Which doesn’t explain why I’m still standing at my kitchen window, pretending coffee takes twelve minutes to make while Claire curls up on her couch across the way. She’s tucked beneath a blanket, blonde hair twisted into a messy knot that keeps slipping loose around her face. She’s wearing thin-framed glasses, turquoise-colored eyes with the longest lashes. She’s fucking beautiful. Her oversized shirt has slid off one shoulder, revealing the thin strap of her bra, and my attention locks there. She looks soft, tired, and completely unaware of what she’s doing to me.
I should move.
I don’t because apparently I’m the kind of Alpha who can face down a room full of cameras without blinking, but one quiet Omega in a blanket has me rooted to the floor like an idiot. Ifmy two packmates were home right now, they’d be giving me so much shit over my obsession with our neighbor.
She scrolls through channels, settles on something, and pulls the blanket higher before reaching for a mug on the side table. Even through two windows and the dark glass between us, I notice the way she wraps both hands around it. Small hands. Delicate fingers. The same ones that signed my book with a tiny heart she tried to pass off as an accident.
It wasn’t an accident.
The coffee machine beeps, saving me from whatever the hell my brain is about to do with that thought. I pour a mug, take a sip, and lean against the counter while Damien finishes his paw maintenance and turns his attention to my coffee with the smug confidence of a creature who believes ownership is just a matter of wanting something badly enough.
“Don’t even think about it,” I tell him.
His paw slides toward the mug.
I move it.
His paw follows.
I move it again, and the little bastard holds eye contact while reaching farther, slow and deliberate, until he bats my spoon off the counter. It clatters to the floor, and he lifts his chin with a soft trill, like he’s just made a valid legal argument.
I stare at him. “Real mature.”
He blinks once.
Which, coming from Damien, is basically a confession.
I pick up the spoon, rinse it, and glance back at her window. She’s laughing at whatever’s on the screen. I can’t hear her, but I can see her shoulders shaking and her head tipping back, and it’s already ruining me from a distance.
I still picture her watching the sweet buns video yesterday, sitting in her backyard in those shorts with the sun on her thighs and her phone clutched in both hands. When I slapped thedough, Claire froze, then grabbed her phone so hard I thought she’d crack the screen. After that came the fanning.
It gave me the stiffest hard-on of my adult life, which is saying something, because I once shot an entire salted-caramel series in gray sweatpants and had to learn humility in real time.
Damien, who’s relocated to the fruit bowl and is attempting to sit inside it, removes a banana from beneath him with his back foot and kicks it off the counter.
“Yeah, I know,” I mutter. “I’m obsessed. Noted.”
I cross the open-plan living space to the window, coffee in hand, and lean my shoulder against the frame. Her living room glows warmly against the dark, all crowded bookshelves, soft lamplight. She’s curled on the couch, small and soft, and I hate that I can’t decide whether I want to feed her, tease her, or carry her straight out of that lonely little room.
Probably all three.
She doesn’t leave the house much. I’ve been next door for weeks, and I can count the times on one hand. The backyard yesterday. The trash bins last Tuesday. A grocery run on Saturday morning. That’s it. This gorgeous, sharp, funny woman has built herself a bunker out of bookshelves, recipe notes, and locked doors.
And damn if I don’t want to get inside.
Not like that.
Well, yes, like that too, but not only like that.
I take a slow sip of coffee and watch her tug at the blanket tighter. I know why she hides. I watched the clip again last month after the bookstore meeting. Sat right here with Damien, who was trying to eat the drawstring on my sweatpants while I pulled up the interview and hit Play.
It was rough.
Not because of what she said. People made it sound like she’d kicked a puppy into traffic while declaring war on food bloggers,but if you watch the whole thing, not the butchered little clip everyone passed around, you hear what happened. She’d been rattled. Her head was somewhere else, and her mouth went sideways before her brain could grab the wheel. The second the words fell out, her face changed. Tiny flinch. Eyes going tight. That awful half second where you know you’ve screwed up, but the cameras are still rolling and there’s no way to shove the sentence back down your throat.
The internet didn’t care. It never does. They chopped it, captioned it, fed it to the mob, and turned a nervous woman having a bad day into the villain of the week. I’ve been online long enough to know how fast people get mean when they smell blood.
Hell, I’ve been there. Years ago, my account got nuked because I uploaded a video without checking the oven door reflection and unintentionally gave the internet a view it did not pay for. One mistake. One click. Years of work gone overnight, and I got to spend the next month being known as the guy who made banana bread with his dick accidentally in frame.
