Smart Mouth (Cougar Crush #1)

Chapter 1

HANNAH

The Outer Banks smells like salt and possibility, and for the first time in twenty-four years, I have nowhere to be.

No depositions. No client calls. No daughters texting me their crises at eleven p.m.— though I love those texts, I do, I just need a break from being the person who fixes everything for everyone.

Four weeks of nothing but this: a weathered rental house, a private stretch of soft sandy beach, and the particular silence that only exists when the ocean is your closest neighbor.

I set my coffee on the deck railing and breathe it in.

This is mine. I earned this.

The drive from Omaha took twenty-four hours, sixteen minutes and I didn’t listen to a single podcast about productivity or legal strategy or how to optimize my morning routine.

I listened to a playlist my younger daughter Mia made me called Mom’s Beach Era and I sang along badly to every song and I cried a little somewhere around easter Iowa and I’m not entirely sure why, except that it felt like something loosening in my chest that I hadn’t realized was knotted.

I’m forty-eight years old and I am, for the first time in recent memory, completely alone and completely okay with it.

The deck is perfect. Wide planks, two Adirondack chairs, a view that makes the rental price feel almost reasonable.

I have books I’ve been meaning to read for three years stacked on the kitchen counter.

I have a bottle of wine I’m going to open at two in the afternoon if I feel like it because there is no one here to raise an eyebrow at me.

I sit down in the chair closest to the railing, prop my feet up, and open my book.

I read exactly four pages.

That’s when I smell the smoke.

I don’t panic —I’m a lawyer, I assess— but I’m on my feet before I’ve consciously decided to move, because smoke on a wooden deck surrounded by dry August air is not something you take a beat on.

I scan my space first. Nothing. I look left toward the neighboring house and find the source immediately.

The man is standing at a gas grill that is, without question, more fire than grill at this point. Flames licking up the sides, a plume of black smoke rising with cheerful enthusiasm toward the cloudless sky, and he — the young man — has his phone out and pointed directly at the situation, laughing.

Laughing.

I’m inside my kitchen in four steps, back on the deck in six, fire extinguisher in hand before he’s even registered that he has a witness to his catastrophe.

“Hey!” I call it over the railing between our decks. “Move.”

He turns, and I get my first real look at him. Tall, ridiculous jaw, dark hair pushed back from his face, white t-shirt that has absolutely seen better days and he looks at me with this expression like I’m the most interesting thing he’s seen all week.

He moves.

I lean over the railing, angle the extinguisher, and put out the fire with the efficiency of someone who has handled a thousand emergencies, most of them more complicated than a grill fire but none of them smelling quite this bad.

When the smoke clears, he’s still looking at me.

“You’re my hero,” he says. And he means it— not sarcastically, not as a line, just as a plain statement of fact delivered with a grin that does something irritating to my pulse.

“You’re a hazard,” I tell him, and I hand the extinguisher back over the railing.

He takes it, and his fingers brush mine for half a second, and I pull my hand back like the metal is hot, which it is, slightly, so that’s fine, that’s a reasonable reaction.

“Cruz Jackson.” He shifts the extinguisher under one arm and extends his free hand. “And in my defense, the wind shifted.”

“Hannah Caldwell.” I shake it briefly. His grip is warm and certain. “And there is no defense for whatever that was.”

“I was making salmon.”

“You were making a scene.”

That grin again. It should be illegal.

He chuckles. “Guilty. Are you always this efficient in a crisis?”

“Yes,” I say, because I am, and I don’t see any reason to apologize for it. “Make sure it’s fully out before you touch the grill again.” I pick up my coffee, which has gone lukewarm, and head for my door.

“I’ll be more careful,” he calls after me.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” I call back, and I go inside before I can think too carefully about the fact that I’m almost smiling.

I do not google him.

I make a fresh cup of coffee, return to my deck, find my page, and read for a productive forty minutes before I go inside to make lunch.

I do not google him.

I eat my lunch, answer three emails I told myself I wasn’t going to answer, and start a new chapter.

I google him at 3:47 in the afternoon and I want it noted, for the record, that I held out admirably.

Cruz Jackson pulls up results immediately— Instagram first, then YouTube, then a profile piece in some lifestyle publication I’ve never heard of. The number that catches my eye: 2.3 million Instagram followers. I click through without meaning to.

The feed is exactly what the grin suggested.

Beach content, workout content, cooking-disaster content that is clearly deliberate, the kind of effortless aesthetic that takes a significant amount of effort to produce.

He’s charming in that specific, calibrated way that reads well through a screen with an easy laugh, self-deprecating, quick.

I find the bio.

Cruz Jackson. Lifestyle. Architect. Living out loud on the coast. 34.

Thirty-four.

I do the math without wanting to. Fourteen years. He’s closer in age to my younger daughter than he is to me, which is a sentence I immediately regret constructing.

I close the tab.

I open it again, because I’m an attorney and I am thorough, and I scroll a little further, and there —posted twenty minutes ago— is a video of a grill fire that looks very familiar, captioned: the neighbor saved the day (and the salmon). 10/10 recommend having a hero next door.

The comments are already in the thousands.

I close the tab.

This time I leave it closed.

I go back to my deck and my book and my lukewarm coffee and I sit in my chair and I think about absolutely nothing except the words on the page in front of me, which is why I am here, alone, on purpose, with no interest whatsoever in my neighbors or their follower counts or the specific quality of their laugh.

The sun drops lower. The ocean does what the ocean does. In and out. In and out without thinking.

Somewhere around seven, I notice something on the shared railing.

A bottle of wine. Really good wine, I can tell from here. And a folded note tucked under the neck. I cross the deck without deciding to. Unfold the note with a suspicion I’m entirely right to have.

For the hero. A hazard says thank you.

It takes me longer than it should to stop almost-smiling.

I take the wine inside.