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“Shut up, Myles. You’re gonna apologize to a woman in her pajamas like you’re scared? Grow a pair for fucks’ sake.”
She whirled, cheeks flaming, on the man that had spoken as Myles muttered a quiet, “Sorry, Dylan.”
Dylan leaned against a different bike, arms crossed as he stared her down over the broken bits of flower between them. His hair and eyes were dark like the boy’s but there was no touch of babyish youth or soft embarrassment on his bearded face. The family resemblance between them was clear, but the cold eyes told her the similarity went no deeper than the surface. A tingle of awareness, perhaps alarm, swept over her, and she crossed her arms defensively as she glared at him.
“You have damaged my property. You’ll all be lucky if I don’t call the police.” She glanced around, noting with a sick feeling in her stomach that there was a face in at least one window of every house in the vicinity. They were making a spectacle out of this, and she did not appreciate it. “You’re my new neighbor, I presume?”
“Nah, you got lucky. You won’t be dealing with me. Ethan’s still in the house.” He smirked and jerked his chin toward the front door.
Eloise narrowed her eyes in that direction. “Ethan apparently needs a lesson in manners and disturbing the peace ordinances,” she snapped, turning on her heel and marching back across the lawn, this time toward her neighbor’s porch instead of her own. “And get that motorcycle away from my flowers!”
They all ignored her, choosing instead to follow a short distance behind her, clearly intent on watching as she confronted the man she blamed for all of this.
She pounded with the side of her fist, forgoing the usual polite knocking altogether because she knew it wouldn’t be heard over the unholy racket still blaring from the speakers.
Her focus on summoning her new nemesis was so intense, and the music so loud, that she didn’t notice the doorknob turning. He pulled the door open just as she swung arm forward to pound again and she found herself flying through the open air where the door had been and straight into the arms of a stranger.
It was like running into a wall, albeit one that was slightly softer and warmer than any she had encountered before. She felt hands come up to grasp her elbows, lifting her and steadying her back onto her feet. The men in the yard were all gathered at the bottom of the porch steps now, laughing at her again. She shot a disgruntled look over her shoulder as she righted herself, stepping back and slapping peevishly at the hands that had caught her. She had no patience left to be manhandled.
“Excuse me,” she began loudly, infusing her voice with enough hostility to make certain anyone listening knew that she was not requesting to be excused at all, but whatever else she had been about to say was quickly forgotten.
She turned away from the miscreants in the yard and back to the man in the doorway. The barrier she had run into was his chest, which seemed to stretch impossibly from one side of the door frame to the other and to do so at about the same height level as her face. In order to see the rest of him, and there was rather a lot more of him to see, she had to retreat an extra step and tip her chin back so far that throat felt bare and exposed.
“Hmng,” she said, swallowing hard against the sudden urge to run back to her own house and slam the door closed behind her. This man was nothing like his friends. He was neither small and timid, nor haughty and cruel, though she wasn’t sure entirely what words she would use to describe him, besides enormous.
She wasn’t particularly petite—she was slender but five foot seven without shoes—he simply overwhelmed her in height and breadth. Standing so close to him made her feel small and vulnerable even before she got a good look at him.
Looking down at her, his head nearly brushing the top of the door frame, was the most compelling looking man that she had ever laid eyes on. Like the man in the yard, he was bearded but his hair was shorter and lighter, bordering on blond, and his features held none of the cruelty of his companion. He had a long nose and though the shadows of the porch hid the color of his eyes she could see even in the dim light that his mouth was plush and pink.
He was amused, if the lazy curl of his lip was any kind of accurate indication, and entirely too smug for a man who had inconvenienced half the neighborhood with his antics. He leaned casually against the door frame, raising one arm above his head to curl his fingers around the top of the trim. The movement pulled the black T-shirt he was wearing tight across his chest, and with his arm this close she could see the tattoos that snaked from his wrist to somewhere beneath his sleeve. It was impossible to tell what they were, but they bled across his skin in a fascinating pattern of blacks and blues and reds.
“Can I help you, sweetheart?” His voice was deep, honey-over-butter smooth, and arrogant.
She scowled. Men tended to take that tone with her often. Lightly condescending. Annoyingly flirtatious. No one ever took her seriously. It was the gold shine in her hair. The powder blue of her eyes. The slight scattering of freckles across her nose, just enough to add interest to her features without overwhelming the soft pink of her cheeks. As a child, she had often been told she looked like a doll. People assumed that meant she would be bendable. Movable. An object that they could manipulate to their whims. That assumption was a mistake.
“You can begin by not calling me ‘sweetheart’. I’m Eloise Mason, your new neighbor. I live right there.” She turned to point to her own house, and he leaned out the door to look, invading her personal space and letting his breath brush her ear as he did so. He was crowding her, but she refused to step back again. She turned to face him with her lips pressed in a discouraging line.
“All right, well, it’s nice to meet you …”
She ignored him, speaking over the end of his sentence until he trailed away into silence. “You’ve parked your car on my lawn, played your music far too loudly, and allowed your friends to damage my personal property.”
Again, she pointed and, again, he leaned around her to look, this time at the sadly broken mess that was her hydrangeas.
He whistled. “The boys did that?”
“They did,” she confirmed. “I don’t know exactly what it is that you do for a living Mr. …?”
“I’m Ethan.”
“Fine. Ethan. I don’t know what it is that you do, but some of us, that is rather all of us, in this neighborhood have jobs and families and need to be awake at respectable hours, especially during the week. Are you aware it’s a Tuesday night?”
“I am aware actually. Tell me, are you always going to be this cranky on a Tuesday night?”
She blinked up at him, mouth opening and closing silently before shutting on a snap. “If you’re always going to be this disruptive.
He grinned. “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’, then. You’re welcome to come over in your PJ’s any time you feel like yelling at me about not parking on your lawn.” She flushed and glanced down at her cotton pajama pants, curling her bare toes into the painted wood of the porch while he continued. “Which is actually my lawn, by the way.”
“Not that part of it,” she insisted, chin lifting in challenge. “The dividing line between my portion of the yard and yours is quite clear. Please, park your car in the driveway, like the rest of us.”
