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She has to have the wrong house. There’s no other explanation.
I should just slam the door in her face and head back to bed, leaving her to figure it out on her own. I’m too fucking tired and too fucking irritated about being woken up in the middle of the night to pull together the very bare minimum of patience that I force myself to give.
It’s dangerous for her to be out in the storm and though I’d like to know what a young woman, about half my size, traveling by herself, is doing entering codes on random people’s house locks in the middle of the night, I know better than to get involved.
I’ve done a good job at staying uninvolved with anyone over the last eighteen years, and I’m not going to break my streak with a woman who looks like a creature who just walked out of the depths of the ocean behind her.
“I can promise you that you have the wrong house. And just a word of caution: you should double-check the address before attempting to break into someone's home. You never know who’s going to be on the other side.”
I begin to shut the door, but her hand slams against it to stop me from closing it.
She’s no match for me in height or strength. Her efforts to push back on the door wouldn’t stop me from closing it in her face if I wanted to. But I stop and look back at her through the small gap still left open between me and her through the door.
She’s got guts; I’ll give her that… but evidently, no brains, considering that she thinks taking on a pissed-off, half-naked man is a good idea.
What woman in her mid to late twenties knocks on some random house in the middle of the night and doesn’t turn and run the second that they see me holding a bat on the other side of the door.
“This is house number 524, correct?” she asks.
She stares back at the house number to the left side of the house, screwed into the stucco.
I let out a frustrated breath. Obviously, she isn’t going to leave me alone until I’ve convinced her that she’s in the wrong place.
You’d think that telling someone that you own the place that you're currently standing in would be adequate enough, but not in this case.
I put the bat down by the side of the door where it usually lives and pull the door wider. Unless she’s got a 45 caliber pistol hidden in that soaked laptop bag, she’s no threat to me, except for putting me in an even worse mood.
“Obviously, that’s the right number since you’re reading it on the front of my house. But you still have the wrong house. I own this place, as I’ve already mentioned, and I don’t rent it out.”
Her eyebrows stitch together at my answer.
“Wait, you can’t own this house,” she says, pointing down at the porch.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a rental unit. My writing agent booked it for me,” she says and then thinks for a second. “Oh wait, is this some kind of squatter situation? Although it seems that you of all people…”
Squatter situation?
Me, of all people?
What the fuck is she talking about?
Her eyebrows furrow even deeper at the idea of it.
“Hell no. I’ve owned it for over fifteen years, and I’ve never rented it for a single day in any of that time. I have no idea who told you that this house is a rental, but I certainly didn’t.”
It’s the honest truth.
I have more money than I’ll spend in a lifetime, even after I retire, which means I don’t need this place to pay for itself in order for me to keep it.
Even if I did want to make a little extra money, I wouldn’t do it by renting out my beach house. The entire reason I have this place is to get away and unwind from the life I live in Seattle.
How can I do that if every time I show up, I know that random people have been screwing like bunnies on my bed, the kitchen table, and every other inch of this house while they’ve been staying in it?
Half of the year, I spend sleeping in hotel rooms for out-of-town games, and the last thing I would ever do is take a black light to any of the nice hotels that the Hawkeyes put us up in. I wouldn’t even trust the walls not to be smeared in bodily fluids.
Nope.
