One day, maybe I’d track him down. Maybe he didn’t hate me quite so much now.
“Stop getting maudlin,” I was cross at myself. “Focus on the good stuff.”
Like the fact I had the sexy-as-hell Hunter living next door.
Everything was great.
Everything wasnotgreat.
By the time I finally dragged myself awake, I’d had maybe five hours of sleep, tops. My skull throbbed with a headache that felt as though someone had wedged an axe behind my eyes, and my mouth tasted as if something had crawled in there and died overnight. Maybe I’d had more than one pumpkin drink after all, or maybe I was running on fumes from the high of the night before. I rolled over, groping blindly for the alarm clock, groaning when the numbers glared back at me—six a.m. Not to mention, my screen showed a missed call from my oldest brother, along with three messages from our family lawyer, and two from my father; I swiped to ignore them.
Money. It had to be about money.
Not right now, assholes.
I staggered into the bathroom, squinting at the harsh light. Peering into the mirror, I winced at the pale, exhausted face staring back at me—and at the smear of red along my neck. For a second, my stomach lurched at the thought I’d injured myself before I remembered the fake blood from last night. Grimacing, I scrubbed at it with a washcloth until it came away.
The shower was bliss, even if I lingered longer than I should have, taking extra time to rinse the sticky mess from my shoulder-length hair. I really needed to get it cut—one day, when life wasn’t so chaotic. I leaned closer to the mirror, double-checking for any leftover blood. Nothing. Just me, looking as rough as I felt, with water dripping down my nose. I gave my hair a rough towel dry, called it good enough, and pulled on clean clothes before heading down from my tiny apartment and into the bookstore a little after seven, unlocked the door, ready for an expected delivery, and dropped behind the counter with a mug of black coffee and a spider-shaped Halloween cookie.
The door swung open, and I plastered a smile on my face as if that could disguise how wrecked I felt.
Hunter filled the doorway, tall and broad, with sandy blond hair catching the light from the streetoutside. Handsome in a rugged way, his blue eyes flashed as they landed on me, piercing through the fog of my tiredness. He wore jeans that fit perfectly and a plain white T-shirt—of course, it was plain, with no logos or silly joke slogans. Clean lines, simple, effortless. And as always, the sight of him made my stomach swoop as if I were tumbling off a cliff, ridiculous and undeniable.
God, he was gorgeous.
And pissed, apparently.
“For the love of god, update the address with whoever the hell is sending you whatever this is!” Hunter snapped as he strode in with a box of books, hefting it like it weighed nothing. I would’ve been straining muscles and gasping for breath with that load, but he carried it as if it were empty. He was already scowling, and when his foot caught on the dangling arm of a plastic skeleton propped by the door, the whole thing toppled into him. Box still in hand, he wrestled with fake bones and nylon string as though it was a real monster, his expression sliding to the peak of the Hunter Index of Grumpy. I pegged him at a solid eight out of ten.
“Seriously?” he muttered, entangled, dropping the box with athudto the floor.
I hurried over to help, which meant I was far tooclose to Hunter—broad, scowling, smelling of soap and fresh coffee—and even closer to the accidental brush of his rough hand across mine. Heat curled low in my stomach, my chest tightening with a ridiculous twist that made me want something I could never hope to have.
Hunter’s growl of exasperation deepened as I tried to help, which of course made things worse. One wrong tug and we were chest-to-chest, his arm against mine as the skeleton dangled awkwardly between us. My mouth worked faster than my brain. “Wait—don’t move. The femur’s twisted in with your sweater.”
He looked down with a sigh, then gave me a flat, unimpressed stare. “That’s a tibia.”
I smirked. “Tibia, femur, whatever. Same thing.”
His eyebrow twitched, the closest Hunter ever came to rolling his eyes. “Tibias are… never mind.”
He unpicked the tangle, and with one final tug, he stepped back. The skeleton slid apart in clattering pieces to the floor.
“You broke Cyril,” was all I could say.
“Cyril?” He didn’t sound impressed.
“Cyril the Cursed. He was a train robber, died in mysterious circumstances way back, and now his skeleton hangs in the bookstore as a warning.”
Hunter shook his head. “It’s plastic.”
“That’s what you’remeantto think,” I shot back, grinning.
He sighed—same as he always did when we talked, and I’d have been disappointed if he hadn’t—then jabbed a finger toward the box on the floor. “Fix the address.”
I didn’t want him to leave, not yet. “Do you, uh, want a coffee? To say sorry? I’ve got cookies.” The words spilled out before I could stop them, and inside my head I was already groaning—what the hell had I said?
The implied ‘you’re an idiot’ was in his raised brow. “I own a coffee shop, right?”
