“Thanks. I may just do that. I’m a sucker for chocolate chip cookies.”
She used to bake them for me all the time. Hands down, the best I’ve ever tasted—other than her lips when I kissed her.
“Alright, well, good night.” She turns to go inside her house but pivots back around. “I’m sorry, but I never got your name.”
Now is not the time to reveal myself, so I give her my middle name.
“Andrew.”
She licks her lips like she’s enjoying the taste of hearing it.
“See you tomorrow for cookies and coffee. Good night, Andrew,” she says, disappearing inside her house.
“Good night, ladybug,” recklessly slips out of my mouth before I’m able to stop myself.
Chapter 4
ARIA
“Good night, ladybug.”
I don’t even make it a foot inside the house before my legs lock tight and my heart—the organ that hasn’t functioned properly for over a year—comes back to life and slams against my ribcage so hard, I think it might literally burst right out of my chest and plop onto the floor beneath my feet.
“What did you just say?” I ask Andrew, knowing I couldn’t have heard him correctly. Because there is no way in hell—no. It can’t… no. Just no. Impossible.
When my eyes frantically seek the outline of where my new neighbor had been sitting in the dark, he’s no longer there. For a second, I think perhaps my brain made up the whole thing. Him, our talk, how I felt both energized and comforted in his presence. The way my skin goose-fleshed at the warm, deep timbre of his voice. That sense of familiarity. How I felt like I’d known him somehow, even though we were strangers meeting for the first time.
No.
No.
He quoted Yeats.
He called you ladybug.
The sound of his voice.
How easy it was to talk to him.
The damn tingles that shivered through your entire body from head to toe.
Only one man has ever given me those tingles.
MasonAndrewMcIntyre.
That son of a bitch.
Before I’m conscious of what I’m doing, my bare feet fly across the slick, dewed grass and run up his deck steps to his back door.
“Mason!”
My clenched fist pounds on the solid pressed wood, each strike filled with an intense rage that grows with every hit.
He knew it was me. Heknew.
How did he know?
I thought I was opening up to a stranger. I don’t do that for anyone. Not ever. I learned long ago that when you let people in, they just hurt you.
