Love at First

by Kate Clayborn

Genres: City Life; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Sixteen years ago, a teenaged Will Sterling saw—or rather, heard—the girl of his dreams. Standing beneath an apartment building balcony, he shared a perfect moment with a lovely, warm-voiced stranger. It's a memory that's never faded, though he's put so much of his past behind him. Now an unexpected inheritance has brought Will back to that same address, where he plans to offload his new property and get back to his regular life as an overworked doctor. Instead, he encounters a woman, two balconies above, who's uncannily familiar . . .



No matter how surprised Nora Clarke is by her reaction to handsome, curious Will, or the whispered pre-dawn conversations they share, she won't let his plans ruin her quirky, close-knit building. Bound by her loyalty to her adored grandmother, she sets out to foil his efforts with a little light sabotage. But beneath the surface of their feud is an undeniable connection. A balcony, a star-crossed couple, a fateful meeting—maybe it's the kind of story that can't work out in the end. Or maybe, it's the perfect second chance . . .



Contains mature themes.

Release date: February 23, 2021

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Reader says this book is...: entertaining story (1) satisfying ending (1) terrific writing (1)

Sample

Sixteen years later

For Eleanora DeAngelo Clarke, the best time of day was, many people would argue, not daytime at all.

The best time of day was before dawn.

It was a fairly recent development, this fondness for 4:00 a.m. When she’d first come back, it hadn’t been so much a choice as a necessity, the demand of days that started early and stretched long, the fallout from frequently disrupted sleep. During those times, 4:00 a.m. had felt indistinguishable from every other hour of the day: darker in quality but not really in character, another part of the grim, human process of saying goodbye that she hadn’t felt—wouldn’t have ever felt—prepared to go through.

When it had been over, though, when the daylight hours became busier and more bureaucratic, when the reality of her new life had started to sink in—4:00 a.m. had started to transform for her. Sometimes, she’d do little more than sit and stare, a mug of hot coffee cupped in her palms, steaming straight into her puffy, tear-stained face. Sometimes, she rose from a restless, unsatisfying sleep and walked to the back door, sliding it open and taking a single step onto the balcony, breathing in the crisp, cold autumn air like it was medicine. Sometimes, she’d sit at the old rolltop desk in the living room, making lists to help her move through the day, to help her feel in control in this place where she’d never once, not in her whole life, had to be in control before.

But day by day, 4:00 a.m. took on a softer rhythm, and Nora moved to its beats with some improved version of those early, impulsive behaviors. In the pitch dark and perfect quiet, she sipped at her coffee and stayed inside when it was cold, letting her body and brain wake up slowly, softly. She left the lists to later, letting herself breathe. She let herself think and not think, remember and not remember. She let herself be.

Eight months on and 4:00 a.m. had become habit, a secret practice she’d even put a name to. At night, when she got in bed, she’d open the clock app on her phone and toggle on the alarm she’d titled “Golden Hour.” She’d close her eyes and look forward to it, to the reset it always seemed to provide her, to the gentle welcome it always seemed to give her to the day ahead.

Four in the morning, she’d started to think, could fix pretty much anything.

Except.

Except for this.

It’d been two and a half weeks since it’d happened, and every day since, Nora had spent 4:00 a.m. exactly like she was right now: sitting on the balcony, still in her pajamas, fretting.

And it was all Donny Pasternak’s fault.

Nora knew it was a terrible thing to think, a terrible thing to feel. Who could blame a man for dying, after all, especially a man so quiet and kind as Donny? Who could sit in judgment of someone—a neighbor, a friend, practically a family member—who’d left this world so suddenly, so unexpectedly, so prematurely? Who could be so . . . so angry?

Well, the answer was Nora.

Nora could.

You’re not angry at Donny, she scolded herself. You know that’s not it.

She took a sip of her coffee, trying to get that golden hour feeling again. It was a perfect not-quite-morning, warm and dry and pleasant, the kind she’d waited for all through her first dark, brutal Chicago winter.

But it didn’t work.

She was angry. She was angry and stressed and scared, because quiet, kind Donny Pasternak was gone, and that was bad enough, especially so soon after Nonna. But beyond that—beyond that, there was the terrible realization that being Donny’s neighbor and friend and almost family member turned out to mean exactly nothing when it came to finding out what would happen to his apartment.

Nora had never been naive about how outsiders judged the old, brick, blocky six-flat that was, for the first time in her adult life, her full-time home, though the precise nature of the judgments had changed over the years. When she’d first come to visit, her parents had spent the whole drive from the airport speaking quietly—well, not that quietly—to each other about Nonna wasting years of money and effort on this “little building” when she could’ve stayed in her perfectly nice, paid-off house in the suburbs after her husband, Nora’s grandfather, passed. Two decades later and the judgments were different: Wasn’t it the most dated-looking building on the block? Shouldn’t it try to do a little better to keep up? Hadn’t anyone considered making it brighter, more modern? Was that striped wallpaper in the hallways made of . . . velvet?

The problem was, people didn’t appreciate a classic. People had no loyalty!

Nonna had always been saying that.

Nora closed her eyes, thinking of what Nonna might say now. She probably would say that Donny wasn’t people. She would say that she trusted Donny—that Donny, like everyone else in the building who had been her neighbor, her family (no almost about it!), for years and years, would’ve made sure the apartment would be left in good hands, left to someone who understood what it was all about here. In fact, that’s what everyone else in the building seemed to think, too. Nonna, after all, had left her apartment to Nora, because she’d known that Nora would take extra care. She’d known that Nora loved the building as much as she did.

“Maybe he’ll have left it to one of us,” Jonah had said only the week before, during their first building meeting since Donny’s passing. Nora had stood at the front of the room, the concrete floor of the basement laundry room a hard press of reality against the soles of her sneakers. She watched the faces of her neighbors light in hope, and she’d thought of the three unreturned phone calls she’d made to Donny’s attorney.

I think we would’ve already heard, she’d thought. I think we would’ve heard if it was one of us.

But she hadn’t said that. She’d pasted on a smile and said, “I guess we’ll have to wait and see,” clutching the building bylaws in her hand with a sense of impending doom. If it wasn’t one of them, she didn’t know who it could be, because in addition to being quiet and kind, Donny was also, for as long as she’d known him, alone. No girlfriend, no boyfriend, no friends or family outside these walls.

Was 4:00 a.m. too early to try calling that attorney again?

She let out a gusty sigh, rippling the surface of her still mostly undrunk dark roast. The fact of the matter was, it was long past time to stop her 4:00 a.m. fretting. Maybe she needed to go back to list-making for a while, because those unreturned phone calls almost certainly meant something bad was in the offing: some faceless property investment firm was probably combing through Cook County death records even as she ruminated, looking for opportunities to do one of those quick turnaround “flips.” They’d show up and park a dumpster out front and toss all of quiet, kind Donny Pasternak’s things, and they would absolutely complain about the hallway wallpaper (No loyalty! Nonna sniffed, from somewhere). A month later there’d be a “For Sale” sign for Donny’s apartment in the front courtyard with a sticker price that’d start spelling the end for this building that Nonna had made a second life in, this building that had—with a bit of fate and a lot of effort—become a family all its own.

She sighed again—it was a real woe is me situation during this particular golden hour—untucked her feet, and stood from her chair, stretching into a posture that was stiff, upright, preparatory. There had to be something she could do other than simply . . . waiting like this.

But right then, she heard a door slide open somewhere below her.

Nora knew 4:00 a.m.

Nora knew 4:00 a.m. in this building.

And she knew no one—besides her—ever came out onto their balcony at this hour.

No one except.

No one except . . . someone new.

Nora realized that it would be, by all accounts, extremely inappropriate to rush to her balcony railing, hang her head over the side, and ask whomever was down there how they felt about vintage wallpaper. First of all, the sun wasn’t even up yet. Second of all, she was not wearing a bra beneath her pajamas. Third of all, if wallpaper was the only conversation opener she could think of at that moment, it was truly time to make good on her intentions to start getting out more.

Maybe it was the attorney with questionable phone etiquette? Or worse! The actual face of the faceless property investment firm? Sure it was early, but maybe these people needed the whole twenty-four hours in any given day to carry out their terrible, wallpaper-hating plans? She was absolutely not prepared to have this confrontation, not without a bra and a PowerPoint presentation about the mercenary nature of real estate trends.

Bra first, she told herself, reaching a hand toward the door handle before pausing again.

What if it’s not one of those two people?

She couldn’t really explain it, the feeling she had—the feeling that she shouldn’t go inside quite yet, the feeling that the person who’d slid open that door was someone she should meet.

Of course, there remained the problem of the early hour, and her lack of supporting undergarments, and also her apparently limited ideas for what she might actually say, so she decided that, at least for the time being, she’d try to make this meeting one-sided. Carefully, she set down her coffee on the small patio table beside her chair, and—grateful for the quiet of her bare feet against the wood and her long-honed awareness of which boards were likeliest to creak—silently stepped toward the railing, tucking herself into one of the empty spaces between her many potted plants.

And then she peeked over the edge, down and across to Donny’s balcony.

She saw him first as a dark outline, limned by the lights left on in the apartment, her perspective from above him giving her only an impression of his body—hands gripping the railing that jutted out slightly farther than her own; long arms spread wide, triangles of empty space between them and the lean waist that fanned out into a broad, curving back; head bowed low between the tense set of his shoulders.

It was like looking at a sculpture, a piece of art, something that took all of your attention. Something that insisted you stay right in the moment you were in, something that told you to memorize what you were seeing. She could’ve looked and looked. Until the sun came up. Until the golden hour was over for real.

But then, it hit her.

This was not the posture of a property man who needed a PowerPoint presentation.

This curved-back, bowed-head balcony lean was the posture of a man who was . . . grieving?

She sucked in a surprised breath and, too quickly, stepped away from her railing.

And knocked over one of her plants.

The sound of the terra-cotta hitting the wood, the sound of a clump of dirt scattering in its wake, the sound of the waxy leaves swishing in the trembling aftermath of their fall—all of it, Nora thought, sounded like the actual loudest noise that had ever been released in the entire history of the known universe.

She squeezed her eyes shut tight. She tried to make herself completely still, the way he had been. If she pulled it off, maybe the man on the balcony would think a rogue, third-floor-exclusive wind had knocked over the pot. Or some kind of critter? Yes, that made sense. A raccoon, or a particularly forceful sq—

“Hello?”

His voice was deep, but he spoke the word quietly, cautiously, and Nora supposed she could ignore it, keep on with the whole sculpture-posture idea until he went back inside. Later (with bra), she could go down and introduce herself, express her genuine condolences, and keep secret her nascent, selfish sense of hope that Donny may have done right by them after all.

It felt a little mean to ignore him, though, after she’d been spying and all, and also after she’d spent the past half hour being unjustifiably angry in the general direction of his recently deceased possible relative. A quick hello, then. An apology for disturbing him. No questions about his feelings regarding classic wall coverings.

She stepped back toward the railing, at the last second remembering to cross her arms over her chest.

This time, when she peeked over the edge, he was looking up at her.

He was tall; she could tell even from high above, and that was down to how well she knew this building, how every person in it looked in relation to its various structures—its railings, its overhangs, its doorways. Standing upright, his shoulders still looked broad, but overall, he seemed leaner to her outside of that bent-over posture she’d first seen him in. Maybe it was something about the clothes he wore—too dark to see him well, but they seemed to fit him loosely, pajama-like, and she liked that, thinking that they might both be out on their balconies, still in their sleepwear.

But it was what she could see of his face—bathed in the warm, golden light from the apartment—that made her breath catch, that made time stop. He was clean-shaven, his jaw square, his brow lowered in an expression to match the question that had been in his voice. Those sharp outlines might have been attractive all on their own, but they were improved—they were made stunning, really—by the soft curves that complemented them. Thick, wavy hair, messy in a way that made Nora wonder if there was perhaps an extremely flattering first-floor-exclusive wind. Full lips, slightly parted. She could only assume about his eyes, because they were hidden from her by the glare off his dark-rimmed glasses.

She swallowed.

“Hey,” she finally whispered back to him.

For a few seconds, he didn’t move at all, and she thought he seemed so good at that, staying still. Like, professionally good at it. Maybe he’s a mime, said the extremely stunned part of her brain. No, a castle guard, she amended. Still stunned, obviously, given the absolute dearth of castles in, you know, Illinois.

But then he lifted his right hand. Slowly, he raised it to the center of his chest, his broad palm rubbing once across his sternum, toward his heart.

“You . . . ,” he said, his hand resting there, right over his heart, and Nora had the wild urge to count the beats of her own. One-two, one-two.

“Startled me,” he finished, though nothing about his tone, or his still-quiet voice, suggested that he’d been startled at all. He shifted, finally letting his hand fall back to his side. There was still that glare shielding his eyes, but she could feel his gaze on her all the same.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, inching closer to the railing, resting her still-crossed arms against it. “I didn’t mean—”

“No, I’m—” he began, and then paused. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “I’m sorry if I woke you, coming out here.”

“It’s okay,” she said, nodding her head toward the building. It felt like they were in a conspiracy of two out here, whispering in the dark. “You won’t wake anyone.”

Three of the six units in this apartment were occupied by people with hearing that was . . . not sharp, to put it mildly. And Benny, in the apartment below hers, waxed poetic about his white noise machine at the barest provocation, so he certainly wouldn’t hear them.

“And I’m always up at this time,” she added, then promptly pressed her lips together. Why had she told him that? It was a secret.

He cocked his head to the side, and it was like everything expressive about his face tipped with it—one eyebrow raised, one side of his mouth quirked. Something about it—something about this expression of genuine interest, of curiosity—hit Nora in such a vulnerable, neglected place.

It had felt like such a long time—months and months, really—since she’d felt interesting. Since she’d met anyone new.

Her cheeks warmed with pleasure.

“You are?” he said.

“Yeah.” She meant to leave it at that, especially because it’d come out decidedly more . . . breathy than she’d intended. But before she could stop herself, she added, “It’s the golden hour.”

Nora! her brain shouted (not breathily). What! Are! You! Saying!

She had a fleeting hope he might not have heard her. Like, over the sound of his first-floor-exclusive hair breeze.

“Golden hour?”

Okay, well. He’d heard her.

She cleared her throat. She would answer this, briefly, not weirdly (or breathily). Then she would somehow find a way to bring up Donny, offer the condolences that she was sure were necessary.

“It’s what I call this time of day . . . or, I guess, sort of not quite day?” Brilliant, she thought, inwardly rolling her eyes at herself. “It’s peaceful, I’ve always thought.”

He was unmoving again, nothing but his brow furrowing, as though he had to consider the definition. Then he sent her a lopsided grin that managed, somehow, to be both self-confident and self-deprecating.

“Not so peaceful now,” he said, taking a step closer to the railing, and she tried not to notice how his smile, his still-soft voice, made her feel. Specifically, in the area beneath her crossed arms.

Yikes, she thought. Better do something about that.

She tucked them tighter against her chest.

“It’s okay,” she repeated, feeling her own lips curve into a smile.

“It means something different in my line of work. The golden hour, I mean.”

“You’re a photographer?” That was the only other context in which she’d heard the phrase—something about the light at a specific time of day. A time of day that was not, of course, 4:00 a.m.

The grin—and the confidence—faded. “Uh. No. Never mind. It’s not . . . very pleasant.”

Now it was Nora’s turn to tilt her head in interest. What could be unpleasant about a phrase like the golden hour, in any context?

“What do you mean?”

Definitely after this she would find a way to bring up Donny. Absolutely she would.

His chest rose on an inhale before he spoke again. When he finally did, he seemed almost sheepish. Apologetic.

“It’s what we call the hour after someone’s been injured. Uh, traumatically injured. It’s the time where you have . . . it’s the best window you have to treat them.”

“Oh.” She lowered her eyes from his face, took in a detail that made more sense to her now. Those weren’t pajamas he was wearing; they were hospital scrubs. “You’re a doctor?”

“Yeah.”

Wow, good thing Mrs. Salas from 2B wasn’t up. Nora could practically hear her now. A doctor, Nora! she would say. Wouldn’t you like to marry a doctor?

Nora cleared her throat again, course-corrected that train of thought. She should bring up Donny. Now was as good a time as any.

Instead, she said, “Do you work nights?”

“I work whenever,” he said, and she thought she could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “I work all the time.”

He sounded so . . . defeated, the way he said that. So weary. She opened her mouth to say something—that she was sorry, that it sounded difficult. But he spoke before she could.

“Do you?”

“Do I work all the time?”

He smiled up at her, a different one, this time. She thought it looked like a sunrise, this smile, for all that it was still dark around them. It shined out every other thought in her head: Donny, the apartment, the building.

“Do you work nights?” he clarified.

“Oh, no. I’m an early riser, I guess. I work during the day. From home.”

He hadn’t asked that, had he? But suddenly, to Nora, this conversation had taken a golden-hour quality all its own. Secret and special and hers alone.

“Oh yeah?” he said, that delicious note of interest in his voice. He reached up and adjusted his glasses, and in that second Nora let herself be absurdly, giddily attracted to him. She almost missed it when he asked his next question.

“What do you do?”

She smiled down at him, shifting her feet against the wood in something like anticipation. She hadn’t had an opportunity to talk about, really talk about, her work, with someone who wasn’t an actual coworker, in a long time. She liked what she did, for all the headaches it had given her recently, what with her new situation and all. All right. She would answer this one question, then she would bring up Donny.

“I design w—”

But before she could finish, a scream rent the air.

“What the hell?” the man said, his head snapping to the side, out toward the inky-black no-longer night.

Nora couldn’t help it.

She laughed.

He looked back up at her, his hand coming to his chest again, that same gentle rub over his heart. Easily startled, this tall, handsome, bespectacled man, and she was so . . . delighted by that. So thoroughly, completely charmed.

“It’s a cat,” she said, the laugh still in her voice. “A stray. Probably one of the big toms.”

Her laughter faded as she realized something. She hadn’t heard them in a couple of weeks, not since . . .

“Donny,” she blurted.

The man on the balcony dropped his hand away from his heart.

There was a long, awkward pause, during which Nora’s soul certainly left her body. Not sticking around for this! it probably said, adding a cheerful wave as it went.

She cleared her throat. “He—um. He used to put food out for them.”

The pause that followed was even longer. Even awkward-er. What a terrible way to bring up the condolences conversation.

The man turned his head again, out toward the yard, out toward where the frustrated feline scream had come from, his hands curling around the balcony railing again, as though he needed to ground himself. She was desperate to say something, anything, but she also wanted to give him a minute, if he needed it. God knows she’d needed a lot of minutes, over the last few months. That’s what 4:00 a.m. was good for, wasn’t it? The poor guy.

It nagged at her, a little, that she’d never seen him before, never heard Donny mention him. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Donny wasn’t a talker, wasn’t a sharer, not even with Jonah, whom he’d known the longest. And he’d worked up until the day he died, leaving every weekday morning at seven and not returning until five thirty. He had a whole life away from here that Nora didn’t know about. Maybe he knew tons of people, but just never brought any of them to the building.

“Did there used to be a tree out there?” the man on the balcony said, interrupting her thoughts.

“Yeah,” she said automatically, her eyes going immediately out to its former spot. “We had to have it removed a couple of months after I moved in last year.”

She’d been devastated, getting that tree cut down. Her first official act as the building’s association president, and it’d felt foreboding, damning, especially so soon after Nonna had passed. I don’t want to do it, she’d told everyone, afraid of what they’d think. I wish I could keep it exactly as it is. But it’d been rotten to the core, that tree, and frankly they’d been lucky it hadn’t fallen on its own. In the end, she’d watched it come down—a whole day of chain saws running, men in truck lifts, wood shavings in the air like snowfall. She hadn’t cried, but she’d really, really wanted to.

“Wait,” she said, realizing that she’d neglected the most important part of what he’d said. She looked back down, found him watching her. “You’ve been here before?”

“Once. When I was a kid.” Something had changed in his voice, though she wasn’t sure she could’ve said what. Maybe it was that the air was changing all around them—the sky lightening, the predawn pitch transforming into a velvet blue-black. She knew it well enough to know: golden hour, almost over.

He cleared his throat. “He was my uncle.”

Nora blinked down at him, shock and relief coursing through her. So it was a relative, then. Loyalty! Nonna was saying smugly, from somewhere, but it also wasn’t really the time to be counting chickens.

“I’m so sorry,” Nora said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

The man dropped his head, something like a nod of acknowledgment, or maybe some kind of bow of respect for the mention of Donny. Inside her chest, she felt her heart squeeze in sympathy, in recognition.

I hate that I’m all the way up here, she thought, though definitely being down there would be weird. What would she do, hug him? Without a bra on? Disastrous. Extremely inappropriate! Nonna, obviously, would never.

“I didn’t know him very well,” he said, and there . . . there she could’ve said what. His voice sounded a little clipped. A little frustrated.

A little . . . disloyal.

No, Nora, she told herself. That’s only your 4:00 a.m. fretting talking. He’s probably still in shock, same as you.

Below her, the man reached up, scratched at that same spot on his chest. He cleared his throat again. “Do you like it here?”

Did she . . . like it?

What a question. This place held the best memories of her childhood, her adolescence. And now, she’d happily moved her whole life here for it. She could talk all morning about this building, thus her PowerPoint idea. Maybe this was an opportunity to bring up the wallpaper! Though probably it made more sense to talk about the people first, and—

They were interrupted again, this time by a shrill, urgent beeping, and the man quickly patted his leg.

“Shit,” he said. “Sorry.” Within seconds, what she could see of his face was being lit by the bluish screen of his phone. The hand that wasn’t holding it rubbe. . .