OFF LIMITS

CHAPTER ONE

POV: Zara

The moment Damon Cole walked through her brother’s front door, Zara felt something shift.

Not dramatically. Not like in those movies where the music swells and everything goes slow motion. It was quieter than that. More dangerous. Like the second before a match catches.

She felt it in her stomach first, then lower like water trickling down a surface.

She hated herself for it immediately.

“Z!” Marcus’s voice boomed from the hallway. “Come meet the guys, we’re doing the game in the living room.”

The guys. That’s what her brother always called them. His crew. His boys. She’d grown up around all of them, knew most of their voices before she even saw their faces. But tonight she’d come home from her apartment for one weekend, one quiet birthday weekend, and somehow she’d forgotten.

Forgotten that Damon was always here.

She rounded the corner holding her wine glass and there he was, shrugging off his jacket by the door. Tall. Dark jacket. Jaw that looked like someone carved it specifically to ruin women. He was laughing at something Marcus said, that low rough laugh that she’d heard a thousand times and never once let herself linger on.

Until now.

His eyes found her across the room. Just a second. Maybe two.

“Hey, little Cole.” Same deep gray voice. Same lazy half smile he always gave her. Like she was still seventeen and annoying.

“Damon.” She kept her voice flat. Easy. “Didn’t know you were coming.”

“Marcus didn’t tell you?” He dropped onto the couch like he owned it. “I’m staying the weekend. Apartment’s getting fumigated.”

“My bad Z, must have slipped my mind” Marcus chimed in.

The wine glass almost slipped from her hand.

The whole weekend.

“Cool,” she said.

Cool. That’s what she said. Cool. Because it was cool, she was no longer a 15 year old fawning over her brother’s friend.

She walked to the kitchen and leaned against the counter and told herself very firmly that she was twenty two years old, she had a boyfriend, Ryan, sweet steady Ryan who sent her good morning texts and remembered her coffee order. She was not about to lose her mind over her brother’s best friend who had a girlfriend of his own, Camille, pretty and polished and completely devoted to him. Typical magazine type of woman, blonde, tall and curvy in the right places, with a smile that could make a man drop to his knees.

This was fine.

She was fine.

“You okay?” Marcus appeared in the doorway, already holding a beer.

“Yeah. Why?”

“You look weird.”

“I always look weird. It’s my face.”

He snorted. “Dinner’s at seven. Damon’s cooking, he insisted.”

“Of course he did.” Today couldn’t get any worse!

Marcus disappeared. Zara stood very still and listened to the low rumble of Damon’s voice drifting from the living room, the way he laughed again at something on the TV, totally at ease, totally unaware.

She pressed her cold wine glass to her cheek.

Get it together.

Dinner was a mistake.

Not because anything happened. Because nothing did, and somehow that was worse.

Damon cooked like he did everything else, too well, too effortlessly, moving around her brother’s kitchen like he’d built it himself. Pasta from scratch. Actual scratch. Sauce that smelled like something from a Roman street corner.

Zara sat on the counter and pretended to scroll her phone.

“You’re in the way,” he said without looking at her.

“This is my brother’s kitchen.”

“And I’m the one cooking in it, so scooch.” He reached past her to grab the colander and she felt the warmth of his arm brush hers and she moved so fast she nearly knocked over the olive oil.

“Easy,” he said. Amused. Eyes cutting to her for half a second.

She jumped off the counter. “I’m going to set the table.”

“Spoons are in the—”

“I know where the spoons are, Damon, I grew up here.”

He held up both hands. That almost smile again. The one that meant he found her entertaining in the way adults find children entertaining.

She hated it.

She hated that she kept looking at his hands.

After dinner Marcus fell asleep on the couch because of course he did, and Zara was left across the coffee table from Damon with a half empty bottle of red between them and a TV show neither of them was actually watching.

She should have gone to bed.

“You and Ryan still good?” he asked.

She looked up. He wasn’t looking at her, eyes on the screen.

“Yeah. Fine. Why?”

“You seem tense.”

“I’m not tense.”

He looked at her then. Really looked. And something in it made her feel like he could see straight through the calm she’d been carefully constructing all evening.

“Camille’s coming up Saturday,” he said. “You two should hang.”

“Sure,” Zara said.

He nodded. Looked back at the TV.

She picked up her wine and took a long sip and told herself the tightness in her chest was just the altitude or maybe the wine or maybe absolutely anything else.

Her phone buzzed. Ryan. Miss you babe, can’t wait to see you Sunday.

She typed back a heart. Set the phone face down.

Outside, the wind had started picking up. She could hear it against the windows, low and building, the kind of sound that meant weather coming.

She didn’t know yet that by tomorrow night, the roads would be buried under four feet of snow.

She didn’t know that Camille’s train would be cancelled.

That Ryan wouldn’t make it.

That it would just be the two of them, completely alone, completely snowed in, for three days.

She didn’t know any of it yet.

She just sat there in the warm quiet of her brother’s living room, three feet from a man she had absolutely no business wanting, and told herself everything was fine.

Everything was not fine.