THIRTEEN
CLARA
Morning camein thin and gray, the kind of winter light that made everything in Wes Vaughn’s house look a little softer and a lot more haunted.
I lay there for a beat with my eyes open, letting my brain catch up to the fact that I lived here now—across the hall from Wes Vaughn—and no amount of pretending otherwise was going to change that.
Unfortunately, neither was pretending I hadn’t seen him naked.
Across the hall, there was a door that should have belonged to a man sleeping in his own bed. A man who brushed his teeth in the bathroom attached to that bedroom. A man who had a glass shower door and a talent for turning my brain into soup.
I stared at the ceiling and waited for the house to make sense.
The upstairs was dead quiet.
Not the peaceful kind of quiet either. The kind that felt like a decision.
His door across the hall never opened. It sat there like a sealed-off part of the house—like the upstairs belonged to the man he used to be, and the man who lived here now had beenexiled downstairs with the couch and the ghosts of his former life.
I swallowed and rolled onto my side, blinking hard until the memory of steam and tile andoh my god, that is his actual penisstopped flashing behind my eyelids.
It didn’t help. Not really.
It’s fine. I’m a grown woman. I could be an adult about this. I could exist in a house with a man I’d accidentally seen naked without combusting.
All I needed was coffee.
I slid out of bed as quietly as possible, tugging at the hem of my pajama shorts and straightening my mismatched top. It was chilly so I tugged a tossed-aside zip-up sweatshirt from the chair and pulled it on. I walked to the doorway and cracked it open, peeking into the hallway.
Still silent.
I took one step out, then another, moving with the careful precision of someone attempting a museum heist—except my prize was caffeine and my security system was a grumpy, traumatized construction god with a bad attitude and an even worse talent for making me feel twelve kinds of flustered.
Halfway to the stairs, the house gave a faint creak beneath my foot.
I froze.
Held my breath.
Waited for any sign of Wes.
Nothing.
Okay. Great. Good job, Clara. Stealthy. Professional. Totally not losing your mind in your brother’s best friend’s hallway.
I made it down the stairs and slipped into the kitchen, where the cold morning light streamed through the big windows at the back of the house. Beyond them, the pines stood shoulder toshoulder like a wall, dark and dense, the property line hugged by forest. In the distance there was a sliver of sandy path cutting between the trees toward the dunes—barely visible unless you knew to look for it.
It was so peaceful out there it made my chest ache.
I turned toward the fridge—and stopped.
The House Rules page was still smack in the middle of it.
Not ripped down.
Not balled up.
Not set on fire.
