Elle went hands on hips. She managed this building for the owner, who happened to be Spence—and she often mistook her job for actual world domination, trying to run his personal life as well.
But Spence had nixed his personal life a long time ago. It was the Baldwin curse. He could be successful in his business life or his personal life—pick one—but not both. Since he objected on a very base level to going back to abject poverty, he’d long ago decided business was a safer bet than love.
Although, to be honest, he’d made a few forays into attempting both and had failed spectacularly.
“Oh, and did you hear that Spence here is rumored to be one of the top ten nominees for San Francisco’s most eligible bachelor?” Joe asked Elle, giving a snort as if this was hysterical.
Spence leaned forward and banged his head against the wall a few times.
“Don’t bother,” Elle said. “Your head’s harder than the concrete. And yes,” she told Joe. “I know. I figure that’s part of the reason he just threw his phone out the window?”
“I could just scare everyone off your ass for you,” Joe said to Spence.
He was kidding. Probably. And actually, Spence was more than a little tempted. This mess was his own fault, for trusting someone he shouldn’t have. As a result, the press had been having a field day with his success in a very large way, threatening his privacy and also his sanity.
Just thinking about the “most eligible bachelor” thing had him groaning.
“Listen,” Elle said more kindly now. “Go take a break, okay? Then you can come back and shut out the world and work.”
It was a well-known fact that Spence’s ability to hyper-focus and ignore everything around him was both a strength and a giant flaw. Great asset for an engineer/inventor, not so great for anything else, like, say, relationships. But truthfully, he was hungry, so a break sounded good. He headed toward the elevator.
“Uh,” Elle said, gesturing to his clothes. “You might want to . . .”
“What?” he asked, looking down at himself. So he hadn’t shaved in a few days—so what? And okay, maybe he lived out of his dryer, grabbing clean but wrinkled clothes from there in the mornings when he got dressed. Whatever. There were worse things. “Joe’s in his underwear.”
“Hey, at least I was wearing some today,” Joe said.
Elle took in the guy’s nearly naked form, clearly appreciating the view in spite of her being very much taken in the relationship department by Joe’s boss Archer Hunt. She finally shook it off and turned back to Spence. “You know damn well when you walk across the courtyard talking to yourself, hair standing up thanks to your fingers, all stubbly because you forgot to shave, and those black-rimmed glasses slipping down your annoyingly perfect nose, women come out of the woodwork.”
“They do?” Joe asked.
“It’s the hot geek look,” Elle said.
“Huh.” Joe rubbed his jaw, where he too had stubble. “Maybe I should try that sometime.”
“No,” Elle said. “You can’t pull off hot geek. Your looks say sexy badass, not geek, which apparently is like a siren call to crazy women everywhere.”
Joe looked pleased. “I’m okay with that.”
Elle ignored this and looked at Spence. “After your last romantic fiasco, you vowed to take a break, remember? So all I’m saying is that you might want to change up your look.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Slouch. Get a beer gut. Fart. Whatever it is that guys do to organically turn us off.”
“Wait,” Joe said. “You gave up sex after Clarissa dumped you, what, two years ago now? Like, willingly?”
“Something you should try sometime,” Elle said to him.
“Woman, bite your tongue.”
“No, really,” she said. “How do you even keep all their names straight?”
“Easy,” Joe said with a smile. “If I forget their name, I just take them to Starbucks in the morning and wait until the barista asks their name for their cup.”
Elle rolled her eyes. “Seriously?”
“Hey, you know I run on caffeine, sarcasm, and inappropriate thoughts at all times.”
“I didn’t give up sex,” Spence said. Okay, yes, his latest project required his 24–7 attention and he hadn’t had time to connect with anyone. But quick hookups weren’t really his thing anyway. What was his thing at the moment was creating a system for getting meds to people via drones, in far-flung areas where they were nearly nonexistent. Meds and also medical care through camera-equipped drones, allowing doctors to remotely diagnose and monitor patients.
He’d had problems. Accommodating for the atmosphere and varying weather patterns, for one. The security, for another—making sure pirates couldn’t intercept and steal the meds and equipment was a high-stakes priority. And then there was the ratio of the changing weight of the cargo to getting enough battery charge to make the long flights, not to mention limited battery life and the struggle to stay connected no matter the conditions. But he was getting close, very close. All he needed was time, uninterrupted time, a rare commodity. He moved toward the door. “I’m going after my phone.”
“The one you just killed dead?” Elle asked.
“I’ll bring it back to life.”
“You’re a genius, Spence, not a miracle maker.”
When he kept going, he heard Elle mutter “great” to Joe. “Now I’ve issued some sort of challenge to his manhood and he has to prove me wrong.”
The truth was, Spence could rebuild his phone in his damn sleep. What he wished he could do in his sleep was get this project up and running. Maybe a part of his problem was that it happened to be for Clarissa’s One-World charity and he’d promised her.
And Spence no longer broke promises.
He took the stairs because he hated the elevator, and when he stepped out into the courtyard, he stilled for a beat. He’d grown up hard and fast and without a home. This building had changed all that for him, and normally the sight of the fountain, the cobblestones, the building itself with its amazing old corbel brick architecture, all worked together to lighten his day.
But when he hadn’t been looking, Christmas had taken over the place. There were garlands of evergreen entwined with twinkling white lights in every doorway and window frame. On top of that, all the potted trees that lined the walkways had been done up like Christmas trees.
This being winter in San Francisco, specifically the district of Cow Hollow, the foggy afternoon air burned his lungs like ice. He grabbed his phone from the coin-filled fountain, dried it off on his pants, and shoved it into one of his pockets to restore later.
“Spence!” Willa called out from the pet shop that opened into the courtyard. She ran a pet day care out of her shop and sometimes when Spence needed to think, he often did so while walking her clients for her.