CHAPTERONE
DELANEY
Let’sget one thing straight: I never meant to burn Brewer Barnum’s home to the ground, okay?
In fact, I’d woken up that morning in my half-renovated house on the shores of beautiful Copper Lake feeling pretty fucking chill.
Optimistic.
Possibly even… cheerful.
I’d stared out at the snow-covered trees and the lake while I’d sipped my coffee, thinking this was the kind of easy Sunday morning I’d signed up for last fall when I’d left the city, moved to this little town in the middle of nowhere, and bought a fixer-upper a few doors down from my sister.
While sipping, I hadn’t felt the urge to glare at the flooring and paint cans stacked where my dining table should be.
I hadn’t cast a single guilty glance at the ripped-out ceiling in the living room.
I hadn’t spent even a moment perseverating on the fact that Brewer Barnum—my unfairly tall, disturbingly sexy nemesis—would be showing up the next morning with his giant tool belt and his long-suffering sighs and his I-know-better-than-you-Delaney attitude.
In fact, for once, I hadn’t thought of Brewer at all.
It had been lovely.
Then a weather alert for Copper County had popped up on my phone with the words WINTER STORM WARNING in big red letters, and my whole day had gone to shit.
There were many scenarios in which a man like me would enjoy “getting 6 to 9 inches” on a Tuesday night.
A blizzard was not one of them.
Especially not when the remains of the last winter storm still lingered in my driveway. And especially-especially not when Brewer’s dry, almost-definitely-judgmental “Guess I’ll just… shovel you out myself, then, if I want a place to unload my truck?” was fresh in my memory.
Just the thought of him using that disapproving tone while looking down at me with those clear blue eyes that crinkled at the corners sent an unwelcome heat through my body.
By which I meant the heat offury.
Of outrage at theinjustice.
Obviously.
As a responsible adult, I owned my mistakes, and I really should have shoveled my driveway or paid someone to do it. But in my defense, shoveling wasn’t a thing I’d had to worry about back in the city. So not-a-thing, in fact, I didn’t own a shovel.
Which, I realized with slow-dawning horror, was something I needed to rectify.
Today.
At the store.
Where the Coppertians were.
I drained my coffee cup and sighed deeply.
Was it more than a little lowering that I, Delaney Monroe, the award-winning journalist who’d once sweet-talked his way into a classified government facility in São Paulo without speaking a word of Portuguese, was actively dreading a trip to a small-town hardware store?
Yes, thank you for asking. Yes, it was.
But something about this town made me feel like I was twelve years old again—the runt of the Monroe litter, standing on the sidelines while my hockey-star siblings glided effortlessly through their lives.
I hypothesized that whatever recessive gene manifested in broad shoulders and the ability to see a puck without tripping over it also gave a person the ability to smile at ridiculousness without the need to point it out and correct it. Which meant my siblings had tragically terrible scores on standardized tests but were almost universally beloved.
