Chapter 7
7
I try the door handle even though I’m certain it’s locked.
How could I have been so careless? This isn’t like me at all: I’m the girl who’s always prepared. I’ve never locked myself out of anywhere, not once in my life.
I guess there’s a first time for everything.
The guy who dropped me off yesterday mentioned an intercom system, but I was so confident I wouldn’t need it that I didn’t pay attention to where it was located.
If I at least had my phone, I could call the concierge and ask for help—
Or.
Maybe Tyler’s home. If so, I bet I could use his phone to call the concierge.
I knock on his door before I lose my nerve.
It whips open only a moment later, and there’s Tyler—
There’s a lot of Tyler. Shirtless Tyler, with a light sheen of sweat, like I’ve caught him near the beginning of a workout.
I blink, force myself to look at his face and not, say, his washboard abs, or the line where skin meets fabric, his thick gray sweatpants hanging low on his hips.
He grins, amused. I’ve definitely been caught.
“Couldn’t wait until tomorrow’s lesson?” he says, and—I’m out of practice—but I would dare to describe it as flirtily .
Heaven help me.
“I was on my way to get dinner, and I locked myself out. Any chance I could use your phone?”
“Thought you were waiting on room service?”
“So did I,” I say. “It never came.”
His brow furrows. “You must be starving .”
“I’ve literally only eaten an oatmeal snack and some maple candies from the café since breakfast.”
He steps back from the door, gestures for me to come inside. “I can make you something, if you want? It’ll probably take them a while to get over here to let you back in.”
“Are you sure? Don’t you have, like… ski work to do?”
Ski work.
Ski work .
“Promise you’re not interrupting anything,” he says, grinning. “Ski work’s all done for the day. How do you feel about salmon?”
“I feel very good about salmon.”
He leads me inside, and I take a seat on one of the barstools at his kitchen island.
“Be right back,” he says, then disappears around the corner.
At a glance, his penthouse has the same layout as mine, only flipped—and the decor is opposite, too. Whereas mine is all white walls and warm wood, his is charcoal everything: charcoal floor tiles, charcoal walls, Edison bulbs inside geometric charcoal-gray fixtures. He’s got potted plants, too—a trio of herbs right here on the island, and farther into the living room, a couple of monsteras. It’s all very masculine, the entire space extremely well curated.
When Tyler returns, he has a shirt on, a fresh cotton V-neck in lilac. I can’t help but picture him without it, the image of his carved stomach permanently impressed on my memory.
“Here you go,” he says, sliding his phone across the island. “I pulled the number up for you.”
“This says I’m calling someone named Julie.”
He shrugs. “That’s the concierge.”
“You’re on a first-name basis with the concierge?”
“Lived here a long time,” he says. “It would be weird if I wasn’t.”
Fair enough. “Thanks again,” I say, then put the call through.
Tyler pulls something out of his fridge—a piece of fresh fish still wrapped in paper from the market.
“You’re making me dinner? ” I say, still waiting for Julie to pick up. “I thought you had leftovers—Oh, hello!”
“You’re not Tyler,” a woman’s voice says on the other end.
“I’m not,” I say. “This is Alix Morgan—I met you yesterday when I checked in, I’m staying in the penthouse next door to Tyler’s—”
“Let me guess, you locked yourself out?”
I blush. “I was wondering if you could send someone up with a new key, or maybe I could come down and get one?”
Across the island, Tyler brushes a maple syrup glaze onto the salmon while the oven preheats. I don’t even see a cookbook.
“I’ll send someone up,” Julie assures me, sounding confident and professional and very kind to not give me a hard time about my mistake. “Don’t worry—Tyler’s locked himself out at least ten times.”
“No wonder he has you saved in his phone!”
She laughs. “We go back a lot longer than that,” she says. “But yes, I’m sure it didn’t hurt.”
Julie promises someone will be up in the next half hour. I’ll be cutting it close for my call with Sebastian, but as long as maintenance arrives on time, I should still be able to make it. I slide the phone back across the island just as Tyler puts the salmon into the oven. He’s wearing bright red oven mitts, reminiscent of lobster claws.
“Oven mitts? Even though the pan isn’t hot?”
He grins. “Spoken by someone who’s never burned herself on a preheated oven rack.”
“Touché,” I say. “So you and Julie—she said you go way back?”
He sets the oven timer, then leans back against the counter. “Known her since I was a kid, yeah.”
“Did you ever date?”
“Definitely not—she’s like a sister to me.”
“So you grew up around here, then?”
“I did,” he says simply, then takes a sudden interest in rummaging around his refrigerator drawers. “Sorry, I forgot to ask what you want with your salmon. I’ve got some salad greens—but no dressing.”
“What kind of monster doesn’t have salad dressing?”
“The kind that doesn’t like salad dressing.”
“What do you, like… put on the salad, though?”
“Fruit, nuts, seeds, goat cheese,” he says. “Whatever I have on hand.”
“Well, I’ll eat whatever your favorite combo is,” I say, because fruit and goat cheese does sound pretty good. “Surprise me.”
Ten minutes later, the salmon is done and there’s a bowl full of greens, goat cheese, apple slices, and walnuts in front of me. Tyler cracks a bit of fresh pepper over the top, and I have to admit, it looks great. I take a bite of salmon, and it’s even more amazing than it looks.
“I think you might be in the wrong profession—not that you’re a bad ski instructor,” I quickly amend. “Do you do this for all the girls who lock themselves out?”
“Oh, yeah,” he replies, not missing a beat. “One hundred percent of the time.”
“Let me guess, I’m the only one who’s done it?”
He grins, tucks that stray piece of hair that doesn’t want to stay put behind his ear. “Don’t get many people staying up here, to be honest. I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone else on this floor.”
“Probably because it costs a bajillion dollars a night to stay here,” I say. I don’t even want to do the math on how much it’ll cost for the entire month.
“Writing must be pretty lucrative,” he says, and I laugh so hard I nearly spit out my spinach, especially because I don’t think he meant it as a joke.
“I could say the same for ski instructing. I’m only here because someone else is paying.”
Now it’s his turn to laugh. “Yeah, my job doesn’t pay that well, either. Julie’s family owns the resort—she took over when her dad died a while back. I get a friends-and-family discount.”
So that’s how he affords this penthouse. I’m hit with a surprising sense of relief: that he’s not just some rich guy, obsessed with money—and obsessed with everyone knowing he has money—like Blake was.
“How long have you lived here?”
“I moved in not long after she inherited, actually. It turned out to be good timing—she was in over her head. That year was kind of complicated.” He grimaces. “Also, please never tell her I said that. She’d resent the idea that I thought she needed help.”
The phone buzzes on the counter between us.
“Excuse me for just a sec,” he tells me, taking the phone into the next room.
“Yeah,” I hear him say. “Yeah, the one from next door—yeah. She locked herself out.”
Is it eavesdropping if the other person has simply moved around the corner? It’s not like there’s any music to drown out the conversation, and it’s not like he’s keeping his voice down.
“I know,” Tyler says. “C’mon, man—you know I can’t.”
Can’t what ?
I wait for more, but he’s quiet, listening. I definitely can’t make out the voice on the other end.
“I mean, I know. We’ve been over this.” A pause. “Can I call you back in thirty? Yeah, talk to you then.”
I stuff a gigantic forkful of spinach in my mouth and hope it looks like I’m so enraptured with it that I’ve blocked out the rest of the world, especially the phone call I was absolutely not listening to.
“Sorry about that,” Tyler says when he joins me again at the kitchen island, then smirks when he notices my face: I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, literally, and it must be a look .
“Enjoying the salad?”
I nod—with enthusiasm —since I cannot in good conscience try to speak. My ratio of greens to good stuff is very much not ideal; I think I only got a single walnut in this bite, and it’s bitter without the other stuff to balance it.
“Need some water?”
He fills a tumbler with cold, filtered refrigerator water and slides it over. It’s a lifesaver.
Naked spinach: not for me.
“Everything okay?” I say, nodding to the phone.
“Oh, yeah. My best friend—Julie’s brother. Just giving me a hard time because someone told him I had a woman over.”
I might be imagining it, but I think his cheeks are turning slightly pink.
“And that’s unusual? Having a woman over?”
“Yeah,” he says, meeting my gaze. “It is.”
I study his eyes, his gorgeous eyes, wondering how it’s possible that this guy doesn’t have a girlfriend—how it’s possible he doesn’t have a woman over every single weekend. He could. I’ve seen what’s under that T-shirt, and yeah, he most definitely could.
You know I can’t , he told his best friend on the phone.
Ski Instructor Tyler is a mystery to me, one I want to unravel.
A knock sounds at the door, three sharp raps in quick succession.
“Maintenance!” a man calls from the other side.
And not a moment too soon—I’ve been here for almost fifty minutes, I realize when I glance at the clock. Sebastian will be calling any second now. How could I have lost track of time like this?
When Tyler opens the door, there’s a man with a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, his polo shirt and puffy coat both boasting the Black Maple Lodge logo.
“New key card for a Ms. Morgan? I appreciate your patience, we had some technical difficulties.”
“That’d be me,” I say, and he hands it over with a nod. “Thank you.”
He gives a little salute and heads off to deal with whatever else needs fixing.
Tyler follows me out onto the elevator landing, propping his door open with the dead bolt so the maintenance guy doesn’t have to come right back up.
“Thank you so much for making me dinner,” I say. “It was amazing. Even the salad.” I pause. “Mostly the apples and the goat cheese—but those made up for the spinach.”
He laughs, and I like the way his eyes crinkle at the corners. “Come back again sometime and I’ll make my famous brussels sprouts!”
I scrunch up my face.
“I’m not even kidding. They’ve won awards—not to mention there’s bacon involved.”
Now I’m laughing, too. “I would try them. I can’t promise I’ll like them.”
I tap my key against the sensor on my door, and the lock slides open.
“All good,” I say.
There’s a beat there—a moment hanging in the air between us—and then he gives a little wave.
“See you on the slopes,” he says.
I wave back and slip inside my own temporary home, the place where I’m meant to hole up and focus for a month. Focused is the last thing I feel: right now, I’m a mess of fizzy and reckless and fascinated.
Puffin rubs against my ankles, his fur soft.
“I know, buddy,” I say.
I’m in trouble.