1 Chapter 1

Jamie’s an asshole when he asks me, “Why are we working our rumps off today, moving all these boxes and furniture, when we both know your aunt can afford a professional company to get the job done?” He wipes sweat away from his forehead with the back of a muscular arm. “It makes no sense to me, Ricky. I’d rather be doing something else. Watching paint dry would be better than this crap.”

“I’ve already told you three times that my Great Aunt Sassy doesn’t like any strangers touching her things. You’re not a stranger. Plus, she has Alzheimer’s and needs it done. Can’t you just keep quiet and help her, and me, out?”

We each haul a cardboard box of cozy mysteries into an elevator, huffing. Both of us are in shape, but exhausted because of the last four hours of moving my aunt’s belongings.

“Whatever,” he says, again being a mean asshole.

We set our boxes down, and he presses the number three on the elevator’s interior wall.

I tell him, “Stop being cranky, Jamie. This is our last load for the day. We’ll finish the move tomorrow.”

The elevator doors close.

“Fuck tomorrow, and fuck this move,” he says. “You need to find someone else to help you tomorrow. I’m not available.”

He’s lying. I know it, and he knows it. We’re monkeys who move pages of insurance claims from one side of our desks to the other for Cassidy Insurance, and we have the day off. Plus, he won’t be playing soccer with his jock friends tomorrow morning because of a bi-week from his amateur games. Jamie Oakley doesn’t have anything else to do but help move my aunt’s things from her cobblestone mansion to an apartment overlooking Lake Erie. Case closed.

“We’re both available,” I correct him.

“You might be, but I’m not. Don’t even think I’m helping you.”

The elevator rises, stops, and its door slides open. We exit in silence.

Aunt Sassy’s lake-view apartment in Radbury Place is everything I want in the city of Templeton, Pennsylvania. She has two walls in the studio apartment that are all glass. The view is remarkable: small schooners, Squirrel Island in the distance, and choppy blue-green waves. As for the apartment, the place looks comfortable and big enough for her: kitchen, living room area, bathroom, two bedrooms, and a few closets. It’s not the mansion on Ruyard Court Road where she grew up as the daughter of a beer tycoon, but it will suffice now that she’s eighty-nine and in a secure building with every essential comfort one can imagine. An in-house spa, library, theatre room, casino room, fountain room, conservatory, and other rooms add to her ease. Also, she has a staff of nurses to care for her physical and mental needs. Money buys good things. Great Aunt Sassy isn’t an exception to the cliché.

As sweet and sugary as Great Aunt Sylvia Sassywoma is, Jamie is her opposite, a complete jerk, bitter, and sour. Although the thirty-seven-year-old man resembles a Hollywood star with his blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and chiseled jaw, he’s an ass. How can a man at six-one with a rock-hard body and a flawless face be so hard? I will never understand. Talk about being negative about everything: the weather, activities, food…everything. No wonder I dislike him at times, even if he has a beautiful exterior.

How Jamie and I get mixed up together to move my great aunt’s things feels unreal. Great Aunt Sassy demands I help her out. No one else. But I need some muscle to move her bedroom and living room sets out of the mansion and into Radbury Place, where my mother, Ruby, currently is making her aunt live since Sassy is beginning to suffer from dementia. Long story short, Jamie owes me a favor for hooking him up with one of my acquaintances, a fireman named Rico Dae. Our deal was simple at the time: if I introduced him to Rico, setting him up on a date with the hot and muscular daddy-stud-fireman, Jamie would have to do me a favor. Today, I have cashed in my favor: to help me move Great Aunt Sassy from one end of Templeton to the other.

The move goes well until he drops his box of paperbacks to the floor and strips out of his canary yellow tank. He releases the cotton shirt, and it falls to the floor by his feet. “I’m crazy hot. Is there anything in the fridge to drink?”

“I’ll get us some water,” I say, but don’t move. My gaze fixes on the blond’s firm chest: rippled, golden-brown flesh, hard nipples, constricting abs, and strings of spiraling hair beneath his navel that create a beautiful treasure trail.