mia flashed a smile that probably looked a little manic and Fourteen returned it, his gaze flicking automatically to her lack of cleavage, then over to where her nametag rested on her lapel.

“Astronomy, huh? So baby, what’s your sign? Lemme guess. A Virgo? You look like a Virgo.”

Mia surreptitiously glanced at her watch. Fifteen seconds. A new personal worst.

Chapter Two

Stalking for Beginners

Chase stared into the lounge of the crappiest Italian restaurant in a hundred-mile radius and tried to figure out where the hell he’d seen the skinny brunette before. She couldn’t have been less his type—he tended to go for voluptuous, laid back and casual, while she was bony and prim and wound so damn tight he could practically feel her tension smacking him in the face from thirty feet away.

So why did she look so damn familiar? And where did this insane urge to kiss her until that pissy expression melted off her face come from?

“
Chase
.” The force with which Brody snapped his name gave Chase a tiny hint that his friend had been trying to snag his attention for a while.

“Hm?” he asked lazily, wrenching his gaze off Miss Prim and tipping his beer for a deliberate swallow.

His college roommate’s eyes narrowed sharply. “Have you heard a word I’ve said for the last ten minutes?”

Not even remotely. Brody’s voice had taken on that irritating “this is an intervention” tone and Chase had zoned. People dealt with their shit in different ways. Chase was a master of avoidance, a skill he’d perfected over the last six years.

Instead of answering Brody’s question, he grinned and contemplated the label peeling off his beer. “How ’bout them Red Sox?”

Brody flinched, his loyalty to the Yankee pinstripes revolting at the mere mention of the Nation, but he managed not to rise to the bait. “Don’t change the subject.”

“I thought baseball was always relevant.”

“It’s pre-season. And this is serious. I’m not just here as your friend, Chase. Your finances—”

“Are in your capable hands. I leave it all to you.”

“You’re broke, Chase.”

Chase laughed at the blunt words. “Maybe your hands aren’t as capable as I thought. Now that you mention it, I probably should have considered something beyond your exceptional skill at beer pong when I was picking my financial advisor.”

“Your income doesn’t even come close to covering your expenses. I’d like to meet the financial advisor who can make a profit under those circumstances.”

“How about a Ponzi scheme? I’ve heard those are pretty profitable.”

“If you don’t mind going to jail for felony fraud.”

The waitress chose that moment to appear at their table with their order and by-the-book Brody, who had lost ninety percent of his sense of humor since his beer pong days, blushed like a middle-school girl at being caught talking about fraud, even jokingly. If he’d been paying attention, he would have noticed the waitress was too preoccupied by her own internal drama to care about Ponzi schemes being hatched in her section. Her eyes were red, hands trembling, and when she’d first come to their table she’d had to ask them to repeat their order three times before she could get it down.

Brody waited until she wandered off to break out his club and start whacking away at Chase’s dead horse. “If you would just sell one of the houses—”

“No.” The word was more reflex than thought.

Brody pushed on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Or rent them. I could hire a property management company to arrange everything. You wouldn’t have to lift a finger, the rents would offset the mortgages and taxes, and then at least the properties wouldn’t be depreciating due to neglect. You can’t just ignore a house for six years and not expect it to fall into disrepair, dude. Being a property owner means maintenance.”

Beneath his carefully crafted layers of
I don’t give a damn
, Chase felt a faint fluttering of guilt. Whose memory did he think he was honoring by letting the houses fall apart just because he wanted to avoid dealing with them?

Inheritance
. It was such a shitty word. The only time it was a good thing was when it came from some old maiden aunt in Kansas no one had ever met. Otherwise it was like being given a bonus for having your life fall apart around you. God had a sick sense of humor. Like He was up in heaven saying,
Sure, I’m gonna yank away everything you’ve ever cared about in the blink of an eye, but look at the prime real estate you’ll inherit! Think of the resale value!

“I’ve tried tact,” Brody went on. “I’ve tried to be all sensitive. I know this sucks for you, but it’s been six years, Chase. It’s time to—”

Chase tuned him out. He didn’t want to hear the standard therapy crap. His eyes flicked back over to the skinny brunette. Just like him she looked like she would rather be anywhere but here.

What the hell is she doing speed-dating?
Chase didn’t examine why it bugged him so much that she was doing the dating version of Russian Roulette. He wasn’t big into self-examination these days.

What was it about her? She wasn’t even that hot. Okay, yeah, she had a little bit of a naughty librarian thing going on. Her dark hair looked thick and he’d just bet it was silky as hell when she pulled out the pen keeping it in a French twist and shook it down. Her face was narrow, but her thinness made her cheekbones jump out and her eyes look freaking huge behind the wire-framed glasses. Nice bone structure, no makeup. A gray suit that hung off her bony shoulders and flat dress shoes.

Miss Prim had done everything possible to downplay her assets—which should have made her eminently ignorable, but instead Chase found himself picturing her tramped up in sky-high heels and a sex-kitten outfit, like her asexual attire was a challenge his imagination couldn’t resist. He shifted in his chair. Christ, he was getting turned on by Miss Prim.

Why sign up for speed-dating if she was going to do everything she could to hide what she had going on? The contradiction tugged at him.

He could crash the event. That wasn’t weird, right? There were empty spaces, so clearly they were short guys. If he just—

“Chase!”

Brody’s shout was loud enough to make several people at nearby tables shoot him nasty looks, but Miss Prim was too far away to pay them any attention. Chase wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or disappointed that she hadn’t turned to find him staring at her. Again.

“Do you recognize that woman over there?”

He didn’t need to look at Brody to feel the anger vibrating off him. “I don’t care if Jessica Alba is doing a striptease on a table over there. I’m not going to let you distract me. You’re going to lose both houses if you don’t—”

“How much?” he asked without taking his eyes off the brunette.

“What?”

Chase tore his gaze off her and met Brody’s. “How much more would I need to make to keep both houses? And hire a maintenance guy,” guilt prompted him to add.

Brody frowned, his eyes going distant as he did some mental math. “Property taxes…the mortgages…insurance…maintenance. Six grand a month would be comfortable, but you might be able to squeeze by on fifty-five hundred.”

The number was a physical blow, but he didn’t show any reaction. “That much?”

“The insurance settlements and retirement accounts helped, and covered you this long, but the equity on your parents’ place was pretty much drained with the second mortgage to put you and Marcus through college.” 

Chase forced his expression to remain careless, refusing to betray the flash of guilt that his parents had put themselves into debt just so he could drop out one semester short of a degree.

Brody cleared his throat, an affectation he’d developed when he was about to say something he expected a client to react to badly. “You could have avoided getting to this point by getting a job.”

“I have a job.”
Sort of.

“A full-time job. And surfing forty hours a week while camping on a beach in Fiji for six months doesn’t count.”

Chase shrugged, unchastened. “The waves were good.”

He wasn’t going to apologize for his life. On his board with the waves curling beneath him was the one place where the world seemed to make sense to him anymore, and life was too short to spend being miserable in some cubicle.

“Do you want your parents’ house to be repossessed? Or your brother’s? Because you aren’t far from that.”

“I’ll pick up some more hours,” he conceded. He had a great deal with his boss—taking jobs whenever he felt like it and left to his own devices when he didn’t. He’d call Karma. She’d be over the moon he was finally interested in playing psychic detective more than four hours a week—not that she’d ever show it.

Brody’s expression clouded. “I don’t think that’s going to cover it.”

Chase didn’t either, but he was an expert at ignoring the voice of logic in his head. He shrugged and took another swallow of beer. “I’ll work it out.” Brody opened his mouth, obviously not done hammering the dead horse and Chase met his eyes, putting an end-of-story iciness into his own gaze that he rarely had occasion to use. “Dude. I get it. It’s my problem and I’ll deal with it. Let it go.”

He looked back over to the brunette and almost swore aloud when he saw that she was rising to leave, gathering her things with quick, jerky moves. He started to stand automatically and forced himself back into his chair when he realized that leaving in the middle of his own meal to follow a stranger out of a restaurant tipped a little too close to stalking for comfort.

She rushed toward the door, head held high, looking neither left nor right. The only thing that kept her from looking like she was fleeing the scene of a crime was her aura of supreme confidence and self-assurance, like nothing in the world could rattle her—and damn if that didn’t make him want to try his hand at rattling her.

Why speed-dating if it was her own personal corporal punishment?

And why did Chase care?

“Molly’d love to see you. We were hoping you’d come over on Sunday.”

The door closed behind the brunette and Chase swung his attention back to Brody. Sunday. His birthday. Twenty-eight and still kicking.

“I don’t think I can make Sunday.”

Brody shook his head. “You won’t convince me you already have plans. Molly and I would love to have you. We could invite some of the brothers. Relive our frat days.”

“Can’t. Sorry. Some other time.”

Brody looked like he wanted to push it—Molly must be giving him shit about getting Chase to open up and reconnect or some B.S. “Dude,” Brody said finally, “it’s your birthday. You can’t spend it alone.”

“I won’t,” he lied easily.

Chase hated birthdays. And holidays. Every other day of the year, his old friends let him dodge them. They would stop pushing and leave him to his own devices. But on birthdays, on Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of Fucking July he
couldn’t
be alone. He
had
to join their perfect domestic bliss—and be reminded of all he’d lost in every goddamn laugh they shared and every mushy, pitying look they shot him when they thought he couldn’t see. He’d much rather be by himself, on the water or maybe catching a double feature in a movie theatre if the waves sucked, convincing himself it was just another day.