Which it did, once.
“What the hell’s goin’ on with you?” Jackson asked after Ryan completely missed a ball Jackson had passed to him. “These two jokers are kicking our asses.”
“Sorry,” Ryan said. Will and Daniel shouldn’t have been kicking their asses; it should have been a pretty fair game. Ryan had played varsity basketball in high school, and Will was an excellent baseball player, which seemed to translate to basketball better than one might expect. With one jock on each team, it should have worked out, and it would have if Ryan hadn’t been so distracted.
“Seriously, man,” Jackson pressed. “Your head’s not in the game. What’s going on?”
They’d been playing for about a half an hour, and they were all starting to breathe hard and sweat. They moved over to a bench next to the court, where they toweled off and drank some water.
“I went over to the gallery yesterday morning,” Daniel said mildly, running a small hand towel through his hair. “Gen wasn’t there. Alex said she was at the ranch.” He said nothing more, but he looked at Ryan and raised his eyebrows in question.
“Aha,” Will said. He hadn’t worn his glasses during the game because of the safety hazard, so now he was squinting a little as he looked at Ryan.
“What the … there’s no ‘aha,’ ” Ryan insisted. He busied himself with rooting around in his gym bag.
“That’s not what I heard when Kate had Gen and the others over for breakfast the other morning,” Jackson observed.
Will and Daniel made a variety of hooting and catcalling noises that Ryan would have found more appropriate if they were fifteen.
“Okay. Look.” Ryan faced the three of them. “I’m not going to talk about Gen like that. About … what might or might not have happened between us.”
Jackson nodded appreciatively. “Respectful. I can admire that. Especially since she’s my sister-in-law. Practically.”
“And my friend,” Daniel put in.
“Yeah, well,” Ryan said, “whatever she told her friends, that’s hers to tell. But I will say this. We’ve got a date this weekend and I don’t know where the hell to take her.”
“Hm. You’ve already been to Neptune,” Jackson said.
“Right. A town this small, it’s hard to think of a place she hasn’t been a thousand times. And I want … I need … to impress her.”
“Aha,” Will said again.
“Shut up,” Ryan told him.
“There’s The Sandpiper,” Daniel offered, suggesting a restaurant with a view of Moonstone Beach.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ryan said, blowing off the idea as too ordinary, too pedestrian.
“You could do something outdoorsy,” Jackson suggested. “Go kayaking over at San Simeon.”
“Hm. Maybe,” Ryan allowed.
“Or you could just bring her to the Cooper House,” Will said.
All three heads turned toward him.
“The Cooper House?” Ryan said.
“Sure.”
Will was the caretaker of an enormous estate just up the coast, not far from the ranch. The Cooper House, a twenty-two-room behemoth atop a hill with a stunning view of the Pacific, was named for Eustace Cooper, the logging tycoon who had originally built the place in the late 1800s. Now it was owned by a tech billionaire who only used the place two or three weeks of the year. The rest of the time, Will tended to the property, bringing in gardeners, painters, plumbers, housecleaners, and others as needed. He lived in a small guest house there while he worked on his dissertation—a study of a particular type of bird that made its home on the Central Coast.
“Are you allowed to let him do that?” Daniel asked.
“Would there be sneaking involved?” Jackson wanted to know. “Not that that would be a bad thing, necessarily. Could add to the overall flavor of things.”
“No sneaking.” Will shrugged. “Christopher says I can use the main house every now and then. Might as well. It’s just sitting empty.”
The “Christopher” in question was Christopher Mills, whose invention of a wildly popular dating website had rendered him so obscenely wealthy that it allowed him to be indifferent to what people did with his coastal mansion. Will had met him when they were both undergraduates at Stanford. They’d become friends, and that was what had led to Will’s admittedly cushy position at the Cooper House.
“Huh,” Ryan said. “Well … how would that work?”
Daniel was warming to the idea. “You get Jackson here to make the two of you a picnic dinner. You take that and a nice bottle of wine or two up to the Cooper House, set it up at a table next to the infinity pool, have a nice intimate meal …”
“There’s no infinity pool,” Will said. “There’s a regular pool.”
“Well, that’s disappointing,” Daniel said.
“But there’s an observatory,” Will offered.
“The guy’s got his own observatory?” Jackson wanted to know.
“Yep. Top-quality telescope, retractable roof, the whole bit.”
“Holy crap.” Jackson looked impressed.
“Okay,” Daniel said, warming to a new and improved script for the evening. “You take a picnic dinner, you eat it by the regular, non-infinity pool. Drink some nice wine, maybe sit in front of the fireplace. Then you go upstairs and retract the roof.”
“You made that sound obscene,” Ryan said. “Retracting the roof. What’s that code for, exactly?”
“You’ll have to figure that out for yourself,” Daniel said.
Ryan thought about it and nodded. “That sounds great. Thanks, Will.”
Will waved him off. “Somebody ought to use the place. Christopher hasn’t been there in months.”
“Any chance he might drop in unannounced?” Ryan asked uncertainly.
Will scoffed. “When he’s coming, he lets me know a week in advance so I can have people clean stuff that’s already clean, bring in groceries, things like that. He’s not coming. At least, not this weekend.”
“Okay.” Ryan nodded. “Okay. This could be really good.”
“Jeez. Now I want to ask somebody out so I can take them up there,” Daniel said.
“Who’d go out with you?” Jackson demanded.
“That’s an excellent question,” Daniel said. “Sadly.”
“Can we play now?” Will insisted. “I think you guys are stalling because you’re losing.”
“We’re not losing,” Jackson said. “We’re giving you guys a false sense of security.”
“Well, it’s working,” Daniel said. “I feel secure.”
Jackson did agree to make a dinner that Ryan could pack up and take to the Cooper House. He also suggested a particular wine that he thought would go well with the food. Well, he might have done more than “suggested.” Jackson pretty much informed Ryan that he’d be a wine-ignorant fool to serve anything else.