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who are you?” Mia demanded hotly.
    “I think the better question is, who are you ?” he asked irritably as he stepped around her to the coffee brewer. He pulled open the drawer beneath it where Nancy kept the coffee pods. “What’d you do, climb the fence? Is that how you got in? Because I don’t believe you walked up from the parking lot—I would have seen you.”
    Fence? What fence? She’d told Drago a crazy man was down on the bluffs—how could Drago miss him? She was going to kill him when she saw him, assuming this guy didn’t kill her first. After he made his coffee, which, inexplicably, he was now doing.
    The dogs . Why weren’t they helping her?
    She whirled around to the pillows before the hearth. The bedazzled little yappers attacked her feet every time she walked through the door, even if only a few minutes had passed, and yet they hadn’t moved one inch since this guy had come in. Only one had even bothered to lift its head. What the hell was happening ?
    The man pushed hair from his face, held up the coffee pod, and said, “Totally bad for the environment,” then shoved it into the portal. He turned the brewer on and looked at Mia.
    In the kitchen, under the lights, Mia noticed the dark circles under his eyes. His feet were dirty, his jeans unwashed—he looked even more like a bum in the soft light of the kitchen. But there was something about his eyes that seemed wrong with this look. They were so arresting .
    Something was off, something was wrong. Mia suddenly had that weird, parallel universe feeling, much like the time she arrived at Karen Elliot’s Oscar-viewing party with her seven-layer dip that was actually only three layers, and had walked in like she always did to find two strange men sitting on a strange couch playing video games. Several stunned, heart-pounding moments later, Mia remembered that Karen had moved the previous month.
    But this wasn’t the result of her being overstressed and preoccupied, which was definitely the biggest contributing factor in the Karen incident. This time, Mia was in the right house, and she had to act. “I don’t know what is going on here, but I’m calling the police,” she said firmly, and stepped over the pieces of cookie, as if a home invasion would be made worse if she ground cookie into the tile.
    “Be my guest,” he said easily. “And when they get here, you can explain what you’re doing in my mother’s house. Just out of curiosity, I’m going to try this again. What are you doing here? Other than trying to brain someone with a frying pan?”
    It took a moment for those words to sink completely into Mia’s brain. This guy with the glassy gorgeous blue eyes was Nancy Yates’s son ? Nancy had a son? Nancy, in her palazzo pants and the gray-streaked hair in a ponytail had a son who looked like a bum?
    No, that couldn’t be. First, Nancy would have mentioned him. By the way, my son is visiting. By the way, he’s a street bum.
    The bum waited for an answer as his coffee brewed. He seemed not the least bit self-conscious about his appearance. Mia was self-conscious for him. So much so, in fact, she couldn’t look away.
    He noticed her looking at him and his expression changed from mildly annoyed to definitely pissed. “Ah, I get it,” he said sharply, and shifted toward her. Mia instinctively leaned back, ready to employ rusty karate moves learned at the age of eight. “Yeah, go ahead,” he said, gesturing to himself. “You want to touch this? Do it.”
    There was a coldness in his navy-blue eyes, a strange look of resignation that was so weird, and so out of place. “The last thing I want to do is touch you.”
    He looked skeptical, the pompous prick. Maybe, Mia thought wildly, he didn’t know how bad he looked. He moved again, and Mia bumped up against the kitchen island. But Nancy’s son was already there, and he planted his hands against the island on either side of her, his body dwarfing hers. He stared down at her with