Quiet Nights Read Online Free PDF Page A

me?”
    “That’s what happened.”
    “Oh!” She was horrified and turned on Mia. “Your friend broke Kelly’s heart. You certainly can’t go into business with such a man.”
    “Mom––”
    “For heaven’s sake, Mia.” She was aghast. “The man’s a cad.”
    Mia made a pained sound. “We already settled this. Were you even listening?”
    Her mother tsked in that judgmental way she had.
    “Stop looking at me like that,” Mia muttered.
    “I don’t like him.”
    “Mother!”
    “Don’t ever bring him to my house!”
    “Oh, that’s just great,” Mia mumbled as I smirked at her. “How do you know he didn’t have a phenomenal explanation for ditching Kel?”
    “Like?”
    “I don’t know,” Mia said dejectedly.
    “Dead,” Annalise said flatly. “I would accept dead .”
    Mia threw up her hands.
    “Maybe he does have a good excuse,” Coz said to me, yawning. “And maybe you’d get to actually hear that reason if you ever allowed him to see you.”
    “No thank you,” I replied petulantly.
    “Oh yeah, no, of course not,” Coz returned snidely. “Then you’d have to, like, have closure or something.” He shivered dramatically for my benefit as he shoveled food into his mouth. “That sounds horrible.”
    “Leave him alone,” Mia defended before her gaze slid to meet mine. “It’s hard to know things sometimes. You want to and you don’t, all at the same time.”
    And she was right. While half of me wanted to hear why Britton Lassiter had not shown up, the rest of me didn’t want to know.
    She shrugged. “Maybe you just let sleeping dogs lie.”
    “Or,” Coz said, clearly annoyed with both of us, “you walk your ass over to where he’s staying and ask if he remembers you, and if so, inquire as to the explanation of his whereabouts on the day in question, which was what—ten years ago now?”
    “Oh God,” I whined, thunking my head down on the table again. “I need to drink more.”
    “I think y’all have drunk enough,” Annalise stated. “Let’s go into the living room and I can tell you about the nude beach Emmett and I went to.”
    “Where’s the rest of the vodka?” Mia asked her brother.

Chapter Three
     
     
    I SERIOUSLY could hear the grass growing, and even with a baseball cap on and my dark-lensed aviators, too much light was still getting to my eyes. When I staggered in through the back door of Blue Days, a bed and breakfast toward the end of the beachfront property, one of the two owners was in the kitchen.
    “Oh,” Dwyer Knolls said softly, scrutinizing me. “Are you all right?”
    He was a nice guy; he and his partner had been some of my first customers, the first people to put faith in me and back it up with money, so I always made certain their property looked fantastic. Dwyer’s partner, Hiroyuki Takeo, did most of the watering, and he’d had the idea to take out the fence on the north side of the property and put in bamboo as a barrier. I hadn’t been sold on the idea, but it had turned out gorgeous, and now with how thick and lush the bamboo was, no one could see through it to the back patio. That had been Takeo’s whole plan: he wanted that area for him and his husband alone.
    “Kelly?”
    I lifted my head so I could see him without opening my eyes any wider. “Yeah?”
    “Are you okay?”
    “Yeah, why?”
    “Because you’re actually gray .”
    I staggered over to the kitchen table and sat down.
    “Dwyer, do you—oh,” Takeo said as he breezed into the room. “Kelly-san, good morning.”
    “He’s hungover,” Dwyer explained, reaching for Takeo, who moved quickly to his side and pressed in close. They were just gorgeous together, and seeing the love wafting around them normally put a smile on my face. But I had nothing in my stomach, my head was pounding because the Tylenol also hadn’t stayed down, and I knew I was dehydrated.
    And all Takeo and Dwyer were doing at present was reminding me that I had no one to take care of me but a