Chapter 3
A iden Parker!” I yell his name as if a) he doesn’t already know it himself, or b) he’s hard of hearing. Both are idiotic.
He shifts to his other bare foot, still holding open the door, still clutching that towel at his hips.
I keep my eyes trained on his face because I swear I cannot look down at the line of hair on his flat lower abdomen that disappears under the towel.
I want to. But now that I know who I’m staring at, it feels.
.. wrong. I mean, Aiden and I used to play hide-and-seek together.
And now he’s... I press a hand to my warm cheek.
I shake my head and clear my throat. “What are you doing here, Aiden?”
There. That is a reasonable thing to ask, especially given that he’s in the apartment where I’m about to post up for an indeterminate period of time. “Don’t you have a house or something?”
I’m still standing on the second step down, one hand balancing my huge suitcase behind me, so I have to crane my neck to look up at him.
I try to make it sound casual, like we just ran into each other at the grocery store instead of me desperately trying not to look at his happy trail. Or think about it.
“Would you like to come in?” he asks, as if it’s totally normal to invite someone in while wearing a towel.
But yes. Yes, I would like to come in. Because I have every intention of staying here tonight, and possession is nine-tenths of the law or something like that. And even if that’s not true, I will quote it as if it’s true later, if I must.
I grunt and start to heft my big suitcase behind me, but Aiden stops me by nudging my shoulder slightly and steps down.
Still clutching the edge of that towel that is going to haunt my dreams for a hot minute with one hand, he grabs my heavy suitcase with his free one and easily swings all of my stuff up onto the top landing.
It’s over in a matter of seconds, and I expel my breath in a heave as if I were the one who just slung a hundred and fifty pounds of clothes up three stairs in one fell swoop.
“Thank you,” I say as I step up into the apartment. First, damn. He’s tall. Like, really tall. And second, double damn. His shoulders. Watching them flex as he lifted that suitcase was... something .
Aiden closes the door behind me. “Just a sec,” he says. “Let me throw on some clothes.”
Or not. You could stick with the towel. That would be fine. I wouldn’t mind.
I scratch the back of my head, as if I can scrape those types of thoughts from my brain.
What was happening? Why was Aiden Parker in Mom and Dad’s attic apartment wearing a towel?
And when had he become so tall and so hot?
And most importantly, with all the inane things Mom mentions on the phone, why had she failed to mention said hotness?
I mean, Aiden and I were kids together. Running around the property and helping our parents with chores.
Then we hit high school, and it was like our relationship changed overnight.
I was Miss School Spirit, and Aiden was a grumpy loner type.
I was busy with schoolwork and extracurriculars, and Aiden was busy with.
.. I don’t know... wood shop and grumbling?
He spent more time with his dad learning about farming the apple trees and less time in the food barn and the inn, and we just sort of.
.. grew apart. The next thing I knew, I was off to college, and I only saw him in passing here and there over the years.
But this is definitely the first time I’d seen him in at least four years and for sure the first time I’d seen him wearing nothing more than a towel.
I rack my brain, trying to remember everything, anything Mom has said about Aiden in the past. He’d gone to college.
That seemed right. Where? I don’t know. Damn.
Why didn’t I listen more? He’d moved back to Harvest Hollow.
Did Mom tell me he had a house? I may have just made that up.
But he couldn’t have been living up here .
Mom wouldn’t have offered me the apartment if it wasn’t vacant.
Oh God. Does Mom have dementia? She’d sounded okay on the phone earlier, but dementia is tricky.
It comes and goes at first. What if she’s been steadily going downhill for years, and my failure to listen intently to her phone calls made me oblivious?
I am a bad daughter. We need to get her a good doctor. Immediately.
There’s a rustling in the bigger of the two bedrooms, which distracts me from my medical intervention plans for my obviously ailing mother.
Aiden comes back out wearing nothing but a pair of shorts.
Oh, great. So, still a clear view of his fully bare chest. Fantastic.
He is scrubbing a towel over his head to dry his hair, and I never knew until this moment that I have a thing for men messily scrubbing their wet hair with towels.
“Hey, there,” he says, grinning at me as if I’d just popped by to borrow a cup of sugar. Out here, neighbors do stuff like that. I try to imagine asking to borrow kitchen items from my neighbors in Brooklyn. They’d probably call the cops on me.
“So, yeah. I do have a house,” Aiden continues, causing me to stop thinking about borrowing kitchen items, “but there was a pipe burst this week. The plumbers are going to give me an estimate as soon as they finish a job at the Moose Lodge. My place is pretty much flooded at the moment.”
“So, you’re staying here?” My voice goes up to a weird octave I don’t recognize, and I point at the floor as if there is some question about where “here” is.
It is probably rude of me to blurt that out, but I’m tired and want a bath and bed, in that order, and now, well, Aiden’s standing here looking like an underwear model. It’s distracting.
“Yeah, Mom asked Lucy about it Saturday. I’ve been here since then.”
Lucy is my mom, and now I’m even more worried about her dementia because she clearly forgot she gave the key to Aiden last weekend.
And how the hell did Charlotte not see this coming from a mile away?
She should have known the second key was missing from the front desk.
There are two keys to every room. There always have been.
“Don’t tell me,” Aiden says, biting his lip in a way that makes me envious of a lip for the first time in my life. It’s a sort of half tug, half nip with two of his perfectly white, straight teeth showing. “You were planning to stay here too.”
“I was,” I say, which probably makes me Captain Obvious, since I’m standing here with no shoes and a suitcase and the key still dangling from my hand. I am also nodding way too hard. As if an excessive amount of nodding will dispel the awkwardness. I feel it. I know it. But I cannot stop.
“Did Miss Guin get you?” Aiden asks next, eyeing my legs, his brow arched.
I glance down at my muddy jeans and have to stop myself from audibly groaning.
“She did” is my next obvious statement, and I am not proud of it.
“She’s pretty stealthy,” Aiden says.
“The stealthiest. The stealthiest of goats,” I pronounce.
Okay, that was dumb. And there is more nodding.
Though it seems more polite than “Are you planning to leave soon, because I’m not really looking for a roommate?
” I mean, he can go to his parents’ house, right?
They have a big place at the far end of the property with lots of bedrooms. I can’t stay downstairs.
Mom turned my room into a craft room years ago.
It’s full of yarn. Like, a hoarder amount of yarn and sewing machines and crochet hooks and probably some quilting stuff and a not-uncreepy collection of dolls on one wall.
I think there may be some teddy bears too.
The point is, I’m not staying down there.
Even if I managed to find a blow-up mattress, I can’t sleep with dolls staring at me.
Besides, this is my parents’ inn, and this is my apartment to use whenever I come home, and just because I never come home— sigh .
Okay, I can totally see why the Parkers would have thought it was completely fine for Aiden to stay up here.
They couldn’t have known I would unceremoniously arrive after being dumped and fired on a random Wednesday, when I haven’t been here in years.
“How long will you be here?” Aiden asks next.
The towel has dropped to one bare shoulder, and he’s looking at me intently.
This time he’s clearly the one trying to sound casual, and his voice goes up an octave.
I can tell he’s hoping I’ll just say one night .
It’s written all over his face. His chiseled, handsome face.
I have always been a sucker for tall, dark, good-looking men.
And he’s quintessential. Like, textbook.
But Aiden’s hotness is not going to help the who-gets-this-apartment issue, so I purse my lips and answer his question. “I’m not really sure. A couple of weeks, probably.” I kinda shrug and splay my hands wide to soften the blow.
His eyes widen as if I’ve just told him I quit my job to become a bounty hunter or something. “A couple of weeks?” The incredulity in his voice slightly offends me. I know I haven’t been home in years, but is it really that unbelievable that I’d show up out of the blue for two whole weeks?
Okay, yes, it is.
I’m the one-off here. Not Aiden.
“So, uh, is there anywhere else for you to stay?” Aiden asks.
He’s let go of his bottom lip, and now he’s kinda wincing.
But it’s a truly sympathetic wince, totally unlike Steve’s fake winces from this morning.
Aiden’s is more like a we-have-a-problem-and-I-know-it’s-probably-going-to-end-with-my-eviction type of wince.