Page 8 of Kellan & Emmett
Something in me stumbled. I fumbled for neutral ground, for a scrap of the old ease between us, but nothing came. My grip tightened on the strap of my bag. “Guess I should… check in then.”
His gaze didn’t waver. For a second, I thought he might refuse. Then his fingers moved across the keyboard with practiced ease.
“Kellan Miller,” he said, more to the screen than to me.
The sound of it—my name in his voice after twenty years—pulled at something deep I didn’t want to look at.
His attention locked on the glow of the monitor, not on me. Professional. Detached. Like typing me into the system was easier than acknowledging I was standing here.
I cleared my throat. “So… how’d you end up with this place?”
His hand stilled for half a second. “Miss Cole left it to me.”
That stunned me quiet. “She… left it to you?”
“She didn’t have a family.” His tone stayed clipped, almost flat. “I helped her out toward the end. The house needed someone. Guess she thought I’d do.”
I opened my mouth, then shut it again. Didn’t know what to say to that.
After a moment, he reached back to the rack, took down a brass key, and set it on the counter between us. His hand didn’t linger. “Your room’s upstairs. Second on the left.”
I reached for the key. Our eyes clashed again, just for a heartbeat.
“I’ll keep it professional,” he said, voice even, controlled. “That’s all you’ll get from me.”
The words hit sharper than I expected.
I slipped the key into my pocket and nodded like it didn’t matter. But my chest felt tight as I turned toward the stairs.
Chapter 4
Emmett
Kellan’s footsteps faded along the hallway, each thud landing somewhere under my ribs. Then silence.
I hadn’t expected him—not here at the inn. When I pulled up the system just now, his name blinked back at me, plain as day. Miller. Grace must’ve processed the booking when it came through the site, slotted it into the calendar, prepped the room. I’d skimmed the entry once but never thought twice—Miller was common enough. I hadn’t let myself imagine it could be him.
Seeing him again at the gym earlier, then at the after-party—I thought that had burned off the shock. Twenty years is long enough to sand down old memories, to file away what someone used to look like.
But the second he walked through my door tonight, bag slung over his shoulder, looking like he belonged nowhere and everywhere at once, the ground shifted.
The Kellan in my head had been eighteen forever. Wide grin, pads on his shoulders, my name on his lips like it was the easiest thing in the world. The man upstairs wasn’t that boy. Broader now, lines around his eyes, hair darker. But the effect was the same: one look, and I was seventeen again, standing on the edge of something I never got to keep.
Anger came next, quick and hot, the kind that burned through nostalgia. He’d left. No explanation. No goodbye. Just gone. Twenty years later, I was still carrying the wreckage, and he’d walked back into town like it was nothing.
He wasn’t getting under my skin. Not again.
I’d spent too long patching myself back together. This time, I’d be smarter. He could sleep under my roof, pass me in the hall, hell, even smile at me like he used to—but that was all.
He didn’t get a second chance at me.
I rose from the chair and got up to lock the front door. Turn the deadbolt, jiggle the knob, flick the porch light off. The house sighed around me, wood beams settling like they knew the hour.
My gaze snagged on the old rocking chair in the corner. Her chair. Miss Cole never sat anywhere else, not once in all the years I knew her. The cushions had been reupholstered since her passing, brighter fabric now, but the grooves on the arms were the same.
I paused.
When Kellan left for LA, I unraveled. He’d been my anchor since we were kids—summers at the creek, winters on the bleachers, graduation night that changed everything. And then he was gone.
