Page 2 of Art of Love

Chapter One

The last time Dylan had lived in her childhood home back in Pride, she’d had a freshly printed high school diploma and an associate’s degree, thanks to all the college classes she’d taken online during high school. All of her worldly possessions were packed in the trunk of her old Subaru.

She’d left without looking back, heading straight to Portland, where she spent the next four years immersed in classes on criminal law, police investigations, and forensic psychology. She had loved every single moment of it. The structure, the challenges, the sense of purpose—it was everything she had craved growing up in a town that had always felt too small for her ambitions.

To fill the hours she wasn’t studying, she started working for a small PI firm just outside of Portland. It hadn’t taken long for her to realize she had a knack for the work. Digging into people’s lives, uncovering secrets, piecing together puzzles—she had fallen in love with every bit of it. So, naturally, she’d started her own PI business after graduation. No boss. No limitations.

Now, two years later, her business was easily as busy as the last firm she’d worked for.

Which was how she found herself back in Pride at the beginning of the summer.

For the next two months, she was going to follow one of the nation’s sexiest chart-topping music artists.

Kevin Sinclair, her client, had walked into her freshly painted, one-room office in downtown Portland and hired her to get to the bottom of an old family tragedy. She’d been excited about the case, then she’d heard the name of the man he suspected.

Abe Collins.

The Abe Collins. Music superstar of the decade. The man whose voice filled her apartment on rainy nights when she was feeling lonely. The one she danced to while making breakfast on weekends when she never left her loft apartment. The one whose songs had gotten her through some of the darkest moments of her life after her father’s death last year.

That Abe Collins.

She’d had to work to keep her reaction neutral as Kevin slid a thick envelope across her desk. Inside were photos, schedules, and a neatly typed check with a figure that made her pulse skip. It was more money than she’d ever made on a single job.

Her PI license was valid in Oregon, Washington, and California, and she had assumed she would be heading to LA at first. After all, everyone knew that Abe lived on a horse ranch outside the city, tucked away in the hills where the press couldn’t hound him.

But then she’d heard a rumor. One that placed him a whole lot closer to home.

So instead of hopping on a flight to California, she’d taken the two-hour drive south and ended up right back where she’d started. In Pride, Oregon. The one place she had spent the last year trying to avoid.

The last time she had been here, it had been to bury her father and lock up the property she’d grown up in and had inherited.

Now, as she pulled into her small hometown, she wasn’t sure what unsettled her more—being back in a place she had sworn she’d never return to or that her first big case involved shadowing a man she had spent years obsessing over.

Either way, she figured that this summer was about to get a whole lot more complicated.

She hadn’t planned on stopping at her dad’s place. She had told herself that she’d just do a drive-by, maybe glance at the place from the road, and then check into the motel for the duration, or maybe see if one of the cabins was available at Pride’s B&B. But as she passed the familiar turnoff, her hands tightened on the wheel, and before she could talk herself out of it, she was pulling into the gravel driveway, the sound of crunching rocks beneath her tires loud in the otherwise silent afternoon.

The home, a one-story log cabin, stood just as she had left it months before—quiet, untouched, and frozen in time. The once warm and inviting log walls now seemed darker, older. The wide front porch was coated in a thin layer of dirt and pine needles. The rocking chair by the door, where her father used to drink his morning coffee, sat motionless, tilted just slightly, as if waiting for him to return.

She shut off the engine and let out a shaky breath.

It felt wrong being here without him. Empty.

For the last year, this cabin had represented memories she had wanted to escape, a place filled with sadness she wasn’t ready to face.

But there had been plenty of happy times before he had died. And now, something deep down caused her to reach for the car’s door handle.

Even the air seemed, different. Stale.

When she stepped onto the porch, the wood creaked beneath her boots, the sound causing so many memories to replay in her head. She almost turned around and ran back to Portland.

Then she remembered why she was there, and she straightened her shoulders and stepped forward. The key was exactly where she remembered it, tucked beneath a loose plank of wood near the edge of the deck. She crouched down and brush away the dirt and debris before pulling it free. It was cold in her palm, the weight of it heavier than she’d expected.

Holding her breath, she unlocked the door, stepped inside, and flipped on the lights.

The air was thick with dust and the faint scent of pine and old wood. The living room was just as she had left it—an old couch against the far wall, a fireplace filled with cold ashes, and a wooden coffee table cluttered with magazines her dad had read through daily. A layer of dust coated every surface, proof that no one had stepped foot inside since the day she had locked the place up after his funeral.

She ran a hand along the back of the couch, her fingers leaving a clean streak in the dust. It was strange being here without him. Even after all the time away, the cabin still felt like his space, a place she had only borrowed.