Chapter 5
There wasn’t enough coffee in the multiverse to put Hadley in a good mood the next morning.
She’d like to think her lack of sleep was the result of lingering adrenaline from being mauled in front of her house by a man she’d once almost considered boyfriend material. But it wasn’t.
She’d been up all night wondering about Cole.
She had so many questions! Where had he learned to break someone’s arm like that?
Could she learn to do that, or did it require specialized John Wick training?
What did he do for work? He must work from home like her, because he almost never left his house.
Where did he grow up? What was his childhood like?
She wanted to know everything about him, every little detail of his life story.
Googling him produced fuck all. He didn’t even have social media, which was super weird. What kind of psychopath didn’t have any social media presence these days?
She needed to pull herself together, she thought as she reached for an energy drink.
Cole had already failed her one and only dating rule by being obviously less enamored with her than she was with him.
It was time to forget about the rudely sexy neighbor who clearly wasn’t her happily ever after man.
THERE WILL BE NO NOTEBOOKS WITH MRS. COLE CLAYTON DOODLED ON THEM IN THIS HOUSE.
That declaration in combination with lots of caffeine and a handful (OK, two handfuls) of chocolate from her candy stash got her through the rest of the day relatively efficiently.
She even managed to finish laying out the Templeman’s wedding website and send out a few invoices without thinking about Cole. At least not too much, anyway.
Until she went out to get the mail and found a giant black duffel bag on her porch.
Her first thought was that Darren dumped a bomb on her doorstep. Then she remembered she wasn’t living in an action film and felt stupid for thinking anyone would try to bomb her house. So, she gingerly opened the bag and found…
An emergency road kit.
Based on the contents of this bag, she supposed she could now survive everything from a hurricane to a zombie apocalypse with relative ease.
She now had a high-quality first aid kit stuffed with gauze, tape, bandages, wipes, painkillers, and an instant cold pack, plus a fair amount of vehicle gear, including jumper cables, tire repair kit, spare fuses, and road flares.
The bag also contained items for visibility and warmth, including a reflective vest, a heavy flashlight and batteries, a space blanket, and a hat and gloves. She shifted a few items and found several water bottles, a bag of mixed nuts, a few protein bars, and some packets of dried fruit.
And at the bottom of the bag were some less common items. There was a seat-belt cutter/window punch combo with a sticky note attached that said, “put this within reach behind the driver’s seat,” a hand-crank solar charger, a state map, and…was that pepper spray?
There was only one person she knew who’d leave her a gift like this.
She looked up and immediately locked eyes with Cole.
He was standing on his own porch, watching her root through the bag like a raccoon, hands in his pockets, looking intense and almost shy somehow.
He must’ve known by the look on her face when he mentioned an emergency bag that she didn’t have one, and he’d taken the time to gather and pack all this with her safety in mind. It was…
Romantic.
Maybe he wasn’t as immune to her as she’d initially thought. Her eyes filled with tears. Damn it, no one had ever given her such a thoughtful gift.
The problem now, though, was that she’d been looking for an excuse to talk to him all day and now that she had one, she couldn’t do it because she was all choked up and might do something really embarrassing like grabbing him and sobbing into his T-shirt.
So, she settled for giving him a tremulous smile and a little nod. One corner of his mouth quirked up the tiniest bit and he gave her a little mock salute.
And just like that, she was officially on the road to reverting to her middle school self—the one with a hopeless crush on an older boy who was probably just being nice to her while she was making plans for their wedding and future children.
Well…fuck.
But being on the road wasn’t the same as being at her destination. The destination, of course, being full-blown obsession with a man before he ever fell for her. There was still time to correct her course.
On the bright side, she didn’t have any notebooks lying around to doodle his name on. So, there was that.