She was hearing things.
Neely used to tell her mother that would happen.
“I’ll go deaf if you keep playing that music so loud,” she used to say all the time she was growing up with hard rock at a hundred decibels blaring in her ears while her mother made jewelry out of old seeds and twigs.
She was probably the only child in the history of the world who had a parent more likely to shatter her eardrums than to wait for Neely to do it herself.
Lara—her mother had never wanted to be called Mom or Mother. “Do I look like somebody’s mother?” she would challenge anyone who dared—had always laughed at her.
But apparently, Neely thought now, staring in dismay at the man in her living room, she had been right.
It was appalling enough to have God’s gift to long-sleeved dress shirts, Sebastian Savas, standing in her living room looking down his nose at her, but to think she heard him say he was moving in and that he was her landlord. Well, that simply didn’t bear contemplating.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, enunciating clearly so that he would, too, and she could figure out what he really said. “What did you say?”
“I bought the houseboat.”
Neely felt her knees wobble. She braced a hand on the doorjamb to make sure she didn’t topple right over.
“No.”
“Oh, yes.” And he bared his teeth in what she supposed was intended to be smile. Or a smirk. “This houseboat,” he clarified, just in case she thought he meant another one. “I’m moving in.”
There was no consolation at all in discovering her hearing was just fine. Neely stared at him, aghast, disbelieving even in the face of evidence, then shook her head because it couldn’t be true. “You’re mistaken. I’m buying the houseboat. It’s mine.”
“Sadly…for you—” Sebastian stressed these last two words, because it was, quite apparently, not sad for him at all “—it’s not. Not yours, I mean. Frank sold it to me a couple of hours ago.”
“He can’t! He wouldn’t! We had a deal.”
Sebastian shrugged. “It fell through.”
She stared at him, feeling as if she’d just caught a lead basketball in the stomach, feeling exactly the way she always had whenever Lara had told her they were moving. Again. And again. And again.
“You don’t know that,” she said slowly, setting down the paintbrush and wrapping her arms across her chest. But even as she said the words, she felt an awful sense of foreboding.
“Personally, no, I don’t,” Sebastian said easily. “But Frank knew. He said someone called Gregory called him. A mortgage broker, I assume?”
The sense of foreboding wasn’t a sense any longer. It was reality. Neely nodded. “A friend of Frank’s.” Her fingernails dug into the flesh of her upper arms. “He promised to find a loan for me.”
“Yes, well, apparently it didn’t work out.”
“There are other places to look,” Neely insisted urgently. “Other lenders.”
Sebastian nodded. There wasn’t a flicker of sympathy in his gaze. “No doubt. But Frank couldn’t wait. Something about a down payment on a house? A wedding? A baby on the way? He was pretty stressed.” Something else Mr. Coldhearted Savas couldn’t possibly care about.
And why should he?
It had all worked out perfectly for him.
Now he set his duffel bag on the floor and his garment bag on the sofa, then turned toward the door.
“What are you doing?” she demanded shrilly, clambering over the big cardboard box and coming after him.
“Going back for more of my things. Want to help?” She couldn’t see his face, but she had no trouble imagining the smirk on his lips.
He didn’t wait for a reply. He left.
And she steamed. She grabbed her mobile phone off the table on the deck and punched in Frank’s number.
He wasn’t answering.
“Coward,” she muttered.
“Are you talking to me?” Sebastian Savas came back in carrying two big boxes and set them on the coffee table. Her coffee table!
“That’s mine,” she snapped.
He followed her gaze to the table in question. “I beg your pardon. Frank said he was leaving some furniture.”
“Not that table,” Neely said, knowing she was being petty. Not caring.
“Right.” He picked up the boxes and set them beside it on the floor. “It is my floor,” he said, making her feel about two inches high—until he gave her another one of those smiles and walked out again.
Neely wanted to scream as she watched him return with another big box and deliberately set it beside the others on the floor. His floor.
“I can’t believe you bought it,” Neely muttered, still fuming.
“I can’t, either,” Sebastian said so cheerfully that she wanted to smack him. “But it’s perfect.”
That comment actually surprised her. She would never have thought Sebastian Savas would consider a rather battered half-century-old houseboat perfect at all. She’d never seen his place, but Max had said he lived in a penthouse somewhere. What had happened to that?
“I can’t imagine why you think so,” she said acidly.
“But then, you don’t know my circumstances, do you?” he said, hands on his hips as he stood surveying his domain.
“Did you get evicted?” Neely asked sweetly.
He gave her a stare hard enough to make her back up a step. She would need to watch her mouth if he really intended to stick around.
But the next instant she found herself saying, “Or maybe you ran away from home.”
“Maybe I did,” he agreed.
She blinked. “Yeah, sure. Tell me, why did you do it?”
“Danny asked if I wanted to buy a houseboat.”
“And you just thought, ‘Sure why not?’ and whipped out your checkbook and said, ‘I’ll take it’?”
“Something like that.”
She didn’t believe a word of it. “Get real.”
He just shrugged.
She hated that about him—that superior cool detachment, that nothing-gets-to-me disdain. At work they called him The Iceman behind his back. They might have called him Iceman to his face for all he’d care.
She watched him open one of the boxes, remove some books and casually begin taking over the bookshelves. She sucked in her breath.
Sebastian turned and glanced her way. “What? No protest? Are the shelves mine, then?”
“As they’re built in, it seems they are,” Neely said through her teeth. “But as the renter I’m entitled to use some of the space.”
“Ah, yes. Your rent.”
“It’s locked in—the amount,” she said firmly, in case he decided to triple it. Or worse. “On my lease.”
He didn’t reply, just said, “Shall I measure and divide the space, then? To be sure you’re getting your fair share?”
“I think we can work it out,” Neely muttered, glowering at him as he straightened again, hating the six feet, two inches of hard, lean, dark masculinity