She repeated her mantra in her head as she walked down the hall, the pugs sprinting ahead of her into the living room, eager to investigate the noise. If she was the heroine in one of her books, she would have a fire-and-brimstone-worthy ass chewing already coming together in her mind like the perfect scene in one of her books. Too bad this was real life and she was just a human woman who was trying to learn new habits in her forties—exactly when every part of her wanted her to stay in her comfort zone. What she wouldn’t do to have a flaming sword or the acid venom her nymph assassins always carried instead of a shaky inner voice talking to her like she was a train in a kids’ book.

The words of her mantra scattered like cockroaches when the lights came on, though, the moment she walked through the curved archway dividing her living room from the hallway. She whacked her shin on the corner of the coffee table and stopped dead in her tracks—but not because of the pain.

No, she jolted to a halt because of what she saw.

There in the middle of her living room (where the couch was now in the wrong place even if it did look better there) Nash stood shirtless in a pair of low-slung gray sweatpants. His sleepwear gave just enough of a hint as to what he was packing beneath them in commando form to make her mouth go dry and her nipples tighten into hard points.

She could do him.

Shut up, brain! That is not the mantra!

His abs and biceps weren’t chiseled like a guy who spent every spare moment of his day either in the gym, working out, or pounding protein shakes. No. Instead of having the show muscles of a gym bro, he had a hard-as-fuck tank of a bod with a solid chest, thick, strong arms, and powerful shoulders. It was like looking up and finding that she was on the shirtless, burly, blue-collar lumberjack side of TikTok or something. And she was soooooooo here for it—or at least she would be if she didn’t remember at that moment that she was supposed to be annoyed enough to go nymph assassin on his very fine ass.

“What are you doing?” she asked once she found her voice and got her eyes to focus on his face, instead of appreciating how his high, round ass kept those gray sweatpants in place.

Nash squatted down and pet the dogs, who were all bug-eyed in love with him. “Fixing things.”

“Excuse me?”