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And whether he knew it or not, Noah was the perfect buffer. He was so easy to read. So kind. And also, so. Damn. Fine.

Why had the universe cursed me with neighbors who looked as alike as night and day but elicited the same response from me?

It’d only been two weeks and the only productive thing I’d done was revise my book’s outline a dozen times.

No writing had been accomplished because I filled my free time with daydreams that could never be a reality. My laptop fell asleep no less than twenty times a day while my fingers hovered over the keyboard and my mind hovered over fantasies I’d never dare to put on paper.

Meanwhile, the words Ineededto put on paper to meet my self-imposed deadline were coming to me as easy as squeezing blood from a turnip.

Maybe I should just go back to King’s Town. At least I had a desk there. My neck was killing me from being hunched over my lap all day while I sat on my sagging couch.

Every day it became clearer that I hadn’t planned this right. Nothing was going right and I?—

“You work on your book today?” Noah’s voice reached my ears, pulling me out of my jumbled thoughts. I heard his voice, but his question was a mystery.

“Sorry, what?” I picked up my glass of water and sipped, my eyes trained on him and not the man I could feel staring a hole in the side of my face.

Noah’s lips quirked. “You zone out a lot. Must be a writer thing. Because you’ll be looking right at me and not hear a word I said.”

He laughed softly and the sound made my stomach flutter. How did I tell him it had zero to do with me being a writer and everything to do with the lust burning my blood at this point?

On my other side, I heard Greyson clear his throat. And maybe I was overreacting, but I swear there was a smugness to the way he did it.

“I was asking if you worked on your book today?”

“A little,” I replied. Rearranging the bullet points on my outline definitely counted as working on my book. To be honest, any day I had to cross off my writing calendar with zero words written was a day I didn’t want to talk about.

“I looked up your stuff. I’m gonna listen to the two you have in audio while I work,” Noah said, cutting another piece of his salmon.

“W-what? You like romance books?”

He smirked. “I don’t read a lot but I told you rom-coms were my favorite movies. I figured contemporary romance gotta be close to that.”

Hehadtold me that, and we’d watchedMiss Congeniality, The Wedding PlannerandTwo Weeks Noticetogether so far. But I didn’t think it would make him look up my pen name and actually read my work.

All my indecent thoughts were replaced with a rush of tenderness for the man beside me.

He was too damn nice.

Every time I walked in the door, he had a bottle of the same wine I’d tried my first night here with him. The first time he poured me a glass, he told me he didn’t really drink but his sister had gifted him with the bottle.

I drank more than half the bottle that night, telling him how much I liked his sister’s taste in wine.

The next night, I walked in through the living room behind Greyson and saw a case of it against the wall.

When I looked to Noah for answers, he inclined his head toward his best friend.

Greyson had only glanced at me with the faintest beginnings of a smile.

“Just wanted you to have something you liked here.”

It was stuff like that that made it impossible for me to kick both of them out of my wildest daydreams.

Noah with his attentiveness and need for quality time. And Greyson with his broodiness and silent acts of service.

They were both a problem and I didn’t know what the next few months had in store for me if they’d wreaked this much havoc on my nervous system in two weeks.

As if on cue, Greyson quietly filled the empty wine glass beside my half-empty glass of water.