Chapter One #2
I laughed as I walked away.
The man had caught me naked in his hot tub, negotiated my surrender, and somehow ended up with dinner.
I was beginning to suspect I hadn’t won that deal.
***
Dad’s second home sat a few minutes away through the trees on another wooded lot in Redmont, the small Colorado mountain town where wealthy people like my father bought secluded vacation houses and then spent most of the year somewhere else.
I let myself in through the rear door and crossed the quiet kitchen while the last of the afternoon light stretched across the hardwood floor.
The house was older than Dane’s gleaming new build but hardly rustic.
Dad liked comfort, good architecture, and anything that could be maintained by somebody else.
I had been coming here on and off for years, which was why staying unnoticed had been so easy.
I already knew the alarm code, where everything was kept, and which guest room I preferred.
I set the drowned paperback on a dish towel and carefully fanned its swollen pages.
It looked terminal.
Upstairs, I showered away the hot-tub water and changed into a soft tank with high-waisted shorts. My long honey-brown hair was still damp when I returned to the kitchen, but at least I no longer looked as though I’d recently been dragged out of a spa by the authorities.
My phone buzzed on the island.
Paige.
A smile tugged at my mouth before I even opened the message.
Paige Winslow had been my best friend since prep school. We had survived teenage disasters, bad dates, career changes, my father’s remarriage, and enough romance novels to have extremely specific opinions about fictional men.
PAIGE: Please tell me you started the monster romance I sent you. I need someone to discuss Chapter Nine with immediately.
I glanced toward the ruined book.
CHRISHELLE: I was reading this afternoon until my book suffered a catastrophic water-related incident.
Her reply arrived almost instantly.
PAIGE: You are vacationing in Europe. How are you destroying books? Your only responsibilities right now are wine, cheese, beautiful scenery, and fictional men with questionable anatomy.
I laughed, then winced at the word Europe.
CHRISHELLE: I successfully managed the wine and the book until the water incident. I deserve partial credit.
PAIGE: You can earn the rest by finally sending me a picture. I have received zero photographic evidence that this fabulous vacation exists.
The guilt that had become increasingly difficult to ignore settled in again.
Since I’d arrived in Redmont, I had dodged video calls with bad timing, changed subjects when she asked where I was eating, and offered vague descriptions that sounded European enough as long as nobody asked for specifics.
Paige was beginning to ask follow-up questions.
I wasn’t going to manufacture fake vacation photos. The lie was already bigger than it should have been, and there had to be a point where even panic respected a boundary.
CHRISHELLE: I currently have wet hair and absolutely nothing worth photographing. I promise you something tomorrow.
The typing dots appeared again.
PAIGE: Tomorrow. Then enjoy the rest of your night before you come home and vanish into that fabulous new kitchen.
My amusement disappeared.
That kitchen had been the reason for the imaginary vacation in the first place.
After culinary school and years in New York restaurant kitchens, I’d finally landed the job I had been working toward: head chef of a high-profile place opening after Labor Day.
The menu would have been mine. For the first time in my career, my name would have been attached to something from the beginning.
Then the financing collapsed and the owner turned out to be a fraud. Within days, the restaurant and my new job were gone.
The New York restaurant world knew what had happened. I hadn’t hidden it professionally, and people who knew the business understood the difference between losing a position because you couldn’t do it and losing one because the restaurant never opened.
Dad was different.
Carlton Palmer loved me fiercely, but he was also a venture capitalist who treated problems like invitations to make calls. If I told him, he would have investors, restaurant groups, and favors lined up before I finished the story.
That was exactly why I couldn’t let him. I wanted my next job to belong to me, not to someone who owed my father a favor.
So while Dad, Vanessa, and Paige still believed I was about to take over the restaurant, I panicked. I invented a long European vacation before opening week and drove to Colorado instead.
My car was still hidden inside Dad’s garage, Paige was waiting for photographs from a trip that didn’t exist, and Dad thought I was returning to New York for a job that no longer existed.
He and Vanessa were due in Redmont on Monday.
I had three days left to tell the truth. That should have felt like plenty.
My gaze fell on the clock over the range. I still had almost half an hour before I needed to go next door, and I should have used it to think about dinner.
Instead, curiosity won.
I picked up my phone and typed Dane O’Shea into the search bar.
The results loaded so quickly that I wondered whether the internet was laughing at me too.
The first page was filled with hockey photos, player profiles, trade reports, interviews, and pictures of the man who had just watched me nearly drown six inches below the surface of his hot tub.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
I opened one of the player profiles.
Dane O’Shea was thirty-two years old and a professional defenseman. More importantly, judging by the number of results attached to his name, he wasn’t an obscure one.
I knew almost nothing about professional hockey despite the sports romances Paige routinely made me read. Apparently fictional knowledge about locker rooms and road trips did not translate into identifying actual players when they appeared beside hot tubs.
I opened a recent article and stopped halfway through the first paragraph.
Dane had been traded to the New York Foundry.
New York.
Of course he had.
I had driven across the country because I needed distance from the city where my career had abruptly fallen apart, only to discover that the naked-trespass victim next door was about to move there for work too.
I scrolled through another profile. The photographs confirmed what I had already noticed in person: he was absurdly large, though hockey gear somehow made him look even bigger.
There were game shots, an interview photo in a suit, and one older image where the beard was shorter and the expression much less amused.
There was plenty more I could have read, but that began to feel intrusive after I had already used his hot tub without permission.
I closed the browser.
His job didn’t change anything important. He was still the man next door, and I was still the woman who had been trespassing on his property. If anything, his public life made his willingness to keep my private mess to himself seem more valuable.
The kitchen clock read 6:31.
I needed to decide what I could make from chicken, rice, eggs, greens, fruit, yogurt, and the culinary depression that was apparently Dane O’Shea’s grocery list.
That part I could handle.
Cooking had never been the problem.
I went to the pantry, found a canvas market tote, and started pulling together a few things from Dad’s kitchen that would make the meal better without violating my own promise to work mostly with what Dane had.
By the time I added lemons, garlic, shallots, fresh herbs, good olive oil, and a small jar of Dijon, the contents suggested at least three possibilities.
My mood improved almost immediately.
Food made sense to me in a way the rest of my life currently did not. Ingredients had properties, heat changed them, and salt had consequences. If something was wrong, I could taste it, adjust, and know whether the correction worked.
People were harder, especially fathers.
Career failure that technically wasn’t your failure but still left you unemployed was worse.
And the enormous hockey player next door had somehow become part of the equation before I even knew who he was.
I carried the tote to the mudroom and slipped my sandals back on.
For nearly two weeks, hiding in Redmont had been simple because I had arranged my days around avoiding other people.
I kept the car in the garage, stayed on the private property, ignored calls when I didn’t feel ready to lie convincingly, and told myself I would deal with reality before Dad arrived.
Until this afternoon, nobody had interfered with that plan.
Now the man next door knew I was here.
Worse, I had voluntarily given him my name, promised him dinner, and negotiated future permission to use the hot tub I had been stealing in peace.
At least the next part would happen on territory I understood.
I checked the time once more, picked up the tote, and headed for the door.
At seven, I had to walk into Dane O’Shea’s kitchen on purpose, and dinner wasn’t the only thing I was looking forward to.