Chapter 5
NATE
Istepped out of the shower, toweling my hair dry and drinking in the silence of my apartment. The Cubs game was already on my TV downstairs, my couch was calling, and I was within easy reach of a peaceful evening until my doorbell rang.
I froze with water still trailing down my spine. No one rang my bell unless they were lost, dying, or Alex. On occasion, it was another of my siblings, but unless your last name was Westwood, that doorbell was off-limits.
I wrapped a towel around my waist and stalked downstairs, annoyed despite not knowing who it was. When I yanked the door open, I found Kate standing there in soft navy pajamas that clung like they had a personal vendetta against my sanity.
She held up a bottle of wine like it was an official summons. I blinked once, then twice, then arched my eyebrows when she still hadn’t explained what she was doing. “What do you want?”
“I need a wine opener.”
I stared at her for a beat, waiting for her to tell me this was a joke or that there was a hidden camera and Alex was watching us make nice with each other. Neither of those things happened, so without a word, I shut the door in her face.
Shaking my head at myself, I went to the kitchen, yanking open drawers with more force than necessary. I owned three corkscrews. Naturally, the only one I found was in the last drawer I checked, because the universe enjoyed watching me suffer where she was concerned.
Storming back to the door, I opened it again and held the damned thing out to her. “Keep it. I’m not big on wine. It gives me a headache.”
Her whiskey-colored eyes flicked over my bare chest before snapping back to my face like she’d been burned. “That doesn’t shock me. You seem like the headache type.”
“I am, actually. Mostly, I get them when I’m around you.”
She accepted the corkscrew, but instead of leaving, she lingered in my doorway like a particularly judgmental houseplant. I narrowed my eyes at her. “If you’re done loitering, I was about to reclaim my evening.”
“We need to set some ground rules.”
“We have those,” I said. “They’re called professional courtesy and mutual avoidance.”
“That’s not going to be enough if we’re neighbors and working on the same bid.”
I gestured vaguely at myself. “I’m half naked. We can discuss it at the office tomorrow.”
She smiled sweetly, which should’ve been my first warning sign. Then she stepped past me into my apartment like she’d been welcomed with open arms. “Or we could just hash it out now and get it over with.”
As she glided across the living room, I closed the door slowly, questioning every choice I’d made that had led me here. Kate wandered further inside, turning in a slow circle as she surveyed the space.
My apartment was neat, minimalist but warm, with dark woods, steel accents, an oversized couch, and walls lined with built-in bookshelves. I had framed memorabilia on display between first-edition hardcovers.
She wrinkled her nose slightly. “This place is too… you.”
“It’s clean.”
“It looks like a hotel suite someone lives in.”
“I’m an adult. What’s it supposed to look like?”
I was also an introvert. My home was where I spent most of my time and it looked like it. Every interest I had was blatantly obvious here, but Kate still scoffed. “It’s supposed to look like a person actually lives here. Where are the clothes hanging over the chairs and the piles of mail?”
“I have a laundry hamper and a closet. That’s where clothes go, and who still gets paper mail anymore?”
“Uh, everyone?”
I shook my head. “Not if you know how to set it up so that everything gets sent electronically like a responsible earth dweller should.”
Kate had already turned her back on me, scanning my shelves with her fingers hovering close to signed baseballs and framed ticket stubs. My pulse ticked upward.
“I like sports,” I said flatly, mostly so she wouldn’t touch anything. Maybe if she knew it was important to me, she’d refrain from smearing her fingerprints all over everything. “All of them.”
“I noticed. Chicago Bears. Cubs.” She nodded toward a glass case. “You have season tickets framed. That’s pretty extreme.”
“Some might say it’s loyal,” I reasoned. “I’m a fan.”
“You also seem to be a fan of Jane Austin,” she said, sounding genuinely surprised as she studied one of my bookshelves.
I shrugged, my heart rate skyrocketing for reasons this insensitive woman would never understand. “My mom was a fan.”
“Oh. I guess that explains it, then.”
She picked up a framed photo from the side table before I could stop her, and instantly, my stomach dropped to my ass.
It was an older picture, sunlight catching bright, golden-blonde hair and green eyes crinkled in laughter.
My mother stood on the dock at our old lake house, wind whipping her sundress around her legs.
Kate studied it, her expression softening. “Is this your girlfriend?”
“My mother.”
She cleared her throat, color rising in her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I just assumed. She’s lovely.”
Her grip tightened slightly around the frame before she placed it back down with surprising care.
“She was,” I agreed.
Silence fell between us, stretching for moment before I turned and marched to the kitchen, grabbed the bottle, and uncorked it in one clean motion. I set the corkscrew beside it and held the bottle out toward her.
“Anything else you’d like to critique? My throw cushions? My personality? Or are we done here? Your wine is open, so you can leave.”
She leaned against the counter, relaxed and looking around like she planned on staying indefinitely. The soft cotton of her pajama shirt sleeve brushed my arm as she reached for the bottle. The contact was brief but it sent a bolt of something through me anyhow.
Fucking annoying.
“You’re very controlled,” she said slowly.
“It beats being invasive.”
She shrugged like she’d taken it as a compliment, but she still hadn’t moved back toward the front door, so I sighed and gestured at the staircase. “Do I have your permission to put some pants on?”
Her gaze dropped blatantly and unrepentantly to the towel riding low on my hips, then lifted again, her expression perfectly composed but the faintest flush tinging her cheeks. “That’s fine.”
“How kind of you.”
She ignored me, already drifting back toward my bookshelves, scanning titles and tilting her head at framed photos of my brothers, sister, and me at various games, charity events, and family gatherings. I shook my head, dragging a hand through my damp hair as I headed for the stairs.
Apparently, she was immune to quiet hints that she was intruding and not welcome here. The next few weeks might actually kill me if she was going to keep insisting on barging into my personal space like this.
I came back downstairs a few minutes later in sweats and a T-shirt, fully prepared to reclaim my apartment and my sanity, but Kate was sitting on a stool at my kitchen island, drinking wine from one of my crystal glasses.
I stopped halfway down the stairs, so surprised that for a second, I could only stare at her.
She must’ve found the glass while going through my kitchen cabinets.
Shameless woman.
“Did you reorganize my spice rack too?” I asked.
She didn’t even flinch before she retorted, “You alphabetized it wrong.”
I walked into the kitchen, grabbed a water bottle, and leaned against the counter across from her. The lights caught in her hair, the red strands practically glowing against the dark shirt she wore. She’d twisted her ponytail over one shoulder and it exposed the long, elegant line of her neck.
I looked away before my brain surrendered to my dick and I started making poor decisions. “You’re really still here?”
“You came back.”
“It’s my apartment. I live here.”
She swirled the wine slowly, studying it like she was evaluating a stock portfolio before lifting her gaze back to mine. “Hinds likes a Bordeaux.”
“You raided my cabinets and now you’re just casually sharing the preferences of the man who owns the company we’re trying to acquire?”
Her hazel eyes tracked me as I moved around the island to stand directly across from her. “I’m just making conversation.”
“You’re trespassing.”
Unsurprisingly, she completely ignored me. “I’ve known Abram since I was a little girl. He’s a family friend. My dad helped build his financial foundation from the ground up. He trusts us. If we present a bid with my family’s name on it, backed by your support, it’s a foolproof plan.”
I took a sip of water, considering her before I finally realized she was actually serious about all this. She wasn’t going to leave until we’d talked, and grudgingly, I had to respect that. She’d come here to do a job, and evidently, she was jumping right in.
“I beg to differ,” I finally offered. “Nothing is foolproof. Especially not if you go in thinking that it is.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t shoot me down right away. “It sounds like you’re speaking from experience.”
“I am. Blood is thicker than water, but money talks. That’s thicker than both. Hinds is going to look for the best deal. If we don’t deliver, he’ll choose someone else regardless of how many of your childhood birthdays he attended.”
She tilted her head, looking at me like she was seriously thinking about stabbing me with her wineglass. “Are you always so cynical?”
“I’m realistic.”
“Abram values loyalty above all.”
“I’m willing to bet that when it comes right down to it, he’s going to value retirement security more.”
Her lips pressed together, but there was a flicker of something thoughtful in her expression that told me she wasn’t dismissing my point.
That alone surprised me. Kate Vanderhaul didn’t seem like the type to consider opposing viewpoints without setting them on fire first, and yet, this was the second time she was doing it in less than two minutes.
Finally, she looked back up at me. “Do you really think he’ll walk away from us?”
I shrugged. “What I think is that he’ll walk toward whoever makes him feel safest. It’s an intimidating position to be in, facing down being retired for the rest of your life while knowing there’s no one out there with a biological obligation to step in if the shit hits the fan.”
She nodded slowly, quietly absorbing what I’d said for a long moment. I never would have guessed it, but Kate and I spoke the same language—risk assessment and human behavior when it was dictated by dollar amounts.
It was disturbingly easy to fall into this rhythm with her. She held up her glass slightly and I grabbed the bottle without a word, pouring her another.
“Thank you,” she said, not sounding remotely grateful.
“Don’t mention it.”
She sipped and watched me over the rim of her glass like she couldn’t quite decide whether or not to argue about the point I’d just made. I didn’t back down or say anything to soften it, instead finding myself just watching her right back, neither of us making a secret of what we were doing.
She was confident as hell, this woman. An absolute bulldog, but it took grit to survive the stock exchange floor. That kind of environment chewed people up and spit out their skeletons.
Just when I thought she’d finally decided to move on to whatever her next argument was going to be, she suddenly slid off the stool, her wineglass still in her hand. “Oh, I forgot something.”
The abruptness of her movement caught me off guard, but I nodded, already turning toward the living room where my paused game waited like a loyal dog. Kate left without saying anything else or giving my glass back, the door clicking shut behind her.
I exhaled, a little whiplashed after all that, but I grabbed the remote anyway and sat down, finally ready to watch the game in peace. Before I’d even pressed play, however, the doorbell rang again. I stared at the ceiling for a full three seconds before standing and going to answer it.
Kate stood there holding a brown paper bag in one hand and her wine in the other. She smiled. “I just had to go grab my food.”
She said it as if it explained everything, and before I could respond, she stepped past me again and returned to the stool like she had assigned seating in my fucking apartment. A place I hadn’t invited her into even once.
As she opened the bag, the scent of creamy pasta and something garlicky instantly wafted through my kitchen. A plastic fork followed the containers she pulled out, and she started eating with zero shame, scrolling through something on her phone between bites.
I frowned. “Are you going to offer me any of that?”
“No.”
“Wow.”
She popped a bite of pasta into her mouth, apparently unconcerned that I was watching her. I shook my head and blew out a long, slow breath. “Is this your actual personality or do you just hate me?”
She didn’t even hesitate. “I hate you.”
I gestured around us. “But you’re in my apartment. For the second time tonight.”
“I know. We should keep talking about Hinds.”
Without missing a beat, she launched into a monologue containing more tidbits of information about the man, random facts she spouted off like she was reading from a list. After she finished the last bite of her meal, she drained her wine and stood, brushing nonexistent crumbs off her pajama pants and placing the empty container on my counter like it was a gift.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Nate.”
She walked out before I could say a single thing, her hair swinging behind her like a final, dramatic punctuation mark. At least she didn’t slam the door, gently drawing it shut behind her instead.
For a very long minute after, I just stood there, staring into space like a complete idiot. Warmth spread through my chest, unwelcome and confusing, but the sensation felt suspiciously close to amusement. I shook it off, grabbed her to-go container, and tossed it in the trash.
The kitchen still smelled like her food and faintly, annoyingly, like whatever she used in her hair. I recorked the wine bottle she’d abandoned on my counter, turning it slowly in my hand.
How on earth does a woman like her exist?
She was a bully, mean and fiery, an intrusion in human form. As I finally pressed play on the game, I dropped back down on my couch and thanked God that the sweet, emotionally forward Emma I’d been talking to—and falling in love with—for years was absolutely nothing like her.
Not even close.