That wasn’t what he wanted. He wasn’t sure what he wanted professionally. He needed time to consider, needed his brothers to give it more thought as well, because leaving Dunn & Lowell… He couldn’t do that on a whim. Couldn’t do that to Sierra without good reason.

As he imagined not being with her for eight to ten hours a day… Hell, he wasn’t sure if he could do it at all.

He steered the conversation to baseball and the World Series fallout, effectively ending talk of a job change for now.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Wednesday evening, Sierra triple-checked the reflective black address numbers above the solid-looking wood door right next to Sunshine’s, a bar she’d never in her life heard of that looked anything but bright and cheery. More like dark and eerie and potentially a bad decision.

Her misgivings started before she even climbed out of her truck. Maybe she shouldn’t have come. Maybe she should’ve done what a normal person would do and texted Cole the news. Or even asked him to her place.

He’d never given her his address, not on a social basis, and she’d had to look it up in his personnel records. It was a bad idea, and maybe he’d see it as crossing yet another ill-advised line. But she couldn’t deny a burning curiosity about where he lived.

It’d been three days since their night together. Three long, torturous workdays of acting professional, keeping her hands to herself, catching him looking at her like he wanted to devour her.

The sexual energy between them was tangible, and if none of her other employees had caught on, it was act-of-God miracle level. But she’d managed to keep herself in check and “play it cool.”

Playing it cool sucked, and there was no question in her mind she was using her good news from the Eldridge contest as an excuse to see Cole somewhere besides the office or jobsite. Did she mention she’d made it three full days?

“I’m going in,” she said out loud to no one.

She got out of the truck and went to the wooden door. Inside, she found a barren concrete stairway going up and not much else, so she climbed. The single door at the top wasn’t marked. Without giving herself more time to doubt her actions, she knocked.