Total pages in book: 56
Estimated words: 52864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 264(@200wpm)___ 211(@250wpm)___ 176(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 52864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 264(@200wpm)___ 211(@250wpm)___ 176(@300wpm)
He was a child I’d had with a Seer during a time in my life when I was lost, unable to remember who I was or that my heart belonged to Mia. Draco was never meant to be.
Mia’s blue eyes narrowed, windows into the pain in her heart. “If you leave, don’t ever come back, King. You won’t be welcome here in our afterlife.”
“I know. And I love you.” I looked down and jumped.
CHAPTER ONE
Piper
I walked into the dilapidated kitchen and swiped a finger over the cupboard door. The blue paint crumbled off, turning to dust on my fingertip.
“This place is a mess,” I muttered with a tickle in my throat. Maybe it was from the mold in the air or the warped pine floor beneath my feet. Perhaps it was the bubbling floral wallpaper in the breakfast nook and the rotting windowsill over the rusted sink. There wasn’t an inch of this house that wasn’t disintegrating.
I turned toward Leo, my boyfriend of two years. “It’s perfect.”
He smiled and shook his head of dirty-blond hair. Funnily enough, we had the exact same shade of hair. Same eye color, too. Hazel. It was the reason I’d noticed him when we first met. My best friend, Constance, “Conni,” had pointed him out at a party. “Hey, look. It’s your male doppelganger,” she’d said.
My heart warmed with the memory. Not about how he and I looked similar—lots of people did—but when we sparked up a conversation, we discovered we had the same likes and dislikes, too. Two peas in a pod.
I loved how the smallest, unforeseen events, like meeting someone at a party, could change your life. Today, of course, was not one of those moments. This was months of planning coming together.
“How did I know you were going to say you love this shithole?” Leo chuckled.
“Was it the way I moaned in ecstasy at the hand-carved banisters in the foyer?”
He stepped in closer, tucking a lock of my hair behind my ear. “Why don’t you moan like that when we’re having sex?”
I shrugged coyly. “If you had original parquet floors, I just might.”
He laughed. “Are we really doing this?”
How could we not? The home was everything we wanted, built in the late 1800s and two stories of pure craftsmanship just crying out to be brought back to life.
“We’re never going to find a Victorian at this price anywhere in the city.” It had six bedrooms, a basement, and a quarter-acre lot—unheard of in this San Francisco neighborhood where every home was valued at five million or more. The only reason this property hadn’t been divided up was because the home had been declared a historical landmark. Developers couldn’t touch it. Yet.
“But we talked about getting out of California, starting a family.” Leo’s eyes swept across the brown water stains on the ceiling.
“No. We agreed to give it six months, and if we couldn’t find a home for you to renovate, then we’d start looking elsewhere.” The truth was, with the way things were going around here—the drugs, crime, and let’s not forget the insane taxes—I wasn’t opposed to leaving the state. It was probably the smart thing to do. But something about this city—the history, the great food, and the smell of the salty fog rolling in from the cold bay—blinded me to the bad things. I still loved it here and hadn’t lost hope that San Francisco would turn around. In a decade or two? In the meantime, home prices were at rock bottom. This was our one chance to get in.
“Leo, I promise when we’re ready to have kids, we can reevaluate.” I kissed the top of his hand. “I’m marrying you. Not this house.” By now, he had to know I would always put us first. This home was nothing more than a great investment, a foothold into our bright future.
“It’s going to need a few hundred thousand in repairs—way over our budget,” he pointed out.
“Yes, but it’s been on the market for years, and Maurice says he knows the estate’s administrator. They really want to get rid of it before it’s condemned.” At which point, a developer could petition to remove the home’s historical status. “Let’s at least have Maurice float an offer and see what happens.”
Maurice was our Realtor, who’d been helping us speed along the process of finding a property. Leo and I were getting married next summer. At least, that was the plan, though we’d both agreed that finding our historic dream house and remodeling it together would come first. We wanted a home where we could have a picture-perfect wedding to start our picture-perfect life.
Leo was an architect, working for a firm here in the city, but he wanted to get out on his own, doing exactly this: renovating historic homes. This house would be his first big project and his calling card. Also, his office and our house.