Page 26 of Me and Mr. Just Right

She reached for her notebook and wrote the words down, then a few more descriptors of Haydn. She was not writing a song about him. Nope. She’d written one about Bo, and look where that’d gotten her.

To prove it to herself, she also wrote down a phrase about Bennett: sad smiles meet sunny stories. And for Jules: rigid lines hide softness inside. There.

All noises had quieted down, and it seemed that everyone was asleep. She lay there for another hour, her brain unable to stop racing through new lyrics about the cabin and the Forrester brothers, especially Haydn. Smelling his pillow and knowing he’d been in this bed before wasn’t helping anything. Lia accepted the reality that she was not going to sleep until she figured this song out.

She opened the bedroom door and peered into the hall. Every light was off. A dim grayish glow from the setting sun still filtered in through the floor-to-ceiling windowed wall of the cabin. She could hear the calming crash of waves on the shore, the pulsing rush of wind rustling through the trees, and the steady patter of rain on the roof, but otherwise, all was still and silent.

She found her guitar case where she’d left it in the living room, sat on the couch with it on her lap, and pulled her guitar out. She ran her hand along the length of the rosewood body. She’d had this guitar since her first album’s royalty payment. She’d spent nearly the entire amount to buy this guitar, and she rarely let it out of her sight.

She clipped on the guitar silencer and ran her fingers over the strings, eliciting the softest of sounds in the vibrations. It was like coming home.

That should be quiet enough. She played a few chords until she got the right one. The one she’d been humming all day. There. All her tension from the last month released in one strum. She sighed in satisfaction.

It had been so long since she’d felt this inspired. One day here without drama, without her phone, without people making her feel horrible, and the music was coming back again. It felt good. Right.

In a way things hadn’t felt right in a very long time.

Chapter 12

Bennett’sbedwastoosoft. Haydn rolled toward the edge of it, away from Bennett—who slept with his mouth open and snored, ugh—but it was like swimming through moss. Impossible and suffocating.

Since Haydn hadn’t planned on sharing a bed with his brother, he hadn’t brought his earplugs, like he might have if they’d gone on a camping trip. He tried to wrap the pillow around his head to muffle the sound of his brother’s breathing, but it wasn’t quite big enough to cover both ears.

With a frustrated huff, he extricated himself from the morass of a bed without waking Bennett. He threw the pillow on the ground and lay down, but that was worse. They hadn’t gotten around to getting rugs for the bedrooms yet, and the floor was hard and cold and gritty with sand against his bare shoulder.

He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling.

He could spend the night dreaming he was being suffocated by a ton of cotton balls. He could spend the night accepting the pain the floor deemed to inflict upon him.

Or he could sleep on the couch.

Done.

He opened the door quietly and tiptoed into the hallway. Bennett kept up a happy face all day, but he’d struggled to fall asleep, and Haydn knew it was because he was thinking of his ex. And Jules was the lightest sleeper on the planet, which was in part why Haydn had chosen to share with Bennett and not sleep in Jules’s larger bed.

And also because Jules basically slept on a board because it was supposedly good for his back. And Haydn had no confidence his brother wouldn’t have accidentally-on-purpose kidney-kicked him in the middle of the night.

Haydn walked toward the living room, but paused when he heard music. Guitar. It started and stopped again, and the only indication he had that he wasn’t listening to a recording was the sound of chords playing then changing and then pencil scribbling.

He walked to the open doorway of the living room and leaned his shoulder against the wall.

Lia sat on the couch, her blonde hair long and wavy down over her slender shoulders and down her back, which was bent over her guitar. A pencil stuck out of the side of her mouth, and she played a few notes, then pulled the pencil out, wrote a few things down, and stuck it back in her mouth again.

When she turned to her guitar, he could see her profile. Her face was creased in concentration, and one word flitted through his mind. Cute. She looked cute sitting there, intently working on a song, her concentration solely on what she was doing. Again, that sense that he’d seen her somewhere before nudged him, but he couldn’t place where that possibly might have been.

He didn’t want to startle her, but he also didn’t want to continue to stand here, watching her without her knowing. He was totally and completely captivated by her, and she was clearly in the middle of an intense train of thought. He didn’t want to ruin that.

She gathered her hair into her hand and pulled it over her shoulder, revealing a bare shoulder that arrested his attention. Then she began to sing, her voice low and husky and sexy in all the best ways, and he was completely nailed in place.

Lia was good. Really good. She looked at home with her guitar, like it was a natural extension of her body. She stopped playing and took the pencil from behind her ear to jot something down, then set it on the couch beside her. This was the most relaxed he’d seen her, and he didn’t want to interrupt it.

And he’d been standing here long enough that he’d probably crossed the line from admiring and straight into stalker territory. He should slip back to Bennett’s room and leave Lia alone.

He moved to take a step back, but his heel got caught on the corner of the side table, and it squealed across the floors like a bald eagle’s call.

She jumped with a squeak and whirled toward him. “Haydn!” She placed a hand over her heart as if doing so would still it. Her eyes flickered to his bare chest for the quickest of instances, and since he was human, he flexed. He wasn’t proud of it, but he did it. “You scared me. Did I wake you up?”

She yawned, and the comfortable sight of it was disarming enough to make him feel tongue tied. Had he ever felt this way about a woman before? No, he definitely had not.

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