The Cliff House. RaeAnne Thayne

of the year, and he thought the world revolved around him.

      She had a couple of options. She could wander around the vast house playing Find the Pop Star. Or she could handle things a different way.

      She pulled out her phone and texted him.

      I’ll be in the sitting room off the great hall. I can wait for ten minutes, then I’ll go and we can reschedule. My time is valuable, too.

      He texted her back immediately.

      Sorry, babe. Forgot you were coming. Be there in a sec.

      She sighed. Cruz might be selfish and narcissistic, and her sister might have divorced him for completely understandable reasons, but he was still family and she loved him.

      She headed for her favorite spot in the house, a small, comfortable room near the sprawling kitchen, with a beautiful view of the Pacific. The windows opened here and she could usually find a lovely breeze, sweet with the sea and the scent of the climbing roses that grew outside.

      It also had three original Marguerites, an intricately painted table and two matching chairs.

      She knew to the penny how much Cruz had paid for them, a staggering amount that still made her blink.

      Cruz liked to think he had discovered the mysterious furniture artist. In a way, she supposed he had. It was a spread of this house in Architectural Digest where he gushed about her work that had put Marguerite on the wish list of every designer in California.

      If she had hoped she might have a few moments to herself to enjoy the functional art while she waited for Cruz, she was sadly disappointed.

      Someone was already there.

      A man who was asleep, his feet on the coffee table and a drink on the extremely expensive Marguerite side table—without a coaster.

      She knew this man, she suddenly realized. She had last seen him climbing into a luxury SUV outside the supermarket the night of Stella’s birthday party.

      He wasn’t staring at her now. He was out, probably sleeping off a night of partying with Cruz into the wee hours.

      She was aware of the sting of disappointment at discovering the man she had thought about several times since their brief encounter was only another one of her ex-brother-in-law’s sycophants and freeloaders.

      A gorgeous one, yes, but that didn’t make up for being a slob.

      She grabbed a walnut-and-leather coaster off the little tray—they were right there, for heaven’s sake—and bent over to slide it under his drink.

      “Well. That’s a lovely thing to wake up to.”

      She jerked her gaze down at the deep voice and that slight, hard-to-place accent and found his stunning green eyes open and fixed somewhere south of her neck. Only now did she realize the position she was in, bending almost over him so that her unfortunately abundant girls were just at his eye level.

      Making matters worse, the top button had come loose on her tidy dress shirt, she realized, revealing plenty of cleavage as well as a hint of the decadent lace from the minimizer bras she favored.

      “Oh.” She straightened quickly, blushing as she worked to button her shirt.

      He sat up, wincing a little. “Sorry. That was the drugs talking. I’m usually not such a pig, I promise.”

      She couldn’t help her inelegant snort of disbelief. A slob, a pig and a junkie. Typical of Cruz’s guests.

      It was completely unfair that he could still manage to look rumpled and sexy, hair messed and the perfect degree of dark stubble.

      She stepped away from him and glowered.

      “I have an appointment in this room momentarily with Cruz. We’re going to talk about big important, boring things, like taxes and annuities and investment properties. I suggest you find somewhere else for your nap. I’m sure there are all kinds of bikini-clad women out by the pool for you to ogle.”

      He blinked a little but she refused to feel guilty for the attack.

      “Wow. Thanks for looking out for me and my ogling.” He glanced at the coaster. “And my water glass, apparently.”

      “As Mr. Romero’s financial adviser, I am compelled to protect his assets. Have you any idea how much an original Marguerite goes for these days?”

      “Entirely too much, if you ask me, for hand-painted folk art.”

      She did her best not to hiss and tried to rein in her temper. “I didn’t. Ask you, I mean.”

      Yes, she sounded bitchy, but she was fairly protective of the artist in question.

      The insufferable man gave her a closer look. “You must be a fan.”

      Daisy had no idea how to answer that. “I admire the woman for building an artistic empire while keeping her anonymity.”

      “If Marguerite is a woman. From what I understand, nobody knows. Could be a ninety-year-old hillbilly with a pot gut and gout who woke up one morning in the nursing home and decided to pick up a paintbrush and go to town on some old furniture.”

      She gripped the strap of her briefcase to keep from walloping him on the side of the head with it. “Isn’t it funny how everyone has a theory, but nobody seems to have any proof?”

      “He makes sure of that, doesn’t he? And that only adds to the mystique, which I’m sure is quite deliberate. I wonder if everyone would still show the same kind of frenzied interest if they found out Marguerite is some middle-aged housewife with too much time on her hands.”

      “Make up your mind. Is Marguerite a bored housewife or a ninety-year-old man trying to pass the time in a nursing home?”

      “Does it matter? The taste arbiters don’t care. They only want what everybody else wants.”

      Who was this man? He seemed older than Cruz’s usual assemblage of unfortunates, the name she had given the acolytes or aspiring rockers or groupies who were drawn to her ex-brother-in-law’s fame.

      There was an intelligence in his eyes that seemed to glimmer through the bleariness of sleep and the haze of whatever drugs he was on.

      Who was he, and what was he doing here at Casa Del Mar?

      “Do you see something wrong with that?”

      “No. I always find it fascinating when something takes hold of the public consciousness. You have to wonder why, right? What makes a musician like Cruz hit big? Talent is part of it, certainly. He is unquestionably talented. A brilliant songwriter with a decent voice and a strong stage presence. But so are hundreds, maybe thousands, of others trying to make it big. There’s something else, some hidden cultural zeitgeist.”

      “Cultural zeitgeist.”

      “Do you know that humans are among only a very few species in the animal kingdom who excel at passing on certain behaviors through imitation, not DNA? Some songbirds do and great apes to a small extent, but that’s about it in the animal kingdom.”

      “What do songbirds and great apes have to do with Cruz Romero? Or Marguerite, for that matter?”

      “Look at the things we call fads. We want what someone else says we should want. Do you know that nobody cared about Vermeer until about two hundred years after his death, when somebody decided he was a genius and the rest of the world jumped on board?”

      “I guess it’s lucky Marguerite and Cruz didn’t have to wait that long, then, isn’t it?” she answered tartly.

      “Lucky for them, anyway,” he answered. “I’m not so sure about the rest of us.”

      Fortunately, her ex-brother-in-law wandered in before she could deck his guest.

      Cruz wore his stardom well, dressed in loose linen slacks and a T-shirt from his latest tour.

      “Daisy,