Last Summer: A Novel Read online

  “Miles has been after me since I quit Off the Grid! Don’t worry. My story’s yours. Let me see what he wants. He’s a friend. This could be a social visit. I drink beers with the guy,” he says.

  Nathan opens his door. Ella scrambles out hers. They meet at the front of the truck.

  “Go inside. I’ll be there in a few.” Nathan tries to hand her his keys.

  She balks at them. “I’ll stay, thanks.”

  “Ella.” Irritation ices her name. “I gave you my word.”

  “You did, and I appreciate that. But I happen to know journalists. They’ll sweet-talk your life’s history out of you.”

  Nathan folds his arms. “Tell me about it.”

  “I don’t trust Miles any more than a pack of wolves that’d wander onto your property.”

  “That would never happen. Bears maybe. Wolves are rare up here, and if they weren’t, Fred and Bing’s incessant barking”—he scowls at his dogs yapping and howling in the window—“would scare them off.”

  “Then why’s Miles still here?” She grins.

  Nathan throws his head back and laughs. “You’ve got me.” He pockets his keys with a smile.

  Miles approaches and she sees the moment he recognizes her. His eyes narrow.

  Nathan shakes his hand. “Good to see you, man.”

  “You too, Nate,” Miles greets. He turns to Ella and extends a hand. “Ella,” he says, his tone cool. “It’s been a while.”

  Fourteen months to be precise. They were introduced through a mutual colleague at the California Press Club Journalism Awards Gala. Ella doesn’t have a personal opinion about Miles and assumes he’s a decent person. Professionally, she respects him and admires his tenacity to go after a story. Until today. Today he’s competition.

  She grasps the hand he offers. “Good to see you again.”

  “No, it isn’t.” He sees right through her. “What are you doing here?” he asks, glancing from her to Nathan and back.

  “I asked her to come. She’s working on a piece about me.”

  Miles recoils. “You gave the exclusive to Luxe Avenue? Their readers aren’t your audience. We’ve talked about this. Running with them won’t do a thing for your career.”

  “That career’s over. You know that.”

  “My advice as your friend? The longer you hide out up here, the less chance your audience will be there when you come back. You’ll be a has-been.”

  Nathan bristles. “I’m not going back.”

  “What about—” Miles slides his gaze to Ella. He shifts closer to Nathan and, lowering his voice, says, “What about that thing we discussed?”

  Ella rolls her eyes. “I can hear you.”

  “He’s talking about my concept for another reality show,” Nathan explains to her.

  “Dude,” Miles says with disappointment.

  “I have nothing to hide from her. She’ll know everything by the time we’re done. And I scrapped it.”

  Miles shakes his head, falls back a step. “Unbelievable. It had so much potential.”

  “My concern. Hey, Miles, great to see you. Ella and I are on a tight schedule. Are you going to be around next week?”

  “Yeah, want me to swing by?”

  “Nah, I’ll meet you at the Tavern. I’ll bring you up to speed over a beer.”

  “Nathan,” Ella starts to object. He shouldn’t be sharing anything about their discussions, at least not until the article’s published.

  Miles looks at Ella. He has something to say and doesn’t want to say it in front of her. Nathan touches her shoulder. “Would you give us a moment?” He shows her his keys.

  Reluctantly, she takes them.

  “I won’t be long.”

  Nathan leads Miles to his car, where they converse, heads close and voices lowered. After a few moments, they shake hands and Nathan claps Miles on the shoulder. Miles gets into his car and Nathan returns to her side.

  “Couldn’t head inside, could you?”

  There was no way she was going inside while Miles was still on Nathan’s property.

  “Why did you promise to bring him up to speed?” she asks when Miles leaves. “You signed a contract with us. You shouldn’t be talking about it.”

  “I’m not sharing anything with him.” Nathan sinks his hands into his front pockets. “He needed something to chew on or he wouldn’t have left, not with you here.”

  “Do I have anything to worry about?”

  “No.” He shakes his head and gently touches her arm. “Will you stay? Dinner’s cooking in the Crock-Pot. We can spend the rest of the afternoon on the assignment, see if we can finish this up.”

  “Thanks. I’d like that.” She waves her phone. “I have to make a few calls first. Do you mind?”

  “I’ll unhitch the trailer and meet you inside.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Ella settles inside her car, grateful that Nathan’s Wi-Fi is strong enough to reach out here, and checks her phone. Eight missed calls from Damien. She’ll get to him later, because right now, she needs to call her editor.

  “Talk to me, Ella,” Rebecca greets.

  “We have a problem. Nathan leaves for Alaska tomorrow.”

  “Wrap it up, then. Use your notes from before. Can you get a draft to me by Monday?”

  Five days.

  “There’ve been some, ah . . . developments.” Like she doesn’t have her notes or her memory, developments. “Miles Jorgenson showed up today. He’s pissed Nathan gave us the exclusive. Apparently, they’re friends.”

  “Nathan signed a contract. He can’t talk with anyone until we go to print.”

  “I know, but I don’t trust Miles, not around a story this big.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I want to go to Alaska with Nathan. I’ll wrap up the interview there. He’s heli-skiing so I can get some great action shots for the article.”

  “Nathan agreed to this?”

  “Yes.” Lie. But she should be able to convince him to invite her along now that she’s convinced they had an affair. She wants the details. Nathan also owes her. He agreed to help her with her memories when she first got here.

  “Go then,” Rebecca agrees. “I’ll give you until Thursday, but that’s a hard deadline.”

  She victory-punches the air. “You’ll have it in your in-box first thing.”

  “Paul was in my office asking about it this morning. Both our jobs are riding on you getting this right. We had to scramble last summer. Don’t let me down again.”

  “You have my word.”

  She ends the call with Rebecca and calls Damien. He answers after the second ring.

  “Where are you? I’ve been trying to reach you all day.” Gravelly and urgent, Damien’s voice rumbles over the phone. She knows he won’t be happy with what she has to tell him, but it’s such a relief to finally hear his voice.

  “Still in Truckee with Nathan Donovan. The coverage is really bad up here. I only just got Wi-Fi again a few minutes ago.”

  “I’ve been worried.” Ella feels the impact of his words. It pulls at her. His frustration that she’s far from him and unreachable.

  She could say the same about him. She hasn’t heard from him since his cryptic text message yesterday morning. Everything’s going to shit.

  “How’s the internal investigation coming along?”

  He sighs, and she pictures him standing by the large front window in the bedroom of their darkened London flat, staring out into the night sky. Scrubbing a hand over his mop of hair, the city lights reflecting in his eyes, his sleep pants riding low on his hips, the perfect V of his lower abs disappearing beneath the waistband. They can see Buckingham Palace from their Kings Gate apartment. To the east, the Thames glitters under the lights of the London Eye.

  “Legal department’s casting a wider net and we’ve brought in our IT security team,” he explains. “This is bigger than we thought, El. It doesn’t stop at the client list or with one employee.”

  �
�Do you still suspect your dad’s behind this?”

  He takes a beat. “My gut tells me yes but the employees involved that we’ve identified aren’t talking yet. We’re keeping this on the down-low until we’ve collected as much evidence as we can. I can’t get into specifics, you know that. My attorneys will shit if they find out I’ve told you anything. But I trust you’ll keep this between us. The last thing we need is for the media to catch wind of it. When’s your flight? I miss you, and . . . we need to talk.”

  “Of course, you want to talk now,” she snaps, the words escaping before she can lock them down. “So here’s a question for you: Did I sleep with Nathan?” She swears he knew she had an affair with Nathan and he didn’t tell her. He didn’t stop her. Yeah, he tried, but looking back, his efforts were weak. Doesn’t he care about her? What about their marriage? Anger pours through her.

  “I’ll answer that but not over the phone.”

  Ella lets the arm holding her phone fall into her lap. Are you freaking kidding me?

  She puts the phone back to her ear. “Do you know how pissed off I am?” she asks. “Why now? Why didn’t you tell me last November or every other time I’ve asked what happened?”

  Say it, Damien, she silently wills. She wants him to admit it out loud. Say, “You fucked Nathan.”

  “Not. Over. The. Phone,” he clips, irritated. “I’m not getting into this with you when you’re with him and eight time zones away from me.”

  “If you can’t give me a straight answer, I mean . . . fuck.”

  What kind of marriage do they have if they can’t talk?

  Reality check. The kind where she cheated on him. Self-loathing is a rusty weight in her stomach, making her queasy.

  “You won’t like what I have to tell you. I don’t know how you’ll take it and I want to be there with you when you hear me out. I can’t risk—” He takes a few beats before he speaks again, and when he does, he sounds so forlorn that Ella wonders—not for the first time—exactly what happened between them before the accident.

  “We weren’t supposed to find ourselves back here.”

  Back where? Pissed off and uncommunicative?

  If he’d been straight with her from the beginning, they wouldn’t have found themselves in this predicament in the first place. Him in London, finally willing to talk, and her on a mountain half a world away. With her ex-lover, apparently.

  “I blame you, Damien. Whatever happens with Nathan, I blame you. You got us into this mess.”

  Had she known she had an affair with Nathan before Rebecca called about the assignment, she would have declined it on the spot. Fuck her job. Not when it interferes with her marriage. But it’s too late. She’s committed. Her boss’s job is on the line. Her job is on the line. The Jordan Talbots of the world are pining for her assignments. Nathan is the one with the key to unlock her mind. She’s sure of it. Only he can tell her exactly what they did together. Only he can show her what they meant to one another and why. Only then will she be able to figure out why she’s forgotten him.

  “Ella.” Damien says her name in warning.

  “Nathan leaves for Alaska tomorrow, and if I can convince him, I’m going with. I need another day or so to wrap up this assignment.”

  “You what?” he bellows.

  “My deadline’s Thursday. I’ll catch a flight to Heathrow when I put the article to bed.”

  “Goddamn it, Ella.”

  “I don’t see a point—”

  “To what?” he snaps, cutting her off.

  She sighs, closing her eyes, weary of the secrets and cryptic talk. The circles they’ve been running around each other like loops of coding. She was going to say that she doesn’t see any point in continuing their conversation. But those aren’t the words that leave her mouth. She doesn’t know exactly what she’s thinking until the two-letter word eases off her tongue.

  “Us,” she whispers.

  “You don’t mean that.”

  She doesn’t. But they’ll deal with it when she gets to London. Because he doesn’t want to talk “Over. The. Phone.”

  “I have to go.” She ends the call, silences her phone, and lets her forehead fall to the steering wheel.

  Everything has gone to shit.

  Ella spends another ten minutes chilling in her car. That conversation did not go as planned. More like a backward spiral into the shallow end of a pool. She has so many questions. But she knows she’ll get the answers from Damien when she joins him in London. For now, she’s with Nathan, and he’s holding a whole other set of answers for her.

  Unfolding from her car, she takes a deep breath of crisp mountain air, tosses back her hair, and straightens her shoulders. She treks across the yard and lets herself into Nathan’s house.

  Inside, Fred and Bing rush over to greet her. Happy with the pats and scratches she doles out, they return to their pillow beds. A fire roars in the wide stone hearth, and stew bubbles in the Crock-Pot. The mouthwatering aroma of roasted meat and onions saturates the large, open living space.

  Nathan is at the wet bar. He has changed into jeans and a fitted, long-sleeved blue shirt, the Squaw Valley ski resort logo above the outline of his pectoral. Ella wonders if there’s a Tahoe resort shirt he doesn’t own. She also wonders at her reaction to seeing him so casually dressed and laid-back, barefoot and freshly combed. He looks too damned good.

  He mixes her a gin and tonic. “You look like you need it.”

  “I do. Thank you.” Who cares that it’s midafternoon? She sips her drink, relishing the cool juniper flavor. “How’d you know I like G&Ts?”

  “It’s your go-to drink. You had me mix them for you last time,” he says, pouring himself a bourbon over ice.

  “Now you’re not playing fair.”

  His brows lift. “How so?”

  “You know more about me than I do you.”

  “Not really, Ella. You do know everything about me,” he says in a tone that leaves Ella wondering how much he’d come to care for her.

  A flush rises up her neck and she delicately clears her throat. “Maybe I did at one point, but now . . .”—she shows him the voice recorder, determined to stay focused—“let’s get down to business. I have a deadline and you have a story to tell.”

  His expression cools. He gestures to the seating area before the fire. She sits beside him, leaving a comfortable, professional distance between them, and sets the recorder on the coffee table.

  Nathan leans forward, forearms resting on his upper legs, just above his knees, the bourbon glass cradled in his wide hands. “Where do you want to begin?”

  “With Stephanie.”

  He sips his liquor. “All right,” he says slowly. “What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s talk about your marriage. The early years. Were they ever good?”

  “Aren’t all marriages good in the beginning?”

  “I’m sure most can be. I want to hear about yours.”

  “We were one of the good ones,” Nathan confirms. “For a few years.” His gaze drifts to the fire. Flames dance, reflecting in his eyes as he slips back in time. “For a while, it was me and Steph.”

  “You loved her.”

  “Ridiculously so. We were inseparable before we moved to Colorado. I couldn’t do anything wrong in her eyes. But like all good things, we came to an end. I’d be filming an episode and couldn’t wait to get home. Then I’d be home with her and couldn’t wait to get back out there.” His eyes skip to the recorder.

  “Forget it’s there,” she encourages.

  “That’s not what worries me.”

  “I don’t share my recordings. With anyone.”

  “But you lose them,” he accuses.

  Ella takes a sharp inhale through her nose. “No. I deleted them.” She wouldn’t have lost them. She isn’t that careless. “I guess I got rid of them because we killed the article.” But even deleting them isn’t something she’d do. “Do you want to tell me why you changed your mind? Why give us the
exclusive only to pull it?” Maybe his reasons will help her understand why she doesn’t have any files left from the first interview. She holds his gaze. He slowly shakes his head.

  “Later.” He apathetically points at the recorder. “Let’s get back to Steph.” He launches into the story about their media-frenzied wedding in New York. She was gorgeous, a gem wrapped in ivory silk amid a sea of flashing lights. Reporters crowded the sidewalk outside Le Parker Meridien, where they held their wedding reception in the Estrela Penthouse. Three-sixty-degree views of New York, with Central Park as the backdrop to the wedding party table. You can’t beat that.

  “I read about your wedding. The grand scale of it, the location, everything, surprised me. I pegged you as more of an intimate affair at a remote lodge type of groom.”

  “Steph wanted it. She was in publicity and thought the exposure would be good for my career. I was shooting the final season of Survival of the Unfittest and was in the preliminary concept phases of Off the Grid! I needed to keep the networks interested in me.”

  Survival of the Unfittest was Nathan’s first adventure reality series where participants were put in unsuspected survivalist scenarios, such as a plane crash in the desert or a broken-down car high in the Rockies in the middle of a snowstorm. The first thirty minutes of the episode set up the situation, and under the watchful eye of the crew and on-location experts to ensure no one seriously injured themselves, they followed the participants as they tried to survive the scenario using their limited knowledge and skills. About thirty minutes in the hour-long episode, when it became obvious to viewers that the chances of surviving were minimal, Nathan would step in. He’d guide the participants from the scenario setup to safety, showing where they’d made poor decisions and what to do instead. Ella read the series premise. She didn’t have time to catch any episodes before this interview.

  Nathan continues his story, sharing that he and Steph lived in New York for several years, and once the house he was having built for them in Colorado was finished, they moved. Nathan was between series and, for the most part, was home more than he was away. The best day of his life was the birth of his son, Carson.