The Daddy Next Door

""Are you planning to demolish the building, Miss Hart?" That is the first thing Grant Callahan ever says to me."

He is thirty-nine, built like a brick fortress, and perpetually unimpressed. As a widowed single father and one of the city's most respected architects, his life is engineered down to the millimeter: quiet routines, rigid schedules, and zero room for complications. I am twenty-five, fresh off breaking an engagement to a manipulative ex, and currently trying to prove to the universe that I don’t need anyone. Unfortunately, my grand declaration of independence begins with assembling a flat-pack bed frame without instructions, and accidentally sending an eighty-pound headboard crashing through our shared adjoining wall. Grant thinks I am chaos in human form. His dinosaur-obsessed eight-year-old daughter, Ruby, thinks I belong in their family. Our war starts on our adjoining balconies. He drafts building safety memorandums; I grade them with a D-minus in neon highlighter. He demands silence; I turn up my music. Our rescue dogs stage prison breaks together, and every time I try to keep my distance, his daughter pulls me back into their orbit. Then comes the night I fall asleep on his couch, wake up half-delirious, and accidentally mumble: "Okay, Daddy." The dead silence in the room could shatter glass. Suddenly, the cold, disciplined architect has a wicked new smirk, and the tension between us turns radioactive. Before I can catch my breath, he’s kneeling on drafty floorboards to rub the cold out of my bare feet, hovering over my kitchen island to make sure I finish my dinner, and stepping between me and the past I ran from. Grant promised we would take things slow. He swore he wouldn't drag me into his heavy, grief-scarred world. But when my life falls into danger, the unshakeable man’s restraint shatters completely, and he’ll tear down the entire city to prove I'm already his. Falling for the grumpy single dad next door was never on the lease… but breaking his rules has never felt so much like home.