Lovely You Read online

  ON THE OUTSIDE, SCARLETT WOLFE IS PERFECT.

  Gorgeous, beautifully dressed, a cool job in fashion PR—what doesn’t she have going for her? She meets a guy on a Hawaiian vacation, and his interesting scars and tough exterior get her heart pumping. She could wrap him around her little finger if she wanted to, and why not? It could be fun to have a little fling with Nate, then go back to San Francisco. Back to cocktail parties and clubs and excitement, back to her adoring family, her sweet job, and her busy, full life.

  That's Scarlett on the outside—that was who she used to be. But now, on the inside, Scarlett Wolfe is coming apart, splintering bit by bit, and she’s scrambling to hold everything together. Things are not as they seem, with her job, with her family, with her friends, and certainly not with Nate Lange, the former soldier she met in Hawaii. Home in California, her life is suddenly entwined with Nate’s and Scarlett finds herself losing her heart to him. She needs to pull herself back from the brink of chaos, and hopefully, Nate will be with her when she comes through to the other side…

  Lovely You

  Jamie Bennett

  Copyright © 2019 by Jamie Bennett

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in a book review. Please contact the author at [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Book cover by Angela Haddon Book Cover Design.

  …to this day, the peacefullest, restfullest, sunniest, balmiest, dreamiest haven of refuge for a worn and weary spirit the surface of the earth can offer…a bloomy, fragrant paradise, where the troubled may go and find peace, and the sick and tired find strength and rest.

  Mark Twain,

  writing about the Hawaiian islands

  Chapter 1

  Whenever I closed my eyes, I started to remember.

  So I opened them and turned over again, the rumpled sheet twisting around my body, wrapping around me like a boa constrictor. God damn it. I wiggled to get free, then viciously kicked at it to escape the knots around my legs. It was just too fucking hot! I flipped onto my back and watched the fan on the high ceiling above me, spinning and whirring. The breeze it created barely reached the bed.

  I sat up and looked out at the dark ocean for a while, then reached for an elastic to pull my hair into a bun on the top of my head. There. Maybe without it annoying me, lying on my neck like an itchy blanket, now I would be able to sleep. I angrily flopped back down and stared at the fan again. What was the point of putting that puny thing so high up there? Had anyone ever thought about that? Why was I the only one who realized how dumb it was?

  I turned on my side, huffing. People were so stupid. I thought about the various examples I had witnessed since I had arrived in Hawaii that afternoon—the baggage handlers who took about ten years to get the bags off the plane, and mine was last, even though I had been in first class; the driver who went exactly the speed limit, like exactly on the line, and refused to go through yellow lights. The property management company that couldn’t manage their piece of shit property well enough to make sure the air conditioning worked. Like, they had one job, and they couldn’t even do that!

  I was burning with anger as well as with the heat inside the house. What was wrong with people? With all these people, with everyone? I turned on my back and looked at the fan, wishing I could reach up and rip it off the ceiling, make a big hole there, then throw it across the room so that it broke into a million pieces. I wanted to hit something. Someone. There was just no fucking way I was going to get to sleep, no way.

  I got up and padded out of the bedroom and into the living room, where I had purposely left my phone. I looked at it lying on the coffee table, and bit my lip. If I opened it, I would only use it to make calls, and I would not look at any messages, emails, or notifications. Nothing. I swallowed and picked it up, then resolutely ignored the red numbers telling me how much communication I was missing. I jabbed at it until I heard it ringing.

  “Aloha, you have reached Naupaka Property Management,” the man’s deep voice told me. It was familiar and so, so annoying. I had already dialed this number at least five times with no response. “If you have reached this message during normal business hours…”

  “This is Scarlett Wolfe calling from Anu House. Again. I’m not sure what the hell you think you’re doing,” I seethed into my phone when, finally, the voice finished and invited me to talk at the beep. “You had one fucking job, to get this house ready for a visitor. Me. You can sit on your ass for the rest of the year and drink your Mai Tai and eat your plate lunch, but for just this one time, you have to do what you’re paid to do!” I finished with my list of complaints: obviously the broken air conditioning, the smell in the refrigerator, chipped paint in the master bedroom closet, etc., etc. I left one more demand to call me back and hung up. My hand clenched around my phone and I resisted the urge to heave it against the wall. To throw anything, to scream, to beat the table with my fists, to cry.

  Instead, I made myself sit quietly on the sofa, the fabric rough against my skin. I never watched TV, but I flipped it on now, moving quickly between channels and looking for anything to capture my attention. The blue light of the screen lit up the room. I peeked over at my phone. No, nope, I was not going to look at it. I resolutely watched the high school volleyball game I had stopped on. I had played volleyball, too, a million years ago, it seemed like. These girls looked so young, so optimistic, so fresh and open.

  And so stupid. They had no idea what was ahead of them.

  ∞

  “Hello. Hello.”

  “We may see a little rain along the Kona coast in the late afternoon, and on the Hilo side, moderate showers throughout the evening.”

  “Hello! Scarlett Wolfe?”

  My eyes popped open, and I was so confused at first. Where was I? The weatherman on the TV was gesturing to a map of the Hawaiian Islands and talking about a high-pressure system coming from the north, but the other voice—

  There was a man standing about a yard from the couch, frowning down at me.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I yelped, and leapt to my feet. Oh shit, I was nude! It had been so hot last night—

  “I’m from Naupaka Property Management. I manage this house.” His eyes swept over me and I grabbed a pillow off the couch to cover at least the major parts. “You called me. Repeatedly. I don’t answer after midnight, so in the future, you can leave off after the one message. I get back to everyone, even if they don’t call seven or eight times.”

  “I—I—” I stopped, stood up straight, and then slumped back over because stretching out meant that the pillow covered less of me. “Yes, I’m Scarlett Wolfe, and I did try to contact last night regarding some serious maintenance issues. I expected a call from you, not that you would break in at dawn.”

  He narrowed his eyes. One of his eyes squinted a lot, but the other moved differently. I realized I was staring at it when he frowned harder. “It’s after eight AM, but I’m authorized to enter Anu House at any time,” he told me. “Authorized by Verity Wolfe. She’s owns it.”

  Yes, I knew that, because she was my grandmother. “Well, well,” I said, pissed at myself as I stammered, trying to formulate my next thought.

  He cut me off. “Could you please put some clothes on?”

  He sounded disgusted. He looked disgusted too, and I almost threw my pillow at his sneering face before I remembered that I was stark nake
d. I breathed hard out of my nose and, since he didn’t turn around like anybody with manners would, I backed out of the room and down the hall, still hiding my body behind the pillow, glaring at him. I quickly threw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt over a bikini, and as I did, I heard the air conditioning start up. Maybe he wasn’t completely useless if he had managed to get it going so fast.

  I was pulling my hair up into another knot when I came back into the living room. “You fixed it?” I asked. The house felt better already.

  “You have to set the thermostat to ‘cool.’ You had it set to heat. That was why the air wouldn’t come on.” He was looking at me like I smelled bad. Maybe I did; it had been really hot last night. I held my chin up high. “Next time you’re, I believe your message said, ‘getting fucking roasted alive,’ I suggest that you open some windows,” he continued. “This close to the ocean, there’s always a nice breeze.”

  “I can’t do that at night. I’m here alone,” I snapped him, and then regretted it, because now he knew I was all by myself in the house. I stepped back, away.

  “Not a lot of crime in a gated community with twenty-four-hour security,” he said dismissively. “I think it’s safe to open a window when it’s ninety degrees inside the house.”

  He didn’t know jack shit about what was safe. “Whatever,” I snapped. “There were other repairs that I mentioned—”

  He pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket. “One, air conditioning. Done. Two, there’s a smell in the refrigerator. I put in a box of baking soda when you went to cover yourself.” Another slight sneer and I could feel myself blush, like I had done something wrong, as if sleeping au naturel in my own house was depraved or something. “Last time Mrs. Wolfe was here, she left some opened cans of cat food in the fridge,” he continued. “They forgot to tell me she was gone for a few weeks after her departure and that’s the smell. I’ll clean the evaporator.” He looked at me, eyebrow raised, as if waiting for me to comment. I nodded slightly, like I approved, or knew what an evaporator was.

  He ran through the rest of the items on the paper, the things I had called and left the messages about the night before when they had all felt like dire emergencies: chipped paint, scratched table legs from my grandmother’s cats, a scuff on the tile, the garbage disposal that made weird noises, a drawer in nightstand that wouldn’t open, a lightbulb that had burned out, the sink the powder room that drained so slowly, and the others. I had walked around the house, seeing nothing but problems. In the light of day, with cool air pouring from the vents, none of the things on the list seemed so life and death to me, but whatever, this was his job, and he should do it.

  I looked at his face while he read. There were marks around his eye. The skin there was a little puckered, almost like it was slightly abraded. A thin white line ran near his jaw on that side of his face, curving slightly toward his mouth. It made the corner of his lips turn down a little, but that wasn’t why it looked like he was frowning at me now. He just looked angry. I had been staring at him, wondering about his scars, and he had caught me.

  “Since I had such short notice of your arrival, I couldn’t get over here to check through the house before you came. It’s not up to my standards, and I’ll get to all of this,” he said gruffly. “Nothing here that will give me any problems. Nothing hazardous to your health.” He stared at me. Glared at me.

  Now that I was clothed and didn’t need to cover up with the couch pillow, I could stand up straight without exposing myself. I did, putting my shoulders back and my chin even higher into the air. “Well, I expect you take care of all of it as soon as possible.”

  He turned and left the living room without another word and I stood there feeling like an idiot. I hadn’t turned the stupid controller to cool? That was why I had been roasting the whole night? And maybe I could have opened a window. We were out on a secluded point overlooking the ocean, only three houses on the private street. And as the guy had said, there was 24-hour security going up and down the block, and a guarded gate that cars had to pass through to enter. So maybe it would have been ok to just crack some small windows, to let a little ocean breeze flow in.

  In fact, I wanted to do that, now. I quickly suppressed the little bits of guilt and embarrassment that I had been feeling about being naked and everything else, and opened all the doors out to the big lanai and pool. Past them, the ocean rolled in on the wide, empty beach. I walked out and took a deep breath. The air out here felt better than the staleness inside the house. The tension in my body started to ooze out, just like it always did when I was around water. I pulled my clothes back off and lay on a chair in my bikini, trying not to notice if the man inside really had left for good or not. I thought he probably had and was already shirking what he had said he would do. People sucked.

  I looked at the waves for a long time. I managed to make my mind stay away from everything and focus only on the turquoise water. I was really, really tired, not only with the lack of sleep the night before, but with everything. I was just tired of everything. My eyes closed and I listened to the ocean.

  This was interrupted almost immediately by the handyman property manager, who came out of the door behind me. No, he hadn’t left. He walked around the side of the house and I could hear some kind of thumping and bumping, then he walked past again with a toolbox, paint cans, a whole mess of things. Then he did it for a second time.

  This time, I stopped him. “Hey. I’m here on vacation, ok? Can you not?”

  He didn’t bother to stop walking. “Last night you said that these repairs were, I believe the exact phrase was, ‘critical and urgent.’ You also mentioned calling Mrs. Wolfe and reporting me for what you called ‘dereliction of duty.’” Now he stopped. “Do you even know what those words mean?”

  “I said it, didn’t I? I know what I said.” I flopped back down on the chair and closed my eyes. “If you have to be here, can’t you be quiet?”

  He dropped something with a huge clang and my eyes flew open. “Sorry,” he said politely.

  Asshole. I wiggled in the chair and closed my eyes again, trying the deep breathing technique that had gotten me through the flight. Trying to listen to the waves and not the idiot slamming things inside the house. Or the rhythmic buzzing—

  It was my phone, and it was my mom, so this call I answered. “Hi,” I told her.

  “Hi, honey. How are you doing? How is Hawaii? How was the flight? What’s the weather like?”

  When my mom was worried, she asked a lot of questions. It was a sign of how worried she was that she continued to ask me things, almost without taking a breath, while I held the phone away from my ear and waited for the noises of talking to stop.

  “Are you done?”

  She sighed. “Yes.”

  “I’m fine. The house is fine, Hawaii is fine. Beautiful weather.”

  “Are you wearing sunscreen, though? Think about that tropical sun…” she reminded me.

  Annoyance crept up my spine. “Mother, I’m old enough to remember to put on sunscreen.” I stood and walked to sit in the shade, because I hadn’t remembered. “How are the kids?”

  That took her off on a totally different tangent. She loved to discuss my sister Zara’s two kids and what they were up to. She talked for a while about their latest amazing accomplishments and then said, “Brooks just got back from looking for office space in Texas. I’m going to be very, very upset if he and Lanie move down there. Think of what they’ll miss!”

  She meant that my brother and his fiancée would miss out on their niece and nephew. I, personally, found the two kids to be annoying in the extreme, and I couldn’t imagine that Brooks and Lanie felt differently. But she was a kindergarten teacher, so maybe she liked all the whining and crying that my sister’s kids usually dished out. They had to be the center of attention at all times, and it was so irritating.

  There was more noise from inside the house and I tried to peer through the door to see what that man was up to. It was too sunn
y outside and too dark within to get a clear view. I stood again and walked over casually, still with the phone to my ear, as if I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going. My mom kept talking about Zara, and her husband, Bradley, who had drunk too much (again) when they had been over for dinner the night before. He’d had to sleep it off on my mom’s couch while Zara drove the kids home. “It’s such a sticky situation,” she told me.

  “Mother, he has a problem,” I cut her off. “He has a drinking problem.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I would say that…”

  “I would. He’s an alcoholic. Sometime or another, you’ll have to face facts.” I tried to keep the edge out of my voice. My mom never wanted to see the faults in anyone that she loved, which was why my brother had been sitting on a pedestal for the entirety of his life, and why my current situation was so incomprehensible for her.

  “Scarlett, honey, you’re just so angry,” she said, sounding hurt. I hadn’t disguised it that well, then. “I wish you would talk to me about what happened. Or to your sister? Anyone.”

  I didn’t speak for a moment. “I have to go. I have to go grocery shopping.” I knew she would love that because she was always harping on me about eating right, and trying to get me to add more bran in my diet and take vitamin C. It was so 1980s.

  She let me hang up after telling me that she loved me, and I fought down the irritation I felt hearing that and made myself say it back. I turned off the ringer and ignored that I now had triple-digits of notifications. I was not looking. I put the phone on the table outside and turned away.

  “You’re not going to be able to get anything cold,” the voice called.

  I stepped closer to the doorway to look into the house. “What?”

  The manager guy stood in the open kitchen across the big living room from me. He gestured to the refrigerator with its doors gaping, and to some pieces which must have come from it spread out on the floor. “I had to unplug it. Go grocery shopping later.”