Suddenly in Love (Lake Haven#1) by Julia London Read Free Book Online Page A

especially liked to spend it when she was trying to get his attention. Brennan wouldn’t be surprised if there was ten thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise in those bags.
    “At least you’re out of bed,” she said. “And while the sun is still up! We’re making progress!”
    Jesus, he hadn’t lived with his mother in seventeen years and had forgotten how annoying she could be. “Mom,” he said wearily. “I work late. I sleep late. You know that. So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t send Magda up at the crack of dawn with her industrial vacuum cleaner.”
    His mother laughed as if he were trying to be funny. He was not.
    “Magda does like to get an early start on some days,” she said breezily as she selected a bottle of wine. “Now, don’t look at me like that, Brennan. Am I supposed to tell her to come back at three o’clock in the afternoon when you’ve managed to drag yourself out of bed?”
    He didn’t sleep until three, but he wasn’t going to argue with her. He was an experienced hand on that front—it led to nowhere.
    She opened a drawer and rummaged around for a corkscrew.
    The beers weren’t doing Brennan any favors on the patience front, and he halfheartedly attempted to tamp down his irritation. But was it really asking too much to let him decompress here, in his mother’s new home, away from the world? In the house that he’d bought for her? This had been a rough year for him, a rough awakening, and he didn’t need his mother’s judgments or her timetables for when he should pick himself up and dive back into the world.
    He sat on one of the kitchen table chairs, his weight causing it to sway a little. “So what’s with the girl?” he asked curtly.
    “What girl?” His mother gave him a feigned smile of innocence as she put the corkscrew to the wine bottle.
    “Mom.”
    “Ooh,” she said, as if a light had just dawned. “You mean the one from John Beverly Home Interiors.”
    “Yeah, that one. I thought she was a damn groupie. I thought she’d climbed the fence.”
    “A groupie !” She laughed roundly. “Brennan, for heaven’s sake. Not every girl you meet is a groupie .”
    Easy for her to say. His mother had not had the pleasure of finding an inebriated woman sitting on the toilet like he had at his home in LA. Or women hanging around the door of his hotel room. Or women appearing like magic on his tour bus offering to do things to his body.
    “She’s really different than the rest of the East Beach crowd, I think. Not so resort-y, like the rest of them,” his mother said. “She has a strange sense of fashion, but I like that, don’t you? It’s refreshing. You wouldn’t believe how many girls are wandering around New York in those desperately short shorts and cropped tops. Like that’s a look. But Mia? She’s unique and she’s adorable .”
    Brennan didn’t know if he would ever use the word adorable to describe anything. But he could agree, at a distance, that the woman was appealing in a very unconventional way. He couldn’t quite put his finger on how, exactly. She wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t a sex kitten or a ball-busting model. And while Brennan knew absolutely nothing about women’s fashion, she had been dressed in a very strange combination of prints and colors. He honestly didn’t know what she was, besides argumentative. That was all beside the point, anyway. “Why was she even here? She had the run of the house while you were gone. She could have taken something or broken into your computer.”
    “She would never!” His mother laughed, as if the notion of a stranger stealing was absurd. “I know people, and she’s not like that. She was here because we are going to renovate this musty old house, remember?”
    There was the liberal use of the pronoun we again.
    “Oh, I remember,” he said drily. Brennan had paid three million for this house, and had agreed to pay another million for the renovation. And that was on top of his mother’s