Know Your Heart: A New Zealand - Tracey Alvarez Page 0,6

it wouldn’t be good enough. That Glen should just quit this stupid daydream like his father suggested and accept that remaining a lawyer was the sensible choice. Glen stopped and started, rewrote and trashed, even hovered his mouse over the files to delete the whole damn thing once not long after Tina had moved out.

Luckily, his muse, which he liked to picture as a Navy SEAL crossed with a ninja but twice as badass, stomped on the bastard critic’s tiny balls and refused to let Glen do it. And when a few months after his thirtieth birthday Grace sent him a link to a reputable New York literary agent’s first three chapters competition, he’d ignored the bastard critic’s eye-rolls and e-mailed off his entry.

Weeks later, the literary agent’s assistant informed him The Last Warlock’s Blade had won the competition. A 4:00 a.m. phone call that had nearly stopped his heart. The five-hundred buck prize money didn’t mean squat, but the agent requesting the rest of his manuscript for consideration? Priceless. Or it would be, assuming he could get the book finished in these next five weeks.

This was his big chance. Like hell would he blow it.

“You’ll make the agent’s deadline?”

“I’d better, or Darth Vader and my brother will never let me hear the end of it.”

“Force be with you, mate.” Nate held out his bottle.

Glen clinked his against it then leaned forward, bracing his forearms on the counter. Time to set the record straight. “I understand this is a shitty position you’re in, but I’m not changing my mind.”

With a huff, Nate sipped his beer. When he set it down, his gaze fixed steadily on Glen. “Aside from the brain-numbing boredom of staring at the same four walls of your townhouse, why is going back to Auckland such a big deal?”

“Do you know how many phone calls I’ve had to take since I arrived last Saturday?”

Nate shook his head.

“None,” said Glen. “Thanks to the God-awful cell phone coverage up here. I can pick and choose whose voicemail to answer. And how many times has someone turned up on my doorstep to bug me?”

“Other than Todd and I scrounging a beer?”

“Yep.”

“I’m guessing zero. Until this afternoon, that is.”

“Precisely. I signed a contract to stay here for six weeks, and once day forty-two arrives, I’ll be gone. Then the diva can have her house back. Until then? Nope. It’s the principle of the thing.”

Frown lines formed on Nate’s brow, but he didn’t argue, just sipped his beer.

Glen hadn’t told Nate everything. Yeah, a tiny part of Glen liked saying no to Savannah. But he had other reasons for staying in Bounty Bay for the next six weeks. Reason’s he didn’t feel right about sharing.

Nate took another swallow of beer and put down his half empty bottle. “She’s going through some tough times at the moment.”

Glen dragged a bowl of pistachios across the counter. Selected one and pried his thumb nail between the shells. Tough to open. Tough times. Savannah wasn’t the only one whose life had turned upside down. So had his sister-in-law’s. She’d packed up her three boys and left his brother a week before he’d accepted Nate’s offer to come north. That’d been a shocker—opening his door one evening to Erin’s tears and her confession she had nowhere else to stay.

“Media is all over her, are they?” Glen said. “Kinda goes with the territory of being a big fish in the tiny New Zealand pond.”

“I think it’s more than that.”

Yeah, and he thought it was more than just Erin growing sick of his brother leaving the toilet seat up one too many times. But although he’d willingly put a roof over her head, the idea of sharing his apartment with Erin and Jamie’s fifteen-year-old, eleven-year-old, and newly minted, rowdy four-year-old while trying to write was as appealing as a punctured eardrum.

“You always did worry about Savannah as if she’s made of blown glass. Your cousin’s got a spine of stainless steel.”

He got a speculative glance from Nate over that comment, the tension wiring through his friend’s jaw a good indication Glen was approaching mine-laden territory.

He gentled his voice. “Whatever happened between you and her and the whole Liam-gate saga is none of my business, but it didn’t crumple that steel in her. She’ll cope.”

“Sav’s no one’s victim. But at the moment, she’s…vulnerable. Go easy on her.”

A sharp twinge in his gut made Glen stand up and stretch. Nate had never shared the details of what happened in an Auckland bar