Chapter 2

Erica's POV

I 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 feet.

The day I finally meet that man, I thought, I am going to give him a piece of my mind he will never forget. Except - and this was the humiliating part - I wasn't entirely sure I had the nerve to actually march over there and say it to his face. I could stare down brides mid-meltdown. I could tell a bridezilla no. I could not, apparently, knock on a stranger's door and demand he stop sawing metal at bedtime.

"One day," I muttered to no one, as I headed towards my room. "Just... one day."

****

The next morning

I woke up angry before I even opened my eyes, which was a new personal low. My body ached with the exhaustion of a night spent listening for a noise to stop that never did. Weren't there laws about this? Noise ordinances, decency, something? Or was I genuinely the only person on this street cursed enough to share a fence line with a man who apparently built machinery for a hobby?

I lay there a full minute, resenting Claire Huggins with my whole chest for choosing today, of all days, to need me in a boardroom.

I dragged myself up and padded past Heather's door on my way to the kitchen. It was cracked open, and through the gap I could see her - sprawled diagonally across her bed, one leg hanging off the edge, snoring softly like the world owed her nothing.

"Must be nice," I muttered.

Heather could sleep through a tsunami. I mean that almost literally - I once watched her doze through a fire alarm test in college as I stood in the hallway in my robe convinced the building was actually burning down. It was a gift. An infuriating, enviable gift.

She'd been staying with me a few months now, ever since I flew out to LA myself to physically pry her out of a spiral - lost her job, got her heart handed back to her in pieces by a man who didn't deserve the years she gave him, and I wasn't about to let my best friend fall apart three thousand miles away from anyone who loved her. So I packed her up, brought her home, and watched her slowly turn back into herself, loud and bright and impossible, exactly the way she was supposed to be.

The one thing she'd never stopped fighting me on? My emotional wellness job.

"It's reckless, Erica," she said, every single time. "You lock yourself in a room with strange people and call it a job."

"It's not reckless, it's managed risk," I always told her. "I have a bodyguard. I have a contract. I have rules."

"You have a death wish with candles."

But what was life, really, without a little risk. I'd built two businesses on instinct and nerve; I wasn't about to let my best friend's fretting undo either one.

I made breakfast light - just enough to get me through the morning without weighing me down, eggs and half a grapefruit. Then I showered, got dressed in the deep emerald blazer that made me look professional, and stepped back out into the hallway.

Heather was still snoring, soft and even, completely undisturbed by the sunlight now pouring across her face.

"Lucky girl," I whispered, and grabbed my keys, my bag, and my tablet on the way out the door.

****

I'd just dropped into the driver's seat when my phone buzzed.

Claire.

I frowned, swiped it open, and read.

Claire: Erica I am SO sorry, an emergency business trip came up and I have to be on a flight to Paris in one hour. I don't want to cancel on you though, you're already doing me such a huge favor. Would you mind meeting my fiancé Malcolm instead? He'll be at the boardroom at Vale's Hotel, same time. I promise he's a sweetheart, he just gets a little serious about work. Thank you thank you thank you, I owe you forever!!

I read it twice, mostly out of habit, and felt absolutely nothing about it beyond mild relief that I didn't have to change my schedule. This wasn't new. Grooms stood in for brides more often than people thought - busy women, business trips, cold feet about vendor meetings they didn't actually care about the details of. It was practically routine.

No problem at all! I typed back. Tell him I'll see him at ten.

I started the engine and pulled out, already running through the questions I'd need answered - floral budget ceiling, guest count, whether they wanted the ceremony and reception under one roof or two - the same efficient checklist that had carried me through ninety-some weddings without a single meltdown that wasn't the client's.

The hotel, when I finally pulled up in front of it, actually made me pause with my hand on the door handle.

I'd planned weddings in ballrooms and vineyards and one memorable rooftop in the dead of February, but I'd never had a client meeting here - inside Vale's flagship, all glass and gold. Whoever these two were, they weren't just wealthy. They were the kind of wealthy that owned the building instead of renting a floor of it.

Well, I thought, stepping out onto the curb and smoothing my blazer, no pressure.

I was halfway to the entrance when I felt it - that heavy, sluggish drag behind my eyes, the kind that came from either too little sleep or, in this case, apparently too much breakfast on top of it. I needed caffeine, real caffeine.

There was a coffee shop across the street, and I ducked into the traffic chaos to get there and back with barely three minutes to spare before ten.

I checked my phone as I pushed back through the hotel's revolving doors, cup in hand.

9:55.

I beamed. Right on time. Erica Vandell does not do late, not for grooms, not for brides, not for anyone.

The elevator was already at the far end of the lobby, doors sliding shut with that soft mechanical hiss, and I did the thing I always swore I wouldn't do and never stopped doing - I ran.

"Hold on!" I called out, heels hitting the floor. "Hold on, please!"

Someone inside must've hit the button, because the doors juddered and slid back open just as I reached them, and my own momentum - combined with three inch heels and a floor apparently designed by someone who hates women - betrayed me completely.

I caught my toe on the threshold.

The cap of my coffee, which I could swear on my mother's grave I'd closed properly, popped clean off.

And every last, scalding drop of it went sailing directly onto the only other person in the elevator - down the front of an obscenely expensive-looking suit, and worse, absolutely drenching the stack of documents he was holding.

TIME STOPPED.