When Elliot showed up to work the next morning, there was a big black SUV with tinted windows running in the driveway, parked behind Kelsey’s Porsche. Apparently, being Julia’s assistant was a gig that paid well.

A big man with sunglasses, behind the wheel of the SUV, threw Elliot a jaunty wave as he parked at the curb and grabbed his tool belt from the front seat. He climbed the stairs to the porch and gave a perfunctory knock, before opening the door and coming to a short stop. Julia was standing in the living room, digging through a very large purse, her eyes flashing to his, her brows drawn down.

“What are you doing here?”

She was the most dressed up he’d ever seen her, wearing a fitted gray dress with flowers on the side and black heels. Her hair was as smooth as it probably got, all her curls looking beaten into submission in a knot at the nape of her neck.

“I was coming in to work on the office, but I can come back Monday if I’m going to be in your way,” Elliot offered even though he really didn’t feel like leaving.

“I want you to work,” she said quickly, her voice far too loud. He felt his eyes widen at her exuberance, but schooled his features. “Kelsey will be around if you need anything.”

“Kelsey has plans this morning but will be back by eleven,” the woman herself said as she walked into the living room, rolling a suitcase behind her, with a garment bag attached to it. “I’ll take these to the car for you.”

“I’ve got them,” Julia told her flatly as she wrestled the bags away from Kelsey. “Bye,” she muttered awkwardly.

He and Kelsey watched through the window as the driver got out of the car and loaded Julia’s bags. He closed the door when she slid into the backseat and drove away.

“So,” Kelsey said as she rocked back on her heels, a sly smile on her face as she shoved her hands in her pockets.

“I’ll just work on the office. I know Julia wanted it done and I didn’t have anything else to do,” he told her.

Doing carpentry and building was the best way he’d found to relieve stress. It gave him plenty of time to think without the pressure of talking to other people all the time. The idea of living in the city like Kelsey or Julia, or working in a busy office, made him itch with a feeling he wasn’t sure how to pinpoint. Anxiety? Annoyance? Could have been either or both. Hell, even trying to picture Julia working with so many people gave him pause. He had no idea what she did other than working with computers, but she’d said she was selling a company. That would imply that she was the boss in some form or another. He had a hard time picturing her in that role—the idea of her in charge of something that relied so heavily on interpersonal communication.

But what the hell did he know? Maybe she was great at it and it was him. They hadn’t exactly gotten off to a stellar start.

“I’ll be back by eleven anyway,” Kelsey told him, interrupting his annoying internal thoughts. “You can call me if you need anything or have any questions.”

“I’ll be fine. I know you’re checking out a condo this morning.”

“Well, aren’t you well-informed.” She grinned as she sat on the couch and starting carefully putting papers and files into her messenger bag.

“Wingate Road, gated community, nice place,” he said as he strapped on his tool belt. “Not your style.”

“Who told you that?”

“That it’s not your style? No one. That’s just my opinion.”

“That I’m looking on Wingate Road,” she prompted.

“Julia.”

“Julia?” Her head reared back. “And when did she tell you this?”

“We shot the shit last night.”

If anything, Kelsey looked more shocked. “You and Julia shot the shit? Julia? My Julia?”

There was a speculative gleam in her eye he wasn’t interested in exploring. Something that said she’d love to hear every tid-bit of every conversation that took place where Julia was concerned. Protective and kind of sweet, but annoying. He wasn’t interested in becoming besties with Kelsey Riggs.

“Good luck,” he offered, dismissing her with a salute as he turned on his heel and went to work. If he was efficient and worked a few extra hours, they might just finish the office part of the project early.

“You’re not even going to ask about her?” Kelsey asked, slinging her bag across her chest and following him.

“Not my style,” he responded with a shrug, ignoring her until she left.

But he’d be goddamned if it didn’t eat at him all day. He wanted to know where was she going in that car. Why did she need luggage? How long would she be gone?

His past made him feel an intrinsic interest in seeing people leave. He’d grown up mostly alone, living in an orphanage that was more socially acceptably called a boy’s home, because no one had wanted him. His own parents, pieces of shit that they’d been, had beaten the crap out of him and left him for dead, their hunt for drugs more important than their kid. They’d eventually been arrested and he’d been taken away, put in foster care.

He’d hated it there too. He’d been placed with a family that only cared about the check he brought in from the state. At ten years old, the father had snuck into the basement where he slept one night and that scumbag stood over his bed, jerking himself off. It wasn’t until he’d tried to touch him that Elliot reacted. He was a street kid—he wasn’t naïve, and he’d punched that guy in the dick so hard he’d dropped to the ground as Elliot ran.

As an adult, he was suspicious by nature, cautious with strangers, and maybe had some trust issues that he would cop to. He was thirty-eight years old and still single, and even he knew that said something about a guy. Maybe that’s why he’d loved the Williams family and Grandma Mary so much. They’d shown him what a loving family was supposed to look like without hurting each other or hurting him. When he’d been adopted at twelve years old, he’d finally learned how to be a kid.

Gram especially had taken him under her wing and had shown him things he hadn’t known he’d need to know. At twenty, she’d taught him how to cook for himself. He wasn’t gourmet or anything but she’d taken the time to teach him. He could remember the day he stood in what was now Julia’s kitchen, looking down and asking her, “Why are you teaching me this?”

He’d laughed because he’d burnt everything up to that point, but she’d held his hand, spatula and all, and told him. “Because, I love you, Elliot.”

* * *

Julia enjoyed her new home in Troy.

She had to work hard to identify her feelings and what they meant to her, how they twisted inside and made her feel.

Happy was a stupid word with far too many meanings for her liking. She and her therapist had drawn charts, diagrams to follow the path of feelings so she could identify where she was and how to tell what she was feeling. Happy led down different paths that meant different things like elated or fulfilled. Proud was another path that shot off of happiness, as was joy or amusement. She wasn’t at any of those places, but thought she was somewhere near content, despite the work still going on.

The ongoing construction alternately annoyed her and inspired her. She liked seeing her ideas and plans come to fruition. It gave her a sense that things would soon be exactly as she’d planned them. They also annoyed her because there were messes in her house that weren’t hers and there were people around when she didn’t want them there. Sometimes she liked them being there, something about their presence comfortable and…safe maybe. But sometimes, they talked too much, their words cutting through her every thought.

Those times she hid from them, taking refuge in her bedroom with a fan running to drown out their voices.

But her trip to the city was making her feel decidedly claustrophobic. She was tempted to leave everything at her old apartment in the city and start fresh, leaving it all behind. Of course, Kelsey had reminded her how much she loved her sectional couch, her own bed, and the artwork she’d painstakingly collected over the years. She’d deal with the city and her apartment, but only because it meant being reunited with her things.

She missed her things. They were comforting and familiar.

She also had a business to sell. Excited would be the right word to use to describe how she was feeling, as she typed out a response to yet another email from a concerned employee. She was anxious, mostly because her dislike for Jonathan Beyer ran so deep, and she was concerned that he wasn’t going to do right by the legacy she’d built. She’d tried to detail as much of that into the contract as she could, but he was a bully, always had been, and she worried he would screw it up somehow.

She’d initially started H-Surf as her own version of an online marketplace or online ad board, but she’d been able to turn it into a very profitable and individualized market for people looking to buy and sell designs. Art and building designs, graphic designs and clothing designs—it was a marketplace for artists and engineers to buy and sell their ideas without having to actually produce them. Turns out there were tons of people willing to join for a small monthly fee and within the first two years, she’d had nearly sixty million users worldwide, and the number kept growing steadily. She had a legal team that were patent experts, negotiating customer contracts by the thousands every single day.

The problem was that she didn’t have any desire to continue with the company and wanted to start a new project, her interest in H-Surf gone. Her financial planner was having a coronary. People didn’t just sell things that were currently making hundreds of millions. In fact, H-Surf had grossed nearly twenty billion dollars in its first two years alone. People didn’t just back away from something like that. But she was going to.

Jonathan had some surprisingly insightful and unique plans for H-Surf, and with their sales contract, she knew that the integrity of the business and the people that made it run would be safe. She just had to survive the next two weeks until the sale was final and then she’d be free.

With all of that, being at her house in Troy was the only place she wanted to be. Julia was thankful Kelsey had decided to move to Troy, as well. She was the only thing Julia had that resembled a friend and was the only person that seemed to understand her quirks. She treated Julia as she would anyone else and was also the only friend she had.

Julia liked Cole, too. His easy laugh didn’t grate on her nerves and she never had to wonder what he was thinking. He was open enough that he always told her flat out if he thought something was funny or not.

Elliot Williams on the other hand was tougher to read. His smoky stares and intense silences didn’t make her uncomfortable per se, but he didn’t say much either. She was just as lost looking at him as she was when she looked at the rest of the world.

Julia had never fit in. She’d always been what her grandparents had thought of as too literal, and not being able to fix her had thrown them over the edge. They’d tiptoed around it until it was impossible to ignore. She’d excelled in her schoolwork, but her lack of social skills were something they could never understand. They’d gone so far as to hire an etiquette coach in hopes of normalizing her. Needless to say, it hadn’t worked. She’d grown up being nothing more than the damaged girl they’d accused her of being.

She didn’t always understand the world around her, but the world around her didn’t understand her either. Instead of focusing on fitting in, she’d learned to exert her personality in other ways as she became an adult. She did things like study and buy art, or travel and learn other cultures to feed her yen for knowledge. She’d built software with the intent of bettering people’s lives, even if she couldn’t effectively communicate with them, she could still provide something to them. She donated money and goods to worthy charities and she felt fulfilled by that.

Lately, she’d studied architectural design and green building technologies. She’d painstakingly planned her home renovations around the latest and most environmentally friendly recommendations. Kelsey, Tucker, and Cole seemed to appreciate her plans, but for some reason, it was Elliot’s acknowledgement she wanted. She wanted him to like her house. When she dug deeper, she could admit that she wanted him to like her. She wasn’t sure why she cared what he thought, she just knew that she preferred when his gray eyes looked at her like they did when they were on her porch, rather than they had that first day in her kitchen.

She’d been answering only the most important calls through the weekend and Monday morning. It had been hectic—too many people coming into her office and talking to her, without the luxury of Kelsey there to be her buffer. There had been a high demand for her attention and it had been hard work to concentrate enough to decipher what people said to her. Not just with their words, but with their facial expressions and body language. She’d also worked hard to speak evenly, keeping her tone and volume as consistent as she could. She was exhausted.

Sometime after lunch on Monday her cell rang. She looked at the readout and without being able to pinpoint what the feeling was in such a short span of time, all Julia knew was that she felt lighter.

“Cole,” she said by way of answering.

“Well,” came the good-natured reply, “I know you said you wanted the office in that front room, but since you’ve been gone so long, we decided that maybe it would look better in the garage. And I know how much you loved the hardwood floors, but Tucker dropped a gallon of paint and ruined them so we installed shag carpet. I think you’ll really love the color. It falls somewhere between biohazard atomic waste and projectile baby vomit.”

Julia’s stomach turned, but despite not seeing his face, she knew he was joking. Cole was always joking. “I don’t believe you.”

“Me?” he asked, his voice high-pitched and dramatic. “I’m crushed.”

“You’re lying. I can hear it.”

He made a tsk sound. “You know me too well. Everything is going fine here. Just thought I’d check in on you. Kelsey’s been pretty tight-lipped about what you’re up to, so I thought I’d skip your consiglieri and go right to the big boss.” He stopped talking, but only for a second. “You know what a consiglieri is?”

“I saw The Godfather,” she confirmed.

“So, boss. How’s it going?”

Without hesitation she told him the truth. “I’m ready to come home. I don’t like it here anymore.”

“Is everything okay?” Cole asked, his voice rising at the end of his question. The sound became muffled for a moment, murmured voices in the background.

“Just tired,” she answered. “How’s everything going really?”

“Really? Well, everything looks great. Elliot came in and did a lot of the woodwork that you wanted and Tucker finished both bookcases. We installed them this morning. I repaired the floor and refinished it the way you asked and now we’re just waiting on paint.”

She tried to hold it back but yawned loudly as he finished. “You’ve been busy.”

“We have. And what, you’ve been on vacation?” he asked.

“I’ve barely left my office,” she admitted. “I’ve been here since Saturday morning. I only left last night to go back to my apartment to sleep for a few hours.” She paused. “I don’t like it here anymore.”

“Being in Troy must have knocked the city right out of the girl,” Cole said. “Maybe it’s time for you to come on home now,” he suggested.

It had been a long time since anybody other than Kelsey cared one way or another how she was faring. In one conversation, Cole had asked her twice and was being persistent about making sure she was doing okay.

“I’m overtired,” Julia insisted. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Tonight,” a small voice from the doorway interrupted. Annie, Kelsey’s assistant, stood there, cell phone in hand. “I’ve already sent someone to gather your things at your apartment. They’ll be in the car, waiting for you to head home,” Annie told her, a slight cringe on her face.

“Kelsey?”

Annie nodded and left the room, her task completed.

* * *

Later that night, as Kelsey sat on the porch finishing a glass of wine, Julia’s car pulled into the driveway. Cole and Tucker had gone home, leaving Elliot behind to finish some trim details before the painting began, while she waited for Julia to come back home. The driver lumbered out of his seat and up the walkway to the porch.

“Evenin’, Miss Kelsey,” he greeted, a small smile on his face. He was Julia’s regular driver when she needed one. A father of two grown daughters and an ex-cop, John took his duties seriously, and Kelsey was always confident that Julia was in good hands with him.

“John.” She set her wine glass on the porch rail. “Did you have an okay ride out of the city?”

“Oh, it’s always a nice ride with Julia. She’s either working or sleeping. Not too much in between.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, looking a bit sheepish.

“I take it she’s sleeping,” Kelsey prodded. She heard Elliot come onto the porch behind her.

Far be it from her to meddle or match-make, but she wasn’t an idiot. She’d seen the way Elliot looked at Julia and vice versa. Not to mention, she’d chatted up the ever adorable and playful Williams brothers as to what the deal was with their older brother. They’d all decided, putting aside Cole’s initial intention of getting into Julia’s pants, that Elliot and Julia would be cute together. He didn’t seem put off by her quirks, something Kelsey herself had grown to find endearing. It had become hard for her to even see how other people didn’t love the woman. They say that honesty is the best policy and Julia didn’t have a coy bone in her body.

Maybe, she thought, she’d take a few liberties and throw Elliot and Julia together now and then, just to see what happened.

“She didn’t make it five minutes out of the city,” John told her then. “I…” he hesitated.

“I know, John,” Kelsey told him, remembering an unfortunate incident where he’d tried to carry Julia while she’d slept and she’d kicked him with her heel. He’d sworn he’d never try to carry her again. “Elliot,” Kelsey asked as innocently as she could muster. “Could you do me a huge favor?”

He stood behind her, big brawny arms crossed over his chest as he eyed them.

He really was handsome even if she wasn’t interested in men. Far too old for her and far too serious in general. He always seemed to wear a stern expression and was too watchful for her tastes, but he was perfect for Julia who often looked eerily similar.

“What do you need?” Elliot asked without moving an inch.

“Could you carry Julia up to her room? She’s not going to wake up easily and there’s no way I can carry her. If I could”—Kelsey raised her three fingers in what she thought might be a Girl Scout promise—”I totally would.”

He stood stock still for a moment, his expression unchanged, his eyes assessing her as though he could see right through her. Eventually though, he sighed and narrowed those eyes, and walked toward the car.

“Oh, thank you!” Kelsey gushed as she hustled to the back seat and opened the door.

It was almost too easy. What guy wouldn’t want to put their hands all over Julia Hawkins? She was almost untouchably beautiful and barely knew it, her fashion sense was incredible, and she was as genuine as they come. Oh, and not that it should matter, but she was also richer than God.

Julia was, as usual when she crashed after overworking herself, out like a light. Her red Donna Karan still looked immaculate as she slept with her head propped on a travel pillow.

Elliot wasted no time reaching in and sliding a hand behind her back and one under her knees, scooping her up. It barely fazed him at all, and Julia’s head lolled for a second before resting on Elliot’s chest as he strode confidently toward the house.

Kelsey bobbed her eyebrows and smiled at John. Her plan was in motion.

* * *

Elliot was alternately wondering how he got himself into such a mess and how he could have avoided it. He could have not gone outside to investigate when he’d heard Kelsey talking to a man, but that seemed unavoidable. It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, at least to make sure someone wasn’t bothering her or she didn’t need anything.

He could have said no to carrying Julia, but the thought of Kelsey trying to do it seemed ridiculous.

That was how he found himself with a house-stealing bombshell in his arms, carrying her to her bedroom. Her hair was tamed back into one of those enormous bun things and she smelled like oranges. Really sweet and probably expensive oranges. She hadn’t moved a muscle since he’d picked her up and stayed motionless as he crossed the threshold of her bedroom. It was strange entering her bedroom like that, like maybe he should have been someone that had been nice to her before being allowed entrance. Not that their last conversation had been bad, but they certainly hadn’t been friendly. On the other hand, she hadn’t been a ray of sunshine toward him either.

He gently laid her on the bed and did his best not to stare at her. She really was a beautiful woman. Her skin was lightly tanned and perfectly clear, and in sleep her face was relaxed, whereas when she was awake she looked wary most of the time. Her small breasts were pushed up toward the neckline of her dress which was tight on her thin body. He looked at her feet and the heels that she still wore, and wondered if she ever wore anything less than a four-inch heel.

He heard Kelsey subtly cough from the doorway and kicked himself for getting caught staring at Julia’s body while she slept. It made him feel ashamed, like he’d crossed a line.

She didn’t seem fazed by the glower he sent her.

“Thank you, Elliot,” she told him as she came over to the bed and began taking her boss’s shoes off. Julia didn’t even flinch as the heels were taken off her feet, exposing toenails that were painted into a fancy pedicure. Kelsey took the shoes and walked them across the room, putting them in a box that was on top of the dresser, which kind of baffled Elliot.

“Why the box?” he asked.

Kelsey turned around after closing the lid. “What do you mean?”

“The shoes,” he explained. “Why keep all the shoes in boxes? Don’t most people just throw them on the floor of the closet?”

She chuckled a little and shrugged as she took his arm and walked him toward the door.

“They’re eighteen-hundred-dollar shoes, Elliot. You don’t just throw them on the closet floor, you know what I mean?”

He stopped in his tracks. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he shouted and then immediately started whispering. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Kelsey propelled him out the door, but before shutting it in his face whispered, “And that dress? Way more than that. Now you know why she wants that awesome closet.”