House Sitters

Chapter 1

The bed was too soft, the room was too warm, and Alex’s phone said it was almost nine, which meant she had officially slept through the exact window of “acceptable adult wake-up time” and landed somewhere in “no longer employed if this were a workday.”

She lay there a second longer, blinking at the ceiling, piecing together where she was.

Right. The mountains. Two weeks. Cass and Marisol’s ridiculous, gorgeous house, all reclaimed wood and glass and a primary suite so comfortable it should be illegal.

She’d made it in just ahead of the storm warning, dropped her bag inside the door, and fallen face first into the best mattress topper money could buy.

She hadn’t even brushed her teeth. A little unlike her, but the drive up the pass had taken twice as long as it should have, white-knuckled the whole way, and by the time she got the door unlocked she’d had nothing left.

She sat up, rubbed both eyes hard enough to see stars, and shuffled out of the primary suite in yesterday’s leggings and one of Marisol’s old college hoodies she’d found folded on the dresser, because packing pajamas had apparently not made her list of priorities either.

The house was quiet in that particular way a snowed-in house gets quiet, muffled and close, like the whole world had been tucked under a blanket. Which was why the sound stopped her cold.

Someone was breathing. Slow, deliberate, audible.

Alex’s stomach dropped somewhere around her socks. Cass and Marisol were in Portugal. She had checked the location on Marisol’s location share not twelve hours ago, a little blue dot very much not in the Rockies. Which meant the breathing belonged to someone who was not supposed to be here.

The whole downstairs was one enormous open room, living room bleeding into kitchen with nothing but a long island to mark where one ended and the other began, no walls, no doorways, nowhere to hide and nothing to duck behind.

Alex grabbed the first thing her hand found on the console table by the stairs, which turned out to be the universal remote, black, chunky, entirely useless as a weapon unless she intended to change someone to death, and crept forward with it held out in front of her like it might do something.

It did not prepare her for what she saw.

A woman stood in the middle of the open living space, facing the wall of windows, in nothing but a sports bra and a pair of leggings so small they barely qualified as clothing, one leg lifted, arms stretched overhead in some kind of pose that looked like it belonged on the cover of a magazine Alex would never subscribe to.

Beyond her, the whole mountain range spread out white and silent under a sky the color of a bruise, snow still coming down in fat, lazy flakes.

Alex stood frozen halfway across the open floor with a TV remote pointed at a stranger’s back and thought, with total, humiliating clarity, did Cass get me a Christmas present?

She rubbed her eyes again. Hard. The woman was still there.

Not a present, then. A person. A very fit, very underdressed, very real person, currently unaware she had an audience, breathing out slow through what Alex vaguely recognized as some kind of tree pose, if trees had abs like that.

“Okay,” Alex said out loud, to no one, lowering the remote an inch. “Okay, that’s a person. That’s a real person in this house.”

The woman’s head turned. Not startled, exactly, more like she’d clocked the sound a full second before Alex spoke and was only now getting around to acknowledging it, which was somehow more unsettling than if she’d yelped and fallen over.

“Morning.” She said it like this was a completely normal Tuesday, like there wasn’t a stranger in leggings holding a remote at her from across the room. “You must be Alex.”

“I—” Alex looked down at the remote in her hand, then back up, then set it on the nearest end table with as much dignity as she could manage, which was not much. “How do you know my name?”

Dani tipped her chin toward the kitchen island without breaking her pose, unhurried, like she had all the time in the world and Alex’s small crisis could wait its turn. “Folder.”

Alex followed the gesture. Two manila folders sat propped against the backsplash at opposite ends of the island, like place settings at the world’s strangest dinner party.

One said ALEX across the front in Cass’s loopy, unmistakable handwriting.

The other, all the way down at the far end, said DANI in a tidier hand Alex didn’t recognize, probably Marisol’s.

“Right.” Alex set the remote down properly this time, feeling only slightly less unhinged. “And you are?”

“Dani.” She unfolded out of the pose with an ease that made Alex’s lower back ache in solidarity, then pressed her palms together at her chest and gave a small bow, the way people did in videos Alex had definitely never watched all the way through. “House sitter.”

“I’m the house sitter.”

“Huh.” Dani tilted her head, entirely unbothered, like this was an interesting puzzle and not a crisis. “Guess there’s two of us, then.”

Alex opened her mouth, closed it, and decided that whatever was happening here required caffeine before it required conversation. “I need coffee before I can be surprised properly. Give me a minute.”

“There’s not really a proper way to be surprised,” Dani said, already lowering back down into some kind of stretch, apparently at total peace with the fact that this conversation was not over. “But I hear you. I’ll be here.”

“Fantastic,” Alex muttered, and beelined for the kitchen.

The coffee maker was, blessedly, exactly where she remembered it, and she had grounds measured and water going before her brain had fully caught up to the fact that there was a stranger in her best friend’s house doing yoga in front of a blizzard like it was nothing.

She braced both hands on the counter and stared at the machine dripping, willing it to go faster.

“You want to finish with me?” Dani called from across the island, not even looking over. “Ten more minutes. Really sets the tone for the day.”

“I would rather eat glass.”

“That’s a lot of resistance for someone who hasn’t even tried it.”

“I’ve tried plenty of things,” Alex said, pulling the fridge open harder than necessary. “I don’t need to try being folded in half at nine in the morning to know it’s not for me.”

She was already elbow-deep in the produce drawer, and what she found there did something to steady her considerably.

Bacon. A carton of eggs, the good brown ones.

A jug of buttermilk clearly meant for pancakes, because of course Cass had thought of that, Cass thought of everything, and beside it, tucked in like an afterthought, a truly baffling amount of kale, two kinds of protein powder, and something dark green already blended into a jar that Alex would not have touched with the remote.

“What,” Alex said slowly, holding up the jar between two fingers, “is this?”

Dani came around the end of the island, sweat-damp and unbothered, and reached past her to take it back with an air of real fondness. “Breakfast.”

“This is not breakfast. This is a swamp.”

“It’s celery, spinach, ginger, and lemon.”

“It’s a swamp,” Alex said again, setting the eggs on the counter with the confidence of a woman who had already decided how this morning was going to go.

“I’m making bacon. And eggs. And, if the universe has any mercy left in it, pancakes, because apparently my best friend anticipated exactly this crisis and left me buttermilk. ”

“Your arteries are going to file a complaint.”

“My arteries can take it up with the buttermilk.” Alex cracked an egg one-handed into a bowl, mostly to prove she still could this early in the morning. “You’re welcome to some, if the swamp doesn’t fill you up.”

Dani unscrewed the jar and took a long drink of it, watching Alex over the rim with something that was almost, but not quite, a smile. “I’ll stick to my swamp. But I’ll take a cup of that coffee. Since we’re apparently doing this together.”

“We are not doing anything together.” Alex reached for the coffee pot anyway, poured a second mug, and slid it down the counter without quite looking at her.

“We are two people who got double-booked into the same house by a couple who apparently cannot communicate, and we are going to be extremely civil about it until the snow stops and one of us can leave.”

“Sure.” Dani wrapped both hands around the mug, and there was definitely a smile now, small and entirely too pleased with itself. “Extremely civil.”

Outside, the wind picked up hard enough to rattle the windows, and the trees at the edge of the property vanished into white.

Neither of them moved to check a phone for a forecast. Neither of them needed to.

The storm had already made its intentions clear, and looking at it now, mug in hand, watching Dani lick a bit of green off her thumb like it was nothing, Alex had the distinct, unwelcome feeling that the storm was not going to be the only thing settling in for a while.