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  LIKE THAT ENDLESS CAMBRIA SKY

  MAIN STREET MERCHANTS, BOOK 2

  Copyright 2016 Linda Seed

  Published by Linda Seed at Smashwords

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any characters, organizations, places, or events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  LIKE THAT ENDLESS CAMBRIA SKY. Copyright © 2016 by Linda Seed.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  The author is available for book signings, book club discussions, conferences, and other appearances.

  Linda Seed may be contacted via email at [email protected] or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/LindaSeedAuthor.

  Front cover photo by Vladislav Ageshin.

  Also by Linda Seed

  Moonstone Beach

  Nearly Wild

  Fire and Glass

  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 s
triking 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.

  She had to get up. The gallery was supposed to open at ten.

  It wasn’t like she was going to get in trouble if she was late; she owned the damned place, after all. And the foot traffic in January tended to be slow, unlike in the summer months, when the tourists kept things busy.

  The more she thought about it, the more appealing it was to just lie there and wallow in her misery.

  But the misery was too intense to make wallowing pleasurable, so she dragged herself out of bed.

  She opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the patio. The house where Gen rented her tiny apartment was perched on the side of a hill with one of the best views in Cambria. Normally, she’d have a 180-degree view of breaking waves from the patio, but this morning a layer of fog obscured the view and shrouded the world in gauze. Not uncommon for January. It was cold outside, and the chill cut through the haze of her hangover and made her feel a little bit better. Thank God it wasn’t sunny. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to cope with sun.

  When she started to shiver, she went back inside, closed the door, and turned on the big gas fireplace in the corner of the apartment’s single room. She pulled a blanket around herself and went into her miniscule kitchenette to make coffee.

  She could hear the sound of footsteps moving around overhead—Kate’s, or maybe Jackson’s. Before Jackson had moved in, Gen would have taken the sound of the footsteps as an open invitation to go upstairs in her pajamas, help herself to the coffee in Kate’s kitchen, and flop onto Kate’s sofa for a little morning camaraderie. But she couldn’t exactly do that when the two of them were likely floating around on a cloud of post-coital afterglow.

  Gen sighed, and her head throbbed.

  She rooted around in the medicine cabinet for some kind of pain killer, found some acetaminophen, and took two with some water from the bathroom faucet. By that time, thankfully, the coffeemaker was hissing and the smell of French roast was wafting through the room.

  As she was pouring, she heard a gentle knock at her door. Still wrapped in her blanket, she went to the door and opened it. Kate was standing there with a steaming mug in her hand, wearing a big hooded sweatshirt that said UCLA. She had a suspiciously big smile on her face.

  “Hey,” Gen said, backing up to let Kate come in.

  “Hey. I heard you moving around. Thought I’d come down and see how you’re doing this morning.”

  “Eeaarrrgh,” Gen said.

  Kate nodded. “I suspected as much.”

  Gen went back into the kitchenette and put sugar and milk into her coffee. Normally she skipped the sugar and milk—she usually drank it black—but this morning she needed whatever energy the extra calories could provide to her.

  She took a long drink of the coffee and groaned.

  Kate and Gen went over to the sofa bed, which was, at the moment, a bed, and plopped onto it with their mugs, sitting cross-legged, enjoying the warmth from the fireplace.

  “You look ridiculously happy this morning,” Gen said.

  “I love morning sex,” Kate replied.

  “Shut up,” Gen said. “You and your morning sex smugness. Why don’t you go back upstairs and have more of your damned morning sex, if it’s so great?”

  Kate considered. “Well, I could, but Jackson’s gone to work, so it would be awkward.” Kate, five-foot-six with short, tousled, dark hair, had never looked happier, or more beautiful. Life with Jackson, the head chef at one of the local restaurants, was obviously agreeing with her. “You’re testy this morning,” she observed.

  “God. I’m sorry. It’s this hangover. The relentless drumming in my head won’t allow for warmth and graciousness.” She drank some more coffee.

  “You want me to go?” Kate looked at her, eyebrows raised.

  “No, no. Stay. I want you to stay.”

  They sat for a while, propped on pillows, letting the caffeine seep into them. After a while, the Tylenol started to kick in and Gen began to feel marginally better.

  “Kind of an adjustment for you,” Kate ventured. “Having Jackson move in.”

  “Yeah,” Gen said miserably.

  Kate reached out and rubbed Gen’s upper arm with her hand. “I’m sorry if it’s hard.”

  Gen shrugged. “It’s not your fault. What were you supposed to do, stay lonely and unhappy for my sake? It’s ridiculous. I’m being ridiculous. And I love Jackson. I do. And I’m happy for you. It’s just … ”

  “I know,” Kate reassured her.

  “Listen, sweetie,” Kate said after a while. “I’ve got to go upstairs and get dressed for work. You going to be okay today? Seems like you really drank a lot last night. You’ve gotta be … ”

  At that moment, Gen turned faintly green, put down her mug, dashed into the bathroom, and hurled into the toilet.

  “Um, okay, then,” Kate said. “I’ll just … I’m gonna go now.”

  Why did she drink so much? Why hadn’t she just stuck with a glass of wine or two? Stupid, stupid, stupid. She wasn’t a twenty-one-year-old having a kegger in the dorms, for God’s sake. That part of her life was over. And good riddance.

  She berated herself as she pushed through the fog in her head to unlock the gallery and go inside. The Porter Gallery, just down Main Street from Kate’s bookstore, was bigger than many of the storefronts in this part of town—thought that wasn’t to say it was big. The main part of the gallery consisted of two fair-sized rooms, and she had a small office and storage space in the back. When she’d originally acquired the space, it had been a clothing boutique. She’d stripped it down to its bones until now it was all sleek white walls and gleaming honey-colored wood floors.

  Flipping on the lights, she surveyed her business with a sigh. Some of the artwork on display was quite good—she had some abstract expressionist paintings from a young artist she thought had a promising future, and she had a beautiful display of art glass by Jackson’s friend, Daniel Reed—but she also had a large number of the watercolor seascapes she considered to be more souvenir than fine art.

  The watercolors were the kind of thing that would prevent her from being taken seriously in cities like New York or Los Angeles. Breaking waves at sunset wouldn’t get you a reputation as a savvy dealer. But this was Cambria, and the seascapes sold. She could advocate for serious art all day long, but in the end, she had to pay the rent.

  The rent had been the motivating factor that had persuaded her to stock a display of ceramics and handmade jewelry, as well. The pieces were lovely, and they sold well, but they were crafts, not fine art. She’d adapted to the realities of the art world in a tourist town, but not without some reluctance.

  Because of the hangover—and the fact that she’d overslept—she was opening the gallery a little late today. It was 10:25 by the time she flipped the sign on her door to OPEN. Sure, one of the benefits of having her own place was that she could open whenever she wanted. But arriving late was just a bad business practice.

  She was dressed in a close-fitting, sleeveless black sheath dress and black pumps with three-inch heels, her curly red hair pulled up into a chignon with a few stray curls dangling beside her face. The look was standard New York. Here in Cambria, the shop owners were more likely to wear a flowing, hand-woven shawl or a maxi dress with a paint
ed silk scarf, but Gen had never quite been ready to go native. She’d been a New York girl once, and she planned to be one again. It was best to act like it, so the transition would be easier when it was finally time to go home.

  Home.

  With Davis MacIntyre gone, and with him all of the obstacles he’d placed in her path, the idea of returning was a possibility once more. But she couldn’t simply show up on 57th Street and announce she was back. While Davis MacIntyre would no longer be spreading hurtful rumors about her, that also meant that everyone had probably forgotten who she was.

  She needed a plan.

  She was thinking about that when Daniel Reed came in the front door toting a carton the size of a mini refrigerator.

  Daniel was tall, dark, and gorgeous, all rugged masculinity with his faded jeans and his close-fitting T-shirt—just the kind of man she was usually attracted to. Too bad she wasn’t the least bit attracted to him. There was no accounting for it. On paper, they’d have made the perfect couple. She was a gallery owner, he was an artist. She was single, he was single. She was delighted by his company, and he by hers. But there simply was no chemistry. After more than a year of working with him, he seemed more like a brother. Life could be unfair sometimes.

  “Hey, Gen,” he said jovially.

  “Ugh,” she answered.

  He put down his carton, put his hands on his hips, and looked at her with his head cocked. “You don’t look so good.”

  “That’s funny, because I feel … like hell.”

  “Last night around the time you took your third tequila shot, I said to myself, ‘Daniel, that girl’s going to have a rough day tomorrow.’ And look how right I was.”

  “But at least you aren’t smug at all, so that’s something,” Gen said.

  “Something bothering you last night?” His tone was casual, but the invitation was there for a heart-to-heart, something she might have welcomed on another occasion, but that she just couldn’t deal with right now.

  “What’s in the carton?” Gen said.

  “You’re changing the subject,” Daniel observed.

  “Imagine that. What’s in the carton?”