Seb stared, transfixed.
Neely Robson?
No. Impossible.
Seb shut his eyes. It was just that his irritating meeting with Max had had the effect of imprinting her on his brain.
When he opened them again he would, of course, see some other stunningly gorgeous woman with dark honey-colored hair and legs a mile long.
He opened them again.
It was Neely Robson.
They stared at each other.
And then, almost in slow motion, she straightened up again so he could no longer see her face—only her legs—and for an instant he could tell himself that he’d imagined it.
Then slowly those amazing legs descended the ladder and she came to stare in the open doorway at him, the paintbrush in one hand as she swiped her hair away from her face with the other.
“Mr. Savas,” she said politely in that slightly husky oh-so-provocative voice.
Did she call Max “Mr. Grosvenor”? Seb wondered acidly.
“Ms. Robson,” he replied curtly, keeping his gaze resolutely away from her long bare legs, though seeing her blowsy and barely buttoned above the waist wasn’t entirely settling.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting—I thought you were Cody with Harm.” There was a flush across her cheeks and she suddenly looked confused.
Seb shook his head, not sure what she was talking about and feeling confused himself.
“My dog. Harmony. That’s his name. Well, not really. But it sounds better. His name is Harm. As in, ‘he does more harm than good.’” Her words tumbled out quickly. “The boy down the dock took him for a walk. I thought you were them coming back and I’m not done painting yet.”
Seb had never heard Neely Robson babble before and he would have found it entertaining under other circumstances. Now he raised a brow and she stopped abruptly.
“Never mind,” she said. “You’re looking for Frank.”
“No.”
She blinked. “No?” A pause. “Then…why are you—?” She looked him in the eyes, then her gaze traveled down and he saw when it lit on his bags. Her frown deepened.
Damn, he wished he could enjoy this more. Wished he had been prepared. Wished he were a lot less shocked than she was by the turn of events.
No matter. What was done was done. And Neely Robson was on her way out.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Ms. Robson,” he drawled. “I’ve already seen Frank. Now I’m moving in.”
“What?” The color drained from her face. Her tone was outraged.
Seb did enjoy that. He smiled thinly. “If you’re the ‘tenant,’ Ms. Robson, you have a new landlord. Me.”
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