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Chapter One
One Door Over
The cold was a malevolent and hypocritical thing. On the one hand, it whipped at your face with its frigid gales, doing its best to send you scurrying back indoors. On the other, it seeped so deep into your bones that it could eventually freeze you in place, stopping you from escaping it. Some people could handle such sadism, having developed a near-immunity to all but the most inhospitable temperatures.
Liam Carr was not one such individual.
He wanted nothing to do with the relentless chill surrounding him, which ruthlessly sought to sneak its tendrils through any vulnerabilities in his thick coat it could. In its hopes of subjecting him to more of its pallid touch, it tried to catch his shoes, but Liam tromped so quickly through the foot of snow beneath him that it couldn’t latch on. If there was any silver lining to the blizzard that had recently slammed into his city, it was that it had packed the snow together so tightly that his shoes didn’t sink very far when he stood on it—as he did now. About a mile away from his home, battered on all sides by the elements.
Such was the price of being a gentleman, and for a woman he was only feigning interest in—at her explicit request. He and Annabelle Royce, the sole heiress of Royce Railroads, might only be pretending that they were considering dating, but they weren’t pretending they were quickly becoming close friends. They might have only met recently, at the instigation of Liam’s next-door neighbor, Tess, and Anna’s best friend, Avril, but that no longer seemed to matter. There was a level of trust calcifying between them, largely due to the falsehood they were perpetuating in front of Tess and Avril.
The two women meant well with their attempts to play matchmaker for Anna, especially given the pressure her father was putting upon her to marry a man—the son of another wealthy and influential family—who all three women had described, in varying degrees of vehemence, as an utterly repugnant human being. Liam hadn’t known Anna or Avril before Tess, his longtime next-door neighbor and secretly the woman of his dreams, had asked him to date Anna. Not wanting to disappoint Tess, who’d emphatically explained Anna’s uncomfortable family situation, he’d buried his discomfort before agreeing to at least meet Anna and see how things went.
Since then, well, there was one thing for Liam to complain about in his life right now: the cold. There wasn’t anything else, even if he tried to find some trivial issue to add. Ever since his return home for winter break, he’d wholly feasted on pleasant experiences.
While he was rapidly becoming close friends with Anna, his relationship with Avril, her best friend and the more…outgoinginstigator between herself and Tess, was difficult to pin down. They were friends, but they weren’tjustfriends. If pressed to assign her something more specific than that, he’d almost have to consider her a mentor. A devilish, jaw-droppingly sexy, and provocative mentor.
What was she mentoring him in? Well, that involved her cohort, whose very house he was making his way back to. Now that he’d delivered Anna safely out of his neighborhood, allowing Avril to pick her up on the connecting main road, which snowplows had thankfully cleared yesterday, he had no reason to linger outdoors. He didn’t have any reason to return home, either. Not when he had an invitation to enter the house just one over.
On his descent of the hill where he and Anna had engaged in a fleeting snowball fight during their ascent, Liam nearly slipped several times. They were all his fault. Impatience drove him forward, recklessly hastening him toward his destination. Escaping the cold was just a secondary objective. The main reason could only ever be because of the angel of a woman he knew he would find when he arrived.
He'd wanted Tess Williams before she’d been Tess Williams, or rather, before she’dreturnedto being Tess Williams. When heaven had bequeathed her to him as a next-door neighbor numerous years ago, her last name had been Levine. Only a few weeks ago, a long time coming, which even she’d admitted on the night he’d returned from college, she’d regained her maiden name after finalizing her divorce from a man as unpleasant as a catheter. When Liam had heard the news, he’d celebrated vigorously.
Still, he would never have guessed that things would end up playing out as they had. It was one thing to fantasize that, no longer chained down by a draining, passionless marriage, a woman worth fighting literal wars over would reciprocate the feelings that he’d long harbored for her. It was another to believe that reality might ever resemble such a fantasy. After all, she was twice his age, a lauded professor at a prestigious college, and as radiantly beautiful as starlight. It had seemed impossible that she would ever see fit to descend from the heavens in front of him, beckoning angelically for him to join her at her side, revealing that she’d chosenhimover anyone else. Even if Liamhadbeen the kind of person who overflowed with confidence and ego, such a belief would have still reeked of outlandish daydreaming.
Recently, however, what seemed impossible had repeatedly scrubbed off those first two letters. Otherwise, he would never have allowed himself to cling to such a farfetched hope as fervently as he now did.
And he owed an external miracle, not an internal one. It had a name, a mischievous grin, and as much uninhibited sexiness as you could stir a stick at.
Avril’s “mentorship” revolved around the possibility that he could romance Tess, around that most infinitesimal speck of hope within him. When he’d met Anna, she’d apparently noticed his feelings for Tess. When she’d reported this to Avril, primarily as her explanation for why she didn’t think it was a good idea for them to date, the latter had taken matters into her own hands. Literally.
Liam had experienced fever dreams that were several steps less outlandish than what had transpired at the women’s shared apartment, where Avril, just minutes after they’d met, had “enticed” him with a simple but effective method: she’d jerked him off.
It hadn’tjustbeen that, and the real reason he’d capitulated to her wishes involved a promise she’d made to him. One where she’d offered to help him earn Tess’s attention—and maybe more. On her side, she only wanted him to date Anna for a little while, solely in the hope that it would help her find some backbone so she might stand up to her father’s selfish wishes. With that being the case, it didn’t cause her any hesitance or guilt to offer him the… unique brand of aid she was promising. Lofty a claim as it was, she’d seemed to believe it when she said he might have a chance with Tess.
That had been the moment where the minuscule hope within him, just a flickering ember for years, had begun to grow.
Arms wrapped around himself, blinking rapidly through the frigid wind pummeling his face, he caught sight of his house and, more importantly, the one next to it. If not for the dozens of tons of snow burying his neighborhood, he would have looked upon numerous Christmas lights and ornaments across his street. He and Tess had put up his lights, and one very plump Santa ornament, which now stood buried under a mountain of snow by his chimney, the day after his return home. Less than a week later, everything remained entombed beneath the snow, and it didn’t seem likely things would clear up in time for the Christmas Eve party Tess had offered to throw at her home.
Gary, Liam’s other next-door neighbor, who put up enough Christmas lights every year to put Clark Griswald to the test, must have been fuming because of it.
Christmas Eve was in just two days, and Liam’s excitement for it had continually ballooned over the past few days. Still, he wasn’t going to get ahead of himself.Todayseemed like it might be pretty spectacular, too.
Marching through the snow toward Tess’s home, he intended to remain focused on the present. He had a text on his phone from last night inviting him over after he saw Anna off. With his mission accomplished, now was the time to reap whatever rewards awaited him there.
With every car not safely stowed inside a garage as entombed as everything else in sight, he didn’t need to look both ways before crossing the street. He left behind fifty hastily taken footprints before he reached her front door, hand already stretched toward its handle, expecting to find it unlocked. His chilled hand met the knob’s equally icy metal, though it stopped short of twisting it.
What’s that?Liam wondered, spotting what appeared to be a folded sheet of paper wedged between the door and its frame.
Had Tess left him a note? He didn’t know what else it could be, but its contents would remain a mystery until he read it. Clutching it with his other hand, he held it from falling as he gently opened Tess’s front door.
If she was downstairs, she didn’t call out upon hearing him open her door. Stepping onto her indoor entry mat, he was careful not to spread the snow caked to his shoes beyond it. Clutching the folded paper, he eschewed escaping them and his coat before viewing its contents.
Written in fine scrawl, he read:Liam. I’m a bit fatigued this morning, so I’ve decided to rest up a little more. When you get back, I’ll probably still be in bed. You are welcome to stay over while I do so, and my pantry is yours. I’ll see you in a little while. Today will just be the two of us.
Dismay and anticipation made for strange bedfellows in his chest, but there was no escaping either’s touch. The former felt slightly more poignant at first, though the latter would supersede it in a matter of minutes. He remembered seeing a few yawns from the beautiful woman when he and Anna had departed a little while ago. Curtailing his impatience, he wouldn’t begrudge her for wanting a bit more shuteye.
After escaping his snow-covered shoes, a blocky coat, and the rest of his winterwear, Liam stared longingly at the staircase heading upward just a few steps into her home. Revoking any thoughts about disturbing Tess’s sleep, he naturally gravitated toward the kitchen. While his body recovered from the harsh environment, gnawing hunger soon replaced it as his most pressing concern. It didn’t take him long to find a box of pancake mix, a pan, and a syrup bottle.
