He brought me through to a quaint living room where a picture window overlooked the backyard and the lake.
“Stay,” he snapped, pointing to an old floral couch.
He wanted me to sit my sweaty ass down on his couch? Fine.
I grumbled under my breath, since he was treating me like a dog, but I obeyed. The couch looked like an antique, but the cushions were soft and almost swallowed my exertion-sore body.
The doofus walked into the next room, and for a brief moment I considered making a run for it. I was pretty fast, and it wouldn’t take long to get my bike. The problem was Vandal was in excellent shape, and the pickup truck in the driveway was faster than any biking I could do on a dirt road.
Fixing this situation without police involvement would be better, not to mention safer than a not-so-high-speed chase—bicycle versus truck—down some rural route with a number for a name. Considering the kind of novels the man wrote, he’d probably get a kick out of running me down and burying me in the woods.
Hell, maybe I wasn’t the first superfan to show up on his doorstep. I’d never seen anything about it on the news, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. Out here, maybe they would never find the bodies. It could happen all the time. Maybe he’d come across this house in the woods and liked it so much he’d killed the little old lady who’d owned it and kept it for himself.
Maybe instead of burying me out back, he’d keep my corpse sitting in a rocking chair upstairs, and he’d talk to me as though I were still alive.
Or maybe he’d eat me and use my bones for arts and crafts.
“Here.”
I jumped out of my seat, screaming bloody murder, and whirled to face him.
He was standing in the doorway holding out a glass of what looked like lemonade. At some point he’d gotten rid of the beach towel and thrown on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, thank goodness.
“What the fuck is your problem, kid?” He walked in and put the glass of lemonade down on the coffee table lurking somewhere around my kneecaps.
“You got me lemonade?” I asked suspiciously. It looked homemade and was even in a pretty glass.
“It’s damn hot out, and I’m guessing you biked here from town. It’ll be a while until Charles gives me a call back, and I’d prefer it if you don’t die of heatstroke in my living room.”
After the hostility outside, this weird kindness was stripping my gears. He’d changed his demeanor along with his attire. I gave a reluctant nod and picked up the glass. It smelled wonderful and had little chunks of ice floating in it as though they’d been chipped off a larger block, ice pick style. I put the glass to my lips, watching him over the rim, suspicious.
Why was he being so nice all of a sudden?
Did he have an ice pick in his back pocket ready to use on me when I let my guard down?
Had he poisoned the lemonade?
When I lowered the glass without taking a drink, he seemed to notice, which only made me more suspicious.
“You’ve caught me. It’s actually a mixture of lemonade, strychnine, mercury, and cyanide.” His smile was sardonic and far sexier then than the usual, charming smile he used at conventions—probably to reassure fans he didn’t kill little old grannies and steal their cottages.
“Very thorough of you.” Defiantly, I raised the glass to my lips again and took a sip.
“Brave girl.”
The drink was absolutely perfect, tart and sweet, and I sighed in relief. It was so relentlessly hot out there. “The cyanide gives it an extra zip.”
He chuckled reluctantly, as though finding me funny was an inconvenience.
“So what did you think of the ending?”
“The ending of my life, now that you’ve poisoned me?” I asked, holding up the lemonade glass. “Perfection. I can’t imagine a better way to go out.”
He waved a dismissive hand. “No, no. Of the book. I’m not sure I’m sticking with that version, so don’t set your heart on it.”
I blinked at him, wondering how he was going to change the ending of a book that had already been published.
Ohhh...he probably meant the book I’d supposedly read from beginning to end in the three minutes I’d been left unattended in his backyard.
“You didn’t read the ending?”
“I didn’t read any of it. I did mention that.”
He leaned back against the window frame, looking every inch the delicious author. With the view of the park-like lawn and the lake behind him, he really should have used the spot for his author photo.
Then again, maybe it was too sexy to be an author photo.
In person, his resting expression was slightly evil—the kind of demon a girl would pay her priest not to exorcise. How had I not noticed that from the few candid shots I’d seen of him? Maybe his inherent wickedness didn’t come through on film...or maybe he went out of his way not to let people see him for what he really was.
I shook myself inwardly, annoyed that for a moment I’d forgotten I didn’t like the man anymore.
He sighed, looking frustrated as he ran his hand over his face and scratched at his jaw for a moment. His sexiness was irritating, not hot. It was important to remember that.
“If you want to keep writing or whatever you’re doing today, go ahead. I’ll sit and wait for your cleaner to get here.”
His brow furrowed. “My cleaner? She only comes out here every second Tuesday,” he said, gazing around. “I try to tidy it myself in between.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “No like…your cleaner? The person who’s going to dispose of my dead body and clean all of my fingerprints and epithelials from your property?”
His lips rounded in a small O of understanding. “Mrs. Garnier has a bad back, so I do all of that myself.”
I chuckled and took another sip of lemonade, wishing I could gulp it down without looking like a pig, but at least the air-conditioning was working its magic.
He tapped the phone in his hand absently with his index finger, glanced out the window, then back to me.
“Did you read the end of Lake of Bone?” he asked, his gaze on me intent.
“Who hasn’t?”
“What did you think of it?”
“It was like your other work—masterful, scary, thought-provoking. It was unexpected, but after I got over the shock, I saw the beauty of it.”
He fidgeted with a small tear in the thigh of his jeans. “A lot of people hated that book.”
“Well, I now hate you, but the book was brilliant, just like your other books.”
My feelings about him, personally, apparently didn’t concern him.
“Why did I get so many complaints about the damn thing? I got fifty-three one-star reviews in the first week.”
Wow. It really seemed to bother him. It had never occurred to me that an author would give a sweet damn what the readers thought, let alone that someone of his caliber would be checking reviews at all. Hopefully, for his sake, he never went to reader sites—readers were often more brutal there.
The phone in his hand rang, startling us both. Vandal answered, sounding grim even before the conversation got fully underway. He explained how he’d found me in his yard, making it sound ridiculously shifty compared to what had actually happened. Eventually he went silent, listening to the person at the other end and grunting intermittently. With so little to go on, it was hard for me to even speculate about what this mystery person was telling him. Was it his agent? His publisher? A lawyer? I probably should have asked earlier.