Chapter 7
Kassidy
Day three of hurricane captivity, and I'm developing a theory that the universe is running a psychological experiment on me.
Hypothesis: trap a romance novelist in a small room with an attractive, emotionally intelligent former Navy SEAL and observe how long it takes for her to abandon all pretense of professionalism.
Current data: not long.
The storm has passed—technically. The rain has stopped, the wind has downgraded from apocalyptic to merely obnoxious, and the sky is the washed-out gray of a watercolor left in the rain.
But the roads are still flooded, trees are down across the main highway, and the Tidehaven Inn remains our reluctant home for at least another night.
I've written two thousand words this morning.
Good words—alive, messy, honest words that don't sound like anyone but me.
My heroine finally stepped off that porch and into the rain, and she's drenched and terrified and more real than she's been in six months of drafting.
Whatever Diana's workshop shook loose, whatever the storm rattled open, the dam is cracking.
But I can't focus, because Tucker Brennan is doing push-ups.
Not in the room—he has that much decency.
He's in the narrow hallway outside our door, using the space between our room and the stairwell as a makeshift gym.
Through the crack in the door—which I left open for ventilation, not for viewing purposes—I can see him.
Shirt off. Arms locked, lowering, pressing up.
The muscles in his back shift like tectonic plates, smooth and controlled, and there's a sheen of sweat along his shoulders that catches the hallway's fluorescent light.
One hundred push-ups. I know because I counted. Which means I was watching for approximately eight minutes, which means I've written zero words in those eight minutes, which means I'm a fraud and a cliché and possibly a character in one of my own books.
He finishes, stands, stretches—arms overhead, torso lengthening, and the line from his shoulder to his hip is a study in geometry that I will now be unable to stop thinking about—and catches me looking through the crack in the door.
One eyebrow lifts.
I slam the laptop screen down, which is pointless because he already saw me, and also suspicious because who slams their laptop when they're "just writing"?
A knock. His knock—two quick raps, the exact same pattern every time. "Room service."
I open the door. He's pulled his shirt back on, which is both a relief and a tragedy. "I wasn't watching you."
"I didn't say you were."
"Good. Because I was writing."
"Must be a good scene. You looked very focused."
The smile he's suppressing makes my face hot. I step back to let him in, and he enters carrying two bottles of water and a granola bar, which he sets on the desk like an offering.
"How's the book?" he asks, settling into the chair he's claimed as his territory.
"Better. The words are cooperating for the first time in months."
"Good. You seemed different this morning. Lighter."
"I'm trapped in a hotel during a natural disaster. Lighter is relative."
"Relative to yesterday, you're lighter."
He's right, and I hate it. Something shifted overnight—not just the story but the weight of it, the suffocating pressure that had calcified around my chest like a cage. It's still there, but looser. Breathable.
"Want to explore?" Tucker asks.
"Explore what? We're in a twenty-room inn surrounded by flood water."
"The inn has a library. Saw it on the first-floor plan when we did the security sweep."
"You memorized the floor plan?"
"Standard operating procedure."
Of course it is.
The library is a small room on the ground floor, tucked behind the lobby—all dark wood shelves, cracked leather armchairs, and that smell: old paper, leather bindings, dust, time.
It makes something in me unclench. It's deserted.
The other evacuees are in their rooms or clustered in the lobby watching weather updates on someone's laptop.
"Oh," I breathe, running my fingers along the spines. The collection is eclectic—paperback thrillers mixed with literary classics, romance novels with cracked spines, a whole shelf of local history. "This is perfect."
"Thought you'd like it."
"You thought I'd like it?"
"You're a writer. Writers like books. It wasn't a complex deduction."
But it was. It was a small, specific kindness—remembering that I write, intuiting that a room full of books would feel like a sanctuary, bringing me here instead of suggesting the lobby or the conference room. It was thoughtful, and thoughtful is more dangerous than attractive.
I pull a battered Scrabble box from a shelf near the window. "Want to play?"
"I should warn you," Tucker says, taking the opposite armchair. "My sister is a speech pathologist. Family game nights were a bloodbath."
"I should warn you. I'm a novelist. Words are literally my profession."
"Then this should be interesting."
The first round is a feeling-out process. He plays solid, strategic words—QUARTZ on a triple letter, JINXED across the center. Respectable. But he's holding back, I can tell. Testing the waters.
My opening salvo: OBSIDIAN, using all seven tiles. Fifty-point bonus.
His eyebrows rise. "Showing off?"
"Establishing dominance."
"In Scrabble."
"In all things."
He laughs—a real one, full and warm—and something in the room shifts.
The formality that's been hovering between us since day one starts to dissolve.
We're not security and guest anymore. We're two competitive people hunched over a board game, and the stakes feel simultaneously trivial and enormous.
The game escalates. He plays ZEALOT on a double word score. I counter with EPIPHANY, hooking the Y onto his Z for maximum damage. He whistles through his teeth.
"Where'd you learn to play like this?"
"My mom. She's a retired English teacher. Scrabble was our version of combat training."
"Ah. So this is genetic."
"This is a lifetime of training for exactly this moment."
He plays VORTEX. I play EUPHORIA. He narrows his eyes at the board, recalculating.
"You know," he says, rearranging his tiles with a focus that's almost military, "you're different when you're competing."
"Different how?"
"Relaxed. You stop editing yourself."
The observation hits hard—because he's right. I am different. The anxious narrator in my head, the one who second-guesses every word and every feeling, goes quiet when there's a game to win. Competition is a framework I trust. Rules, strategy, measurable outcomes. No ambiguity.
"Maybe I need more competition in my life," I say.
"Or maybe you need to stop competing with yourself."
I look up from my tiles. He's watching me the way he does—steady, patient, seeing things I'm not ready to have seen. His hair is still slightly damp from his workout, and there's a looseness in his posture that's new. He's relaxing too. This room, this game—it's dissolving both our defenses.
"That's very insightful for a man who just played FROG for twelve points."
"FROG was strategic. I was setting up the triple word."
"FROG was surrender."
"Watch and learn." He plays GRIFTER off the G in FROG, landing the R on triple word. Forty-two points.
"You sandbagged me."
"I prefer strategic patience."
"You sandbagged me with FROG."
He grins, and it's disarming in its openness—boyish and sly and completely at odds with the stoic security professional who's been radioing status reports for three days. This version of Tucker Brennan—loose-limbed, competitive, delighted—is the most dangerous one yet.
We play for two hours. The lead changes six times. I take it with JUXTAPOSE in the final round, winning by eleven points, and the look on his face—impressed, annoyed, reluctantly admiring—is worth more than any word score.
"Rematch tomorrow," he says. Not a question.
"You're a glutton for punishment."
"I'm persistent. Different thing."
We clean up the board in companionable silence, returning tiles to the bag with the care of people handling something more fragile than plastic letters. When our fingers brush over the last tile—an X, worth eight points—neither of us pulls away.
"Tucker?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. For finding this room. For the game. For..." I gesture vaguely at the space between us, which contains too many things to name. "All of it."
"All of it," he repeats, and the words sound different in his mouth. Heavier. Fuller. Like all of it means something specific that neither of us is ready to say.
"Can I ask you something?" His voice is careful now. Deliberate.
"Depends on what it is."
"Your manuscript. The one you've been working on." He meets my eyes. "Can I read it?"
The question stops my breath. My manuscript.
My half-finished, emotionally raw, barely coherent manuscript that I haven't shown anyone—not my agent, not my editor, not even my best friend.
The manuscript that has a hero who is tall and quiet and military and observant, because apparently my subconscious has zero subtlety.
"It's not finished," I say quickly.
"I know."
"It's rough. Like, first-draft rough. Like, some of the scenes are just brackets that say INSERT EMOTION HERE."
"I don't mind brackets."
"Tucker, the hero is—" I catch myself. Can't say it. Won't say it. "It's personal."
"I know that too."
Of course he does. He reads Ishiguro. He understands subtext.
My heart is a metronome set to panic. Showing him the manuscript means showing him the character I've built from stolen details—the way he scans a room, the way his voice drops when he's being honest, the scar on his wrist. It means admitting that the romance I'm writing isn't just fiction. It's a confession.
"Okay," I hear myself say. "You can read it."
The word okay hangs in the air, and the room feels different now—charged with the weight of what I've just handed him. My whole messy, unfinished heart, disguised as fiction.
He sits down. Opens the laptop. Starts reading.
I pick up the Ishiguro he left on the armchair and pretend my hands aren't shaking.