Chapter 2

And there, cutting a sharp, pale crescent through his left eyebrow and trailing down toward his temple, was the scar. It split the dark hair of his brow in two, giving his intense hazel-gray eyes an involuntary, permanent skepticism.

He looked down at her. His jaw was dusted with three days of dark stubble, and his mouth was set in a tight, unyielding line.

"The flatbed that dropped off your timber pallets this morning blocked my loading bay for twenty minutes," he said. His voice was deep, scraping like river stones rolled around in a swift current. "I had a shipment of white oak waiting on the curb."

Nora’s heart gave an unexpected, sharp flutter against her ribs—partly from intimidation, and partly from the sudden, visceral realization that the man was violently handsome in the manner of an unpolished granite boulder.

She opened her mouth to apologize, then Clara’s script snapped across her memory like a ruler against a desk.

*Hand him the thermos before he finishes his third sentence.*

"They were supposed to drop them curbside," Nora said, keeping her tone cool and level. Before he could speak again, she lifted the thermos and held it out between them like an olive branch wrapped in steel. "Dark roast from the pier. Two raw sugars."

Silas stopped. His mouth stayed half-open for a fraction of a second, the words dying on his tongue.

He didn't take the thermos immediately. Instead, his eyes darted from the blue metal container up to Nora’s face, searching her features with a sudden, startling intensity that made the breath catch in her throat. His gaze lingered on the bridge of her nose, the curve of her jaw, and then dropped back to the flask.

Something flickered behind those stormy gray eyes—something raw and intensely guarded, like a man seeing an apparition step out of the fog.

"What is this?" he asked, his voice lower now, stripped of its initial bite.

"Bribery," Nora replied evenly, holding his gaze and pointedly refusing to look at the silver line over his brow. "And restitution for your white oak. I’m Nora Davies. I took over next door."

"I know who you are," Silas murmured.

He reached out. His fingers were large, rough-skinned, and warm where they brushed against hers as he took the thermos. A tiny jolt of static seemed to leap between their palms, so sharp that Nora almost pulled back. Silas didn't flinch, but his fingers tightened around the cylinder with an iron grip.

He unscrewed the lid with a slow, deliberate twist. Steam curled into the damp alley air, carrying the rich, bitter scent of roasted chicory and caramel. He lifted it to his lips, took a long, measured draught, and swallowed.

His Adam’s apple bobbed. For a brief second, his eyelids fluttered shut, his shoulders dropping a fraction of an inch from their defensive brace. When he opened them, the defensive frost had thawed into something far more complicated.

"Two sugars," he said quietly. It wasn't a question; it sounded like an ache.

"Two," Nora confirmed, crossing her arms to hide the fact that her pulse was racing at an entirely unprofessional cadence. "Clara’s recipe for dealing with neighborhood crises."

Silas’s jaw tightened. He looked down at the coffee, then past her shoulder toward the weathered brick wall of the bakery. "Clara was full of opinions."

"She was a tyrant with an apron," Nora countered, a small, genuine smile tugging at the corner of her lips. "And right now, her bakery is threatening to dump its main hearth into the crawlspace. The subfloor under the pastry station has a structural deflection of nearly two inches. I need an auger, a five-ton jack, and someone who understands eighteenth-century heart-pine framing."

Silas stared at her. His gaze dropped to her practical leather work boots, her paint-speckled canvas trousers, and the architect’s scale ruler tucked into her back pocket.

"You're an architect," he said flatly. "You work in an office with climate control and glass elevators. What do you know about heart-pine?"

Nora bristled. The city exhaustion she had carried for months flared into sharp, defensive pride. "I know that heart-pine from the 1890s has a tensile strength nearly fifty percent higher than modern kiln-dried Douglas fir, but its grain tends to shear along the growth rings if you drive an improper fastener through it. I also know that whoever laid that floor thirty years ago was either half-blind or entirely drunk, because the joists are spaced on twenty-two-inch centers instead of sixteen, and the header beam is bowing."

Silas held her gaze for three full seconds. The wind ruffled his dark hair, sending a stray lock falling over the pale ridge of his scar.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the corner of his stern mouth twitched.

"Carl Higgins was definitely drunk," Silas said. "It was September. His wife had just left him for a lobsterman from Rockport."

Nora blinked. "You were there?"

"I was seven," Silas grunted, taking another drink from the thermos. "He dropped a hammer through the coal chute and cried on Clara’s flour sacks. Clara gave him black coffee and told him if he didn't square the joists, she’d poison his crumpets."

A sudden, warm burst of laughter escaped Nora’s throat before she could stop it. It was the first time she had laughed out loud since the lawyer had read the will, and the sound seemed to startle both of them.

Silas looked at her mouth, his expression softening into an unguarded fascination that made the heat rise instantly to Nora’s collarbones. The quiet between them stretched, thick and electric, punctuated only by the distant squawk of gulls over the marina.

He cleared his throat, suddenly looking down at his boots. "Give me five minutes to clean the planer bed. Don't touch anything in there until I bring the jack."

"I have a crowbar," Nora offered.

Silas looked up, his brow furrowing with absolute, dry authority. "Put the crowbar down, Davies. If you crack that hearth foundation, the whole chimney will settle into your ovens, and then I’ll have to spend my weekend masonry-pointing instead of fishing."

He stepped back and swung the heavy door shut, leaving Nora standing in the alley with her heart pounding against her ribs and the faint scent of cedar shavings lingering in the air.

***

Ten minutes later, Silas Vance ducked through the back entrance of Honeycomb Hearth carrying an iron hydraulic bottle jack in one hand and a tool tote that looked like it weighed fifty pounds in the other.

He didn't ask for permission. He set the tote on the floor with a dull thud, dropped to one knee near the cracked base of the brick hearth, and ran his bare hand along the floorboards.

His fingers moved with the practiced sensitivity of a doctor examining a fracture—pressing down on the tongue-and-groove joints, feeling for hidden nail pops, tapping the wood with the knuckle of his index finger to listen to the resonance underneath.

"The main sill plate is dry," he muttered, his voice muffled as he leaned down to peer into the narrow gap between the baseboard and the masonry. "No rot. But the secondary joist took all the water from that leaking proofer Clara refused to replace in 2012."

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