Like That Endless Cambria Sky
Linda Seed
For Chloe, Evan, and Condee
Chapter One
Genevieve Porter had a hangover.
This was not an ordinary hangover, the kind that could be brought under control with copious amounts of water and a couple of Extra Strength Tylenol. No, this was the kind that made one pray for sweet, sweet death. Or at least an extended period of unconsciousness.
Gen hadn’t had a hangover of this proportion since college, a good ten years before, when keg parties and tequila shots had made them a semiregular occurrence. These days, she usually didn’t drink more than a couple of glasses of wine, maybe a good craft beer.
Last night had been different.
Her best friend, Kate, had thrown a party to celebrate the fact that her boyfriend of six months had moved in with her. It had been a housewarming of sorts for Jackson, a celebration for Kate, and a reason to get together with good friends for everyone else.
Usually at a party, Gen would have a few drinks, eat some of the chips and salsa, and call it a night well before she was drunk enough to worry about how she’d feel in the morning. But last night she’d lost control of the situation—of herself—for reasons she hadn’t yet talked about to anyone.
How could they understand?
How could Kate understand that while Gen was happy for her—honestly, genuinely happy—she was also jealous as hell? Kate had found love, a love that by all appearances was destined to make it for the long haul, and that was great. That was fine. But here was Gen, at thirty-one (actually thirty-three, but so used to lying about it that who remembered anymore), no closer to finding anyone to share her life with.
That was bad enough, but now she didn’t even have Kate anymore.
Well, she did, but it wasn’t the same.
Gen lived in an apartment that occupied the bottom floor of Kate’s house. Before Jackson had come into Kate’s life, Gen had treated Kate’s place as her own, coming and going as she pleased, enjoying morning coffee upstairs with her best friend, rehashing work problems and guy problems at the end of the day, ordering food, watching Netflix, and just generally living inseparably, like sisters.
Now that Jackson had moved in, Gen could hardly pop in at seven a.m. in her pajamas. She was jealous because the easy closeness she and Kate had shared couldn’t stay the same now that a third party had been added to the mix. And she felt like shit about the jealousy, because what kind of person couldn’t be happy when someone she loved had found her soul mate?
And that was only part of it. The other part, the other thing that had driven her to behave irresponsibly the night before, was the news that her former boss had died.
She had so many feelings about that. None of them was grief, and none of them was simple.
Davis MacIntyre had owned the most influential art gallery in New York before his untimely demise at age forty-eight due to an accidental drug overdose. Gen had begun working for him as an intern right out of college, with her shiny new art history degree and her ambitions to be a player in the art world.
She’d known right away that Davis MacIntyre was a sleaze. She’d known about the drug use, about the sex in his office with bimbos who never showed their faces more than once. She’d known about the shady deals.
As she’d risen from intern to full-time gallery employee, she’d put up with the sexual harassment—the occasional hand on her ass, the double entendres, the suggestions that perhaps she should try being “friendly” to a top collector—because she knew that an association with Davis MacIntyre was like gold in the New York art world.
But when she’d learned that Davis was selling forgeries—paintings with doctored signatures and fraudulent provenance—she couldn’t keep her mouth shut any longer. Knowing what she knew, she could have gone to jail right along with Davis if she hadn’t done anything and he got caught. So she spoke up. She told him that she knew what he was doing, and that he had to stop.
The result had been swift and merciless. She’d been fired, and Davis had made it known not only in New York but nationwide that anyone who hired her would never find favor with MacIntyre again.
Broke and unemployed, she’d done the only thing she knew to do.
She’d blackmailed him.
She told Davis that she would go to the police about the forgeries—and she would sue him for sexual harassment and for the damage he had done to her reputation—unless he gave her enough money to get set up somewhere far away, where he wouldn’t have to see her or hear from her again.
He’d taken Option B.
The money he’d given her wasn’t extravagant, but it was enough for her to come to Cambria, California, buy a small art gallery on Main Street, and have enough left over for a healthy savings account.
Now the son of a bitch was dead, and that meant so many things. It meant she could come out from under the rock where she’d been hiding. She could go back to New York if she wanted. She was fairly certain that she could find work there again. Davis’s reputation was such that it was likely everyone knew she’d done nothing wrong—she’d simply gotten on Davis’s bad side. It hadn’t mattered whether anyone believed the things he’d said about her. They probably hadn’t. It only mattered that an important door would have been closed to them if they’d worked with her.
Now that door no longer existed.
The disappearance of the only major obstacle that had been standing in her way should have filled her with joy. But she didn’t know how to feel. Now that she was no longer boxed into a corner, the possibilities before her seemed terrifying.
So, last night, she drank.
She’d stood around upstairs in a crowd as big as they could fit into Kate’s tiny house, drinking margaritas and watching the gorgeous Ryan Delaney drool over Lacy Jordan, who, along with Kate, was one of her three closest friends.
And why wouldn’t he drool? Lacy was a tall, leggy blonde with pale blue, hypnotic eyes and skin like fresh cream. The fact that she was entirely unaware of her striking beauty made it even worse, somehow. It was impossible to hate her—impossible, in fact, not to love her.
Gen herself had none of Lacy’s graceful height. At five-foot-two, she felt positively stunted by comparison. Her wild, curly, red hair was completely unmanageable, and her fair complexion freckled at the very mention of sunlight. She wished she had Lacy’s effortless elegance—wished, in fact, that she had been the one to catch Ryan Delaney’s attention—but instead, she had to work hard not to feel like a garden gnome.
And right now, she felt like a gnome with a thundering headache.
She groaned and her stomach roiled as she rolled over in bed and looked at the digital clock on the nightstand. It was past nine a.m.
Shit.