Page 1
Chapter one
ZANDER
The woman standing on my porch looks like she wandered out of the redwoods to put a curse on me.
Long red hair falls nearly to her waist, catching what little coastal sunlight has broken through the cloud cover. Her clothes are head-to-toe black, her eyes are a vivid, dangerous green, and silver rings cover half her fingers. Then there are the tattoos: wild, vibrant blooms winding up her pale forearm and disappearing beneath her sleeve, with another flash of color peeking above the cuff of her boot.
She’s small. Furious.
And entirely too attractive for a woman who looks like she’s calculating whether burying my body in the timber would require a permit.
I lean against the doorframe. “Can I help you?”
Her green eyes narrow. “You can turn down the music.”
Ah.
So this is the source of the pounding on my wall for the last five minutes.
I glance back toward my living room, where a speaker is currently perched on a cardboard box in lieu of actual furniture. “That was you?”
“No. There’s another woman living inside the drywall who’s also sick of listening to you.”
My mouth twitches.
“I thought something fell over.”
“Repeatedly?”
“It’s an old place.”
She crosses her arms over her chest. “Some people don’t want to hear your playlist through their living room wall.”
“Technically, people usually pay to hear it.”
“I’m paying rent specifically not to.”
A laugh slips out before I can stop it. Her expression doesn’t budge, which only makes the urge worse.
“I’m not even playing it that loud,” I say.
She gives me a flat, unblinking stare that my mother spent twenty-something years perfecting. “You have a speaker pointed directly at our shared wall.”
“It’s not pointed at the wall.”
“It’s facing the wall.”
“That’s different. The angle deflects the bass.”
Her gaze flickers past my shoulder as if debating whether to argue acoustic geometry with an idiot. It gives me a second to take her in. Up close, her hair has darker strands of auburn woven through the copper, and a tiny silver hoop hugs the curve of her nostril. With the all-black wardrobe and the riot of floral ink, she looks like a dark woodland fairy with a severe attitude problem.
“The wall between these units is paper-thin,” she says, her gaze snapping back to mine. “It’s not surviving whatever concert you’re putting on over there.”
“I’m unpacking.”
“Loudly enough to rattle my cabinets?”
“That seems dramatic.”
