Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
Nova
I wake up with an aching hip, a sore neck, and…warm.
I frown because I distinctly remember feeling cold just before exhaustion had risen up and claimed me.
Steve must be sprawled out on my chest, slowly suffocating me as he’s wont to do.
It’s the fatal flaw in his life plan of causing as much trouble and eating as much food as possible—if he kills his owner, he can still do plenty of the first, but the last will be difficult.
Unless he starts noshing on my dead body.
And I hold no false notions about him feeling bad about losing me—he’d definitely snack on a dead me, especially if my chonky boy got the hungries.
A bead of sweat starts to drip down between my breasts.
I wince, scrub at it, knowing this is far too much dead-body talk for whatever time in the morning it is—well, really, my dog eating my corpse is too much dead-body talk for any time of the day. As for the hour, I’m not sure what it is, aside from early, based on how tired I still am.
Though, that might be depression speaking.
Exhaustion pulling at every limb, the urge to pull the blankets over my head, to sleep for a thousand hours, every muscle aching.
Either that or I’m tired and sore because I’m sleeping in a nest of clothes on a cold hardwood floor.
“Right,” I whisper, peeling open my lids and blinking until my eyes adjust to the light…
From the fireplace.
From a much larger fire than I built.
I frown. Turn my head to the side, doing more blinking when I spy the under-cabinet lights are also on. And…cue more frowning.
I know I turned those off before I went to bed.
Same as I know that my fire hadn’t had a pile of logs on it, that the basket hadn’t been full to the brim with firewood.
That I hadn’t been warm.
“What the hell?” I whisper, taking in the blankets—the extra blankets that had been draped over me and the…extra pillow behind my head that smells spicy and male and far too much like Lake for my own peace of mind.
I lift my head and Steve grunts in protest, his little head poking out from a blanket that I definitely hadn’t tucked over him.
Because I only grabbed the one blanket last night.
The fire. The blankets. The pillow. Steve wrapped up like an oversized burrito.
I either have a temperature fairy—or Lake has proven his humanity again.
Sighing, I sit up, immediately shivering against the cool air, but it also helps wake me up. I need to focus, figure out what I’m doing with my life.
I need to figure out what the fuck Ella had been thinking, sending me on a collision course with the grumpy Lake.
For that, I need my phone.
It’s probably dead, but I have a charger in my purse.
I’ll track both down and plug it in, wait for the bare minimum of charge, and then yell at my friend.
There. Good plan.
Mentally, I clap my hands together and say, Break!
But I’m moving slowly as I force myself from the blankets, as I slide carefully away from the burrito that is Steve.
My purse is on the counter, but my phone isn’t inside.
And neither is the charger.
“What—”
But I don’t finish the question because then I spy my cell and the charger—plugged in at the other end of the island.
Something I definitely didn’t do last night.
Something that makes butterflies fill my stomach.
Lake.
It doesn’t matter.
I exhale, round the counter, and unplug my cell, looking at the screen and seeing a bevy of missed calls and text messages.
But only one is from the person I want to talk to.
I delete the unwanted texts, the voicemails, then jab at Ella’s text chain.
Please tell me you got laid.
A bolt of outrage, my shoulders tensing, annoyance gathering in my belly.
Was she fucking serious?
I do some more jabbing, this time at her name in my contacts list.
The call rings once before my friend’s voice comes onto the other end. “Please tell me that you climbed that giant hockey player like a tree and got stuck on his branch like a naughty, naughty pussy cat.”
Was. She. Fucking. Serious?
“You’ve lost your mind, Daniela,” I snap.
My friend clicks her tongue, sighs sadly. “That’s a no then.”
“You told me it was your brother’s house,” I grind out.
“Well, for all intents and purposes, Lake is like Knox’s brother. And Knox is my brother, so…” She trails off then pops her lips. “Ipso facto my brother.”
“I don’t think you’d get arrested for fucking Lake,” I say. “So table your ipso facto, and tell me what the hell you were thinking? Was I just going to use that spare key on the porch, walk in on a man I don’t know and be like, Surprise! I’m here to crash at your place!”
A beat then, “Well…yeah,” she says.
I sigh, rub at the ache in my forehead. “You’ve lost your mind.”
Ella’s voice softens. “We needed to get you out of there. Knox said that Lake is a good guy and that his new house is huge. Plus, it’s in Lake Tahoe. You love being up in the mountains. I just figured it would be as good a place as any when you told me what happened with George—”
I wince and she somehow picks up on that through the airwaves, or maybe she just knows me far too well.
“—with he-and-she-who-must-not-be-named,” she corrects and I know her well enough that I can picture her biting at her bottom lip before straightening her shoulders, lifting her chin.
“Lake is pretty and successful and he’s known for keeping things light and easy and commitment-free.
I just figured some horizontal fun time would be good for you after—”
“It’s been a day, Ells,” I say, heart squeezing but annoyance fading. Because she’s trying to look after me. “It’s too soon, even for my free love and easy breezy soul.”
A long pause. “Right,” she whispers, and I know there’s more lip-biting commencing. “I’m sorry.”
“I know, honey,” I tell her softly.
Another moment of quiet. “Is the house at least nice?”
“It’s”—I pause and look around at the wood and stone, the painted cabinets, the hand-scrapped floors, the wide windows behind which the snow falls in a flurry—“incredible.”
A relieved breath. “There’s that at least.”
“And what about the room you stayed in?” she asks. “Is it luxurious? Knox says he’s spent an ass-ton of money on the place.”
“Is ass-ton a precise measurement?”
She giggles and I relax, annoyance gone, worry that she’s worried fading, and settle into a dishfest with my best friend.
I glance at my nest of pillows and blankets, towels and clothes, and tell her, “The house is empty. Well, nearly empty,” I amend, though this is less shocking now that she’s told me this place is new.
“He has a stocked kitchen and food in the pantry, a few bags of towels and other stuff from the home goods store, and one bedroom has a bed, but there’s nothing else. ”
A beat. “Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
Her exhale rattles through the speaker. “So, my brother sent you up to a house in the mountains with a famous hockey player who’s well known for the size of his branch and his skills wielding it—”
Probably, I should have realized that Lake is a hockey player sooner.
He’s huge. And that ass.
But I haven’t been on my game since I walked in on my sister and boyfriend fucking so…
“—and it only has one bed?”
“Yup,” I say dryly.
She cackles. “This is too good.”
“No,” I say, despite the fact that I’ve stepped out of the pages of a romance novel. “It is, in fact, not good. You and Knox sent me up to Tahoe to the house of a grumpy hockey player who has no interest in sharing his space with me and Steve during Snowmageddon.”
“What’s a Snowmageddon?”
Yeah, see? I’m not alone in not knowing what the hell Snowmageddon is.
“A giant blizzard that means my car is currently stuck in a snowbank and the likelihood of me being able to leave said grumpy hockey player’s house is nil,” I tell her. “At least for a couple of days.”
Silence then a guilty laugh. “Shit, Nov, we did you dirty.”
“Yup, that I know.”
“Was his bed at least comfortable?”
“No clue,” I say. “He slept in the bed. I slept on the floor.”
A gasp. “Seriously? What a jerk.”
Except, he gave me that pillow he was attached to the night before and covered me in blankets and rolled Steve up like an extra-large burrito…
I open my mouth to tell her that, but suddenly there’s a commotion at the front door—a flurry of wind and snow and noise.
I jerk my head up, watch Lake shuffle inside.
“Uh, Ells, honey,” I say instead. “I’ve got to go.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I say distractedly as I see him waver on those tree trunks of legs. “I’ll fill you in later.”
“Okay,” she says. “But don’t forget, jerk or not, if you change your mind about it being too soon, he supposedly knows how to use that branch of his and can—”
“Bye,” I say.
“Multiple orgasms!” she calls.
I blink, shake my head, and click off. “Lake?” I say, standing up from the stool, taking a step toward him.
Just as he slips and eats serious shit on the hardwood floor.