She also missed breakfast.
And lunch.
And the nap she’d been counting on since she hadn’t slept more than a few hours in so long she couldn’t remember what a good night’s sleep felt like.
Not exactly an auspicious beginning to her vacation from life, but hopefully all her trouble was behind her now and the rest of the trip would be perfect.
A girl could dream anyway . . .
Eight hours later, she pressed her face to the window of her plane as it banked and came in for a landing at SFO International. They’d been diverted twice for too much air traffic, which turned out to be a blessing because they came in from the north, giving her a view of the Golden Gate Bridge glowing red in the late afternoon sun. The bay was a gorgeous sparkling blue, all of it looking like a postcard, and something in her tight chest loosened. It seemed like the entire world was laid out in front of her and she brought a hand up to the window as if she could actually touch the sight.
This, she told herself. This was exactly what the doctor had ordered—if she’d actually gone to a doctor for her anxiety and crippling writer’s block. Here she would find herself, so that by the time she went back home in three weeks for Christmas Eve, she’d be happy again.
She was sure of it.
Chapter 1
#SonOfABeanbagChair
“Spencer Baldwin?” an unfamiliar female voice asked.
Shit. Anyone who used his full name was most definitely not someone he wanted to speak with. After the past few months, he knew better than to answer his phone without looking at the screen, but with both hands busy directing a drone around the room, he’d answered on voice command without thinking about it.
“Wrong number,” he said, the drone hovering with perfect precision—and engineering—above his head. Then, to prevent a repeat call while he was working, he took one hand off the controls and chucked his phone out the high, narrow window of the basement.
Which felt great.
Directing the drone to continue hovering, he moved to the far wall of the huge basement below the Pacific Pier Building and climbed the three-foot ladder that was against the window for just this sort of situation.
Yep. His cell phone had landed directly in the fountain in the center of the courtyard. “Three points,” he murmured just as the elevator doors opened and Elle entered.
“Are you kidding me?” she asked in a tone that only she could get away with and not die. “You killed another one? Why don’t you just stop answering to the damn reporters—wouldn’t that be easier?”
He turned his attention back to his drone, impressed with the changes he’d made in the flight software. “Am I paying you to bitch at me?” he asked mildly.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” she said. “You’re actually paying me a hell of a lot of money to bitch at you. Why don’t I just change your phone number again?”
“He can’t,” Joe said from the other side of the room. He wore only a pair of knit boxers and stood in front of one of the three commercial-grade washer-dryers, waiting for his clothes. “Me and the guys like it when he gets all the marriage proposals.”
“You mean you like the nudie pics that come with the proposals,” Elle said.
“They send him presents sometimes too,” Joe said. “Junk food and panties. That’s always fun.”
Elle rolled her eyes. “Why are you in just your underwear?”
Joe was an IT wizard who worked at Hunt Investigations two floors up. He was second in charge there, a master finder and fixer of . . . well, just about anything, and fairly badass while he was at it. And although Elle terrified almost everyone on the planet, Joe just grinned at her. “Had a little tussle earlier on the job,” he said. “Spence let me in down here to use the machines.”
Elle was not impressed. “If by tussle you mean a takedown went bad and you got blood all over yourself again, you best not be using those machines.”
“Hey, at least it’s not my blood. And I’m fine, thanks for asking.”
Elle went hands on hips. She managed this building for the owner, who happened to be Spence—and she often mistook her job for actual world domination, trying to run his personal life as well.
But Spence had nixed his personal life a long time ago. It was the Baldwin curse. He could be successful in his business life or his personal life—pick one—but not both. Since he objected on a very base level to going back to abject poverty, he’d long ago decided business was a safer bet than love.
Although, to be honest, he’d made a few forays into attempting both and had failed spectacularly.
“Oh, and did you hear that Spence here is rumored to be one of the top ten nominees for San Francisco’s most eligible bachelor?” Joe asked Elle, giving a snort as if this was hysterical.
Spence leaned forward and banged his head against the wall a few times.
“Don’t bother,” Elle said. “Your head’s harder than the concrete. And yes,” she told Joe. “I know. I figure that’s part of the reason he just threw his phone out the window?”
“I could just scare everyone off your ass for you,” Joe said to Spence.
He was kidding. Probably. And actually, Spence was more than a little tempted. This mess was his own fault, for trusting someone he shouldn’t have. As a result, the press had been having a field day with his success in a very large way, threatening his privacy and also his sanity.
Just thinking about the “most eligible bachelor” thing had him groaning.
“Listen,” Elle said more kindly now. “Go take a break, okay? Then you can come back and shut out the world and work.”
It was a well-known fact that Spence’s ability to hyper-focus and ignore everything around him was both a strength and a giant flaw. Great asset for an engineer/inventor, not so great for anything else, like, say, relationships. But truthfully, he was hungry, so a break sounded good. He headed toward the elevator.
“Uh,” Elle said, gesturing to his clothes. “You might want to . . .”
“What?” he asked, looking down at himself. So he hadn’t shaved in a few days—so what? And okay, maybe he lived out of his dryer, grabbing clean but wrinkled clothes from there in the mornings when he got dressed. Whatever. There were worse things. “Joe’s in his underwear.”
“Hey, at least I was wearing some today,” Joe said.
Elle took in the guy’s nearly naked form, clearly appreciating the view in spite of her being very much taken in the relationship department by Joe’s boss Archer Hunt. She finally shook it off and turned back to Spence. “You know damn well when you walk across the courtyard talking to yourself, hair standing up thanks to your fingers, all stubbly because you forgot to shave, and those black-rimmed glasses slipping down your annoyingly perfect nose, women come out of the woodwork.”
“They do?” Joe asked.
“It’s the hot geek look,” Elle said.
“Huh.” Joe rubbed his jaw, where he too had stubble. “Maybe I should try that sometime.”
“No,” Elle said. “You can’t pull off hot geek. Your looks say sexy badass, not geek, which apparently is like a siren call to crazy women everywhere.”
Joe looked pleased. “I’m okay with that.”
Elle ignored this and looked at Spence. “After your last romantic fiasco, you vowed to take a break, remember? So all I’m saying is that you might want to change up your look.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Slouch. Get a beer gut. Fart. Whatever it is that guys do to organically turn us off.”
“Wait,” Joe said. “You gave up sex after Clarissa dumped you, what, two years ago now? Like, willingly?”
“Something you should try sometime,” Elle said to him.
“Woman, bite your tongue.”
“No, really,” she said. “How do you even keep all their names straight?”
“Easy,” Joe said with a smile. “If I forget their name, I just take them to Starbucks in the morning and wait until the barista asks their name for their cup.”
Elle rolled her eyes. “Seriously?”