Page 3 of A Beach House Beginning

Twenty minutes later, she juggled her laptop bag, a box of cupcakes and a stack of math papers she had graded the evening before.

She couldn’t help humming a song as she walked out of her apartment, Addie right behind her.

A man stood on the landing outside her apartment, hand on the banister. He was big, dark, muscular, wearing a leather jacket and carrying a motorcycle helmet under his arm.

For one ridiculous moment, her heart skipped a beat, as it always did when she saw her new upstairs neighbor. Her song died and she immediately felt foolish.

“Morning,” he said, voice gruff.

“Um. Hi.”

“You’ve got your arms full. Can I help you carry something?”

“No. I’ve got it,” she said, her voice more clipped than she intended.

His eyes darkened slightly at her abrupt tone. Something flickered in his expression, something hard and dangerous, but he merely nodded and gestured for them to go ahead of him down the stairs.

Did he guess she was afraid of him? Jenna had tried to hide it, but she strongly suspected she hadn’t been very successful.

“Come on, Addie.”

Her daughter, who seemed to have none of Jenna’s instinctive fear of big, tough, ruthless-looking men with more ink than charm, smiled and waved at him.

“Bye, Mr. Calhoun. I hope you have a happy day.”

He looked nonplussed. “Thanks. Same to you.”

Jenna led their little procession down the central staircase of Brambleberry House, which featured private entrances to the three apartments, one on each floor.

As she hurried outside, she couldn’t help wondering again what Rosa Galvez Townsend had been thinking to rent the space to this man.

She had heard the rumors about Wes Calhoun. He had a daughter who attended her school, and while Brielle was a grade older and wasn’t in Jenna’s class, the girl’s teacher was one of Jenna’s closest friends.

Teachers gossip as much as, if not more than, other populations. As soon as Wes Calhoun rode into town on his motorcycle, leather jacket, tattoos and all, Jenna had learned he was an ex-con only released a few months earlier from prison in the Chicago area.

Learning he would be her new upstairs neighbor had been unsettling and upsetting.

Rosa—who functioned as landlady for her aunt Anna and Anna’s friend Sage, owners of the house—assured her he was a friend of Wyatt, Rosa’s husband, and perfectly harmless. He had been wrongfully convicted three years earlier and had been completely cleared, his record expunged.

That didn’t set her mind at ease. At all. She would have found the man intimidating even if she hadn’t known he was only a few months out of prison.

She hurried Addie to her small SUV, loaded the cupcakes into the cargo area and made sure Addie was safely belted into the back.

As she slid behind the wheel, Jenna watched Wes climb onto his sleek, black, death trap of a motorcycle parked beside her and fasten his helmet.

While he started up the bike, he didn’t go anywhere, just waited, boots on the driveway. He was waiting for her, she realized.

Aware of his gaze on her, steely and unflinching, she turned the key in the ignition.

Instead of purring to life, the car only gave an ominous click.

She tried it a second time, with the same results, then a third.

No. Oh no. This wasn’t happening. She was already running late.

Normally she and Addie could ride bikes the mile and a half to the school, but not when she had two dozen cupcakes to deliver!

Hoping against hope, she tried it a few more times, with the same futile click.

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