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Rationally, she should have known her aunt’s pen pals would have landed at the hotel. Where else would they stay? But irrationally, she would have preferred not to be so painfully aware that Caleb’s bedroom lay right below hers. Their showers shared pipes. The exterior staircase from the kitchen hugged the sidewall where it descended to a second-floor landing adjacent to the balcony. She could join him in under ten seconds anytime she felt like it.
Not that she would! He was insufferable. A huge roadblock to her project, which was not going to happen if she didn’t figure out how to sway the folks into selling. That was her deal with Damian; he’d front the money if she’d talk them into it. And then it would be her project to run while he focused on the resort.
Caleb’s timing could not have been worse.
Or could it not have been better?
Inspired all at once, she didn’t hesitate to do exactly as she’d sworn she would not. Taking the stairs two at a time, she hit the landing be
fore fully catching her breath.
“Hey,” she called and climbed over the spindle railing. There should have been a gate, but the stairs had been erected as a fire escape, not a second path to the balcony. Or a secret back entrance to his bedroom that her aunt would know nothing about if she chose to use it.
Definitely she should not have thought of that.
“Hey,” he said casually as if women climbed onto his balcony every day.
Maybe they did. None of her business. “I’m on the third floor.”
“Congratulations.”
The temper that lived under the surface of her skin started simmering again. Curse of the Irish, and it figured that she’d gotten that from her mother instead of the luck of the Irish. “Do you have a problem with me? Because we’re not on opposite sides here.”
“Aren’t we?”
He hadn’t moved from his solitary pose, leaning against the spindle railing as he surveyed the street. She’d call it people watching if they’d been on 6th Street in downtown Austin where all the bars and tattoo parlors had apartments above them. If you stood on one of the balconies overlooking the throng at around midnight, you could see one of everything—drag queens, Amish on Rumspringa, drunk college kids, drunk middle-aged tourists, once even someone in a full Buzz Lightyear costume when it wasn’t even Halloween.
In Superstition Springs, only Aria trod the dust until she hit Ruby’s front door, disappearing inside quickly where the air-conditioning was the coldest in town. It wasn’t an accident. Ruby kept it low to get people in the door, which was smart marketing.
Since the sole person available to watch on Main Street had vanished, Caleb only had one excuse for not facing someone speaking to him—rudeness.
She crossed her arms. “I’m on the side of doing what’s best for this town. Since you haven’t been here all that long, I’ll help you understand what that is. We need more traffic. Locals come in to get carrots and cabbages from Mavis and to eat at Ruby’s, but outside of that, it’s a ghost town. I want to change that.”
“So do I,” he said after a long enough pause that it had become a toss-up whether he’d actually respond. “Where we clash is on how to do that.”
“We shouldn’t be clashing at all! This is not your fight. It’s mine—” She cut herself off before she admitted how important it was for her to change the dynamic she’d started eight years ago. “There’s no fight here. I’m trying to promote progress and give people fair payment for their land. And maybe get a career boost at the same time.”
His expression didn’t change. Did he not have any emotions in his cold, hard chest?
Of course a man like him could never understand what it was like to feel so suffocated and desperate that there was no other way out than to slough off all your responsibilities and just… flee. Or what it meant to grapple with guilt over it on a daily basis. Or how a man’s unfulfilled promise could devastate a woman’s psyche late at night when she had no resources to staunch the crippling emotion.
If she didn’t have this shopping center project, she had nothing.
“I’ve been here long enough to know that people don’t want a shopping center plopped down in the middle of their land. Why don’t you find somewhere else to put it?” he suggested mildly like she was a simpleton who had never considered how much easier it would be to do exactly that.
But Damian’s investors didn’t want the failing, falling-apart town near their resort; they wanted a chic shopping center. Her role was to guide the residents into seeing the benefits to them, namely money and lots of it.
“Because the whole point is to buy the land from the townspeople so they have resources to start over somewhere else if they want. Or stay if they want.” She’d given this speech so many times she could do it in a dead sleep, and the constant repetition had only infused the message with her passion for the project. “It’s about giving them choices. I need the locals to be champions for this, or we’re just hostile developers coming here and building up around them without their say.”
“Funny, seems like that’s happening anyway,” he drawled, which put her back up even worse.
“I have a degree in urban planning,” she informed him. “Which means I know a few things, mister.”
At that, he swung around to face her, leaning one hip on the railing and crossing his arms to mirror her but in a maddeningly casual pose that drew attention to the hard swell of biceps that had burst out below his T-shirt sleeves. A slow smile spilled onto his face, which hooked her inside, way down deep.
She liked it better when he was ignoring her.
“Well, now. Did they forget to write the definition of ‘urban’ on the board while you were earning that fancy degree?” he asked, and one side of his grin kicked up into an infuriating smirk. “Because I don’t see anything urban around here. Missy.”
