Stranger in my Bed

Erica's POVI was still floating somewhere between Bear and Erica when I pulled into my driveway, that soft, lingering feeling still sitting in my chest.The second I stepped out of my car, I heard it. That awful, grinding, metal-on-metal screech coming from my neighbor's garage, like someone was trying to resurrect a car that died with dignity years ago and refused to let it rest."Oh, come on," I groaned, keys still in hand, glaring at the fence between our properties like it personally offended me.This was the third night this week. I'd bought this house with my own money - money I'd earned wearing two different faces, building two different empires, sleeping maybe five good hours a night for the privilege - and some man I'd never even met was out here at ten p.m. running power tools like he was building an airplane in there.I stormed inside, slammed the door a little harder than necessary, and stood in my kitchen breathing like I'd just run a marathon instead of walked twenty fe

Erica's POVThe line disconnected with a soft, final click, and then Malcolm turned that same cold, deadly stare on me. "Get out of my hotel." My hotel.The words landed like a second hammer on a nail I didn't even know had been driven halfway in already. And that's when it hit me - really hit me, all the way down - because I'd been so busy drowning in the shock of his face that I'd completely blanked on his last name. Vale. Malcolm Vale. How does a person forget the surname of their own high school nemesis? How is that even possible? And yet there it was, arriving minutes too late to save me any dignity at all. I must have looked exactly as stricken as I felt - rooted to the spot, mouth slightly open, doing quiet, catastrophic math in my head - because he had to say it again, louder this time, with all the patience of a man addressing a nobody. “I said get out." That did it. Whatever thread of composure I had left snapped clean through, replaced by pure, scalding embarrassment.