Page 41

“Are we meeting her up there?”

“No, umm …” I turned off the ignition and unclipped my seatbelt. “She couldn’t make it. She had something with her kid or something. I’m not really sure. But I have the keys, and we can stay as long as we want. I just have to drop them off at her office tomorrow.”

“But we fly up to Toronto tomorrow,” he pointed out for the second time in the span of a handful of minutes.

“Oh,” I said, pushing open my door. “Yeah. Right. I’ll have to text her.”

I met Mikey around the back of my SUV, bracing myself for more questions I didn’t have an answer to because I hadn’t actually thought any of this through properly.

“How’d you hear about this place?” Mikey asked as the elevator slid open and we stepped inside.

I leaned across him and pressed the button labeled “PH” as the doors slid closed.

Okay, this I did have an answer for. And as a bonus, most of it was true.

“My dad knows the developer—a guy down in Boston trying to cash in on the real estate market up here. When he heard I was up here, he contacted my dad about buying the place for me.”

Only, when Corey had contacted him, my dad had told him I wouldn’t be in Portland much longer. But Corey was desperate to offload the place to help finance his next project, and he figured that even if I didn’t want it, one of the other guys on the team might. He got in touch with my agent, Donovan, who passed his contact information along to me. At the time, I’d been scouring rental listings, and not liking anything I saw. Because I’d been willing to pay the full asking price—in cash—we’d managed to close the deal quicker than another buyer might have.

Mikey shot me a wary look as the elevator came to a stop and the doors slid open. “Please tell me a Callahan isn’t the landlord.”

“Uh, no,” I said, scratching at my cheek nervously. “My dad’s not the landlord. I promise.”

He glared at me like he might not believe me, but I pretended to ignore it as I slid the key into the lock. “I ended up working directly with the developer and a real estate agent he recommended.”

Not a lie.

“The guy actually hates my dad.”

Also true.

“Hmm,” Mikey hummed disbelievingly as I pushed open the door and gestured for him to go in before me.

As he brushed past, I caught a whiff of his cologne—something spicy and woodsy—and pulled a deep breath of it into my lungs, dropping my eyes closed for a quick moment to savor it.

“Wow,” I heard him say.

I opened my eyes to find him standing by the island, checking out the open plan layout and the panoramic view of the water out the floor-to-ceiling windows on the far way.

He inspected a few of the kitchen cabinets and the paneled fridge before running a hand over the quartz counter. “This is fucking sweet—like a proper kitchen.”

“As opposed to?” I stepped into the room, my hands shoved into my pockets to hide the shaking. I’d been so damn nervous he wouldn’t like it.

He looked back at me over his shoulder, his smile wide. “Fuck you,” he muttered without any trace of heat as he moved down the hall toward the bedrooms.

“Holy shit.”

I followed his voice, finding him standing in the doorway of the primary bathroom staring at the glass-walled shower that took up the entire length of the far wall, rainfall shower heads at both ends.

“Freaky. I like it.” He waggled his eyebrows.

“What do you mean?”

He covered his eyes and shook his head, muttering something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like, “So fucking innocent.”

You wouldn’t be thinking that if you knew what I’d pictured doing to you in that shower, I thought as I left the room, telling him, “Yours is the first door we passed in the hallway.”

“Is?” he asked, joining me in the smaller of the “primary” bedrooms, though it wasn’t small by any stretch of the imagination.