Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Find love in unexpected places with these satisfying Lovestruck reads… About That Night
The Roommate Problem
The Best Man Problem
The Best Friend Incident
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Ballance. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
Entangled Publishing, LLC
10940 S Parker Rd
Suite 327
Parker, CO 80134
[email protected]
Lovestruck is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.
Edited by Heather Howland
Cover design by Mayhem Cover Creations
Cover photography by The Killion Group Images
Allgusak/Shutterstock
ISBN 978-1-68281-552-6
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition May 2020
Some of you manage to move gracefully from one phase of life to the next.
For the rest of us, don’t try this at home.
Chapter One
Lexi Dean’s kitchen was on fire.
One minute she stood amazed that her tart almost sort of looked like the one in the recipe, and the next, poof. Flames. From fruit.
She eyed the pan, wondering if she could get it into the sink and under running water without setting herself or her potholder on fire, but she didn’t have to contemplate long. With a small pop and a burst of light, the fire bounced sideways, dancing merrily across her stovetop.
Fire extinguisher. Heart racing, she lunged through the laundry room doorway, scooped up the apparatus, and took aim. At precisely the moment the foam shot forth, she heard her name.
“Lexi, what the—?”
She jolted in the direction of the disturbance, leaving no greater than four molecules of extinguishing agent on the fire. The remainder arced wildly, dusting her cabinets, countertop, wall, and finally, her neighbor, who stood bewildered in the doorway. Fortunately, her aim had dropped so she hadn’t hit him in the face, but the plate of waffles he gripped held a dissimilar fate. She watched, frozen, as a blob of what she assumed to be butter slid off the side of the stack, riding a wave of foamy muck to the plate.
Her stomach had the absolute nerve to growl.
“Lexi!” Matt—next door neighbor, best friend extraordinaire, and firefighter by trade—dropped the plate and snatched the extinguisher from her hands. He aimed for the flames, but the effort seemed futile. The fire now shifted carelessly across her formerly pristine stove, hues of orange and yellow licking at the cabinets, the curtains catching like tissue paper.
“Call 911,” he told her, the words so calm he might have been asking her to order a pizza. Actually, she was pretty sure he’d been much more aggressive about ordering a pizza, which made it a little hard to take him seriously.
“Are you kidding?” she asked. He was a fireman. He held a fire extinguisher. All things considered, the situation should be improving.
But it wasn’t. She stepped back and snatched her cell phone from her back pocket as a burst of heat ballooned from the growing inferno. “Waffles?” she asked in a sudden moment of panic. She and Matt shared a dog, and before the fire she would have said she was certain he was at Matt’s, but—
“He’s at my place,” Matt told her, not so subtly directing her toward the exit while she placed the call and relayed the details of her emergency. She probably knew the dispatcher, she realized at the vaguely familiar voice. Matt wasn’t the only one who worked at the Dry Rock FD, though she worked the supply room, not the front lines. She would certainly know the first responders, but she thanked any lucky stars she might have left that it wasn’t Matt’s shift. Those guys were her closest friends, and she’d already never hear the end of this. She didn’t need firsthand accounts to color the retelling, and she didn’t need a stretch of the imagination to realize how this would play out. They still brought up the last time her kitchen had been on fire, and the damage then had been minimal.
The damage wasn’t going to be minimal this time.
“What about water?” she asked once she realized Matt had joined her in the yard, the presumably spent fire extinguisher hanging loosely from one hand. The other hand rested lightly against her lower back, an oddly caring gesture for someone who would make sure she remembered this moment for the rest of her life. Her own words made her realize she wasn’t thinking straight. Every other day, she lived with a low-key fear that he’d get hurt Rambo-ing his way into a fire, and now here she was, wondering why he’d left one.
“Smoke’s too thick,” he said needlessly, because she knew that, but standing in her yard watching toxic air billow behind the window left her feeling the kind of helplessness she’d been fortunate enough to largely avoid.
This despite being an admitted disaster in the kitchen. Today wouldn’t be her first consequential run-in with the fire department. She glanced at Matt, expecting to find him on the verge of laughing at her, but the way he watched the house was so intense she almost didn’t recognize him. In that moment, he wasn’t her notoriously annoying best friend sporting sweat pants and a stain on his T-shirt. He was a raptly attentive student of the flames that licked the window, no doubt digesting the last of her curtains and the paltry remains of a long-deceased houseplant she’d tried and failed to bring back to life. It was funny how the smallest shift in perception could have such a jarring effect on reality.
Sirens split the air, closer than she expected, jolting her away from her visual perusal. With a final glance at the house, Matt left the side yard with the best view of the kitchen to go out front, and she followed, hitting the sidewalk in time to see the fire truck turn onto their street. She kept back, which is probably why she didn’t immediately notice her good friend Diego sticking out of the first pair of boots to hit the pavement.
She blinked, hoping she’d imagined him, but nope. Of. Freaking. Course. She should just call the others—Jack, their lieutenant Shane, and his wife and Lexi’s bestie-who-wasn’t-Matt, Caitlin—and have them bring dessert, since her tart was definitely overcooked at this point.
The next few moments were a blur of shouted orders and radio exchanges and nosy neighbors, but the urgency faded pretty quickly. Diego walked over, sweaty and soot-smudged, but no worse for the wear. “Unofficially,” he said, “you’ll get a new kitchen out of it, but the fire was contained. Smoke, water damage. I don’t need to tell either of you how it works. What happened?”
“I’m not sure,” Lexi muttered. “I was making a tart and I turned away for a
moment and…” She stared at the ground, toeing at a strip of grass that had crept into the crack of the sidewalk. The warmth of the late morning sun had nothing on the embarrassment heating her cheeks, which just gave her another reason not to look at her friends, but she couldn’t stare at the ground forever. Resigned, she lifted her gaze to meet Diego’s. “Guys, could you please, please not tell anyone?”
“Wait. You made a dessert?” Diego’s brow lifted in surprise. “What, like a flambé?” To his credit, he didn’t look like he found his question terribly funny, but behind that professional mask of his, she’d bet money he inwardly howled with laughter.
Matt snorted indelicately. Nothing inward with him. “Do you think Lexi, of all people, can make a flambé?”
Lexi rolled her eyes—yep, here it was—while Diego did a terrible job of suppressing a grin. “I think she did.”
They should just get Shane and Jack on speaker so they could all howl in unison. Get it over with. Her eyes heated, and her frustration grew. She did not want to cry, but with her lawn torn up by firemen and their equipment and her door hanging open and her friends staring at her, she was at a justifiable breaking point. And she did an Oscar-worthy job of not hitting it until someone pulled on the hose and it jerked backward, taking out her fledgling Japanese tree lilac that had been propagated from one of her grandparents’ beloved gardens. They were long gone, but the new landowner had let Lexi take cuttings.
And the lone scrawny survivor had just been raked from its bed, across the wet lawn, and into the gutter.
“It was just a tart!” Lexi burst out. “I wanted to surprise Elsie with her mother’s recipe and I don’t know, I guess the butter from the crust—” She stopped when she saw Matt and Diego were on the verge of laughter. She wanted to be mad, but they didn’t know how much that stupid tree meant to her, or how badly she wanted to make a beautiful tart, or how desperately she’d been trying to turn into a baking, gardening, domestic goddess.
“You were making my grandmother a tart?” Matt asked. “She’s pretty much the baking champion of Colorado, and you were making her a tart?”
“She hasn’t baked in years,” Lexi reminded him, as if that justified the brand-new low she’d just reached when it came to ruining otherwise good recipes. She and Matt’s grandmother were close. Closer, probably, than Matt and Elsie. He tried, but the old woman bewildered him—intentionally, Lexi often suspected—and Elsie was old-fashioned enough to prefer to have a woman’s help when it came to more delicate matters. Lexi had known Matt’s grandmother for as long as she could remember, and she’d naturally fallen into the role of caregiver as the elder woman aged.
“Have you baked ever?” Matt asked. “Successfully, that is?”
Lexi turned slightly, doing the best she could to show Matt her back. He, of all people, already knew the answer to that.
“You aren’t going to be able to live in your house for a few days, maybe longer,” Diego said.
Lexi’s jaw dropped. “I can’t live here?”
“Maybe the average person shouldn’t under the circumstances,” Matt said, butting right back in, “but this is Lexi. If you just board up the kitchen, which she clearly has no use for, she’ll be fine, and the rest of the neighborhood…well, suffice to say we’ll all sleep a little better tonight.” He countered her wounded look with an apologetic grin and held up his phone. “As far as it not getting out, we all get dispatch notifications.”
“Crap,” Lexi muttered. She’d forgotten that little detail. She turned to stare at her house. It looked okay, barring the slight cosmetic damage to the yard and what she could see through the window. Maybe she could just board up the kitchen.
The little bit of hope lasted until the inspector showed up a few hours later and informed her otherwise. “Sorry,” he said, not sounding the least bit apologetic. “You’ll need to strip out the damage and pass inspections on the plumbing and electrical before you can stay here. Do you have a contractor in mind?”
No, she did not. She had a shower in mind, then a nap. She was exhausted, and now it looked like she’d be crashing at her parents’ place for however long it took her to get her kitchen rebuilt, which meant the distance of her morning commute would be a nightmare. Lexi barely did mornings as it was, and now she’d have to figure out how to do them an hour earlier.
“I don’t know,” she said, hugging herself. She wore Matt’s sweatshirt, oversized on her smaller frame, and the faint scent of him brought her a ridiculous amount of comfort. Ridiculous because he’d never let her hear the end of this, and the last thing that felt was comforting.
“Hey, Lexi.” She looked up at the sound of her name to see her neighbor, Keith, who owned a construction company. “I’m sorry about your house. If you need someone to spearhead the repairs, I’ll match your lowest estimate.”
“That’s incredibly generous,” she said, thinking of the renovation he’d done to another home on their block. Lexi and Matt had once wandered over to an open house and had been astounded by what had been done with the same simple floor plan she and Matt each had. The real estate agent had absolutely raved about Keith’s work, saying she recommended him to her clients. “I’d love for you to take the job,” Lexi told him, grateful to find a bright spot in this debacle. She hadn’t even thought to worry about finding someone to do the repairs.
“If you put it all in writing,” Matt said from behind her, causing her to jump. His voice wasn’t unkind, but it was decidedly in her business.
Keith smiled. “Covers my butt as well as hers,” he said. “Get a few estimates. Your insurance company will want to see them, and we can talk about any differences to make sure you get what you want out of the restoration.” He glanced back at the house, then to Lexi. “Where should I deliver the paperwork?”
“My parents’ house,” Lexi said. She hadn’t talked to them yet, not wanting to worry them and having fully believed she could stay at her own place, but they certainly wouldn’t turn her away. “I’ll text the address—”
“They’re an hour away,” Matt interrupted, frowning. “That’s a long commute.”
“Well, my tent is at the cleaner’s,” she said drily. “And I’m quite the fan of hot water and indoor plumbing, so I’ll just have to—”
“Stay with me,” he said. When she didn’t respond, he added, “I’m next door. Your stuff is right here, easily accessible. You’re over here all the time anyway, and I have the extra bedroom. There’s absolutely no reason you should drive two hours a day.”
“Well, there is the one about not invading your…privacy.” The excuse fell flat at the end—at least compared to what she wanted to say—but the neighbor was right there, and she didn’t want to call Matt out on his endless parade of first dates, not one of whom she wanted to run into on a middle of the night bathroom run. And as for her own dating life…that was definitely something she wanted to keep under the proverbial sheets, to the extent that she’d kept a secret bit of news from him for an entire week now. A record. She should have known that wasn’t going to last.
“You wash my underwear,” Matt said, eliciting a raised brow from Keith. “I think we can share a house for a few days.”
“Three weeks for a kitchen,” Keith said. “Maybe sooner once I get in there, but that’s a safe ballpark.”
“Three weeks,” Matt repeated. “That’s nothing. And what about Waffles?”
Lexi groaned. This had potential for disaster written all over it. They shared friends, a dog, coworkers, a property line, and Matt was like a son to her parents, while his grandmother would be stuck in granny panties for the rest of her life without Lexi there to covertly supply the thongs Elsie insisted on wearing under her housecoat. If the living situation went wrong, it would ruin everything. Lexi choked down a troubled sigh.
Her burned-out kitchen could easily turn out to be the least disastrous thing about this day, but Matt h
ad her on one point: she didn’t have a single excuse that would justify her abandoning their dog.
“Okay,” she finally agreed. “I’ll stay.”
Chapter Two
Matt had seen a lot of folks deal with the immediate aftermath of a house fire, and even though she worked in the industry, he was a bit surprised that Lexi seemed to be holding it together better than most. She smiled and greeted neighbors like she was hosting a block party while Matt kept to the side, serving the dual purpose of keeping anyone from getting too close to the damage and chatting with the few personnel who wrapped up the scene. By the time everyone cleared out, the silence between them was uncharacteristically heavy.
“It’s still sinking in,” she said after a moment in the thick air, hugging herself into his sweatshirt. His attention snagged on the waistband skimming her mid-thigh and he had to blink himself back into the room. Funny… He didn’t typically daydream on scene, and certainly not about Lexi. Not that it was about her, exactly, but he had sudden second thoughts about pulling her into his arms.
Any other day, it would have been fine, but she’d taken their running joke about how bad she was in the kitchen to new, smoke-riddled heights, and mentioning that seemed like a bad idea. But being nice about it…that was just weird. For the first time, he felt awkward around her, and hugging her didn’t promise to remedy that.
He did it anyway.
“Thanks,” she said, settling easily against him, the word muffled against his chest.
“For what?” he asked, realizing it wasn’t so weird after all. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized how much he should have anticipated that one day he’d find himself precisely in this situation.
“Being here.”
“It would have been a little unkind to set up a lawn chair and watch from next door.” He smiled, not that she could see it. “I do have one question, though.”
“I’m not fixing dinner for you,” she said, pulling away to look at him, her tone so utterly deadpan that he almost missed the hint of humor in her eyes.
Finding Mr. Right Next Door Page 1
