Calendar Girl (August) Chapter 3:
It’s time for Mia to meet her next client, and she leaves a none-too-happy Wes behind:
Stubborn man could not accept that I needed to do this. Pay this debt to Blaine on my own, as much to save my dad as to save myself. Finish one thing from start to finish and come out the victor. Knowing that once and for all, I was the owner of my destiny.
At this point I’m not surprised that Calendar Girl is still grasping wildly around for reasons to convince us why Mia just can’t accept Wes’ money, I just don’t get why she’s not sticking with the one from last chapter about how she’d always feel like their relationship wasn’t equal. That one at least made sense unlike this vague nonsense about how this is about saving herself/not being a quitter.
Mia talks a bit more about how Wes is going to need to learn to let her make decisions rather than just moving her into his home, which she went along with completely.
Not wanting to waste the little time we’d had left with one another, I didn’t ask about adding my stuff to his home to make my mark the way a woman normally would.
Mia meets her new client, Max, and makes a point of telling us how his eyes are almost identical to hers. You guys don’t actually think this might be Mia’s long-lost brother and she actually somehow stands to inherit a lot of money?
“Mia? You’re Mia, right?” the man said, but the rumble in his voice hit my heart and squeezed. Not with desire but a faint hint of something else. A familiarity shimmered across my senses, like a long lost dream I’d had, remembering it when I awoke, but unable to place the pieces appropriately.
I will be so angry if that is the conclusion to this story somehow.
There are more pointed references to how alike their eyes are, and when he tells Mia how beautiful his “eyes were haunted”, so something is definitely up here. Mia also keeps feeling like she’s on the verge of having some sort of flashback, which never happens.
Max promises her he’d never hurt her, which is a suspicious thing to tell someone pretty much out of nowhere. To assure her he’s not a creep, he explains that they’re headed back to his ranch and Mia will meet his wife Cyndi. So by the end of this story, Mia will probably stand to inherit loads of money and also solve a problem between Cyndi and Max with the suggestion they have a baby.
When they pull up to the ranch, it seems Max and Cyndi have beaten Mia to the punch because they’ve got a child and another one on the way.
Me, I was just thrilled he was married, and happily by the looks of it. I didn’t have to pretend to be a love interest. With my relationship with Wes so new, it felt like a godsend to find out I’d be playing the part of a long lost sister.
Wait just a second, Mia already knew this was the part she was playing. This seems like a crucial piece of information that Wes would have appreciated knowing before she left!
Mia gets along well with their four-year-old daughter, and everything seems to be going fine until this incredibly ominous passage:
She looked away, not making eye contact with either one of us. “We’re glad you’re here, Mia,” was all he said, but the way he said it was odd, telling, and anxiety-inducing. I got the feeling that sooner rather than later I’d be thinking the exact opposite.
Shit. Maybe these people are going to try to murder Mia, and this is going to devolve into a Texas Chainsaw situation. I’m into it!
Later, Mia has a phone call with Wes and he says he’s going to have his own private investigator dig into Max’s background. I suppose this is just par for the course when you have an ultra rich boyfriend. Honestly, though, in this case I’m in full support because Wes is right to be incredibly skeptical about how weird this whole situation is. You know things have gotten out of hand when I’m saying that Wes comes out looking like the most stable character of the book.
In a bizarre twist of fate, it turns out that Wes is good friends with someone named Aspen who owns a nearby ranch. Maybe Aspen will be Mia’s BFF for this story since I can’t think of any other reason to introduce this weird connection into the story except to tangentially involve Wes in the plot somehow while also provided Mia with her obligatory new friend.