by Jill Shalvis
Embarrassed, she grimaced. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I came here to be alone.”
Elle nodded. “I get that. And so does Spence, more than anyone I know. He’d be a complete shut-in if we let him. We routinely have to drag him around with us and force him to be social.”
Spence looked pained. “I’m not that bad.”
“Wanna bet?”
He shook his head but didn’t take his gaze from Colbie. “I want you to know that you’re safe here in this building. I promise you that.”
He had incredible eyes and that combined with a killer smile, and she was sucked right in. Her problem was simple. The promises of people she loved had never meant jackshit, so she certainly couldn’t accept a promise from a stranger. And yet, her gaze locked with Spence’s, she found that she somehow wanted to.
“This way—follow me,” Elle said and started walking, Daisy trotting along after her.
Colbie stared at them. “Do people always just do what she says?”
“Always,” Spence said. “Resistance is futile. Come on, I’ve got ya.” He took her stuff and led her past the wrought-iron gate that would’ve taken her back to the street.
The irony was that she’d come into the courtyard on her way to the hotel she’d Googled only because of the fountain. The one with the crazy love legend that had appealed to the writer deep down inside her.
Ahead of them, Elle and Daisy took the stairs, which was impressive because Elle was wearing some seriously kickass heels.
Thankfully, Spence bypassed the stairwell and hit the button for the elevator.
“Your girlfriend—” she started.
“Not my girlfriend.”
“Okay, then,” she said, not sure why that sent a thrill through her. “Your dog is taking the stairs.”
“Because she’s not in danger of hypothermia. And she’s not mine either. A friend owns South Bark Pet Shop on the farside of the courtyard. To clear my head, I sometimes help her out and walk her day care clients.”
So Daisy wasn’t even his, a fact that oddly relieved Colbie. He hadn’t been shirking responsibility of his own pet.
Which meant she’d jumped to conclusions about him and she didn’t like what that said about herself. “So . . . you’re a professional dog walker?”
He laughed as the elevator doors opened. “No.”
They stepped on and he pulled out a special keycard, sliding it across the card reader as she looked at him. “Dog walking is a perfectly respectable profession,” she said.
“Of course it is. But that’s not what I do.”
She waited, but he didn’t say what he did do—and that’s when she caught sight of herself in the mirrored walls of the elevator and did her best not to gasp in horror. Her hair was so much worse than she’d imagined, and she’d imagined it pretty bad. The waves had exploded around her face and shoulders like she’d stuck her finger into an electrical socket. Letting out a shaky breath, she turned her back to the wall so she couldn’t see herself. Better.
“So where you visiting from?” Spence asked, his hair also tousled but looking ridiculously effortlessly sexy.
Where was she from? “Another planet entirely,” she said.
He did that brow arch again, which somehow with his glasses and those piercing light brown eyes was hot as hell and loosened her tongue. “I mean a life that seems like another planet from here,” she clarified.
He studied her a moment, leaning back against the elevator wall like he didn’t want to crowd her. “And you . . . ran away.”
“Sort of.”
“Are you in trouble, Colbie?”
The way he said her name did something to her low in her belly. “No.” Yes. Most definitely, yes. Her deadline was barreling down on her and instead of working on her book, she was three thousand– plus miles from home. “There were . . . things I couldn’t control in my life, so I decided instead to control the way I responded to it all. It’s my superpower.”
He smiled, and oh boy did he have a nice smile, so she returned it. “New York,” she said. “I’m from New York.”
“That’s a long way to run.”
Hopefully long enough. As the oldest sister to twins Kent and Kurt, the two brothers she’d mostly raised herself, both of whom had so far refused to grow up, she’d have liked to go even farther. And then there was Jackson, the agent who’d single-handedly put her on the map in her career. Until not too long ago, he’d been one of the most important people in her life. So important that she’d fallen for him hard, and she’d believed he was doing the same.
Oh how woefully, pathetically wrong she’d been. Remembering her humiliation over what had happened, she felt her face burn.
So yeah, she’d desperately needed to get away, and far away. After a lifetime of taking care of everyone around her, she just needed to be left alone for a little bit, needed that quite badly. Just her and her laptop and her thankfully vivid imagination.
Except it wasn’t so vivid lately, was it. Not since she’d become an entire huge franchise that she alone maintained. The pressure was killing her. Her brothers and their incessant neediness were killing her. Jackson was killing her.
Everything was killing her and she’d lost it. Lost herself.
“I’m going to ask you again,” he said very gently. “Are you in some kind of trouble? Do you need help?”
“No,” she said and repeated it when he didn’t look like he believed her. “No,” she said more firmly. “I’m really not in trouble. I’m . . .” She sighed. “Well, what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks. I’m a fiction writer,” she admitted.
His mouth twitched. “H-E-double-hockey-sticks?”
She shook her head. “Don’t ask. It involves a swear jar and me going broke.”
He laughed. “Creative swearing. I like it. So you’re a writer. Who ran away from New York.”
“I hit a wall. I need some inspiration. I was thinking a tropical beach, but then a surprise hurricane thwarted me, so here I am. And so far it’s been the right call. On the cab ride here, I saw a gorgeous bridge, a sparkling bay, and streets lined with elegant Victorian houses.”
“And then a horse of a dog and a fountain up close and personal,” he said with a smile. “With all that inspiration, I bet your first book flies right out of you.”
She opened her mouth to correct the notion that this would be her first book. In fact, she’d written three, the first of which had a movie coming out on Christmas Day. In her mind, she’d finished off the series, but her publisher wanted to add a fourth book and they wanted it by the first of the year.
One month from now.
As a result, she felt like there was an elephant sitting on her chest. “That’d be great,” she said.
“So what do you do to support yourself while writing?”
“Waitress,” she said, citing what she’d done all through college and up until the day she’d gotten her first big deal. See? She wasn’t a complete liar. She was merely an omitter, and that was totally allowed with perfect strangers, no matter how hot they were.
Look at her learning something from Jackson after all . . .
“Do you live or work in this building?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She smiled at his vague answer. She wasn’t the only secret keeper.
“So why Cow Hollow?” Spence asked. He was still leaning against the far wall, giving her as much space as he could. Not that it mattered. He was tall, broad shouldered, and long legged. He alone nearly filled up the elevator.
“I’ve never been to San Francisco before,” she said. “And when the cabbie at the airport asked me where to, I told him to surprise me.”
This got a bark of laughter from Spence.
“True story,” she said, smiling in spite of herself because he had a nice laugh too. Contagious really, even if she could tell he didn’t do it very often. “With a name like Cow Hollow, how could I resist checking this area out? Plus he told me more about the myth of the
fountain in the courtyard, that if you wish for true love with a true heart, you’ll find it.”
“Is that what you were wishing for when Daisy Duke knocked you into the water?” he asked. “True love?”
Actually, the opposite. She wanted to never be hurt by love again, but that was way too personal to admit. “I was wishing for peace and quiet for as many days as I could get. I figured any fountain with such a good reputation wouldn’t mind granting such an innocuous wish, right?”
He smiled, and like the other times, something fluttered deep in her belly. Something most definitely not peaceful or quiet. She might be cold and drenched and completely exhausted, but she wasn’t sorry. About any of it. The truth was, something about this building energized her, gave her a sense of an adventure that had been missing from her life. And that gave her a piece of what she just realized she’d been missing—hope.
Chapter 3
#Motherforker
The elevator doors opened onto the fifth floor, Spence’s private floor. He guided Colbie off the elevator into a lobby with four doors. One led to the stairwell—which Elle came out of with Daisy Duke in tow, perfectly behaved now, of course.
Two more doors led to Spence’s private penthouse apartment and office. The last one opened directly into his gym. They went through that door, and while Elle flicked on lights and hit the alarm pad to enter his code, Spence heard Colbie gasp. He turned back quickly to find her staring in awe out the windows at the sun setting over the bay.
“Wow,” she breathed, still shaking but taking the time to eye the 180-degree vista of the city as she hugged herself in his jacket. He knew that from where she stood, she could see the rest of Cow Hollow, and past that, Fort Mason Park, the Marina Green, and the bay.
And he thought it was pretty wow too. He loved this view. It was one of the many reasons he’d bought the building in the first place.
“I wouldn’t be able to work out to this view,” she said.
“Never gets old for me either.” Spence pulled out his phone to crank up the heat from his app before remembering he hadn’t dried the phone out yet. He had to actually use the control panel on the wall before going to her at the window. When he was stuck in his own head and unable to get anywhere with his work, he liked to stare out at the city that was more home to him than anywhere else had ever been.
“I love it,” she breathed. “I feel like from right here I can see all the way to the ends of the Earth.”
He knew what she meant. Out beyond the bay stretched the Pacific Ocean in all its deep-blue majesticness, clear to the gently curved horizon.
“I could so write to this view,” she went on in a hushed, amazed voice and turned to Elle, who was working out her thumbs—on her phone. “This is such a great building. I saw the pub downstairs. And the coffee shop and that cute reclaimed-wood furniture place. What else is there?”
“More shops and businesses,” Elle said, her thumbs still going, Daisy Duke at her side falling asleep standing up. “An eclectic mix on the first and second floors. Residential apartments on three and four.”
“I don’t suppose you have any apartments available for a short-term rental?” Colbie asked hopefully. “I’m only going to be here until Christmas Eve but would happily pay for the whole month to stay here.”
“Sorry,” Elle said. “But no.”
Spence met Elle’s gaze. She was the mother figure he didn’t need, the bossy-as-hell sister he’d never asked for, and his favorite and most important employee, but she was also a colossal pain in his ass. “What Elle means,” he said, “is that she doesn’t know of anything offhand but I’m sure she could check it out for you.”
“Hmm,” Elle said and nudged a trembling Colbie toward the shower area. “The restroom’s through that door. Fresh towels under the sink. Go get warmed up.”
Colbie, apparently too cold to further argue, nodded. She shut the door behind herself and they heard the lock click into place.
Cute, sexy, and smart.
“Are you kidding me?” Elle asked him, keeping her voice low.
“What?”
“Don’t ‘what’ me. You know what. You’re in the middle of saving the world right now for Clarissa, remember? So please tell me what the hell you think you’re doing.”
They heard the shower come on from inside the bathroom. “Look,” he said, trying to not picture Colbie stripping out of her clothes. “I got her into this mess. This is the least I can do.”
“No,” she said. “The least you could do is give her a hundred bucks for her trouble and send her on her way.”
“Cold, Elle, even for you.”
“Did you even get a last name on her? Or what she does for a living? Did you vet her in any way?”
“For what?” he asked. “I’m the one who ruined her day, not the other way around.”
“And how about the way she reacted to you even thinking about touching her phone? Did you notice that little red flag?”
“Of course. And I wouldn’t have let a stranger touch my phone either,” he said. “Hell, I barely let you touch it.”
“You know what I’m getting at,” she said. “Maybe she has something to hide, Spence.”
Or maybe she was in trouble. She’d denied that but he couldn’t help but think of her sweet eyes and the haunted depths he’d seen in them. “She needs a place to stay. Give her the empty furnished apartment I’m holding on the third floor.”
“We don’t do short-term rentals here. By your own decree.”
“We do today.”
There was a beat of silence. Since Elle was never silent, it had to be shock.
“You hold that open for a reason,” she finally said.
“Yeah, and so far Eddie’s refused to come in off the streets, hasn’t he.” Yet another problem he hadn’t been able to solve, which tightened the ever-present knot in his chest. “Make the rent cheap because she’s a struggling writer—she probably doesn’t have much money.”
Elle’s mouth fell open. “She’s a writer? Are you kidding me?”
“Not a reporter,” he said. “A fiction writer.”
Elle just continued to stare at him. “Are you even listening to yourself?”
“Look, I got her knocked into the fountain and it’s butt-ass cold out there, and she rolled with it.” He remembered Colbie’s throaty laugh and it made him smile even now. “She’s been a really good sport about it.”
“Maybe she had a good reason,” Elle said. “Maybe she was trying to get close to you. Hell, maybe she is a reporter and the whole thing’s a setup.”
“Come on,” he said. “She couldn’t have known Daisy Duke would send her sprawling into the fountain. This happened on my property—I’m making it right, end of story.”
“Fine.” Elle pulled out her phone, which had gone off four thousand times in the past four minutes. “But I’d like to remind your stubborn ass that you’ve not been yourself since this whole media thing. You need to be more cautious about connecting with a stranger who appeared basically out of nowhere.”
“She’s not running a con on me.”
“I’m not saying she is, but we both know you’ve been screwed over, twice if we’re counting, and you haven’t come to terms with the betrayal yet. So just be careful, okay? That’s all I’m saying.” She pointed at him. “And remember, you’re the smartest person in this building and probably the smartest person I’ll ever meet. Use your powers for good.”
He had to laugh. “Ditto.”
She blew out a sigh, gave him a quick hug, and then she and Daisy Duke were gone.
Spence let his smile slip as he walked across the room to check the thermostat again. He’d heard what Elle had to say, and he got it. He was still stinging, and he wasn’t himself. Added to that was the project for Clarissa. The unfinished project. It was critical work, more important than anything he’d ever done, and it was kicking his ass. He was on a deadline and could feel it breathing down his neck every single day that passed
. He could afford no break in his concentration and efforts.
A problem now that 99 percent of his brain had short-circuited over the thought of Colbie naked in his shower . . .
He heard the water go off and he pictured her wrapping herself in his towel. Dripping wet . . . Shoving his hands in his pockets, he moved to the window and looked out at the view that had so impressed her. Once upon a time he couldn’t have imagined living in a place like this, much less owning it. But he’d conquered the