11. A Storm with a Grudge
A STORM WITH A GRUDGE
JUNIE
The sky turns the color of a bruise at two in the afternoon, and by three, Porchlight Cove is being swallowed whole.
I’ve lived through Boston nor’easters. I’ve lost power in February with nothing but Nolan’s med school textbooks to burn for warmth—hypothetically because he would have killed me—but a South Carolina coastal storm is a different animal entirely.
It doesn’t creep in. It arrives like it’s been personally offended by the existence of dry land and has come to settle the score.
The wind starts first.
Not a gradual build, but a switch flipped, zero to tree-bending in under a minute. Rain follows in horizontal sheets that hit the glass like someone’s power washing the building.
I’m in the conference room when the lights flicker, hold, then flicker again just before everything goes dark.
My laptop screen is the only light in the room. And my battery’s at 2 percent. Excellent.
Cole appears in the doorway, and I know damn well he’s been waiting for this kind of emergency because emergencies are where he thrives—the bossiness, the control. It would be sexy if he were allowed to be sexy.
He’s not.
“Clubhouse,” he says. One word. He’s already in fix-it mode, securing windows and moving around me as though I’m an afterthought. It shouldn’t hurt after all this time, but it does.
His rain jacket leaves puddles in his wake. There’s a flashlight in his hand, and his boots appear to have survived three wars and a Home Depot clearance sale.
“Residents are meeting there.” He moves onto the next window, pulling down shutters I hadn’t noticed before. “Transformer blew. Stanley’s doing headcounts, and Nana Mae’s coordinating kitchen rations.”
The low timbre of his voice, the authority…he makes it freaking impossible to think of him as an ogre.
“I’ll grab my things and head over—”
“You’re staying here.” The low, rolling growl of his words infects my limbs with his order.
Hovering above my chair, I blink. Slowly, intentionally, to get my shit together. “Excuse me?”
“Your apartment stairs aren’t safe in this wind.
I’ve been meaning to update the railing, but—” He pulls a second flashlight from…
somewhere. The man is a walking hardware store.
He sets it on the table between us. “I’m not having you break your neck crossing the driveway or falling down the stairs.
The generator is in the garage. I have to get the clubhouse running first, then I’ll come back and get ours online. ”
“Ours,” I repeat. Of course the possessive pronoun is the thing my brain latches onto.
My thighs quiver because I’m still hovering, so I drop into my chair and reach for the flashlight, but he’s already gone. The door slams, and I jump, then I’m left alone in his dark house.
The flashlight flickers to life, catching on the fucking diamond I still can’t remove.
How pissed will Nana Mae be if I have someone cut it off?
Lightning sears the sky, as if warning me not to do it.
But at some point, this damn thing has to come off.
Right?
Ugh! Don’t be stupid, Juniper. The ring may be real, but the sentiment is not. Cole would never allow it.
Frustrated with the direction of my thoughts, I exit the conference room in search of candles. Nana Mae probably has them in the kitchen, so I head there first and find them in the third junk drawer down.
Matches are in the blue ceramic jar by the stove, and I try not to focus on how comfortable I am here as I light the candles.
The room shifts from dark to amber, and suddenly Cole’s kitchen feels less like the office I pretend it is and more like what it should be, a home.
The candlelight softens the hard edges. The granite looks warm.
The photos on the fridge that I’ve actively avoided all month are suddenly golden and intimate, and I really need to stop staring at them.
There’s one of Cole and Nolan at a Red Sox game—they’re younger and carefree here. It makes me believe it’s after my dad ran off but before my mom died and they inherited the burden of ensuring I made it through high school.
Beside that is one of all four guys. It must be Hudson’s law school graduation because Hudson is the only person I know who would wear a three-piece suit under his cap and gown.
I lift it with the tip of my finger, and the Palmetto magnet falls to the floor. I slam my palm to the door to keep all the photos from fluttering to the ground, and my gaze snags on…myself.
Something lodges in my throat.
I’m sitting on my porch in Boston, my knees pulled up to my chest, and I’m staring at something off camera, but it doesn’t hide the sadness, the sheer devastation in my expression.
This was taken the night of Nolan’s grad party.
I can tell by the dress—it was the one and only time I wore it.
This was the night I knew I was losing Cole for good—it happened even before he left Boston.
I felt it that night dancing. The surgical separation.
The stitches in the barrier reinforcing.
Why does he have this? Who took it?
The storm outside screams as loud as the thoughts in my head, and I attach a new magnet, then back away from the fridge.
I sit numbly at the island with my dead laptop clutched to my chest and my candles and my catastrophic inability to stop collecting evidence about a man I’ve vowed to keep at arm’s length.
Something metal crashes in the yard—my money’s on Stanley’s new aftermarket fenders. The rain is so heavy it sounds like static, like the world outside these walls has been replaced with white noise. Or is that just in my head?
I twist the ring on my finger with growing irritation. I’ve already rubbed the skin around the band raw, and still it doesn’t budge. At this point, I’m half convinced Nana Mae had it enchanted by a sea witch before she forced it onto my finger.
How the hell did she even get it over my freaking knuckle?
The back door crashes open forty minutes later, and Cole blows in with the storm.
Have I really been sitting here staring at those freaking pictures this entire time? Get a grip, Juniper!
Cole shakes his head, and water droplets fly about the room. He’s drenched. Absolutely soaked through. His rain jacket dripping a river on the hardwood, boots leaving muddy prints that would give Nana Mae a stroke.
“Clubhouse is set,” he says, shaking the water from his hair again like a dog. A very large, very annoying, very attractive dog. “Everyone’s accounted for. Stanley tried to do a perimeter check, but Bea physically blocked the door.”
I hand him a towel without being asked because apparently, my body is making this a home while my mind tries to burn it down.
He takes it.
Our fingers don’t touch—I ensure it. I’ve developed an entire system for object exchange designed to prevent skin-on-skin contact, and it’s fine. Not at all pathetic.
“Generator?” I ask.
“Breaker panel first. Something tripped when the transformer blew.” He towels his hair, and I look away because a wet Cole is a hazard I didn’t prepare for. “It’s in the utility room. I need you to hold the flashlight.”
Of course he does.
The utility room is the size of a closet, which I didn’t fully appreciate until Cole stepped inside and took up approximately 80 percent of the oxygen.
I’m wedged between the water heater and the wall, holding the flashlight at the angle he specified—forty-five degrees because he’s anal like that. He’s working the breakers with both hands, flipping switches in a sequence that apparently makes sense to him and looks like a guessing game to me.
“Higher.” He’s gruff, and I almost tell him to stick the flashlight up his ass.
Instead, I adjust it, silently cursing how much heat this man puts off. If he were standing outside, he’d have steam rising from his appendages.
“More to the left.”
Now, he’s pushing it.
I adjust again, but my arm’s beginning to shake. I don’t remember the last time I worked out, and my biceps are not built for this.
“Steady,” he mutters.
Is he just messing with me now? I glare at him in the dark.
“I am steady.”
“You’re drifting.”
“You try holding a flashlight at a mathematically precise angle in a room the size of a coffin while a man who apparently generates his own gravitational field and heat source takes up all the breathable air.”
He pauses. Turns his head just enough for the edge of his jaw to cut into the flashlight’s beam. There’s a drop of rain still caught in his stubble.
I definitely should not file it away in the growing vault of Things About Cole Whittaker That Are Ruining My Life.
“Are you always this dramatic during storms?”
Asshole. He knows I am.
“Are you always this bossy during electrical repairs?”
“Yes.”
Even my nipples respond to his huskiness. I need to talk to Hudson. Maybe I can get him to rethink hiring me and allowing me to hide out in his condo from now until…forever.
Cole turns back to the panel. I hold the flashlight. The storm gets angrier. We exist in this tiny room together with air that’s too thick and charged to have anything to do with the breaker panel.
His hand drops to reach a lower breaker, and his shoulder brushes my arm. My bare arm. I don’t have a barrier today. And it’s not a graze. It’s contact. Solid and warm through his damp Henley, and I feel it in my teeth.
He doesn’t pull away.
Why do I lean into it? Pull away, Juniper. Pull away.
“This one’s corroded,” he says, but his voice has dropped to a register that has no business being in a conversation about electrical…somethings. “I need to—can you hold the light closer?”
I step in—into the room, into him. The room doesn’t allow for subtlety. Stepping in means my chest is at his back. It means I can smell the cedar and rain and whatever pheromone this man secretes that makes my brain sign off.
My arm wraps around him, under his arm, closer.
It hurts my feelings.
My hand isn’t steady anymore, and neither is his breathing.