CHAPTER 2
Beckett
The text was a mistake. I knew it before I sent it, and I sent it anyway, because her porch light flipped on and then off again in under a minute and that wasn't how someone came home to a place that was working fine.
Also because I could still feel her mouth on mine, and that was making it difficult to think clearly about anything, including appropriate neighbor behavior at eleven o'clock on a Monday night.
My phone buzzed.
So funny story. My cottage is flooding.
I was off the couch and pulling on boots before I'd finished reading.
Outside, the night was cool and the grass was wet between our yards. Her porch light was off now. She was sitting on the front step in her dinner dress, shoes in her hand, feet bare, staring at the dark doorway of the cottage like it had personally betrayed her.
She looked up when she heard my boots on the path.
"You don't have to —"
"How much water?"
She blinked. "I don't — I stepped in and my feet got wet. I could hear it in the wall."
"Stay here."
I went inside. The floor was covered, maybe half an inch, coming from the kitchen wall — a supply line behind the cabinet, from the sound of it.
I found the main shutoff under the sink, cranked it closed, and waited until the hissing stopped.
Then I checked the kitchen, the bathroom, and the one bedroom.
Floors wet. Baseboard swelling already. The electrical panel was in the back hallway, which had standing water around it.
I walked back out.
Nora was still on the step. She'd pulled her knees up, arms wrapped around them, her dress bunched around her legs. Her hair was looser than it had been at dinner, starting to fall out of whatever she'd pinned it into.
She looked up at me and I could see her assembling the brave face — the same one she'd been running all night, the one that said I'm fine, nothing is wrong, I have never been more in control of my life — and something in my chest went tight, because she'd been doing that all evening and she was still doing it now, sitting barefoot on a wet porch, and she shouldn't have to.
"Supply line behind the kitchen cabinet," I said. "I shut the water off. The floors are soaked, the baseboards are already swelling, and there's standing water near the electrical panel, so you shouldn't turn anything on until someone checks it."
"Okay." She processed that. "So what you're saying is I can't stay here tonight."
"You can't stay here tonight. Probably not for a few days, depending on the damage."
"Cool." She pressed her fingertips to her forehead. "That's — cool. That's great. Everything about this night has been great."
I sat down on the step next to her. Not close. But close enough that I could smell her perfume underneath the night air — something floral, half-faded, warm.
I should not have been noticing that.
"I can call Aunt June in the morning," Nora said, more to herself than to me.
"Or — I could call Willa, except this is her wedding week and I'm not putting plumbing drama on her.
My mom's guest room has my cousin's kids in it.
Theo's on a friend's couch." She exhaled.
"I could get a hotel in Ashland. That's only, what, forty minutes? "
"In wedding week, during tourist season."
"So that's a no."
I didn't say anything for a second. The obvious answer was sitting right in front of both of us. It had been sitting there since I walked across the yard.
"I have a spare room," I said.
She turned her head. Those brown eyes, sharp and a little glassy from the night, looked at me the way they'd looked at me right before she kissed me — like she was calculating risk and running out of better options at the same time.
"Beckett."
"It's thirty feet away. It has a door. The plumbing works."
"I kissed you in front of the entire town two hours ago."
"I remember."
"And now I'm going to move into your house."
"Spare room."
"You understand how that looks."
"To the town that already thinks we're together? Looks about right."
She stared at me. Then she dropped her head into her hands and made a sound that was half laugh, half surrender. Her bare shoulders shook with it.
I watched her laugh. Her shoulders. The line of her neck. The way her fingers dug into her hair at the temples.
I was in trouble. I'd known it since the bar — since before the bar, if I was being honest, since she'd walked into the Wisteria in that green dress with her chin up and her composure so tight it was practically vibrating.
I'd known it when she laughed at the Pilates joke — a real laugh, surprised, the kind that gets out before the person can decide whether they want it to.
I'd known it definitively when she kissed me and every thought I'd had about appropriate distance went quiet.
Now she was on my porch step, close enough to touch, about to sleep in my house for a week, and the smart thing — the controlled, reasonable, self-preserving thing — would be to treat this like a logistics problem and keep my hands to myself.
"Okay," she said, lifting her head. "Okay. Here's the thing." She turned to face me, and the dim light caught her eyes. "The whole town thinks we're together. If I move in — even the spare room — that story gets louder. A lot louder."
"Yeah."
"So either we tell everyone tonight it was fake, while I'm literally homeless —"
"Or we don't."
She held my gaze. "If we don't tell them, it's a whole week. Willa's wedding. Every dinner, every event, every time your mother looks at us. We'd have to actually make it look real."
"I understand what a week is."
"Do you? Because your mom asked you twice tonight who you're bringing to the reception, and now the answer is the woman living in your guest room. That is going to generate questions, Beckett."
I thought about it. Not for long. The math wasn't complicated.
She needed a place to sleep. I needed my mother and half the town to stop treating my love life like a community improvement project.
We were already in it — the kiss, the public reaction, the sixty witnesses who'd gone home tonight with a story.
Pulling it back now would cost her more than keeping it going.
And the honest part — the part I wasn't going to say out loud on this porch — was that the kiss hadn't cost me anything. It had felt like an answer to something I hadn't asked yet.
"Here's what I know," I said. "You need a place to stay.
The town already has a version of events.
We're both in the wedding, so we're going to be next to each other all week no matter what.
If we tell people it was nothing, you're back to being the story you were trying to get out from under tonight. "
She flinched at that. Small, fast. I saw it.
"I'm not trying to —"
"I know." Her voice was quieter. "I know. You're right. That's the part I hate."
We sat with that for a moment. Crickets. The sound of water still dripping somewhere inside the cottage.
"One week," she said finally.
"One week."
"We'd need rules."
"Such as."
She held up a finger. "Nobody finds out it's fake. If this falls apart in front of Willa, I will not emotionally survive it."
"Agreed."
"We keep it simple. New, casual, nothing too intense. Nobody needs a backstory they can poke holes in."
"Fine."
"And —" She hesitated. Her eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up fast, like she'd caught herself. "The physical stuff stays minimal. In public, just enough to be convincing. In the house, we're — normal. Roommates."
"Roommates."
"Don't say it like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you think it's funny."
I didn't think it was funny. I thought she was sitting close enough that I could see the pulse going in her throat, and the idea of spending a week treating that like a logistics problem was going to require more self-control than I'd used on anything in recent memory.
"Roommates," I said again. Flat. Neutral.
She narrowed her eyes at me, but the corner of her mouth twitched.
"I need to grab my things from the cottage," she said. "Suitcase, garment bag, bathroom stuff. Some of it might be wet."
"I'll get it."
"You don't have to —"
I was already standing. "Tell me where."
She looked at me for a second — measuring something, I didn't know what — and then rattled off the list. Suitcase by the bed. Garment bag on the closet door. Toiletry kit on the bathroom counter.
The cottage floor was cold and wet under my boots.
I found everything where she said it would be, suitcase a little damp on the bottom, garment bag fine, toiletry kit dry.
I grabbed the phone charger from the nightstand and a pair of sneakers by the door that looked like they'd be useful for a woman about to spend a week at wedding events.
When I came back out she was standing, arms crossed, weight on one foot, watching me like she wasn't sure whether to be grateful or annoyed.
"You brought my sneakers."
"Your feet are wet."
She looked down at her bare feet, then back at me, and something shifted behind her expression — something not quite controlled enough to be the brave face. Softer than that.
"Thank you," she said. Quietly.
I carried her things across the yard to my place. She followed a step behind, barefoot in the grass, carrying her shoes from dinner.
Inside, I set her suitcase down in the spare room, showed her where the towels were, and pointed out the thermostat in the hallway. The room was clean — I'd had a client's family in it last month and hadn't bothered to undo the guest setup.
She stood in the doorway, her arms still crossed, surveying the room like she was working out its terms. The light from the hallway caught one side of her face. Her dress was wrinkled. Her mascara had smudged slightly under one eye.
She was the most distracting thing that had been in my house in a long time.
"Okay," she said. "This works. This is — thank you. Really."
"Bathroom's across the hall. Extra blanket in the closet if you need it."
"Got it."