One
Daisy Emmett knew she should never have agreed to help her mortal enemy the moment she saw the KEEP OUT sign. Or, more accurately, the twelve KEEP OUT signs, in varying shades of unhinged. There was an official-looking one, advertising extreme legal action for all trespassers. Then a gigantic round one attached to the barbed-wire-laced gate of his middle-of-nowhere Maine home, with various health-and-safety-style stick figures being brutalized by booby traps all over it. And if that wasn’t enough to put you off, there were also the seven massive dogs the other signs advertised.
She felt pretty sure one of them was just a picture of a werewolf.
Its fork-sized fangs glared down at her from a glossy billboard-looking thing atop the fence next to the gate. And this fence was big. It stood twice as tall as her, even though she was five-five in her very professional heels, and it seemed to wrap around the entirety of the property that lay beyond.
All of which was, in one way, understandable.
Caleb Miller was a very famous man. And not just because his books were familiar with the number-one spot on every bestseller list in existence. Or because there was now a near cottage industry of glossy TV adaptations of most of his work, two of which had starred Nicole Kidman. Or because many airport bookstores survived on his name alone.
No, there was also his mythos.
The legends that had built up around him.
That he hated talking to people so much everyone in the small town he lived in had barred him from their establishments. That he never smiled; that he did smile but his smile was bloodcurdling; that if you smiled at him, he would have you fired. And of course the big one: that the only thing he cared about was the mysterious beloved he had lost long ago.
Oh yeah, people loved that one.
She could definitely see some trying to scale his fence over it. So it made sense, it really did. And yet at the same time, all this just seemed like typical Miller bullshit to her. She could still see him now in her mind’s eye, sitting across the table from her in Professor Dunderson’s workshop. Perpetually sat back in his chair, enormous arms folded across his thick chest, expression set to withering.
An opinion like happy endings are for fools always on his lips.
In fact, those were the very words that had landed him in this much hot water—spoken on The View, directly to Whoopi Goldberg’s face. Before he’d stormed off, to the horror and shock of literally everybody on the planet.
Though if she was being honest, she had no idea how he’d even managed to write romance novels that so many people actually believed in and loved in the first place. Or how he made his fan club think he had secret passionate depths, and some love story for the ages in his past. All those dedications at the start of his books—my soul is lost without yours, my heart wants to march to where you are sleeping, there is no light without the one that you provide—were just bunk, as far as she was concerned.
Lemony Snicket–style nonsense.
Something to get people salivating and speculating.
He was savvy enough for it, after all. He’d tricked her into thinking he had a soul at one point. Right the way back before their enemyship had begun, when she first heard him speaking in some lecture and thought—I want to know that guy. The one who understands The Remains of the Day. The one who understands every single thing that lies beneath the surface of that fool’s words. The one who said it all to back up a girl who’d just been interrupted by some dipshit.
Then she had watched as he slowly ground all her glowing first impressions down to dust.
By graduation, she’d wondered if she could get away with murdering him.
And it seemed like nothing about him had changed. Honestly, she wasn’t sure why she’d imagined otherwise. Or what had made Henry Samuel Beckett—“Beck” to his friends, of which she had somehow found herself being one—believe that hiring her for this job was a good idea. Because, yes, she had a fabulous public relations company with a stellar reputation. Sure, she also had a kind of former relationship with the man Beck had wanted the public relations sorting for. But it had all just seemed to happen so quickly and in such a poorly-thought-outway.
Beck had bowled her over with his golden retriever enthusiasm over dinner, the minute she just happened to mention she had once known Caleb Miller. And her other good buds, Mabel and Alfie, had chimed in with what a great opportunity this would be to raise her company’s international reputation. And then the next thing she knew, they had been making plans over Alfie’s birthday steaks.
A book tour. For Miller’s latest book, If You Were Mine.
But one that would really give him every opportunity to show his softer side, his better side, the side of him that was passionate with this mystery woman the internet always blathered on about. He must have one, Beck had insisted, with his big earnest eyes all wide and his warm voice all full of sincerity. God, it was like he had hypnotized her with kindness.
She hadn’t even managed to say that Miller definitely didn’t.
She just couldn’t when faced with someone who thought life was all rainbows and sunbeams.
Instead of what it actually was: turning up to a supposedly arranged meeting with your mortal enemy just to discover the only way in was via an intercom that didn’t work. She finally took a breath and dared to press the button on it, and it tilted sideways. It made a weird hollow noise. Then she looked behind and found not one connected wire.
She was forced to knock.
But of course knocking just triggered the sound of a snarling dog. It made her jump back and scan the surrounding area, as if it was going to lunge at her somehow. Heart racing, every breath coming too quick and too ragged, one hand on her chest—until she realized. She heard it loop, pretty distinctly, and rolled her eyes.
It wasn’t real.
Of course it wasn’t.
The chances of Miller having another being in there that he needed to care for were precisely zero. The usually unfriendly campus cat at Nordbrook had taken a liking to him, and she’d never seen anyone ignore something so fiercely in all her life. People had looked on in awe at this wizard who had received the blessing of that perfect creature, while he’d responded with nothing but fuming. Once she was sure she’d heard him hiss, Leave me alone, I will never love you.
And then there was the time the dean’s daughter had accidentally taken his hand, because he was older than most students and sort of shaped like her dad. He’d whipped that thing away so fast you’d have thought the kid was made of molten lava. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see him nudge her with his foot.
Nudging things away had been his favorite pastime, after all.
If one of the romance novels she loved to read in college had gotten too near to him: Nudge.
Her cardigan brushed his sleeve on the arm of a lecture hall chair: Nudge.
Someone looked at him too long, or spoke to him too much, or breathed in his direction, or broke the cone of silence he established around himself at parties she didn’t understand him attending: Nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge. Hell, she was fully expecting a nudge now, even if she did somehow manage to get to him.
You scale that fence and he’s going to shove you off it, she told herself.
But that core of determination inside her was, unfortunately, already forcing her to slip off her heels, climb up onto the bonnet of her car in her stockinged feet, and get ahold of the top of the fence. There was a sign with a sturdy edge that she could get her foot onto, and she did. She dragged herself toward it and up, muscles screaming, something going prang in her shoulder as she went about it.
But she got one leg over.
She managed to hold there, half balanced on the inch-thick wood between coils of barbed wire, while she got her breath back. Then, after that, all she had to do was slide herself all the way over and down, no problems. Just a quick ten-foot drop into a probable snake pit. No big deal. Think of Caleb Miller winning this war against doing something he actually agreed to, she thought, and went to slide to the right.
And that was when she heard the throat clear.
Barely more than a sigh, soft as a slight breeze.
But enough to immediately raise her hackles. Of course it did—she would have known the sound of him anywhere. He had always looked like the kind of man who spoke with a deep roar of a voice. Only he didn’t really at all. Instead, every sound he made almost seemed to purr out of him and pour over whoever he was speaking to. It made her think of melted butter spread over something just ever so slightly rough.
Though she told herself that maybe the mismatch between the sound and the look of him wasn’t the same as before. Maybe he was different now. Maybe he had shrunk. Or shaved. Or started wearing soft jumpers. She’d turn her head and find somebody as unintimidating as a spoon. But then she dared to actually look at him, and oh god god god.
Copyright © 2026 by Charlotte Stein