"Good. Follow me. You look about ready to collapse and I've reached my quota of dragging heavy men from one place to another."
Clara gestured for Jack to follow, and as she led him upstairs to her bedroom, a weird feeling shivered across her nerve endings, as if a goose had just danced over her grave as Granny would've said.
Ohh, settle down. This means nothing.
This is a temporary distraction. Soon enough, everything would go back to the way it was.
And it couldn't happen a moment sooner.
She didn't trust adorably good-looking men with crooked smiles and warm hazel eyes any more than she trusted a hungry seagull because she had bad experiences with both.
two
Jack woke to rain hammering stone and his brain scrambling to answer the question:Where the hell am I?
Then it came back. The capsized boat. The rocks. The red-headed woman with a pitching arm like a minor league prospect who'd hauled him out of the Atlantic like an oversized trout.
Right. Clara. Lighthouse. Near-death experience. Not your typical Tuesday but definitely one worth remembering.
He sat up carefully, doing a mental inventory. Shoulder throbbed where he'd slammed into—rock? Boat debris? The wrath of Poseidon himself? Ribs ached when he breathed too deep. But nothing broken, which meant he'd gotten lucky.
Lucky being a relative term when you'd almost drowned because you thought buying a boat without knowing how to sail it was a solid life choice.
Good one, Jack. Not your finest moment, for sure.But living for the adventure was sort of his thing so it tracks that he almost died doing something stupid.
The room wasn't his. The bed wasn't his — too soft, mattress dipping in the center the way they did when only one person slept in them for years. Through the narrow window, gray sky met grayer water, summer rain blurring the line between them.
He'd woken up in enough unfamiliar rooms to have a system: locate exits, check phone, assess damage, move on. But this one didn't feel like a place to move on from. It felt quieter than that. Like the lighthouse was holding its breath.
He kinda liked it, honestly. Felt calming, in a weird way.
His clothes hung over a chair, freshly washed. Which meant Clara had done his laundry while he slept. That was... thoughtful. Also slightly weird. But mostly thoughtful.
And speaking of weird—had her father been a bear? Because the sweatpants he'd borrowed last night could've fittwo of him.
Jack dressed quickly, his carpenter's brain automatically clocking details. Small bedroom, spartan furnishings, everything arranged with a neatness that felt less like tidiness and more like armor.
Stack of books on the nightstand, spines perfectly aligned. Single framed photograph on the dresser—Clara with an older woman, both squinting into sun. Same red hair, though faded with age. Grandmother, maybe.
The room felt like Clara. Careful. Controlled. No clutter because clutter meant chaos and chaos meant?—
He shut down that thought before it could finish. Not his business. Not his problem. He was just passing through.
Like always.
The spiral staircase descended into the main living space, and Jack took it slowly, hand trailing the curved stone wall. Solid craftsmanship. Probably a hundred years old, maybe more. Whoever built this lighthouse knew what they were doing—the kind of work that lasted, meant to outlive its maker.
He used to build things like that. Before he'd started building things he could leave behind.
At the bottom of the stairs, the circular room opened up. He loved an open floor planwith everything in view. Clara stood at the stove, red hair twisted into a knot, wearing faded jeans and an oversized sweater that kept slipping off one shoulder. She moved the way she organized her space — efficient, deliberate, no wasted motion. Everything in reach. Everything where it needed to be.
Jack's brain, which should have been focused on the fact that he'd almost died yesterday, decided instead to focus on the curve of that exposed shoulder. And then the hips doing their best to hide under all that fabric. And then it occurred to him that maybe he should stop cataloging his rescuer's body like he was assessing a floor plan.
Also—why was she single? Living alone in a lighthouse like some beautiful, sarcastic hermit? That seemed like a story.
Not that he was going to ask.
“Please don’t just stand there gawking, it’s weird and it makes me uncomfortable.”
