Page 18 of The Accidental Innkeeper

Rule two: Don’t rescue people who didn’t ask to be rescued.

You offered help once. If they said no, you left them to their choices. It kept you from becoming the guy who fixed everyone’s shit while yours rotted quietly in the background.

Rule three: Never mix business and feelings.

Feelings made you sloppy. Sloppy got expensive.

Rule four: You don’t chase women.

If a woman wanted you, you’d know. If she didn’t, you didn’t push. You didn’t hover. You didn’t linger around like a damn stray dog.

And rule five, the one that mattered most: Don’t start something you can’t walk away from.

That last one had saved my ass more times than I could count. The problem was, I’d already started something.

Not on purpose, but it was there. The beginning of a thread, loose and tempting, and I hated that my brain kept tugging at it.

Fuck.

She’d looked at me like I was the enemy and the solution all in one breath. Like she didn’t trust me but wanted to. Like she was standing on the edge of something and pretending it wasn’t a drop.

I’d heard her voice in my head—intelligent, funny, fast—and it pissed me off because I didn’t carry people around in my head. I carried numbers, schedules, material lists.

I turned onto my street and slowed, the tires crunching gravel as I pulled into my driveway.

My place wasn’t fancy. It was clean and quiet. It was mine.

I killed the engine and sat there for a second, my hands still on the wheel as I listened to the tick of cooling metal. The night pressed in, calm and dark, the kind of calm I’d earned.

Then my brain, because it was apparently a traitor, tossed me a vivid picture: New York inside that inn, stumbling around in the dim, probably tripping over a loose floorboard, probably talking to herself, probably insulting a painting.

I exhaled, climbed out of the SUV, and walked to the front door. I unlocked it and stepped inside, already moving on autopilot. Keys on the hook. Boots by the door. Lights in order. Habit was comfort. Habit was control.

I poured a glass of water and drank half of it. The house was quiet. Just the fridge humming and the wind outside.

Most people called that lonely. They were wrong.

I set the glass down and leaned against the counter, staring out into the dark.

She’s fine, I told myself.

Becca’s SUV was there. Becca knew the town and the inn. She wouldn’t let New York get herself killed on her first night.

I didn’t like the thought of New York being alone in that place, not because I cared but because it was a dumb setup. A person like her, city type, used to control in different ways, walking into a building with six months of dust and broken routines? That was an accident waiting to happen.

And she was accident-prone. I could tell.

I left the kitchen and walked through the house, checking locks the same way I checked job sites: front door, back door, windows. The muscle memory kept my mind from running in circles.

But when I got to the bedroom, the circles came back anyway.

Damnit. I lay down and stared at the ceiling, my arms behind my head.

The thing was, I didn’t have time for this.

I had projects, deadlines, a crew that depended on me being consistent and clear-headed. I had permits to pull, inspectors to schedule, and subcontractors who would absolutely try to bullshit me if I wasn’t on top of them.

I didn’t have time for women with baggage. I wasn’t a fucking teenager. I wasn’t bored or lonely. I didn’t need some woman with a suitcase and a mouth full of sarcasm to come in and mess with my head.