“Oh. My,” Tierney says in a deep Joan Crawford-esque manner, lifting her palm to her chest as she drinks him in. Subtle is a language she’s never been able to master.
I mouth the word “sorry” to my neighbor and link my arm into hers in an attempt to drag her away.
“Excuse me,” she says to Jude as she jerks her arm from my grasp. “You two are neighbors?”
He looks at me then to her before his full lips pull into a smirk. He’s amused.
“We are,” he says.
“Have you met yet?” she asks, her finger pointed as it moves between the two of us.
“We have,” he says. “Last night.”
Turning to me, Tierney’s liquid blue eyes widen and she fights a smile. I’m sure the second we’re out of here, she’s going to go off on me for not mentioning him, but there’s nothing to mention.
I have a hot neighbor. So what?
“You know she’s single, right?” Tierney says.
“Oh, my god.” I turn away for a second. “Tierney. Stop.” Glancing back, I say to Jude, “I’m so sorry. She’s pregnant and crazy hormonal and she has no filter.”
“Are you trying to imply in front of this ridiculously beautiful specimen of a man that I’m a hot mess?” Tierney asks, one auburn eyebrow perched.
“Yep,” I say.
“Don’t sweat it,” Jude says, pulling his phone and earbuds from his shorts pockets. He speaks to her but looks to me. He’s still a stranger, but there’s something going on behind those olive-green eyes of his that seem to intensify the longer he stares at me. “Love, see you around.”
Turning away, Jude heads toward the elevator, but I stay back. It’d be awkward if we all piled in now.
“I can’t believe you said that,” I say once he’s gone, lightly punching her arm before clapping my hand over my mouth. “What are we? Fifteen?”
Tierney laughs. “Lighten up. Your neighbor is hot as hell and you’re single as hell. I was just putting that energy out there. If it’s meant to be, something will come of it.”
“I don’t want anything to come of anything,” I remind her. I’ve told her this a hundred times this year alone. I don’t want to date. I’m focusing on myself for a while and then I’ll see what happens. “What if he asks me out now?”
Not that I think he would …
And for all I know, he’s got a wife or fiancée or girlfriend or something.
But still—if he did ask me out and I said no, it’s going to make bumping into him around The Jasper real fun.
“Fine,” she says, throwing her hands up as we make our way to the elevator. “I’ll leave the divine interventions to fate from now on.”
I chuff through my nose.
Good. Because I don’t believe in fate.
Chapter Four
Jude
“You know I still don’t agree with any of this,” my sister, Lo, sighs into the phone.
“Yep.” Pretty sure she made that crystal clear at least thirty-eight times before I left the apartment earlier this week.
“You have my support but not my approval,” she says.
She said the same thing when I enlisted in the Army a decade ago.
“Ah. Good to know.” As of a few days ago, I had nothing from her but dirty looks and rolled eyes.
“You’re a good person, Jude,” she says. “And I know you think you’re doing this for the right reasons. I know you’ve justified this a hundred times already. But just … be careful.”
“You guys should come check out the place sometime,” I change the subject. What’s done is done. The train has left the station. There’s no getting off, no turning around. “There’s tons of room for the girls to run around. I bet they’d love it.”
Lo pauses, and I can just picture her hand smacking across her forehead because she knows I’m redirecting the conversation.
I begin to add that there’s a fountain outside they’d love, but I’m interrupted by a knock at the door. Pulling my phone from my ear, I check the time.
10:04 PM.
This is odd.
“Lo, can I call you back?” I ask.
“What’s wrong?”
“Someone’s at the door. I’ll call you back, all right?” I hang up before she has a chance to ask another question, and then I head for the door, squinting through the spyhole and smirking when I see a pretty little blonde standing on the other side of the door.
Taking a closer look, I see she’s wrapped in a fluffy white bathrobe.
“Hey,” I say, greeting her a moment later. “What’s going on?”
She gathers the lapel of her robe in her left hand, the other one holding onto the knot of her belt. “I’m so sorry to bother you. I know it’s late. I, uh, I have an issue and I’ve called the super, and all I got was a voicemail that said it could take twenty-four hours for them to get back to me. I called a plumber, but the quickest anyone could get out here would be two hours from now, and by then my entire apartment might be flooded so—”
“—what happened?”
“I drew myself a bath, walked away for a few minutes, came back and went to shut off the water, only the water won’t shut off,” she says. “It’s like the faucet is broken or something.” She worries the left corner of her bottom lip. “I’m so sorry. Maybe you don’t even know how to fix something like this, but I just thought I’d ask.”
“Yeah. I can take a look for you,” I say. Her expression softens and I follow her across the hall, where she leads me through her foyer, past the living room, down a hallway, and across her master bedroom to an all-white bathroom. The standalone tub acts more like a waterfall at this point since the overflow valve can’t keep up, and there’s a good inch or so of water on her bathroom floor, some of it sopped up with towels.
It takes maybe thirty seconds for me to locate her water shut-off valve and give it a good couple of cranks.
The water stops and Love stands in the doorway with wet feet and a pretty smile on her pink lips.
“How did you know what to do?” she asks.
Rising, I shrug. I can’t let her know that I’m a plumber by trade. According to Hunter, I’m a “strategic consultant” with multinational clients. It’s exactly the kind of job you can BS because no one really knows exactly what it is you do and contracts are private, so …
“I might be a little on the handy side,” I say.
She smooths her palm over her lapel. “Well, I’m impressed. And grateful. This should buy me some more time until the super can get someone here.”
“But you won’t have any running water in your bathroom until then,” I remind her, hands on my hips as I ponder my next move.
I could fix this issue for her easily. There’s usually a missing piece inside the faucet, a screw or part that came loose, but I don’t want to give myself away because something like that isn’t exactly common handyman knowledge.
But screw it.
She doesn’t have time to wait for the super to call her back. By then, her apartment will be so water damaged, she might even have to relocate.