Love and Joy Read online

  Love and Joy

  An Otter Bluff Romance

  Linda Seed

  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.

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  LOVE AND JOY

  Copyright © 2021 by Linda Seed

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  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book 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 your favorite e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  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.

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

  Linda Seed may be contacted via e-mail at [email protected] or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/LindaSeedAuthor. Learn more about Linda Seed’s novels at www.lindaseed.com.

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  Cover design by Kari March.

  Created with Vellum

  By Linda Seed

  The Main Street Merchants

  Moonstone Beach

  Cambria Sky

  Nearly Wild

  Fire and Glass

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  The Delaneys of Cambria

  A Long, Cool Rain

  The Promise of Lightning

  Loving the Storm

  Searching for Sunshine

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  The Russo Sisters

  Saving Sofia

  First Crush

  Fixer-Upper

  Loving Benny

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  Otter Bluff

  The Icing on the Cake

  Christmas in Cambria

  Love and Joy

  Then, Now, and Always

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Read more by Linda Seed

  Chapter 1

  Joy Maxwell needed a new angle, because what she was doing wasn’t working anymore.

  Last year at VidCon, the line of fans waiting for selfies or an autograph had stretched for fifty yards. This year, she’d had to send someone out to round up people to wait in line for her. It had cost five dollars a head, but it would cost her more than that if people thought she was losing her audience.

  Which, let’s face it, she was.

  You could only do so many hair and makeup tutorials, so many videos featuring the unboxing of purses or jewelry. You could only review so many moisturizing face masks before people got bored.

  And when they got bored, they watched someone else.

  Joy thought about it as she pounded away on the treadmill at her gym, a layer of sweat glistening on her skin. She’d done four miles, and she had one to go. The scale in the locker room had shown her up a pound, so she turned up the speed and increased the incline for the last mile.

  Amber Pittman—her best friend, who occupied the treadmill next to her—was jogging at a much more sedate pace. Amber could afford to do that—it wasn’t her ass that was scrutinized on Instagram for signs of spread or, God forbid, Photoshopping.

  “Slow down. You’re trying to stay in shape, not kill yourself.” Amber slowed from a jog to a walk.

  “Can’t. Extra pound.” Joy would have spoken in complete sentences, but she was breathing too hard to manage it. Her running shoes—free in exchange for an endorsement—pounded against the track.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Amber scowled at her. “I’m looking at almost every square inch of your body right now, and you are not carrying an extra pound.”

  Joy’s Puma running shorts and sports bra—free in exchange for product placement—left little to the imagination, and there was certainly no place for her to hide any extra weight. Still, if Amber saw the extra pound somewhere around Joy’s thighs or midsection, she wouldn’t say it.

  The only thing to do was beat the pound into submission.

  “Did you eat this morning?” Amber asked.

  Joy nodded, sending her blond ponytail bobbing. She was too out of breath to answer verbally.

  “Bullshit. Or if you did eat, it was two egg whites and an apple.”

  One egg white and an apple, actually, but she wasn’t about to admit it and have Amber launch into one of her lectures about how Joy wasn’t taking care of herself.

  She hit the five-mile mark and reduced the speed to cool down. Sweat streamed down her forehead and into her eyes, and she mopped her face with a towel, then dried the back of her neck and the portion of her chest that peeked out through the sports bra.

  On the wall-mounted TV over the treadmills, a show about tiny houses was playing silently as captions ran across the bottom of the screen. A couple in sneakers, jeans, and T-shirts talked about their transition to tiny living.

  “That place couldn’t even hold my shoe collection.” Joy wrinkled her nose at the screen.

  “You moving into two hundred square feet?” Amber laughed. “I’d pay to see that.”

  Joy turned off the treadmill, took a swig of water from her insulated bottle (free with an online review), and looked at her friend. “You would?”

  “God, yes. The comic potential is endless.”

  It planted a seed in Joy’s mind—a seed that was potentially much more fertile than anything the TV couple had in their permaculture garden.

  “It’s a good idea,” Joy told Amber when they were both showered, blow-dried, and dressed and were heading out of the gym and into the sun-blasted parking lot. “The tiny house thing, I mean.”

  “What idea?” Amber hefted her gym bag and squinted at Joy in the sunlight.

  “Your idea. That I move into a tiny house.”

  Amber stopped in the middle of the parking lot and turned to face Joy. “My idea?”

  “Yes. You said you’d pay to see me move into two hundred square feet. If you would, maybe other people would, too.”

  Amber laughed. “Now, wait. I didn’t—”

  “Why not? I move into a tiny house for a period of time—say, six months or a year. It could be a blog, a series of YouTube videos, plus
a big presence on Instagram. Then when it’s over, I could write a book.”

  Amber stared at her. “Holy shit. You’re serious.”

  “I need something new. A fresh idea. The stuff I’m doing is getting old. You’ve got to admit that.”

  Not to mention the fact that, with her decreased revenue, Joy wouldn’t be able to afford the mortgage on her condo in Santa Monica for much longer. She’d been able to manage just fine when she was a top influencer, but now that her fortunes were falling, she was going to have to downsize.

  What if she downsized more than she’d planned?

  If she sold the condo and rented a tiny house, she could fortify her savings account and save a couple thousand a month at the same time as she was reinventing her media persona.

  It could be a win-win.

  Joy walked a little farther toward her car, with Amber at her side, as she thought about it. Then she stopped short and spun toward her friend. “And not just the tiny house, either. I need to do the whole deal. Off the grid, sustainable everything. Maybe even some organic farming. It’s gotta be a whole lifestyle thing if I want it to get attention.”

  Amber pointed one finger at Joy. “You wouldn’t last a week.”

  Joy grinned. “That’s where the drama comes in.”

  Amber stared at Joy. Then she shook her head and laughed. “It could work. Tiny houses are a big trend right now, and when you add in the fish-out-of-water angle … Hell yes, I’d watch it.”

  Nix Landry still hadn’t gotten used to the feeling of being one infinitesimally small person adrift in far too much space.

  That’s what happened, he supposed, when you moved from 250 square feet into a three-bedroom ranch-style house with two bathrooms, a great room, and an open floor-plan kitchen with five times the counter space he was used to.

  He was accustomed to waking up in a sleeping loft with ceilings so low he had to crawl to the ladder to get downstairs. Now, he woke every morning in a bedroom so big his bed might as well have been a raft adrift on the ocean.

  The house wasn’t even that big by most people’s standards, but compared to what Nix was used to, it was gargantuan.

  Why in God’s name did anyone need this much space? He could see it, maybe, if you had a family—a wife and three or four kids. But Nix was alone, and it seemed like so much wasted housing.

  Well, he wasn’t here for his own amusement, and he wasn’t here permanently. He was at Otter Bluff to do a job, and once he’d done it, he could go back to his own place off Santa Rosa Creek Road.

  It would be a while before that happened—the house needed a lot of work. The kitchen had been remodeled recently, so that was fine, but all three bedrooms and both bathrooms needed complete updating. Not to mention that he had to do something about the erosion on the ocean side of the property.

  All that, and he still had to find a renter to stay in his own house while he was here at Otter Bluff.

  He hadn’t been up more than half an hour when Evan called him.

  Nix was out on the back deck, sitting in an Adirondack chair with a mug of coffee and watching the waves crash against the bluff, when his cell phone rang.

  “Why are you calling me so early?” Nix didn’t mean for it to come out as irritably as it did, but hell, it wasn’t even seven a.m.

  “What’s the problem? You were up.”

  “How do you know I was up?”

  “Because you’re always up at the crack of dawn. It’s one of your quirks. Don’t lie and tell me I’m wrong.”

  Okay, so maybe he was right. Nix and Evan Bridges had gone to high school together, and after that, they’d shared rent on a two-bedroom apartment for a couple of years until they’d both moved on to other things. Maybe it was true that Nix had a pattern of early rising. That didn’t mean he wanted to talk to someone at this hour.

  “Maybe you’re not wrong,” he admitted. “But still …”

  “I have a meeting in ten minutes, and I wanted to check in before then. How do things look?”

  Evan had bought Otter Bluff as an income property after Lisa Barlow, the former owner and an internationally famous artist, had decided she didn’t have the time or interest to deal with it anymore.

  The house, which sat at the edge of the Pacific Ocean in one of Cambria’s most sought-after neighborhoods, had been a vacation rental for years, but the outdated interior had kept rental prices lower than they were for comparable houses in town.

  That’s where Nix came in. Evan, in an effort to save money on the renovations, had suggested that Nix move into the house and do the redesign himself. He could live rent-free during the project, bring in some income renting his own place, earn a reasonable fee for his work—much less than Evan would have had to pay a professional contractor—and have the satisfaction of helping out a friend.

  That was how Evan had pitched it, anyway.

  So here Nix was, trying to figure out where to start.

  “Well, you’ve seen it,” he began, trying to sort out in his mind what the highest priorities might be in the renovation. “The bathrooms look like hell, you need all new flooring, the bedrooms still have popcorn ceilings, you probably ought to replace all the windows with double-pane, and that’s just off the top of my head. But the first thing you’ve gotta do is put in a retaining wall to stop the erosion at the bluff. You’re gonna need a professional for that, because I’m in over my head on that one.”

  Nix had built his own tiny house, a project that had been one of the most fulfilling things he’d ever done. But he wasn’t a professional, and he didn’t want to be held responsible if Otter Bluff one day crashed into the ocean in a mess of drywall and two-by-fours.

  “Yeah, okay. I knew that was coming. If you can coordinate it for me, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Sure.” Nix took a sip of his coffee and inhaled the ocean air. “Are you sure you trust me with all of this? I’m really more of a hobbyist. A licensed contractor would be—”

  “I can’t afford a licensed contractor.”

  “Oh, hell. Yes, you can.” Evan could afford ten licensed contractors, each of them with a team of personal assistants and a fleet of chauffeured limos. He was just a cheap bastard.

  “Well, maybe. But I’d prefer not to pay one. You still want to do this?”

  The truth was, Nix was excited about the job. He loved this stuff—loved houses and building and painting and all of the other things that came with taking a place that was tired and outdated and making it new again.

  He had to do his share of bitching about it, though, just to keep Evan in line.

  “Yeah, yeah. I said I would, and I will.”

  “All right, then. Be sure to invoice me for the supplies.”

  “You’d better believe I will. And Evan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is a hell of a view I’m looking at. Are you sure you don’t want to move here yourself when I’m done?”

  Evan laughed. “I don’t have time to look at a view. You enjoy it, though.”

  Nix hung up thinking that he would, in fact, enjoy it as long as he was here. Drinking your morning coffee with the ocean breeze in your face and the sound of barking sea lions in your ears was exhilarating.

  If Evan was too much of a workaholic to come down from the Bay Area every once in a while, then Nix sure as hell would take advantage of everything his friend was missing.

  Chapter 2

  Joy didn’t jump into the tiny house idea right away. It needed thought. The whole concept needed time to percolate.

  The plan—if she could call it a plan this early—had tons of potential. Tiny houses were hot right now, so she had that working in her favor. Plus, everyone loved to see someone else do something they themselves wanted to do but didn’t have the nerve for.

  If it went well, Joy might even have fun. And if it didn’t go well, that would only benefit the blog and eventual book.

  On top of all that, she had to go somewhere. Her income was dropping, her savings ac
count was dwindling, and her condo cost three thousand dollars per month.

  She had to downsize, but if people saw her doing it, they’d assume she was on her way out. The tiny house idea had the benefit of hiding her failure behind a facade of intention and planning. People wouldn’t see her move as a setback if she could convince them she’d chosen it.

  “Are you really going to do the tiny house thing?” Amber asked on the phone one afternoon while Joy was setting up the lighting for an unboxing video. She’d be revealing a Prada purse that she couldn’t afford and that she’d be returning shortly after shooting the video.

  Joy cocked her head and propped one fist on her hip as she considered it. “You know, I really think I might.”

  “You have to. It’d be so cool. And make sure it’s located somewhere close enough that I can come and visit.”

  Joy had already given some thought to the location, and she’d drawn a few conclusions: she needed somewhere picturesque for Instagram and somewhere as different from Los Angeles as possible to maximize the fish-out-of-water angle. At the same time, she wanted to be within a reasonable driving distance from L.A. to be near her best friend—and of course, Nordstrom.