Love Your Neighbour: A laugh-out-loud love from the author of One Day in December. Kat French
he’d laughed when Dan shoved property details into his hands for some place that had just come back onto the market due to a deal falling through with a cupcake company. Cupcakes? How could a company hope to survive just selling cupcakes? No wonder the deal had fallen through. It would be way too small, but he’d viewed the premises anyway to shut Dan up. Cupcakes didn’t take up as much space as dead bodies.
Wrong again.
Gabe wasn’t much given to mystical flights of fancy, but had he been pushed, he’d probably have agreed that it seemed as if the planets had aligned obligingly just for him. He had the money. He had the experience. And now he had the perfect premises. ‘Go big or go home’ had been Dan’s sage advice over a pint in his prospective new local. And because going home wasn’t an option, Gabe had climbed the beanstalk and signed on the dotted line before he could let himself back out of it.
‘Time to grow up, Gabe.’
He picked his way between the stepladders and criss-crossed extension cables and let himself through to the back. In the kitchen, his eyes fell on the bright yellow note gaffer-taped to the bubble wrap around the newly delivered fridge.
‘The Yank bird from across the way is on the warpath. Watch yer back, kid.’
Gabe read it over twice more, still none the wiser about the note’s possible meaning. What Yank bird? And why the hell would she be on the warpath already?
He glanced out of the window, half expecting to see someone storming his way, but no warring harridans appeared to be beating a path to his door at this early hour. No doubt all would become apparent when Phil the Drill arrived. Late, of course. But what Phil lacked in time-keeping skills, he more than made up for in fitting skills. He’d worked for the family undertakers in Ireland for over twenty-five years and knew their business inside out. He’d been happy to bring his boys on a jolly across the Irish Sea on the promise of decent money, good digs and as much beer as they could drink.
Impatient for his first caffeine shot of the day, Gabe rummaged around and managed to unearth the kettle from behind a pile of half-eaten packets of biscuits.
A blur of red caught his eye outside as he sat down with the steaming mug cradled in his hands. He rocked back on his chair legs to watch the girl outside as she struggled to find something in the bottom of the huge bag she was balancing on her knee. Why did girls always carry such huge handbags? Her hair whipped around her cheeks, heavy red waves that irritated her enough to make her brush them roughly away from her mouth. She found what she was searching for, straightened up and disappeared around the back of the weird chapel place next door.
Interesting. He added ‘attractive redhead working next door’, to the growing file of positive aspects to his new venture. He grinned as the caffeine seeped steadily into his system. Phil the Drill was wrong. Today was going to be a good day. He could feel it in his bones.
Crap, crap and triple crap. Gabriel Ryan was divine. ‘Are you selling lucky heather?’
Marla knew she sounded surly, but come on. Really?
What else could he expect when he turned up on her doorstep uninvited, all rumpled with come-to-bed eyes? The man might hold the future of her business in the palm of his hand, but right at that very moment the only question on Marla’s mind was how on earth the sexiest man on the planet could possibly be an undertaker.
His gypsy-black hair would probably be given to curls if he let it grow, but as it was it had just reached that optimum run-your-fingers-through sexy length without veering too far into goth territory. Truth be told, there was something ever so slightly grungy about him. But cool, louche, stubbly grunge, rather than the patchouli-soaked rocker-in-need-of-a-bath kind.
He was smokin’ hot, and Marla didn’t have a fire extinguisher. Pity he was a funeral director. Eeew. Not to mention the fact that he was in danger of killing her business stone dead. The double reality check was enough to make his halo slip down to his throat, and Marla was only sad it wasn’t tight enough to pose a full-on choking hazard. Gabriel Ryan might be easy on the eye, but as far as she was concerned, he was trouble in all the wrong ways.
His face cracked open into a big, easy smile as he lounged against the doorframe and held out a chipped, empty mug.
‘Not heather, but any chance I could borrow a cup of sugar please?’
The ‘cup of sugar’ line again. He wasn’t even original. Marla leaned ever-so-slightly forward and gazed into the empty, chipped mug for a long moment before raising her eyes back up to his.
‘You must be Gabriel.’
He pushed his spare hand through his hair and assaulted her with that slow smile again.
Jeez, he had perfect teeth.
Marla was American.
Teeth mattered.
‘Guilty as charged. But please, it’s just Gabe.’
‘Gabe.’
His name felt treacherously good on her lips. A shiver ran down her backbone as he held her gaze for a second longer than strictly necessary. Invisible to the naked eye, a gossamer spider web of attraction spun around them, and undetectable to the human ear, Mother Nature’s wicked laugh tinkled off the chapel’s stained-glass windows.
Marla swallowed hard. It was her move, but somehow it didn’t feel safe to invite him over the threshold. He was like a vampire trying to glamour her into submission, and right at that moment he was doing a pretty good job of it. She gave herself a mental slap and swung the door wide. ‘Come on through.’
He stepped past her into the chapel, and as she closed the door she couldn’t help but take a sly sniff of him.
Not a whiff of patchouli or dead bodies.
Phew.
In fact, he smelled really rather delicious, all lemony-spice shower gel and fresh coffee. Marla loved coffee. And lemons.
She led him into the small back kitchen and gestured for him to take a seat at the buttercup-yellow formica table. As she flicked the kettle on, she turned to him sceptically. ‘Do you really need sugar?’
He grinned again. He needed to stop doing that. It was distracting.
‘Not especially. But I could murder a coffee.’
Marla made no move to take his bashed-up mug from him, but instead took down two pretty duck-egg blue cups from the cupboard and heaped coffee into them. They needed to talk. It might as well be civilised, over coffee. And at least here she had the advantage of being on home turf.
‘Sugar?’ She held the jar up.
He shook his head and laughed. ‘Never touch the stuff.’
Why oh why did he have to have a beautiful voice to match his beautiful face? His soft Irish lilt was full of gravel, as if the man had actually swallowed a bucket full of blarney stones. She placed the cups down on the table before dropping into the seat opposite him.
‘I’m Marla.’
‘Marla. That’s unusual.’
Oh God. Her name sounded bone-meltingly good with his Irish lilt. He rolled the R in the middle, as if he were playing with it in his mouth, and deciding whether or not to let it escape.
He raised his cup in salute. ‘To new neighbours.’
And there it was.
The perfect inroad into the most delicate of conversations. Marla sipped her coffee and eyed him over the rim, suddenly unsure how to begin now show time had arrived.
He lowered his cup and watched her steadily. ‘So … a little