Chapter 1
loved by Neighbor chap 1
The rain did not tap against the glass; it hammered, desperate and violent, threatening to shatter the floor-to-ceiling windows Julian had insisted upon for the primary bedroom.
Clara stood in the center of the imported Persian rug, the silk threads cold beneath her bare feet, staring at the ceiling. A watermark, the color of bruised plum, was spreading across the pristine white plaster. A slow, rhythmic drip, drip, drip hit the teakwood floorboards.
"Julian, it's getting worse," Clara said into her phone, her voice tight. She pressed the cold edge of the device against her cheek.
"Clara, darling, I'm in Geneva. It's three in the morning here," Julian’s voice drifted through the line, smooth, exhausted, and laced with that familiar patronizing edge. "Call property management. Or put a bucket under it. I can't fix a roof from Switzerland."
"I called them. They said the storm is too severe to send a crew out before morning. It’s going to ruin the floors, Julian. The plaster is going to cave."
"Then let it cave," he sighed. "We’ll replace it. Don't be so dramatic. Just go sleep in the guest wing."
The line clicked dead.
Clara lowered the phone, her chest tight with a familiar, suffocating panic. She was supposed to be the architect, the fixer, the one who held structures together. But in this house—Julian's house—she wasn't allowed to touch the bones of the place. She was just another expensive fixture.
She turned to grab a towel, but a heavy, rhythmic thudding from directly above her made her freeze.
It wasn't the rain. It was footsteps. Heavy, deliberate boots walking across the slate tiles of the roof, directly over her bedroom.
Clara’s heart seized. She backed toward the doorway, her mind racing through the security protocols Julian had installed. But before she could reach the keypad, a shadow fell across the skylight. A man’s silhouette, broad and drenched, knelt against the glass.
A flashlight beam pierced the darkness, cutting through the sheets of rain, illuminating the exact spot where the plaster was failing.
Elias.
Clara let out a breath that was half-relief, half-fury. She didn't bother with a raincoat. She threw open the French doors to the second-story balcony, the wind instantly whipping her silk robe against her legs and driving freezing rain into her eyes.
"What the hell are you doing up there?!" she screamed over the thunder.
To the left, separated only by a low stone wall, stood the dark, gothic spire of Elias Thorne’s Victorian home. And up on her roof, clinging to the slick slate with terrifying ease, was her neighbor.
Elias didn’t flinch. He slung a heavy canvas tarp over the damaged section of the roof, driving masonry nails into the flashing with sharp, brutal strikes of a hammer. He wore no jacket, just a soaked thermal shirt that clung to the heavy musculature of his back.
He finished securing the corner, slid down the slope of the roof with a sickening lack of hesitation, and dropped onto her balcony. The marble shuddered under his weight.
He stood up, dwarfing her. Rain ran in rivulets down his jaw, matting his dark hair to his forehead. He smelled like ozone, wet iron, and something fiercely alive.
"Your roof was failing," Elias said. His voice was a low, rough rumble that carried easily under the roar of the storm. He didn't sound out of breath.
"You can't just climb onto my house in the middle of a hurricane, Elias!" Clara shouted, wrapping her arms around herself as the wind bit through her soaked robe. "Julian has a security system. You could have been shot."
"Julian’s security system is offline," Elias said flatly, his dark eyes locking onto hers. "It shorted out twenty minutes ago when the grid flared. Which he would know, if he bothered to check his alerts instead of dismissing your phone call."
Clara flinched. He had been listening. Again.
"Get inside," she snapped, stepping back into the bedroom.
Elias followed, bringing the storm in with him. Puddles immediately formed around his steel-toed boots, ruining the teakwood Julian prized so highly. Elias didn't look at the floors, or the expensive art, or the imported rug. He only looked at her.
"You shouldn't have done that," Clara said, her voice shaking as she crossed the room to grab a towel from the en-suite. She threw it at his chest. "You can't just trespass because you see a leak."
Elias caught the towel with one hand but didn't use it. "The ceiling was going to collapse directly over your bed, Clara. You would have been under it."
"I was going to sleep in the guest wing!"
"No, you weren't." Elias stepped closer, closing the distance between them. The sheer mass of him made the sprawling bedroom suddenly feel like a cage. "You were going to stay in here with a bucket and a mop, trying to save his floorboards so he wouldn't yell at you when he got home."
"He doesn't yell," she whispered, her defense entirely automatic.
"No. He just looks at you like you're something he bought at auction that turned out to be defective," Elias said, his voice dropping to a terrifyingly gentle pitch. "I’ve seen him do it on the driveway. I’ve seen him do it in the garden."
"Stop it." Clara backed up until her shoulders hit the wall.
To be loved by a neighbor was supposed to mean borrowed sugar, polite waves over the rhododendrons, and keeping an eye on the mail. It was not supposed to be this. It was not supposed to be a man who watched the shadows in her windows, who knew the cadence of her arguments with Julian, who risked breaking his neck in a storm just to keep the rain off her head.
"I secured the flashing," Elias said, his eyes dropping to where her wet robe clung to her collarbones, then snapping back up to her eyes. The restraint in his jaw was tight enough to snap bone. "It'll hold until morning. Tell his contractors they need to replace the underlayment, not just patch the slate."
He turned toward the French doors, stepping back out into the freezing deluge.
"Elias," Clara called out, the word tearing from her throat before she could stop it.
He paused, one hand on the wrought-iron railing of the balcony.
"Why do you care?" she asked, her voice trembling. "Why do you do this?"
Elias looked back at her through the sheets of rain, his expression unreadable, a shadowed phantom against the violent sky.
"Because Julian built you a glass box," Elias said softly. "And I'm just waiting for you to realize you hold the hammer."
Before she could answer, he vaulted over the balcony railing, disappearing into the dark drop toward his own property, leaving Clara alone in a perfectly dry, utterly silent room.