Page 14 of Rosie and the Beast Next Door

My brain short circuited.

“Are you bleeding?” My voice had entered the opera singer register, where glass broke and dogs wailed. I did not like blood. The sight, the smell, talking about it, seeing it, thinking about it, reading about it, even knowing that it existed right there under my skin gave me the ick.

I spun away from him. “I’ll get you a towel.” I turned back toward him. “No, I put out the new towels. You can’t get blood on those.” My stomach flipped. “Paper towels!”

I twisted away. “But you’re getting the floor bloody”—gag—”and the paper towels are next door.”

I faced him again, but had to brace myself against the wall near the painting of a bald eagle. Spinning around on a queasy stomach was a terrible idea. I took a deep breath and held it.You cannot smell blood, brain. You’re not a vampire.“I regret every decision that brought me to this point.”

“Me too,” Dylan muttered.

We stared at each other, him with his T-shirt lifted to cover his nose (and the blood), and me holding onto the wall as if it was my own personal knight in shining armor. Who needed a man when you had plaster and paint?

“Sorry. I don’t do well with blo—” I pressed a hand to my mouth. I needed a distraction right now. I looked around the room, my gaze locking in on his exposed abs. Solid muscles peaked and valleyed like the mountains outside the window. Oh. My.

“Yeah, that’s clear.” His shirt dropped, covering the toned muscles, revealing the bl— The red stuff. He felt around his nose and scrunched it like a bunny a few times. “I don’t think it’s broken.”

Oh, geez. I hadn’t even considered that I might have broken his nose. When I imagined us meeting for the first time, it usually involved other b-words: brooding, bonding, baby-making … Not the one Iwon’tmention again. Therealb-word in my house.

My head had cleared enough for action. “Towel!” I raced to the bathroom and grabbed one of the fluffy white towels from the rack, ran it under the water, and raced it back to him. As hedabbed the skin under his nose with the towel, he studied the apartment.

The sagging futon sat in the middle of stacks of boxes that looked as though they’d been through a flood. I’d set mouse traps in every corner, and I was pretty sure that was a dead cockroach by the window.

Plus there was the smell. A mix of mildew, dirty socks, and paint thinner. Every single car freshener from the dollar store wasn’t making a dent in it.

“I’ll have this apartment ready by tomorrow, as we agreed,” I said as firmly as I could. “I’m Rosie Forrester, by the way.”

His exhaustion-lined eyes flared with alarm, and he took me in from head to toe. The gaze wasn’t necessarily appreciative, more assessing. “You’re the landlord?”

He didn’t have to sound so shocked. “I know we got off on the wrong foot, what with you coming a day early and all—”

“My contract starts today,” he argued. He pulled up our contract on his phone and held it out to show me the dates.

“Exactly. The seventeenth is tomorrow,” I said, triumphant.

He clicked over to the home screen on his phone—a generic, boring blue—where the date said … the seventeenth.

Oh no. I’d been so busy with working at the restaurant and trying to get new art into the shop that I’d lost an entire day somehow.

Suddenly, Dylan scrambled away from me as if I had contracted cooties. “Holy—”

Eliza B. wound her way around his ankles. She liked him.

“That is not a mouse.”

“No.” I laughed and leaned down to pick her up. Her bare skin was cool to the touch, and she curled into my arms. “This is Lizzy.” I nuzzled her pink nose. “Who’s a cute little kitten?”

“That’s acat?” He shuddered.

“She’s lived a storied life.”

“More like a cursed life.”

“We’ll forgive him, Lizzy,” I whispered. “He’s had a hit to the head.”

He removed the towel from his face with a glare. “This apartment’s not going to work.”

Panic flashed through me. “Why not? You signed a contract!”

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