Love Handles (Oakland Hills #1)(94)

“Liam said that?”

“He did.”

Richard pursed his lips, squeezed them between his fingers, and sighed through his nose. “I can buy you another two months,” he said. “After that you can include me in the two dozen.”



It took her three days to reach the teen pop star she’d first met as an incontinent, hyperactive five-year-old.

“Oh, I totally got it, Bev,” Annabelle said that Saturday morning, sounding short of breath. From the sound of the music and the humming machines in the background, Bev guessed she was at the gym. “Don’t stress about a thing.”

Bev was on a long walk through Golden Gate Park, sucking in as much fresh, foggy air as she could after a week of living and sleeping in the Fite building. For once getting her heart rate up felt really, really good. Nobody needed to know she was wearing a Fite bra and Power Panties, or that her new crosstrainers made her want to break into a run. Liam couldn’t nag or tease or pressure her to do anything anymore, because he was gone.

Because he left.

After she’d rejected him.

Bev massaged her temples. “Whatever you do, I need to know it’s okay with your mother.”

“My mom? Please. She wants me to accidentally release a sex tape on my eighteenth birthday.”

“No!” Bev remembered Tina Tucker as being a bit—ambitious—about her daughter, but wow.

“It’s something I was going to do anyway. I’ll just make sure to wear Fite when I do it,” Annabelle said, laughing when Bev squealed in protest. “Not the sex tape. Something else. Anything in particular you’re marketing right now?”

Bev shoved aside her memory of Annabelle gluing macaroni to empty toilet paper rolls, feeling ancient at thirty. “Something not too sexy. Something other girls could wear, not just a pop star.”

“No, you’ve got it all wrong, Bev. I am the pop star. That’s why they’ll want it.”

Bev smiled, grateful but uneasy. “I’ll mail you something new we’re working on. Just a hooded sweatshirt, but it’s got a huge Fite logo that will stand out in pictures.”

“Send me more than that,” Annabelle said. “I’ll improvise.”

“You don’t have to go crazy—”

“Leave it to me, Bev. I’m really good at this stuff.” Then the machine in the background came to a sudden stop, and Bev could hear her gulping down water. “I was ready to take the Annabelle brand to the next level anyway.”

“Promise me you’ll show your mother first.”

“Bev, she so doesn’t care.”

“Humor me.”

“Tell you what. Send me extra Fite merch, and she’ll place them herself. She loves underground marketing. Since I fired her as my manager she’s been kinda bored.”

Poor Tina. “I’ll send a truckload.” Bev thanked her again and hung up to get to work. She swung around so fast she nearly collided with a trio of cyclists coming up behind her. One of the guys screamed, careening off the road while his friends laughed and weaved around her, Lycra-butts pumping. She watched them ride off around a grove of eucalyptus, mentally screen-printing Fite logos on each skinny ass.

She had to get back to Fite to write up the cut sheets and sample requests so they could start working first thing Monday morning. If she was fast enough, she thought, breaking into a jog, she could find enough new stuff lying around the showroom to make it into the Saturday afternoon mail.

Liam wouldn’t see that she ran east through the rest of the park, all the way down the panhandle and up and down through the lower Haight, across town and south of Market Street. Liam wouldn’t see anything.

Because Liam had left.



One week without Fite and Liam was restless, disoriented, cranky, and bored out of his mind.

After two weeks he started seeing things. Hallucinating, like a shipwreck victim on a raft in the middle of the ocean, seeing bottles of water and ten-course meals everywhere. Except what he saw, while he washed the dishes and painted the trim in his bathroom and replaced the garbage disposal, was Bev standing next to him, sharing in his chores, in his life. Sometimes—all right, often—she was naked, which was some consolation.

The third week, things got scary. On this Monday evening drive over to Oakland he could see Bev sitting next to him in the passenger seat, disturbingly with no skin showing, because going to have weekly dinner at Mom’s was just the sort of thing people did together. Committed, boring, married people.

“Thank God somebody’s going to feed me,” April said. It was his sister, not Bev, who sat next to him as they passed onto the eastern span of the bridge. “I’ve been starving since you tore up the kitchen.”

“Property comes with responsibilities,” he said. “I’ve been putting maintenance projects off too long.”

“Replacing the tile countertops with hand-crafted concrete was hardly necessary.”

“You don’t like it, get your own place.”

She sighed. “I wish you’d just call her.”

When they pulled up the road to his mother’s house, he only glanced at Bev’s house, determined to be relieved if her RAV4 wasn’t in the driveway.

But it wasn’t in the driveway, and when the dogs burst out of the house and ran across the yard to nibble on his legs, Liam wasn’t relieved. He hadn’t been breathing well since they pulled off on Broadway, and now, realizing he wouldn’t see her today, after he’d worn a new shirt and his favorite cologne and shaved extra close—