"Your team?"
"My team."
"Are they giving you a hard time about the room?"
"They give me a hard time about everything. It's how they show affection."
She almost smiles. Almost. Then she turns back to the laptop, and the clicking of keys fills the room like rain on a tin roof—steady, rhythmic, alive.
I settle into the desk chair, pull out my own phone, and pull up the weather tracker. Helena is moving northeast at fourteen miles per hour. The worst of it will hit tonight, pass by morning. Roads might reopen in thirty-six to forty-eight hours, depending on flooding and debris.
Thirty-six to forty-eight hours in this room. With her.
Thirty-six to forty-eight hours. Her keys tap a rhythm against the quiet, and somewhere in it is a sentence she'll keep and a hundred she won't, and I'm listening like I can tell the difference.
My phone glows with the weather tracker. Helena crawls northeast at fourteen miles per hour. The storm will pass. The roads will open. And Kassidy Monroe will drive back to wherever she came from with her color-coded outlines and her stubborn curl and her unfinished book.
I set the phone down and listen to her write.
Chapter 5
Kassidy
The pillow barrier is a joke.
Not because Tucker violates it—he stays on his side with military precision, which is annoying in its own way—but because a wall of cushions does nothing to block the awareness. The room is small. The bed is large. And every molecule of air between us feels charged, like the atmosphere before a lightning strike.
It's 10 p.m. The hurricane screams outside like a living thing, hurling rain against the windows in bursts that sound like handfuls of gravel. The power has flickered twice but held, and the lamp on my nightstand casts a warm circle that ends just past the pillow line.
I'm propped against the headboard with my laptop, trying to write. Trying being the operative word. Because Tucker Brennan is on the other side of the bed, reading a book, and the sight of him is doing things to my concentration that should be illegal.
He changed into sweatpants after his last security check. Gray. Low on the hips. With a white T-shirt that's soft enough to be old and thin enough to outline every plane of his chest. His hair is slightly damp from the rain, and he's wearing reading glasses—actual reading glasses, dark-framed—that transform him from intimidating security operative into something dangerously approachable.
I hate that I noticed the reading glasses. I hate that my brain cataloged them instantly, filed them under dangerous details, and is now building a character sketch around them.
The book in his hands catches my eye. Not a thriller or a tactical manual or any of the things I'd assumed. It's a literary novel—I recognize the cover. The Remains of the Day. Kazuo Ishiguro.
"You read Ishiguro?" The question escapes before I can catch it.
He glances up. The reading glasses make his eyes look larger, and this close—three feet, pillow wall notwithstanding—they're definitely green. With brown. Both. "That surprise you?"
"I don't know what I expected. Tom Clancy, maybe."
"I've read Clancy. Good plots, thin characters." He turns a page. "Ishiguro writes about people who can't say what they mean. That's more interesting."
A Navy SEAL who critiques character development. My brain is short-circuiting.
"Have you read Never Let Me Go?" I ask, because apparently I'm incapable of not engaging.
"Twice. Destroyed me both times."
"Same."
Silence. It should be awkward. It isn't. The wind howls, and the building shudders, and we're two strangers in a bed that smells like clean linen and hotel soap, discussing fiction like this is normal.
"Do you read romance?" I venture. Dangerous territory, but curiosity wins.
Tucker sets the book on his chest, open, spine up. "My sister sends me one every few months. She says they're the only genre that guarantees a happy ending, and I could use more of those."
