Ultimate Gift Set

Housekeeper Under the Mistletoe

Cara Colter

Larenzo’s Christmas Baby

Kate Hewitt

The Demure Miss Manning

Amanda McCabe

A CEO in Her Stocking

Elizabeth Bevarly

Winter Wedding in Vegas

Janice Lynn

Her Christmas Protector

Geri Krotow

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Housekeeper Under the Mistletoe

Introduction

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

EPILOGUE

Larenzo’s Christmas Baby

Introduction

One Night With Consequences

About the Author

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

EPILOGUE

The Demure Miss Manning

Introduction

Author Note

About the Author

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Epilogue

Author Note

A CEO in Her Stocking

Introduction

About the Author

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Epilogue

Winter Wedding in Vegas

Dear Reader

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

EPILOGUE

Her Christmas Protector

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

About the Author

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Copyright

Housekeeper Under the Mistletoe

Cara Colter

Jefferson took a deep breath and looked into the pleading eyes of the woman who had landed, uninvited, on his doorstep.

Was this who he had become? So embittered by the death of his wife that he could turn a woman so obviously terrified away from his door?

“Geez …” Jefferson muttered under his breath. He was a man who made decisions every day. That was what he did for a living. His decisions often had millions of dollars riding on them, and the livelihoods of thousands of people.

And yet this decision, this split-second decision, about what kind of man he would be, felt bigger than all of those.

Jefferson Stone stepped back marginally from his door. It was all she needed. She catapulted over his threshold and into his house.

Into his life, he told himself grimly. “Thank you,” she breathed.

“Nothing has been decided,” he told her gruffly, though somehow he knew it had been.

And she knew it, too. She was beaming at him.

“It’s not going to be a walk in the park,” he told her. He was already annoyed that his decision had been based on a moment of pure emotion, not rationale. He had to get things back on track and make sure she was aware this was a professional arrangement.

CARA COLTER shares her life in beautiful British Columbia, Canada, with her husband, nine horses and one small Pomeranian with a large attitude. She loves to hear from readers, and you can learn more about her and contact her through Facebook.

To all the people who share my love of the wild and untamed beauty of Kootenay Lake.

CHAPTER ONE

“UNDER DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES,” Angelica Witherspoon muttered to herself, as she drove down a main street where the summer sun was filtered through a thick green canopy of leaves, “this is the kind of place I would adore.”

The city of Nelson was nestled in the Selkirk mountain range of British Columbia. It was quaint and charming.

She angle parked her car and noted plenty of activity on the wide sidewalks in front of historical buildings. It made her feel safe enough to vacate her car and get out and stretch. Her muscles were cramped with tension. In the distance, she could catch glimpses of the sparkling waters of the west arm of Kootenay Lake.

Angie sighed with longing. “This is a place I would love to explore.” But she reminded herself, sternly, it was her old life that would have allowed her to explore the vibrant, artsy and scenic community.

In her new life she was extraordinarily tired and on edge. And it took money to explore. Angie had six dollars and twenty-two cents left to her name. She had allowed herself one cash machine withdrawal and was still in shock at how quickly two hundred dollars, the maximum she could take, had evaporated.

Under a colorful awning, just in front of where she had parked her car, there was an outdoor café. The savory smells of rich coffee and of spicy Indian food enveloped her. She felt a pang of hunger. It was the first time in a week on the run that her stomach had unknotted enough for her to feel hungry.

But, she told herself, if she bought a loaf of bread, and some sliced meat she could make her six dollars and change go a bit further than if she gave in to the temptation to sit down to a restaurant meal. She looked around for a corner store.

Tires squealed off in the distance, a jarring sound, and Angelica felt her heart begin to hammer, and a fine bead of sweat broke out on her lip. She fought terror as she scanned the street, making sure she was not being watched.

Inwardly, she talked herself down from the ledge.

“Of course you are not being watched,” she chided herself. “How could anyone have followed you when you were not sure yourself where you were going?”

But it was part of this surplus of caution that wouldn’t allow her to use the bank machine again. Winston had shown remarkable creativity in invading her life. What if he could track her transactions? No, she would find a loaf of bread. Peanut butter might be a better choice than meat, because it would be easier to keep.

And then what? she asked herself. With her quickly dwindling resources, she was going to have to give this up and go home?

Home. A shudder ran up and down her spine.

He’d been in her home, she reminded herself. Winston had been in her home. In her bedroom. What had he touched?

“Ugh,” she said as repulsion shuddered down her spine, making her uncertain that she was ever going home again. But, realistically, she had to be back at school in September—summer would not last forever. Surely this would be over by then? What if it wasn’t?

She thought of faces of her students, the changes she saw in those faces over one school year, the sense they gave her of being needed, and she nearly wept at the thought she might not be able to return to them and to the job she loved.

“Never mind that,” she told herself firmly. That was all in the distant future. Right now there was a more urgent and immediate question. How was she going to get by for a few weeks until the police apprehended Winston?

“I just need a break,” she whispered, heavenward. “One small break.”

And that was when she noticed the community bulletin board. She was drawn to it as if it were a magnet and she a dropped pin. All else faded, and she saw only one posting.

In very masculine printing it read:

HOUSEKEEPER NEEDED IMMEDIATELY.

MATURE APPLICANTS ONLY.

EMPLOYER DESIRES QUIET AND PRIVACY.

CHATTERBOXES NEED NOT APPLY. APPLY IN PERSON AT THE STONE HOUSE, ANSLOW, BC.

Angelica snatched the scrap of paper down off the board like a starving pauper who had been tossed a crust. She glanced around surreptitiously, holding the paper close to her chest, as if others might be waiting to pounce on her and wrestle her to the ground for that job opportunity. It occurred to her she might be drawing attention to herself.

But Nelson seemed to be a place that embraced everything from the slightly eclectic to the downright weird, and no one was paying the slightest attention to her. She forced herself to relax and read the notice again, more slowly.

The position was probably long gone. There was no date on it. The paper it was written on seemed frayed around the edges and slightly water damaged. On the other hand, it was downright unfriendly. Only someone desperate—that would be her—would be the slightest bit interested in such a posting.

She wasn’t sure how “mature” would be defined, but considered herself a very mature twenty-five. She definitely was not a chatterbox, though she was outgoing and friendly, which was probably what had gotten her into trouble in the first place.

Angelica Witherspoon was being stalked.

Stalked. It was like something out of a movie. Three months ago, she had gone for one cup of coffee with someone she’d felt sorry for. Her life had been unraveling ever since.

Angelica forced herself to focus on the scrap of paper in her hand instead of revisiting what she could have done differently, where she went wrong.

She read it for the third time. In her mind, a picture formed of an elderly gentleman, sweetly crusty and curmudgeonly—maybe like the beautifully animated character in the movie Up—who found himself alone and needed some help around his house.

She had asked for one small break. And here it was. She had to grab it. Her resolve firmed within her. With her background in home economics, she was fully qualified for this job.

“Excuse me,” she said. She was startled—and faintly ashamed—by how timid she sounded. It seemed that a minor annoyance deepening into something more sinister had changed everything about her in a very short amount of time.

The man going by her had dreadlocks and a multicolored striped knit toque despite the mid-July heat. He also looked as if he was wearing a skirt instead of pants. But when he stopped and looked at her, she saw he had friendly eyes.

“Where is Anslow?”

“Take the highway that way, around the lake. It’s only fifty-eight kilometers, but it will take you an hour. The road is windy.”

“Is there any other kind of road in British Columbia?” she asked wearily.

“Ah, an Albertan.”

Just like that, without intending to, Angie had revealed things about herself, which Canadian province she lived in. If somebody was following her and came asking... Rationally, she knew the chances of this very same man being stopped and asked about her were slim to none, but her life was not rational, not right now.

“Saskatchewan, actually,” she lied. She was aware the lie filled her with an odd sense of guilt, which she shook off. “Have you ever heard of the Stone House in Anslow?”

“No, but I like the possibilities.”

Given his very Bohemian appearance and the faint, acrid smell of smoke coming from him, Angelica got his meaning and actually smiled. It was the first time she had smiled since coming home a week ago to find the campaign to infiltrate her life had escalated. The doors to her new apartment had still been locked, but a brand-new stuffed panda with a red bow around its neck had been residing jauntily against the pillows on her bed. She was sure her dresser drawers had been opened. This had been the final straw in a string of steadily escalating and upsetting incidents that had been going on for the three months since she had said an innocent yes to that cup of coffee.

The shock—finding the bear on her bed, the red ribbon looking horribly like a cut throat—had sent her pell-mell into flight mode. Still, after a week, it felt that no matter where she went, she wasn’t far enough away yet.

Now, an hour and a half after leaving Nelson—she’d stopped to wolf down a peanut butter sandwich at a picnic area being enjoyed by several families—following instructions she had received in the town of Anslow, she pulled up to a formidable stone-pillared entrance that would not have looked out of place guarding the entrance to a haunted house. She hesitated but the wrought iron gate hung open, and really...? If she was looking for a place where it would be hard to find her, this was certainly it.

She could not see a house, just a long, deeply shaded drive that wound down to a sharp curve, where it disappeared.

She took the road slowly, around the curve, but still no house, just the drive, weaving its way through magnificent old-growth forest. Angelica opened her window, and birdsong and a wonderful smell, sun on fallen pine needles, wrapped around her.

She felt some of the edginess drain from her. It made the feeling of exhaustion intensify.

The road dropped down and down, drawing ever closer to the water. It wove its lazy way through the forest and occasionally broke out into cleared grasslands that allowed her to see the full and enormous expanse of Kootenay Lake. And then she would be back in the deep, cool shadows of the forest, catching only glimpses of the glinting waters of the lake.

Finally, after a good fifteen minutes of driving, the house came into view.

The name had led her to expect she would see a stone house. Instead, Angie saw it was possible the house was named for its location, anchored as it was into a slab of natural gray stone forty or fifty feet above the placid waters of the lake.

The gate and the picture of the curmudgeonly little old man she had been working on had led her to expect a decrepit mansion.

Instead, the house before her was a masterpiece of modern architecture, blending with the elements around it. The house appeared to be constructed of 90 percent glass, the glass reflecting leaves and trees and sky at the same time as making the interior of the house and its contents seem as if it was an oasis that was magically suspended in the outdoors.

The huge expanse of windows made it possible to see right through the house, past a sectional white leather sofa and a stand-alone fireplace, to the deck on the other side of the dwelling. The deck, though huge, seemed to hold a single hammock, positioned in a way that took best advantage of the breathtaking view of the lake.

The setting and the house were stunningly beautiful. Angie imagined if you were inside the house it would feel as if nothing separated you from the forest on one side and the lake on the other.

It was not, to be sure, the house she would have expected a curmudgeonly old man to live in!

She suddenly felt ridiculously vulnerable. She was out here in the middle of nowhere, alone. No one, except the person she had asked for instructions in Anslow, knew she was here.

What if she was jumping from the frying pan into the fire?

“What are the chances,” she asked herself, “that you could meet another deranged man in such a short span of time? None!”

Realistically, her situation—peanut butter and loaf of bread in the backseat not withstanding—couldn’t be more desperate. The past three months had made her steadily more cowardly, but she had to call on what little courage remained in order to do what needed to be done.

She twisted her rearview mirror over and ran a hand through her hair, tried to tidy her blouse and straighten the crumples out of her shorts, which suddenly seemed too short. Despite her efforts, she could not lose the faintly disheveled look of a week of living out of a suitcase.

Then, putting her anxiety about her appearance aside, Angie parked her car under a towering pine. She got out and marched to the door of the house. Okay, she left the keys in the ignition and the door of her car open, just in case she had to make a quick getaway.

As she made the winding walk to the front door, she was aware again of a beautiful aroma, deep and woodsy, and a cacophony of birdsong.

It was a double-entry doorway and it was constructed of stainless steel, etched with a geometric pattern of interlocking squares. The leaves of the trees surrounding the house were casting dancing shadows on the surface. Despite the fact it needed a good scrubbing, it was more like a work of art than a door.

In the center was a ring of steel, and she grasped it firmly and rapped against the door. The sound was loud and pure, like a gong in a Buddhist temple, and it startled her. She was aware of the sound reverberating inside of her when the door swung inward soundlessly.

Angie was pretty sure her mouth had fallen before she snapped it shut.

The man who stood in front of her was about the furthest thing from a curmudgeon that she could imagine.

He was stunningly handsome.

He looked to be in his early thirties. Tall and powerfully built, he had brown hair, the exact color and sheen of a vat of melted dark chocolate. His hair was long enough to touch the collar of an untucked white denim shirt that needed pressing. His hair was faintly mussed, as if he had been out in the wind.

To add to the pirate-straight-off-the-boat look of him, his cheekbones and chin were cast in the dark shadows of a day or two of whisker growth. His legs were long and set apart, braced, which showed the powerful cut of his thigh muscles underneath the faded denim of blue jeans. His feet were bare, which Angie was perturbed to note she found sexy. She hastily lifted her eyes from them to look him in the face.

His eyes were astonishing, the same restless gray blue of the waters of the lake she could see through wall-to-wall windows beyond him. But the water looked welcoming on this sweltering day, and nothing about his expression, and especially not his eyes, welcomed. And still, his eyes were every bit as sexy as his bare feet had been!

He regarded her with a furrowed brow for a moment, the line of his sensuous mouth pulled down in a surprised frown.

“Nope,” he said. It was a single word. Despite the fact his voice was a rasp of pure unwelcome, there was something about it that made Angelica even more aware of what an almost criminally attractive man he was, blatantly sexy without even trying.

Apparently, the attraction was not shared. He shut the door. It clicked closed with metallic finality.

CHAPTER TWO

“NOPE.”

The gravelly rejection rang in Angie’s ears for long moments after the door had clicked shut.

Oddly, her first reaction to the door being slammed in her face was relief. She reminded herself she no longer wanted men to find her attractive. It was dangerous. Plus, if he was deranged, he could have taken advantage of the isolation to pull her inside that house. Instead, he was dismissing her.

Though, looking into the strong cast of his face, the intelligence in his eyes, the confidence of his bearing, derangement did not seem like even a remote possibility.

She recognized her relief at the closing of the door, in part, not just because he was obviously not a pervert just waiting for a damsel in distress to land at his door, but because she had reacted to him in a very primal way, and she could not tolerate that in herself.

In the past year her fiancé, Harry, had abandoned her in favor of a beach in Thailand, and a more exciting companion, and now she was being stalked by a maniac. If anyone should be absolutely immune to the charms of the opposite sex, it was her! But apparently she wasn’t. So, she should be glad of that door closed with such quiet finality.

But she wasn’t. In fact, the relief that she was being dismissed was short-lived, indeed. It gave way to a stirring of indignation at his summary dismissal. And indignation felt so much better than the wound she had carried with her since Harry had shattered her dreams.

And it felt way better than the cowering scared-of-her-own-shadow fear she had been living with ever since Winston’s escalating invasion of her life.

Angie decided, right that second, that she was not going to be a victim anymore.

Besides, she needed this position as a housekeeper. It was an answer to that whispered prayer she had said at the bulletin board in Nelson just a few hours ago.

Angelica took a deep breath. She marshaled her courage. She set her chin and her shoulders. And then she lifted that ring of steel again and rapped it against his door with all the gumption she could muster.

“Damn him,” she muttered, when it seemed the master of the Stone House intended to ignore her. She drew in a sharp breath, marshalled her threads of tattered courage, and then she grasped the ring again.

Her hand was clutching the door knocker with the fierce determination of a drowning person clutching a life ring when the door was yanked open.

The unexpected force pulled Angie over the threshold and into the cool, marbled foyer of his house. She stumbled, let go of the knocker—a full second too late—and put out her hands to stop her forward momentum.

Angie’s hands ran straight into a solid wall...of man.

She stared at her hands on his chest. Through the fabric of his shirt she could feel the steady, slow beat of his heart and the shocking heat of his skin. She could feel the utter and steely power of him. His scent was masculine, absolutely tantalizing and utterly spellbinding. He smelled of sunshine and lake water and pine trees. Angie dragged her gaze away from the wide expanse of manly and mesmerizing chest in front of her.

Those gorgeous stormy-water eyes were fastened, with some consternation, on the placement of her hands, which for some reason she had not yet removed from his person!

She gulped, came out of her trance, and snapped her hands off his chest and down to her sides. She took a giant step backward.

He raised his eyes from where her hands had been glued to him and tilted his head at her. “You’re still here,” he said.

His tone was laconic, but his eyes were narrowed with annoyance. There was a little muscle flicking in the uncompromising line of his unshaven jaw. It was fascinating.

“Um,” she said intelligently.

“Yes?”

“I just needed to know.”

“Know?”

“Nope to what?” Angie was trying very hard to regain her sense of equilibrium. She reminded herself to straighten her shoulders and lift her chin.

He seemed surprised that she would have the audacity to even question him. He regarded her piercingly.

“I mean, who answers their door like that? With a single word? Nope? When you don’t even know why I’m here.” Angie had to remind herself of her vow not to be a victim anymore. Still, she had to fight herself not to fidget, to hold her chin firmly in place and her shoulders square. He regarded her silently, with lowered brows and narrowed eyes. She was certain that he intended to let her stew, to see if he could make her squirm. She held her ground.

Finally, he sighed. The sound was one of pure exasperation, and yet she felt certain his expelled breath had touched her cheek, like a kiss. It was everything she could do to keep her hands at her sides and not touch her cheek.

“Nope to whatever you’re selling.” His voice was stern and annoyed, not the voice of a man who could kiss cheeks with his very breath.

“But you don’t even know what I’m selling!” she protested. Was that a quaver in her voice?

“Yes, I do.” His voice was like gravel.

“You don’t,” she said stubbornly.

“I do.”

I do. The words she had expected to be hearing from Harry. Even said out of context, they filled Angie with a longing that made her despise herself. How many kicks in the teeth did a gal have to endure before she got it? There was no knight in shining armor. There was no happily ever after. Those kind of illusions were what got people in trouble.

“Girl Guide cookies,” he said, his voice hard, “or your version of enlightenment, or tickets to the high school play. And to all of those, an emphatic nope.”

See? This man was the cynical type. He would never fall victim to illusions of any kind.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, stripping any trace of quaver—or illusions—from her voice, “you’re wrong on all counts. I am not selling anything.”

This man was not accustomed to being told he was wrong. She could see that instantly, when the dark slashes of his brows dropped dangerously.

Angie told herself she needed to be careful not to be off-putting. He was going to be her future boss, after all!

“I’ve come about your posting on the community board in Nelson,” she told him.

The firm line of his lips deepened into a frown. That, coupled with his lowered brows, made it inarguable. Her future boss was scowling at her. He had no idea what she was talking about.

“I’m here about the position you advertised for a housekeeper.”

His eyebrows shot up. His gaze swept her. “Oh,” he said, “that.”

“Yes, that.”

He gave her another long look, apparently contemplating her suitability for the position. She tried for her most housekeeperly expression.

“Especially nope to that,” he said.

When the door began to whisper shut, again, it was pure desperation that made Angie put one foot in to stop it.

The man—good God, was he Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights—glanced down at her foot with astonished irritation. And then he gave her a look so icily reserved it should have made her withdraw her foot and touch her forelock immediately. But it did not. Angie held her ground.

The master of the mansion glared back down at her foot with deep annoyance, but she refused to retreat. She couldn’t!

After a moment, he sighed again, and once more she felt the sensuous heat of his breath whisper across her cheek.

Then he opened the door wide and leaned the breadth of one of those amazing shoulders against the jamb, the seeming casualness of his stance not fooling her. Every fiber of his being was practically vibrating with displeasure. He folded his arms over the immenseness of his chest and tilted his head at her, waiting for an explanation for her audacity.

Really, all that icy remoteness should not have made him more attractive. But the impatient frown tugging at the edges of those too-stern lips made her think renegade thoughts of what was beyond the ice and what it would be like to know that.

These were crazy thoughts. This man was making her think crazy thoughts. She was a woman who had suffered so completely at the hands of love.

First, her Harry had decided all their dreams together were decidedly stodgy and had replaced her with insulting quickness with someone far more exotic and exciting.

And then, a coworker, Winston, had taken total advantage of her brokenhearted vulnerability. She had caved to his constant requests. Angie had said yes instead of no to a single cup of coffee. He had used that yes to force his way into her life.

With that kind of track record, it made her thoroughly annoyed with herself for even noticing what the master of the Stone House looked like. And what his voice sounded like. And what he smelled like. And what his breath had felt like grazing the tenderness of her cheek.

If she had a choice, she would have cut and run. But she was desperate. She had absolutely no choice.

With her foot against the door he was too polite to slam, she said, determined, “I need this job.”

He contemplated that, and her, in silence.

“Really,” she clarified when it seemed as if he was not going to say anything at all.

“Well, you don’t qualify.” His determination seemed to match her own. Or exceed it.

“In what way?”

“You’re obviously not mature.”

“I guess that would depend how you defined mature,” she said.

“Old.”

“How old?” she pressed. “Fifty? Sixty? Seventy? Eighty?” She hoped she was pointing out how ridiculous he was being. Old was not necessarily a great qualification in a housekeeper.

For a moment he said nothing, and then one corner of that sinfully sexy mouth lifted, but not in a nice way. “Older than you.”

“I’m sure the human rights commission would have quite a bit to say about not being considered for a job—for which I’m perfectly qualified—because of my age,” she said.

The smile deepened, tickling across his lips—cool, unfriendly, dangerous—and then he doused it and lowered the slash of his brows at her. “Are you threatening me?”

It occurred to her that annoying him would be the worst possible way to wiggle her way into this job position.

“No, not at all. I’m just suggesting that you might have attracted a better response to your posting for an available position if you had said you needed someone highly organized and hardworking and honest.”

“All of which I’m presuming you are?” he said drily.

She took it as very hopeful that he had not tried to physically shove her foot out the door and slam it on her.

Not that he looked like a man who ever had to get physical to get what he wanted. That look he was giving her was daunting. Anyone less desperate would have backed down long before now.

“I’m desperate.” There she had admitted it to him.

“Your desperation is not my con—”

“I’m willing to guess you haven’t had a single response to that ad,” she plowed on. “Who would answer an ad like that?”

“Apparently, you would.”

“I’m not just desperate.”

“How very nice for you,” he said, his tone so sardonic it had a knife’s edge to it.

“I’m also highly organized and hardworking and honest.”

“You’re too young.”

“Humph. I think youth could be a great advantage for this position.”

He didn’t answer, so she rushed on.

“I will be terrific at this job. You’ll love me.”

He looked insultingly dubious about that.

How could she have said that? That he would love her? You did not want to even think a word like that in front of a man like this—who could make you feel as if he had kissed you by simply sighing in your direction.

“I’ll work for free for one day. If you’re not impressed, you haven’t lost anything.”

He frowned at her. “Look, Miss—”

“Nelson,” she filled in, using the name of the town she had just come through. “Brook Nelson.” There. A new name. She had used part of the city of Cranbrook that she had passed through on this wild ride, and part of the town of Nelson.

She held her breath, knowing from the tension she felt while she waited that she needed the new existence her new name promised her.

CHAPTER THREE

JEFFERSON STONE REGARDED his unwanted visitor. Something shivered along his spine when she said her name. He knew she was lying.

And she wasn’t very good at lying, either. In fact, she was terrible at it.

He allowed himself to study her more closely. Brook Nelson—or whoever the hell she really was—was cute as a button. She was dressed in a brightly patterned summer blouse and white shorts. She was a little bit of a thing, slender and not very tall. It looked as if a good wind would pick her up and toss her.

And yet when her hands had been pressed into his chest, he had been aware of something substantial about her. That little bit of a thing had set off a tingle in him—an awareness—that had been as unwelcome as she was.

Hard not to be aware of her, when those shorts ended midthigh and showed off quite a bit of her legs.

Annoyed with himself, Jefferson shook off the thought and continued his study of his housekeeper candidate.

It just underscored what he already knew: she would not do.

She had light hair, a few shades darker than blond, but not brown. Golden, like sand he had seen on Kaiteriteri Beach in New Zealand. That hair was cut short, he suspected in a largely unsuccessful effort to make those plump curls behave themselves. They weren’t. They were corkscrewing around her head in a most unruly manner.

Her eyes were hazel, leaning toward the gold side of that autumn-like combination of golds and greens and browns. She had delicate features and it was probably that scattering of freckles across her nose that made her seem so wholesome, even though she was lying about who she was.

There was something earnest about her. Despite her youth, and despite the shortness of those shorts, she seemed faintly prim, as if she would be easily shocked by bad words. Which, of course, was part of the reason she would be a very bad fit for him as a housekeeper.

Because of her size, Jefferson had assumed she was young. But on closer inspection, she looked as if she was in her midtwenties. Still, she was exactly the type you would expect to be peddling cookies for a good cause or wanting to change the world for the better or encouraging attendance at the annual Anslow high school performance of Grease, which would be dreadful.

And he should know. Because a long time ago, in a different life, he had been cast as the renegade in that very high school play.

Jefferson shook it off. He did not like reminders of his past life.

Besides, Brook wasn’t anything like the ideal person he had in his head for this job, which was gray haired, motherly but not chatty, and someone willing to stay out of his way and keep schtum about his life.

Brook Nelson, in spite of the wholesome exterior and her claims of honesty, was lying about who she was. He needed her gone.

“Look, Miss, um, Nelson, I’ve gone through three housekeepers in three weeks—”

“Somebody answered that ad?” she asked disbelievingly.

“Not exactly,” he had to admit. “That ad was a result of the other failures.”

The failure was that he had mentioned to Maggie, at the Anslow Emporium, that he was going to need someone.

He hadn’t anticipated that telling Maggie—whom he had known since he was six—that he needed some help at his house would be like creating a posting in a lonely hearts club rag.

“Tell me about my three predecessors.”

He frowned at that. She was a cheeky little thing, wasn’t she? What part of no could she not get? But, since she was immune to slamming doors, why not give her anecdotal evidence of her unsuitability for this position?

“Okay, the first one was not mature. Mandy, showed up in flip-flops, and had a most irritating way of popping her gum, except when she was texting on her cell phone, which seemed to require her jaw to stop moving. When she had been here approximately three hours, she knocked on my office door to complain that the internet signal was weak from the deck. And then she acted insulted when I suggested I didn’t need her services any longer.”

Jefferson did not mention that Mandy had told him that she was prepared to overlook the vast difference in their ages if he wanted to give it a try.

He had escorted her to the door with a sense of urgency almost unparalleled in his life—and before finding out exactly what “it” meant.

“The second one was also not mature. She had on too much mascara and her skirt was too short, and she seemed way too interested—”

He stopped.

“In you?” Brook asked quietly.

He didn’t want to get into that. He was a small-town boy who had left here, made good of himself and then come home with a wife. He should have figured out, before he took his request to Maggie, that now that Hailey had been dead over three years, he would be perceived, by the good and simple people of his hometown, as a rather tragic figure. Which was nothing new. He’d come to live with his grandparents when he was six, after his parents had died. He sometimes wondered why he had come back here, to this place where he had been and always would be the little orphan.

And now a widower, seen by one and all as much more in need of a new wife than a housekeeper.

“You don’t have to worry about that with me,” Brook piped up. “I have no romantic inclinations at all. None.”

Brook seemed too young to have developed a truly jaundiced attitude toward romance, and Jefferson remembered housekeeper number two’s rather frightening avarice.

He focused on her work performance flaws instead of telling Brook the full truth. “She also said youse instead of you. Do youse want the toilet seat left up or down?”

“You don’t have to worry about that with me, either,” Brook rushed to assure him. “There are few things I love as much as the English language and its correct usage.”

“Hmm. That is not adding up to housekeeper, really. A true housekeeper might have been more concerned about the toilet seat and its correct usage.”

A delicate blush crept up her cheeks.

“I’m a student,” she said, “desperate for a summer job.”

The desperate part was true enough, he could see that. But her eyes had done a slow slide to the right when she had said she was a student.

“My third housekeeper was Clementine.” Clementine had been sent after he’d gone back down to the Emporium and read Maggie the riot act.

“She was certainly more suitable in the mature department. She’d actually been a friend of my grandmother’s. But Clementine started talking the second she got in the door and did not stop, ever.”

Jefferson remembered how even the lock on his office had not stopped her. “She stood outside my office while mopping the floor and polishing the door handle, chattering about her Sam. Husband. Mickey and Dorian. Children. Sylvester and Tweety. Bird and cat.”

Suddenly it occurred to Jefferson, he was being the chatty one. This stranger standing at his door—whom he had absolutely no intention of hiring—certainly did not need all of this information.

Maybe it was a sign of too much time alone—three failed housekeepers not withstanding—that he just kept talking.

“I barricaded myself inside my office for three days, but Clem showed no sign of moving on to other parts of the house. To avoid discussion, I finally shot a generous check and a nice note about how I really didn’t need her anymore under the door. It achieved exactly what I hoped—blessed silence.”

He had managed to stop talking before he revealed Clementine’s real fatal flaw. She had one divorced stepdaughter and three single nieces, all of whom she thought he should meet.

Brook’s lips twitched. That hint of a smile deepened Jefferson’s awareness of her as what he wanted least in his house: the distraction of an attractive woman. But that tentative smile also made him aware of the fine lines of tension in her—around her shoulders and neck, around her eyes, around her lips.

“It must have been hard to fire a friend of your grandmother’s.”

“You have no idea,” he said.

But, looking at her, he had the uneasy feeling she did have an idea.

“Why the sudden search for a housekeeper? Are you replacing a housekeeper you were quite satisfied with?”

He scowled at her. Who was interviewing whom, here?

“No, I’ve never felt the need of one before.”

“And now?”

He sighed. “In a moment of weakness, I agreed to allow an architectural magazine to photograph the house.”

She glanced past him. “A moment of weakness? The house is extraordinary. You must be very honored at their interest.”

“I may have been when it was all just an idea. But as soon as a date was set, I realized the house would need attention, which, six weeks later, I am no closer to giving it.”

“When is the photo session scheduled?”

“Two weeks.” He was aware he was engaging with her, and it didn’t seem to be bringing him any closer to getting rid of her.

“I can have your place completely ready for a photo shoot in two weeks. I promise.”

Jefferson contemplated that. It was a weakness to contemplate it. But he did need someone to get the place ready, and the date of the photo shoot was creeping up far more rapidly than he could have believed. And he suspected, from the lack of applicants now, that word had spread far and wide through this tight-knit region of the Kootenays that he was impossible to work for.

So, the young woman in front of him could be considered a godsend, if one was inclined to think that way, which Jefferson Stone most definitely was not.

No, Nelson Brook, or Brook Nelson, or whatever her name was, just wasn’t going to work out, despite the fact no one else had responded to his blunt posting that had laid out exactly what he needed. He would just have to postpone Architecture Now indefinitely. He was aware of feeling relieved at that possibility.

He reached for the door. He was going to gently shove on it until she moved her foot.

But then a crow cawed loudly and raucously in the tree the prospective housekeeper had parked her car under. It dropped a pinecone out of its beak onto the roof of her car, and both sounds, the cawing and the sharp plunk of the cone on her car roof, were loud and unexpected in the drowsy quiet of the afternoon.

She gasped and jumped forward, and she smashed against him. For the second time, in the space of just a few minutes, she was touching him.

Only this time, it wasn’t her hands splayed across his chest, which had been disconcerting enough. This time he could feel the press of the entire length of her body against his, and he was acutely aware of the sweet softness of her. He was acutely aware of hesitating a fraction of a second too long before putting her away from him.

“I’m so sorry,” she stammered, but he caught the look on her face as she swiveled her head and glanced over her shoulder. It was the frantic look of a deer being startled by wolves. When she turned back to him, despite the fact she was trying hard to school her features, he could see the pulse pounding in the hollow of her throat.

Tension trembled in the air around her, and her muscles had gone taut. It made him notice there were shadows under her eyes and an edginess about her that was far from normal.

Her car door, he noticed, looking beyond her, was open, as if she had planned what to do if she needed to make a quick getaway.

Brook Nelson, or whoever she was, was terrified of something.

What shocked Jefferson was how her fear pierced the armor around his heart. It was as if a little sliver of light found its way to a place that had been in total darkness.

Inside himself was some nearly forgotten sense of decency, some sense of being connected to a human family he’d managed to ignore for three whole years, much to the dismay of the people of Anslow.

Jefferson stood very still. For a moment, he thought of the grandparents who had raised him, in a house not far from here. They had been old-fashioned people, who were decent to the core and kind to a fault. They would have never turned someone in need from their door, and no one had benefited from their generosity of spirit more than him. He could almost imagine the look of disapproval on both their faces if he shut the door now.

Jefferson took a deep breath and looked into the pleading eyes of the woman who had landed, uninvited, on his doorstep.

Was this who he had become? So embittered by the death of his wife, Hailey, that he could turn a woman, so obviously terrified, away from his door?

“Jeez,” Jefferson muttered under his breath. He was a man who made decisions every day. That was what he did for a living. The decisions he made altered the courses of entire cities, impacted huge companies and global corporations. His decisions often had millions of dollars and the livelihoods of thousands of people riding on them.

And yet, this decision, this split-second decision, about what kind of man he would be, felt bigger than all of those.

Jefferson Stone stepped back marginally from his door.

It was all Brook Nelson needed. She catapulted over his threshold and into his house.

Into his life, he told himself grimly.

“Thank you,” she breathed.

“Nothing has been decided,” he told her gruffly, though somehow he knew it had been. And she knew it, too. She was beaming at him.

“It’s not going to be a walk in the park,” he said. He was already annoyed that his decision had been based on a moment of pure emotion, not rationale. He had to get things back on track and make sure she was aware this was a professional arrangement. “The finer aspects of housekeeping have been neglected for a long time.”

He fully intended to tell her that if she didn’t put them right he would not tolerate her presence any longer than he had her predecessors. But she spoke before he could get the grim warning out.

“I could tell that from this door that things have been slightly neglected,” she said, tapping the front door. “It needs polishing. You probably use something special for it, do you?”

“I have no idea. That’s your job, not mine.” He was trying to make up for his moment of weakness in letting her in, but she didn’t seem to notice uninviting his tone.

“Do you have an internet connection here?”

“Not one that housekeeper number one, Mandy, approved of, but my career is dependent on being connected.”

“I’ll just look up online what to use on a door like that one. Is it stainless steel, like kitchen appliances?”

He considered her question. She was focusing on the job at hand and not asking any personal questions about his career. Hopefully, that indicated a lack of nosiness. Hopefully, that indicated his impulsive decision to let her in was not going to lead to complete disaster. “Yes.”

“I know I just use a few drops of vegetable oil on mine. At home.”

So, there was a home, somewhere, and presumably a fairly nice one if it had stainless steel appliances in it.

Despite his intention to keep everything professional, he smelled man problems in his new housekeeper’s personal life. She had already claimed she had no romantic notions, which basically meant burned by love. It would be nothing but good for him if she was sour on the whole relationship thing. It could be almost as good protection as mature and silent. And, despite the fact he had his own history that had turned his heart to the same stone as his name, he sensed a need to keep up his defenses and to demonstrate the same lack of nosiness that she was showing!

Still, she wasn’t just having man problems. She was terrified.

CHAPTER FOUR

JEFFERSON CONTEMPLATED HOW Brook’s obvious terror stirred an emotion in him that he did not feel ready to identify and, in fact, felt a need to distance himself from.

He’d been living—despite the efforts of the townspeople—without the complication of untidy emotions for some time.

He’d give this woman—Brook Nelson, or whoever she was—a break. That didn’t mean he had to involve himself in her drama in any way. The house was ridiculously large. With the slightest effort, during the day he wouldn’t even know she was here.

Though that might pose some challenges, because she was in his living room now, and despite the fact the windows let in all kinds of light, it was as if sunshine had poured into the room with her. She flounced into his living room, hands on her hips, eyes narrowed, lips pursed.

“Wow,” she said.

He thought she was referring to the architecture, which generally inspired awe, but she turned disapproving eyes to him. “Good grief, I can see neither Mandy nor Clementine got to this room. You mustn’t have allergies. How long since this has been dusted?”

“A while,” he admitted, instead of never.

“And I take it, it would have gone a while longer if it weren’t for the photo shoot?”

“That’s correct.”

“You are a true bachelor, aren’t you? Why live in such a beautiful house if you aren’t going to take care of it?” she wailed with genuine frustration.

“I’m a widower,” he said tersely.

He was not sure why he had imparted that little piece of information. He hoped it wasn’t because he thought that would make her more sympathetic to his slovenliness than being a bachelor would.

But, as soon as he saw the sympathy blaze in her eyes, he realized he did not want her sympathy. Arriving in Anslow as an orphan, losing his wife, Jefferson Stone had experienced enough sympathy to last him a lifetime. He did not want any more challenges to his armor. He realized he needed to be much more vigilant in his separation of the professional and personal.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice a low whisper that could make a man long for a bit of softness in his life.

But he had had softness, Jefferson reminded himself, and had proved himself entirely unworthy of it.

He lifted a shoulder in defense against the sympathy that blazed in her eyes. “My wife was the architect who designed the house.”

“Ah, that explains a lot.”

He lifted an eyebrow at her.

“You don’t really seem like the type of person who would be amenable to having your home photographed. You are honoring her. That’s nice.”

Jefferson really didn’t want her to think he was nice, and he squinted dangerously at her.

She got the message, because she moved over to an enlarged black-and-white photo on the wall.

“Who is this?”

The people responsible for the fact you haven’t been sent packing. “It’s me, with my grandparents, in front of the old house.”

“It’s a very powerful photograph.”

That’s what Hailey had said, too. She wasn’t into hanging family portraits, but she had unearthed this photo and had it enlarged to four feet by six feet and transferred to canvas.

“How old are you in it?”

“Six.”

She turned and looked at him. “How come you look so sad?” she asked.

He started. Hailey had never asked a single question about the photo. She had considered it an art piece. She had liked the composition, the logs of the old house, the dog on the porch, the hayfork leaning against the railing.

This woman was looking at him as if all his losses were being laid out before her, and he hated it.

“My parents had just died.” He kept his tone crisp, not inviting any comment, but he saw the stricken look on her face before she turned away from him and ran her finger along the bottom of the frame.

She looked at her finger but didn’t say anything. Her expression said it all. She felt sorry for him. No, it was more than sorry. She was, he could tell, despite the lie about her name, the softhearted type. She didn’t just feel sorry for him. Her heart was breaking for him. And he hated that.

“This is a temporary position,” he said, his voice cold. “After the photo shoot, I’ll return to companionship of my dust bunnies. Maybe you want to consider if two weeks employment is what you are really looking for.”

It was a last-ditch effort to let her know this position probably was not going to work for her. Or him.

“Temporary works perfectly for me,” she said, as if that made it cosmically ordained. “Two weeks. I have a lot to do.”

She had been careful not to express sympathy, and yet Jefferson felt her I have a lot to do could somehow mean rescuing him. Just a second. Wasn’t he rescuing her? And if she thought she was going to turn the tables on him, she was in for an ugly surprise.

“We haven’t come to terms yet. What do you expect for remuneration?”

“I haven’t passed the free-day test yet.”

He looked at her face. The softness lingered, but he was willing to bet she was one of those overachiever types. He deduced if she set out to impress, he would be impressed.

“Let’s assume,” he said drily.

She named a figure that seemed criminally low. But then she added, “Plus room and board, of course.”

Jefferson stared at her. Why was this coming as a surprise to him? Obviously, some fear had sent her down his driveway, and just as obviously she was not eager to go back to it.

“I’m in the middle of relocating,” Brook said vaguely. Then, as if sensing how disconcerted he was, she added, “This looks like a huge place. There must be a spare bedroom? Or two? Or a dozen?”

“I’m not sure—”

“Besides, if I’m going to be a proper housekeeper, I should probably make you some meals. That would be easier to do in residence, don’t you think?”

He saw it again. Behind her I’m-going-to-be-the-best-housekeeper-in-the-world bravado was terror.

She wanted to stay here.

Under his roof and his protection. He supposed if you were looking for a place to hide, the Stone House fit the bill quite nicely, as long as the things you were hiding from were outside of yourself.

Jefferson wondered if his new housekeeper would feel quite so eager to seek shelter here if she knew how colossally he had failed the one other woman, his wife, who had expected protection from him.

Meals. He hadn’t really even considered a housekeeper providing meals. His search for a housekeeper had been motivated strictly by getting the house ready for the magazine photo shoot. He considered telling her meals would not be part of their agreement but found himself oddly reluctant to do so. He had not had a home-cooked meal in longer than he could remember, and his mouth was watering. His weakness annoyed him.

“Look,” he told Brook sternly. “Against my better judgment, I’m giving you a chance, but be warned, if you chatter, you’re out of here.”

She looked as if she might say something. But then she pursed her lips, brought her fingers up, locked and put the imaginary key in her pocket. But before he could even be properly relieved, she reached into that imaginary pocket, took out the key and unlocked her lips.

“Maybe just before we begin our vow of silence, I should get you to show me around and you can tell me what you’d like to see prioritized. I’ll make a list of what each room needs.”

It was a reasonable request, and he knew he could not really refuse it.

“Let’s begin here,” she coaxed, when he was silent.

“This room is the great room,” he said. “I noticed the windows are rain spotted.”

“The windows would be a priority,” she agreed. “But I should probably leave them until right before the photo shoot so they just sparkle that day, right?”

“Right,” he said, though of course he had not thought of that.

“Dusting.” She looked up at the high vault of the ceiling. “You have a ladder somewhere? I see cobwebs up there.”

He frowned up at where she was looking. He did not like spiders. Before he answered, she went and slapped the couch, and a cloud of dust flew up from it. “Vacuuming. If the weather stays nice, I might even put the furniture outside for a bit to air it out.”

He couldn’t really imagine she was going to get all that furniture outside by herself. The sectional was huge. And apparently she was going to need a ladder. Actually, he was not going to let her up on a ladder, so there was no point in finding one. He needed to make it clear he was not going to be roped into interaction with her. He was going to protest, but then she went on.

“It smells faintly stale in here. I think a good airing of the furniture will change that.”

It smelled stale in his house?

“For the photo shoot,” she said, a little pensively, “it might be nice to make it look lived in. You don’t use this room much, do you?”

“Not really.” She was proving to be uncomfortably astute.

“What would you think if we set it up a bit?”

We?

“We could just add a bit of color. Maybe a bright throw over the couch, a few glossy magazines on display, a vase of flowers.”

“Don’t you think the photographer will do that?”

“Well, if he doesn’t think to bring a vase of flowers with him, you’d be out of luck, since the nearest vase of fresh flowers would be quite a distance away. I could make the throw. I’ll snoop around and see what you have.”

He must have looked unconvinced because she rushed on, “You’d be surprised what you can make things out of. And I’m pretty handy with a needle and thread. I made this blouse.”

That made him stare at the blouse for an uncomfortable second.

Thankfully, she had moved on. “It’s just that this room—the house—is so beautiful, but it doesn’t look very homey. It would make me happy to help it look its very best.”

He stared at her. She already appeared much happier than she had when she first arrived, that little furrow of worry easing on her brow.

“I’ll leave it up to you to spruce it up however you see fit. If you need to buy a few things, let me know,” he said, and was annoyed that he felt he was giving in to her in some subtle but irreversible way. “Stay out of my office. And my bedroom.”

The fact that he did not want her in his bedroom, that most intimate of spaces, alerted him to the fact she—this little mite of a woman in her homemade blouse with her wayward curls—was threatening him in some way that he had not allowed himself to be threatened in, in a very long time. If ever.

“But surely they’ll want to photograph those rooms, too?”

“I’m quite capable of getting two rooms ready.” His tone was curt and did not invite any more discussion, but he was aware that she had to bite her lip to keep herself from discussing it.

“I’ll show you the kitchen,” he said stiffly, leading her through to that room.

“Whoa,” she said, following him, “now this is a room you use.”

She didn’t say it as if it was a good thing.

He looked at the kitchen through her eyes. The sink was full of dishes. She didn’t know yet, but so was the oven. His mail was sliding off the kitchen table, and there were several envelopes on the floor. The counter by the coffeemaker was littered with grounds and sticky spoons. He often tromped up from the beach, wet, across the deck and through the kitchen. His bare footprints were outlined against the dark hardwood of a floor he’d allowed to become distinctly grimy.

Instead of looking daunted by the mess, she gave him a smile. “You need me way more than you thought you did.”

He looked at her. In this room, as in the living room, it felt as if her presence had made the light come on.

He had the terrible feeling that maybe he did need her more than he had thought he did. His life had become a gray wash of work and isolation.

And damn it, he told himself, he liked it that way. What he didn’t like was that Brook had been in his domain for only a few minutes, and he already was seeing things about himself that he had managed to avoid for a long, long time.

“Look, I have work to do,” he said. “I’m going to let you poke around the rest of the place by yourself. I’m sure it will become very quickly apparent to you what needs to be done.”

He could have left then, but he watched as she wandered over to where the mail had fallen on the floor.

“This one is marked Urgent,” she said. She came across the distance that separated them and held out the envelope. He reached for it.

For just a moment, their hands brushed. Something tingled along his spine, an electrical awareness of her. She might have felt something, too, because she spun away from him and went to the kitchen counter. It had a long, sleek window that overlooked the lake. But she did not look out the window. She opened up a cupboard.

“Is this what you’re eating?” she asked him, holding up a soup can, and then setting that down and holding up a stew can.

He folded his arms over his chest, uninviting.

She ignored that. “Canned food is very high in sodium,” she told him. “At your age, you have to watch things like that.”

“My age?” he sputtered.

And then she laughed. It was a tinkling sound, as refreshing as a brook finding its way over pebbles.

“Do you have any fresh food?”

“Not really. There might be a few things in the freezer.”

“That’s not fresh. What do you eat?”

He thought of the stacks of microwavable meals in the freezer. “Whatever I feel like,” he said grouchily.

“Never mind, I’ll make a grocery list. How do you get the perishables here? In this heat? I guess ice cream is out of the question.”

“I take the boat and a cooler,” he said. “Anslow is quicker by water.”

“You take a boat for groceries?”

“In the summer, yes.”

“That’s very romantic.”

And then she blushed. And well she should. You did not discuss romance with your employer!

“If you make a list, I’ll do a run tomorrow.” That hardly sounded like a reprimand for discussing romance with him! It sounded like a concession to her feminine presence in his house!

“Oh, good,” she said. “I’ll be happy to prepare some meals if I have the right ingredients.”

There was that whole meal thing again. A strong man would have just said no, that it was not part of her job, and that he was more than capable of looking after himself. But Jefferson had that typical man’s weakness for food.

“What kind of meals?” he heard himself ask. He tried to think of the last time he’d had a truly decent meal. It was definitely when he’d been away on business, a great restaurant in Portland, if he recalled.

Home cooked had not been part of his vocabulary for over a decade, not since his grandmother had died. How she had loved to cook, old-fashioned meals of turkey or roast beef, mashed potatoes and rich gravy. The meal was always followed with in-season fruit pie—rhubarb, apple, cherry. When he had first moved in with his grandparents, his grandma had still made her own ice cream.

Hailey had been as busy with her career as he himself was. She liked what she called “nouveau cuisine,” which she did not cook herself. She had made horrified faces at the feasts he fondly remembered his grandmother providing.

“It is not healthy to eat like that,” she had told him.

And yet he could never remember feeling healthier than when his stomach was full of his grandmother’s good food.

Jefferson remembered, suddenly and sharply, he and Hailey arguing about this very kitchen.

“Double ovens?” he’d said, when they met the kitchen designer. “We’ll never use those.”

“The caterers will appreciate it when we entertain.”

Why had he argued with her about it? Why had he argued with her about anything? As they had built the house, it had seemed as if the arguments had become unending.

If a man only knew how short time could be, and how unexpectedly everything could change... Jefferson felt the sharpness of regret nip at his heels. Somehow, it felt as if Brook, nosing through his fridge, was the reason for this regret. He usually was able to bury himself in work. It prevented being bothered by pesky emotions and, worse, by guilt.

Brook closed the fridge door and opened the freezer side of the huge French-door-styled appliance. She stood with her hands on her hips for a moment, staring at the neatly stacked boxes of single-serving freezer foods.

“I’ll make that list,” she said, obviously dismissing everything in the freezer as inedible.

“You do that,” he said.

Apparently, she meant to make a list right now, while the lack was fresh in her mind. She found a piece of paper on the counter, and a pen. Her brow furrowed with concentration, and as she wrote, she muttered out loud.

“Chicken. Chocolate chips. Flour. Sugar...”

Chocolate chips. And flour. And sugar. Was she going to make cookies? Jefferson felt some despicable weakness inside himself at the very thought of a homemade cookie.

She had obviously been distracted from her request to see the house. “I’m expecting a call in a few minutes, so if you’ll excuse me,” he said.

Jefferson eased himself out of the room. His mouth had begun watering at the mention of chicken. Again, his thoughts went to his grandmother and platters of golden fried chicken in the middle of the old plank table.

It was a weakness, but he had no power to fight it. Besides, so what? She was signing on as his housekeeper, if she wanted to cook a few things, why shouldn’t he be the beneficiary? He’d be signing the paychecks, after all. There were no worries that she would be as good a cook as his grandmother had been. No one was that good a cook.

CHAPTER FIVE

AS SHE WATCHED him go, Angie realized that, in her eagerness not to annoy her new employer with anything that could even remotely be construed as chattiness, she had not asked him his name. Now he was in full retreat and she didn’t know where his cleaning supplies were kept or where he would like her to stay.

Instead, she watched mutely as he stalked away, down a wide hallway, turned and disappeared from view. A moment later she had heard the slamming of a door.

Considering how unfriendly he was, Angie contemplated what she was feeling. She felt as if she understood his unfriendliness. Her new employer was a man who had lost everything.

For the first time in a long time—far too long, in fact—Angie was aware that it was not all about her. She had seen in his face that he would not brook any sympathy from her, and though her first impulse had been to offer some, she had listened to her instincts. There were other ways to let him know she had heard him and seen him. There were other ways to offer comfort. After the public humiliation of her broken engagement, she personally knew how hollow words could feel.

Her boss had become an orphan when he was six, and now he was a widower. She remembered the shattered-glass look in his eyes when he had revealed that about himself, and his quick rejection of what he had perceived as sympathy even though she had not said a word.

He didn’t want sympathy, and she did not blame him. He wanted to be left alone, and she did not blame him for that, either.

But he had let her into his house, and that was a gift to her. She would give him a gift, too. She vowed she would be the best housekeeper the world had ever seen. She vowed for the next two weeks, she would make her employer’s life a little bit easier in any way that she could.

Angie contemplated the feeling in her. It was nice that it was not terror. What was it?

She felt safe.

Maybe his unfriendliness even made her feel safer. Look where seemingly friendly male interest had landed her last time, after all!

But no matter the reasons, for the first time since she had bolted after finding that stuffed panda on her bed, she felt something in her relax. Really, the tension had been increasing for months, as it became more and more apparent Winston’s interest in her was not healthy.

Now, it was as if she had exhaled, after a long, long period of holding her breath. Looking around the neglected house, it felt extraordinary to have a purpose beyond her own survival.

With that exhale came a sensation of pure exhaustion, and she let her eyes wander longingly to the hammock that she could see through the kitchen window. But falling asleep would be no way to make a good first impression or forward her goal of making her boss’s life a little better!

She made herself focus on the task at hand. From the stack of leaning mail that had taken over the beautiful harvest-style kitchen table, she presumed his name was Jefferson Stone and that he was a business consultant who owned a company called Stone Systems Analysis. She made a mental note to sort the mail for him. Some was obviously junk, but some of those envelopes just as obviously contained checks and business correspondence.

The kitchen cabinets revealed a rather impoverished selection of food. As she went through the cupboards, her grocery list was becoming quite extensive, especially since the thought of cooking for him now was imbued with her sense of altruism.

After she had finished in the kitchen, she went exploring. Off the kitchen was a laundry room. When she opened the washing machine it had wet clothes in it that had been sitting so long they smelled dank. She found the soap and restarted the cycle. The soap was in a cabinet sadly lacking in the cleaning supplies necessary to keep a house. She retrieved her list and added a few more items.

Moving on, feeling like something of a snoop, which was ridiculous, she showed herself around the house. Though from the outside it looked as if it was only one level, she took a stairway off the kitchen that led downward to the next level.

It was not really a basement, but a beautiful above-ground lower level, set up for entertaining. It had a billiards table and a bar, but the cover on the table and the dust on the bottles at the bar suggested no one had entertained down here for a very long time. There was a huge TV on one wall. It looked as if Jefferson did watch that, as there were several smudged drink glasses on the coffee table and a bowl that contained the crumbs of potato chips.

There were two guest suites off the entertainment room with fold-back doors out onto private decks that overlooked the lake.

She could choose one to stay in. Both would probably provide ample separation from the master of the house.

But it looked, she thought with a bit of trepidation, as if it would be very easy to break into this lower level. Besides, maybe the photo shoot crew would need a place to stay.

After making a thorough list of what needed to be done downstairs to make it habitable for the photo crew, should they decide to stay there, she scooped up the dirty dishes and went back upstairs. There was no room in the dishwasher for the dishes, and so she started it, stacking a second load above it. It felt beautifully satisfying to be doing these normal things.

Then, she crept down the hall the way Jefferson had gone. The first door was firmly closed, and she went on extra silent feet past it. She could hear him talking, and since he did not seem like the type who would talk to himself, she presumed this was the phone call he had scheduled.

And then she went past his office, farther down the hallway. The next door was open a crack to reveal the master bedroom.

She peeked in. There was a huge window that capitalized on the view. Like all the other windows in the house, it needed a thorough cleaning.

A door led to a private deck, where there was a covered hot tub. Another door, closed, must have led to the master bath.

The bed was king size, with a gorgeous solid headboard of gray weathered wood that looked as if it might have been retrieved from an old barn. Still, the room lost any semblance to boutique hotel chic because the beautiful linens on the unmade bed were rumpled. There were clothes on the floor and overflowing the dresser drawers. There was a heap of magazines sliding off the nightstand, and several empty glasses and plates were scattered about available surfaces.

She moved away from Jefferson’s open bedroom door, contemplating how relieved she was he had specifically told her to stay out of his room. She bit back a nervous giggle at the thought of what might be in there. Good grief, she’d been saved from picking up his underwear off the floor.

“My heart is overflowing with gratitude,” she said softly, out loud, and realized it was completely true. She felt as if she had been plucked from a terrible predicament, but more, she had been given a task to do, and she had a sense of being needed, of having a contribution to make.

She kept going.

There were two more guest bedrooms, and a guest bath. The opulence of these rooms was undisturbed. Except for dusting and freshening—and maybe a vase of flowers—they already looked ready for the cover of a magazine.

At the far end of the hall was a narrow doorway. She thought it was a closet, and opened it to see if this was where extra linens were kept.

Instead she found a narrow staircase, and, intrigued, she followed it.

As soon as she saw what was at the top of that narrow staircase, Angie knew this was where she would stay. Her sense of gratitude deepened. The room was a secret sanctuary, octagon shaped, encased in windows. There was even a tiny bathroom through one door. She peeked in at the claw-foot tub, and at yet more windows overlooking the lake. Then she turned back to the room.

It was a delight in whites: white bed, white linens, white walls. The white draperies, on closer inspection, were silk. She was delighted to see the room also had a small craft alcove with a sewing machine and neat cubicles full of fabrics and craft items.

Angie could not help herself. She went over and inspected the sewing machine. It was a very good model. Growing up as she had, in a single-parent household, there hadn’t always been money for the fashionable clothes she wanted. But a sewing lesson in a home economics class had changed all that. By the time she was in high school, she could copy any design she saw and was creating her own designs, too. She had made extra money sewing for her mother’s friends and for her own classmates.

At home, tucked away safely in a drawer was a sketch for the wedding dress she had designed herself and hoped to wear down the aisle.

That memory brought her back to reality with an unpleasant snap. She became aware it was also unbelievably hot and stuffy in this room, and she went across the bleached hardwood floor and threw open the windows. Within seconds a gorgeous, cool cross breeze was coming off the lake, fluttering in the curtains and cooling and freshening the room.

Though it was not 100 percent in keeping with her mission of making mental lists of what needed to be done in each room, Angie gave in to the temptation to flounce down on the bed. Her flounce created a cloud of dust, but she lay there, anyway, letting the fresh breeze from the windows carry the dust away. She allowed herself to contemplate the delicious sense of being 100 percent safe.

The windows were low, and even lying down she could see the lake. The view from this room was spectacular. She was looking down at the decks below, the one with the hammock on it, and the other with the hot tub.

She blushed at the thought she could spy on her boss while he sat in that tub. He did not seem like the kind who would wear a bathing suit!

“That’s exactly the kind of nosey parker he does not want around,” she told herself.

She looked away from the hot tub and could see that, beyond the decks, there were rough stairs carved out of the face of the huge stone the whole house sat upon. The steps led to a crescent moon of a beach and a dock with a sleek motorboat bobbing at its mooring. An afternoon wind was kicking up, and there was a chop on the water, the waves white capped.

She knew she could not go to sleep. She could not. But to find safety after experiencing so much tension? To have a sweet sense of mission after floundering in her own distress for so long?

Her eyelids felt as if they were weighted down by stones. She sighed, snuggled into the somewhat dust scented white of the duvet on the bed, and fell fast asleep.

* * *

Darkness fell, and Jefferson was edgily aware as he set down the phone after a long afternoon of conferences that he was not alone in his house.

The envelope she had passed him earlier, marked Urgent, caught his attention and he opened it.

Dear Jefferson,

As I mentioned to you in our recent phone conversation, the town of Anslow hopes to provide a picnic area where the Department of Highways widened the road after your wife’s accident. Our intention is to name the area the Hailey Stone Lookout.

Hailey had not been part of our community for very long, but we so want to honor her in this way. Would you please consider attending the fund-raiser as our guest? It would mean a great deal to all of us.

The theme is Black Tie Affair and dress is formal. Dinner with dancing to follow.

Will you let me know?

The letter was signed by Maggie, who as well as running the Emporium, was second in command to the mayor, and the town’s most goodhearted busybody.

She, like, Clementine, had been a friend of his grandmother’s. She had been one of the ones who circled around him after the death of his parents, clucking over him and loving him through all that pain, sewing him seamlessly into life of a small town. She had cheered at his hockey games and been part of the standing ovation for Grease. She had been in the front row, beaming at his graduation. She had held his grandmother’s hand when they had buried his grandfather, and again when he had gone away to university. It was Maggie who had held his own hand when he came back for his grandmother’s funeral.

When he and Hailey had decided to build on this land that had been his grandparents’ it had been Maggie who had welcomed them home as if they belonged here.

Had he already known, even at those initial stages, that Hailey would never belong here?

Jefferson glanced at the date. The fund-raiser was two weeks away, the day before the magazine crew was showing up. He cursed under his breath. It was the second time in one day that honoring Hailey had come up. Just like with the photo shoot, how could he refuse? Plus, he didn’t want to let Maggie down. But he had a horrible feeling the whole thing was just a ruse—not to honor Hailey but to parade the whole town’s eligible women before him.

The people of Anslow meant so well, but none of them could believe a life worth living could be had without family. They thought it was “time” for him to get over it and get on with it, as if these things could be done on a schedule. But couldn’t they see? For him family was forever connected to loss. And it was loss he could not bear any more of.

“I’ll think of a way,” he decided. He wished his new housekeeper had never handed him the envelope.

His new housekeeper. He listened. He thought he would hear sounds of her rummaging around, but there was nothing. In fact, he was pretty sure, now that he thought about it, that he had not heard a sound for hours.

He slipped out of his office and into the hallway. Night was falling and his house was in deep shadow. He sniffed the air. He knew there was hardly anything to cook with, so why was he disappointed that she had not made him dinner, and then sharply annoyed at his disappointment.

He had done fine without her for all these years.

He noticed the doorway at the end of the hall was open, and he went toward it, and then quietly up the dark staircase.

He paused as he came into the room. There was very little light left in it. It had been Hailey’s favorite room in the whole house design.

“Like a secret room,” she had said.

It had seemed to him it was the kind of room their kids might have adored, back then, when he had still held the hope he would one day create a family of his own.

But Hailey had designed the room not for kids but for crafts.

Crafts? He remembered the astonishment in his voice. Because his wife, the consummate professional, did not do crafts any more than she did double ovens.

The knife ache of pain throbbed along his temples. Because he had had a dream of settling here, and having kids here, and the night that Hailey had run off into the storm, it had been apparent their dreams were entirely different.

He had failed her so colossally.

Then, as his eyes adjusted to the dimness in the room, Jefferson saw Brook on the bed. She was curled up on her side, facing him, and she was fast asleep, her golden sand curls scattered over the white pillow cases.

It occurred to him he should feel annoyed. This was hardly the way for her to make the stellar impression she had promised. And yet seeing her sleeping, the anxiety completely relaxed from her face, Jefferson did not feel annoyed.

He felt as if he had done the right thing, and maybe the only thing. A thing that would have made his grandparents proud of him. This was his grandparents’ land. They would have never turned away someone in need. That was the unspoken creed they had lived their lives by, and no one had benefited more than he from their strict adherence to the golden rule.

He stood there for a moment too long, because Brook’s eyes opened, sleepy and disoriented at first, and then they widened.

She sat up on the bed. A scream of pure terror erupted from her. She scrambled backward, knees to her chin, pulling the covers along with her and putting her back into the corner.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, Brook, it’s okay. It’s me.”

That apparently was not reassuring, as she screamed again, a scream of fear so primal it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

“Jefferson Stone,” he said, but then it occurred to him he had not volunteered his name as of yet, so it might not reassure her at all. It also occurred to him, the light in the room was very dim. All she could see was a hulk standing in her doorway.

He stood there for a moment trying to get his eyes to adjust more fully. She scooted out of the corner bed, and he lost sight of her in the darkness. And then something crashed down on his head. By instinct, he reached out, connected with the arm of his attacker and pulled her in close to him.

“Let me go,” she screamed, fighting like a wildcat.

Instead of letting her go, Jefferson pulled the panicky woman into his chest and held her hard and tight. She pummeled him with her fists. She reared back and hit his chest with her head. He was afraid she might bite him. But he would not let go.

“Brook, stop it,” he said quietly. “Stop it. It’s just me. Jefferson.”

Finally, his voice seemed to penetrate all that panic. The wriggling strength of her went suddenly still, though he could feel the rabbit-fast beat of her heart against his chest.

“Jefferson?” She tilted her face up at him, and he could see the glitter of gold in her eyes as she stared up at him, frightened and baffled.

“Jefferson Stone, your new boss?”

Silence. And then, recognition pierced the glaze in her eyes, and for the first time he thought she might actually be wide-awake.

“Oh, my God! My new boss. I just hit my new boss with a lamp.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I’m so sorry. No. I’m beyond sorry. I’m mortified. Devastated. Appall—”

“I get it,” he said drily.

She seemed to realize she had made no effort to pull away from him. He realized how delicate she felt pressed into the length of him. He realized what he wanted to realize the least: that his life had become too vacant, lacking almost completely in this most basic of human needs. To be touched.

Jefferson Stone was far too aware that Brook felt good. And smelled good, and that a man could live to see eyes like that searching his face for goodness.

And finding it.

She seemed to realize now that rather than fighting to get out of his arms, she was clinging to him. Embarrassment painted her cheeks a delicate shade of pink. She dropped her arms to her sides and took a wobbly step back from him. After a moment, she lifted her arm and pushed her hand through her rumpled curls.

“I think you should sit down,” he said.

No argument. She retreated to the bed. She sat on the edge of it, peering through the darkness.

He reached over and flicked on the overhead light.

Jefferson had never seen terror as naked as what remained in her freshly illuminated face. He held up his hands, like a cowboy who had dropped his weapon, and he backed toward the door. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

But now comprehension was dawning in her own features.

“Of course, you’re not,” she said. “I know who you are now. I thought you were...” She dropped her head into her hands. Her whole body shuddered.

“Are you crying?” he asked. It was the first time since this whole thing had started that he felt panic.

“N-n-no.”

Clearly she was lying. Sheesh. She was the world’s worst liar.

Jefferson hesitated in the doorway. What he wanted to do was run from the sheer need in her. She was about to hit emotional meltdown.

“I’m practically a hermit,” he told her. “I don’t know how to help you.”

“I—I—I don’t need any h-h-help from you.”

But she did. She needed, obviously, to be comforted.

He was in no way qualified to do that. His every inclination was to keep backing up until he was all the way down the stairs.

But what he wanted to do, and what he did, were two separate things.

“Has anyone ever told you that you are the world’s worst liar?” he asked.

CHAPTER SIX

“THAT WOULD BE a good thing, wouldn’t it?” Brook sniveled. “Being a bad liar?”

In any other circumstances, Jefferson would have agreed with her. But at the moment? He would have liked to believe her. That she did not need any help from him.

Jefferson told himself that rap on the head with her bedside lamp was preventing him from thinking rationally. He was shocked at himself when he did not retreat from Brook’s naked need but, instead, dropped his arms to his sides and moved with measured steps into the room, around the shattered lamp and across to the bed.

She looked very vulnerable, still in the blouse and shorts she had arrived in, though now her outfit was quite crumpled. He was ready to stop the second she indicated he should, but she never did. He arrived at the bed, and felt large and oafish, towering over her. She peeked through the fingers that covered her face. She drew in a long, shuddering breath.

She was trembling. It reminded him of aspen leaves in a breeze. Given how frightened she had been, he was sure his very size intimidated.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I feel like an ogre in a fairy tale.”

She hiccuped, glanced at him through her fingers again and tried for a wobbly smile. “Then I hope it’s Wreck.”

“I don’t have a clue who that is,” he admitted.

“Wreck and Me? It’s a kid’s movie about an ogre.”

“I’m not up on my kids’ movies.”

“Wreck turns out to be the good guy, despite appearances.” She wasn’t sobbing uncontrollably anymore, so he was making progress. Maybe. Did he want her to think he was a good guy? Not really.

Women like her pinned their hopes and dreams on men they perceived to be good guys. Like most, he would eventually let her down.

But not tonight. Tonight he could be a good guy. He hesitated, looking for a way to not be quite so big against her tininess. And then, seeing nothing else to do, so he was not hovering over her from a great height, he sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress gave under his weight, and she slid toward him. Their thighs touched. Hers were bare.

A truly good guy would not be so suddenly and painfully aware of her.

She did not try to scoot right through the wall, but regarded him with wide eyes studded with tears.

“So, Brook, who did you think I was?” he asked.

For a moment, she didn’t comprehend the name, confirming that she was just about the world’s worst liar and that she had lied about who she was. But that lie was somehow connected to this terror and to the tears trickling down her cheeks. Now was not the time to press her for the truth.

“I—I—I thought you were someone else,” she managed to stammer.

“That’s reassuring.” He deliberately kept his voice flat and calm. “I can be grumpy, yes. But I don’t think terrifying enough to deserve a lamp over the head.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’ve certainly never had a woman react to me like that before.”

He saw the faintest glimmer of a smile and was encouraged by it. It was like trying to win the trust of a wary deer in a meadow.

“No, I don’t suppose you have,” she said.

This was going from bad to worse. She was blushing delicately. She probably would have liked to lie about the fact she thought he was attractive. There was no need for him to preen. He needed to recognize the danger. His housekeeper thought he was attractive. And a good guy.

She was obviously going to survive. He ordered himself to get up and leave.

The stupid good guy vetoed him.

“Who?” he asked. “Who the hell is scaring you like this?”

His tone was all wrong, he realized, the fury at whoever it was having crept, entirely unbidden, into his voice. She seemed to shrink in on herself, as if being terrified was an indictment of her, as if somehow her being terrified was her own fault, an unforgivable weakness.

“It was just a bad dream,” she said, her voice muffled.

She was lying again. It had not been just a bad dream. But he let it go. He shouldn’t have pursued it in the first place. It fell strongly into the none of his business category. It was time to extricate himself from this situation.

The good guy was not ready to go. The good guy was struggling to find words to bring her comfort. Of course the colossally self-centered guy had been in charge so long, he could find none. The analyst had long ago banished sensitivity as a weakness that could not be tolerated.

The good guy could not fail to notice she was still trembling, that tears were still slithering out between the fingers that covered her face.

The bad guy in him sighed with resignation and went, somewhat unwillingly, where the good guy told him to go. It was not a place of numbers. Or words. Or equations. Or analysis.

The good guy in Jefferson Stone went to the place where his grandmother had gone when a frightened and heartbroken waif had been delivered to her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

But she wasn’t. Her voice was wobbling as if she was running a jackhammer. She scrubbed furiously at her tears with the palm of one hand.

Some instinct or memory of the little boy he had once been, some primal recognition of what goodness was and what was required of him made Jefferson slide his arms under her and tug her over onto his lap. Her hesitation—a sudden stiffening, a small resistance—did not even last a breath. And then she was snuggled into his chest, her curls tickling his chin, her tears washing through his shirt, her warm weight a puddle against him.

“It’s okay,” he said. His voice was rusty, unaccustomed to reaching for that gentle note. “It’s okay, sweetheart. You’re safe.”

Sweetheart? Desperation to make her feel better was obviously making him crazy. What was he doing calling her sweetheart? But somehow he didn’t want to call her Brook, to invest in the obvious lie she had told him about her name.

It added to his sense of craziness that making physical contact with his new housekeeper seemed to be becoming a regular event!

But, at that moment, the good did shine through. Because despite the sweetness of her curves, despite her warmth pooling against him, despite her designated role in his life, despite the lie of her name between them, she felt not like the beautiful woman that she was. She felt only like a frightened child, as he had once been. And he felt only like a person reaching deeply and desperately within himself for the decency to comfort her, as his grandmother had once done.

And so he stroked her hair and told her over and over again, in a crooning voice that he did not recognize as his own, that she was safe. He could feel the tension draining out of her, her muscles relaxing, her breathing becoming more regular, the hard pulsing of her heart slowing.

And she must have felt safe, because she finally said, her voice low and tentative, “You know how you said I’m not a very good liar?”

“Hmm?”

“My name isn’t Brook.”

He waited.

She sighed as if she were weighing the wisdom of what she was about to do. “It’s Angelica. Angie.”

He waited, again, to see if she would go on, if she would explain the necessity of the subterfuge to him, but she didn’t. In fact, he felt her relax totally, and then her breath came in even little puffs against his chest. Her hair had fallen forward, shielding her face, and when he tucked it back, he saw she was asleep.

He sat there for a long time, afraid to waken her. Finally his arm felt as if it was going numb. He wondered, as he worked his way out from under the slight weight of her, if she had ever truly been awake.

He settled her back in the bed, drew the covers over her and gazed down at her for a moment.

Her face looked relaxed, angelic even, the perfect face for someone named Angelica. He bent and kissed her cheek, as if she was a child he had tucked in.

And then he turned swiftly from her, embarrassed by his tenderness. “I hope,” he muttered, “neither of us remembers a thing about this by morning.”

She had a chance of that. He did not.

He glanced once more at the sleeping woman, then went quietly down the steps and closed the door to the turret room behind him.

Jefferson was aware of steeling himself against whatever he had felt in that room. It was one thing to be a good man. But it was another to care about others. To care about others was to invite unspeakable pain into your life. He would use this incident to shore up rather than lessen his resolve for their relationship to be professional only. He would withdraw himself, as completely as it was possible to do while they were under one roof. Withdrawing was something he was an absolute expert at. After the blow of Hailey’s death, he’d withdrawn quite successfully from the world for the past three years.

Though it was now late at night, he was aware he would not sleep. He went into his office and shut the door. He was in the middle of a contract to revamp the computer systems for the City of Portland. This was what he loved and this is what he could lose himself in: researching, planning and coordinating the selection and installation of the software systems that gigantic enterprises, towns and cities, corporations and businesses counted on for smooth and efficient operation.

He sat down at his computer and sighed with satisfaction at the reassuring world devoid of emotional complexity. This was his world: analysis. Numbers and graphs and statistics appeared on the screen before him.

“Two weeks?” he told himself. “That’s nothing.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANGIE AWOKE IN the morning, bright light embracing her. For a moment, she had no idea where she was. But the ceiling had a display of dancing light on it, the windows reflecting patterns off the nearby water. She remembered the lake. She remembered arriving at the Stone House. And finding this bedroom and surrendering to the exhaustion that had been building in her.

And then, she remembered last night.

She remembered the panic that had clawed at her throat as she woke up to see a man’s figure silhouetted in the doorway.

Disoriented, her fears and stresses must have been playing out in her dreams, because Angie had thought, Winston found me. She had reached for that lamp and attacked with full force.

But it had not been Winston. She hoped it had all been a bad dream.

But, no, it was all true. There was the lamp, with a large chunk missing from its glass base and the shade completely crumpled, lying on her floor.

It hadn’t been Winston. It had been a man she barely knew. It had been her new employer, Jefferson Stone.

Heat raced up her cheeks as she remembered him comforting her even after she had smashed a lamp over his head. When he had climbed onto the bed? That’s when she should have protested more convincingly that she did not need him! When he had pulled her onto his lap? That’s when she should have put the wall up and resisted with all her might.

But, no, instead, weakling that she was, she had surrendered into it, allowed herself to feel something she had not felt in months, not even with the police.

It was a sensation beyond feeling safe. Angie had felt protected.

Even if Jefferson hadn’t said to her, over and over, that she was safe, she would have felt protected by him. It was not his words that had comforted. Unlike her, he was incapable of lying about who he was. She had felt the truth that was at the core of Jefferson Stone. She had felt the great strength and calm in his physical presence.

She had felt he was that man—that one-in-a-million man—who would lay down his life to protect someone he perceived as weaker than himself, or vulnerable.

Fresh from terrifying dreams—not to mention months of uncertainty—she had not been strong enough to resist what he had offered. It was what she had wanted most since her terrifying ordeal with Winston had begun. To feel safe again in the world.

And after she had felt safe? After she had realized she was in a lovely bedroom at a house on a lake that most people would not be able to find, even with a map? Then she should have told him to go, released him from that primal duty he felt to protect someone not as strong as him.

But, oh, no, she had given herself completely over to the temptation of being weak. She had relished his presence. The solidness of his chest, that delicious scent that was all his, the tenderness of his hand in her hair. She had lapped up his attention like a greedy child lapping up ice cream, and in the light of morning, that was exceedingly embarrassing.

Had he really kissed her cheek before he left the room? Her hand flew there as if she would be able to feel the evidence of it lingering. She had let down her guard. She had told him her name was not Brook. It was a moment of terrible weakness that had allowed these indiscretions. She vowed there would not be another.

Though maybe that would not be her choice. She had admitted she had lied to him. She had hit him with a lamp! He would be within his rights, in the cold light of day, to ask her to leave. Or at least to demand an explanation.

A half hour later, showered and dressed and ready for her first day of official duties—if she still had a job—she realized her new boss must also have a plan of avoidance. Obviously, she had managed to embarrass him, too.

His office door was shut when she went by it. There was coffee ready in the kitchen, but investigation did not show much else for breakfast. The man did not even have a loaf of bread! There was an empty box on the counter.

She picked it up and read the label. Apparently Jefferson had indulged in a microwavable bean burrito for breakfast. It was quite pathetic, actually.

She remembered her resolve, even before last night’s kindness, to make his life better while she was here. Now, standing there holding the burrito box, she committed more fully to that. She would see that he had proper meals and clean clothes, and that every surface of his house shone, reminding him of what a beautiful place he lived in. Maybe reminding him that it was a beautiful world.

That awareness, that it was a beautiful world, had evaporated from her in the past while, too. Maybe, in helping him discover it, she could recover some of her own faith in the world.

A little frightened, Angie realized she was allowing the most dangerous thing of all into her world.

She was allowing herself to hope.

That hope infused her as she did normal things. She made a grocery list, put dishes in the dishwasher, cleaned crumbs off the counter. It was a testament to how crazy her life had become that doing these small things filled her with such pleasure. She had never really appreciated how wonderful it was to just be normal.

Still, she could not use these simple pleasures as an excuse to delay seeing Jefferson this morning. With her list in hand, she approached his office door. It was true her boss had made it plain he didn’t like interruptions, but she couldn’t very well ignore the events of last night. And she needed to know if he planned to oust her over her deception about her name.

Standing in the hallway, she was aware her heart was beating too hard. She rehearsed what she would say. If he did keep her on, she needed him to know that his tender concern, while appreciated, was not in any way expected by her. The exact opposite, in fact. She would prefer they stay on less familiar terms. The list was a pretext to get into his office and make her speech.

She knocked.

“Yes?”

She opened the door a crack and peeked in. Jefferson looked exhausted. Here, she had vowed to make his life better, and it was apparent it was already worse!

“You haven’t been up all night, have you?” she asked, appalled, her rehearsed speech forgotten.

He glowered at her. “You’re my housekeeper, not my mother.” His tone was unnecessarily curt.

But all she heard was you’re my housekeeper. He wasn’t firing her!

She was relieved that the tenderness she thought she had experienced last night had been largely imagined. At the same time, she was aware that she was ever so faintly annoyed that he had reached the conclusion, all by himself, that his tender concern would not be necessary in the light of day.

“I just wanted to apologize for last night,” Angie said, the opening line of her speech. It would be a shame to let the whole thing go to waste. She opened the door a little more, though he clearly had not invited her to.

“No need.” He waved a dismissive hand at her. The message was clear—Leave me alone.

“I was very tired...” She felt driven to explain, stepping over the threshold into his office. “I’m sure it won’t happen again.”

“Great,” he said. He glanced up from his computer, acknowledged the fact she was actually in his office with a slight frown and looked back at the computer. “I only have so many lamps.”

This was very good. He was going to make it about the lamp instead of about her. And him. And embarrassingly tender moments.

“I’ll pay for the lamp,” she insisted, following his lead. Let’s make it about the lamp. Only that was harder than it should have been. Even with that scowl on his face, he was a very attractive man. It was not so easy to dismiss the fact she had been on his lap last night.

“I don’t care about it, actually.” Apparently, it was easy for him to dismiss it.

“Well, I do. I’ll pay for it. I insist.”

“Whatever.” This was a discharge.

In case she didn’t get that, he waved a hand at her, as if she was a bothersome fly. She noticed a lump on his head and stepped in to his office even farther. She didn’t stop until she was standing right in front of him.

He looked up from his computer and folded his arms over his chest, clearly annoyed. “You’ve apologized. We’ve established you are paying for the lamp. Was there anything else?”

“Are you having any symptoms of concussion?” she asked. “Because you have quite a large lump right—”

She reached for him; he reared back. She snatched her hand away and touched her own forehead above her eyebrow. “Here,” she finished weakly.

“I am not having the symptoms of a concussion,” he said.

“How’s your head?” He had a lump rising above one of his slashing eyebrows.

She thought he would at least express some curiosity about her real identity, but he did not.

“Aren’t you going to ask me why I gave you a false name?” she said.

He studied her for a moment. “No.”

“Oh.” She realized she was disappointed in his lack of interest—not that she wanted to get into the whole tawdry tale of her failure to discern a bad person from a good one. Still, she felt driven to say something else.

“I just want you to know, I’m not a person you can’t trust.”

He looked at his watch, a hint that she didn’t have to say anything else.

For some reason, she babbled on. “I don’t have a list of aliases. There is no dead person in an attic somewhere that can be attributed to me. I’m not on the run from the law.”

Something like a smile tickled at the edges of his lips. “You think you had to tell me that you’re not a murderer or a fugitive?” he asked.

She nodded vigorously.

“It’s imminently apparent that you are not.”

“That’s good,” she said, though she wasn’t so sure. He had managed to say that as if she had boring written all over her, as if she was exactly the kind of woman whose fiancé would leave in search of excitement elsewhere.

“It’s also imminently apparent that something, or someone, has thrown a very bad scare into you. If it’s a man—” the smile had disappeared completely and something dangerous darkened his eyes “—you need to get rid of him and never look back.”

She opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Jefferson was already looking back to his computer. It was a man, but it was too complicated to explain, and he clearly did not want an explanation. Despite the advice, he was letting her know that theirs was a temporary arrangement and that she had to handle her life herself. He had absolutely no interest in her personal dramas. He did not want a repeat of last night any more than she did.

Except that looking at him, she did feel a strange longing to see the tender side of him again, to feel his hand in her hair and his lips on her cheek.

After a moment, he glanced at her, and she realized she was still standing there, trying to reconcile this cold indifference with the man who had comforted her last night.

Yes, that lump on your head, right over your scowling brow, needs some attention. And I would love to finish what I started, to lean over and put my fingers on it, as if somehow I could soothe the pain away. The way you soothed mine away last night.

But he was looking at her like the man least likely to want his pain soothed away. She thought of the little lost boy in that photograph in the living room. And she suspected the lump on Jefferson Stone’s head was the least of his pain.

She was glad she had the grocery list and didn’t have to make up an excuse for the fact she was standing there staring at him. “You asked me if there was anything else and yes, there is. There’s this.”

Trying not to feel as if she was scurrying under his impatient eye, she crossed the room and thrust the list in front of him.

He picked it up and studied it. The annoyed scowl creased his brow again. “Good grief, are we supplying a barracks?” he said, lifting his eyes to hers.

“It’s really just basics.”

He glared again at the list, then lifted those cool gray eyes to hers. “Cumin is a basic?”

His pronunciation of cumin was way off. He made it sound like something quite erotic.

“It’s a spice! You don’t have any spices,” she sputtered. She willed herself not to blush over something so silly as the pronunciation of cumin.

“Well, I doubt if they have anything quite so exotic in Anslow. There’s no big-box supermarket there. It’s a little family general store.”

“It’s not exotic,” she said. Good grief. She sounded defensive over a spice. She was pretty sure she was blushing.

“Well, I’m still not going to go ask for it. People would get the wrong idea entirely.” He took a pen off his desk and put a line through cumin.

“They might indeed get the wrong idea if you said it like that.” She could not resist commenting. “It’s not coming.” Now her cheeks felt as if they were on fire. “It’s pronounced coo-men.”

“Huh.” Unsaid: I don’t give a damn, though he was watching her face with interest now.

“I use it in homemade guacamole. I make really good burritos. You’ll never want a frozen one again.” She was hoping to get him to put cumin back on the list and to distract him from her schoolgirl reaction to what was simply a wrong pronunciation.

“That’s the problem with improvements,” he said. “They make you dissatisfied with the way things were before.”

“Well, in terms of frozen burritos for breakfast, that can only be a good thing.”

He appeared about to remind her, again, she was not his mother. Instead, he looked back at the list.

“I don’t know where any of this stuff is,” he said. “Cornstarch. Where do you find that? In the vegetables or in the laundry supplies?”

She pressed her lips together to keep from laughing.

“How essential can something called cornstarch be, anyway? I don’t even like my shirts starched. That was my grandfather’s generation.” He took his pen and struck another item from her list.

“It’s for thickening sauces, not for doing laundry,” she said, but he did not appear to hear her.

“Dark chocolate ice cream? Not just ordinary chocolate?”

She had been planning on making iced mocha for the heat of the afternoon. In truth, it was all part of her plot to make him happy.

It was more than obvious happiness did not come naturally to him. Rather than seeing that as a challenge, she should just admit to herself that she had set an impossible task.

If only bringing someone happiness could be as simple as giving them an iced mocha on a hot afternoon.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“THE ICE CREAM may not be essential,” Angie admitted, though she was reluctant to give ground.

“Good.” Jefferson crossed it off the list with a little too much enthusiasm, and then muttered, “If I was going to get ice cream, it wouldn’t be chocolate, anyway.”

“What kind would it be?” she asked, curious despite herself. You could probably tell a lot about a man by the kind of ice cream he liked.

But he only spared her a glance that made her feel as if the question had been highly personal, like asking if he preferred boxers or briefs.

“You know,” he said, displeasure deepening his voice even more, “I offered to pick up a few things in town because I have another errand to do there, but a list like this? I’ll be wandering in the market for hours. They’ll have to send in a Saint Bernard to find me, hopefully with a keg of brandy around his neck. Brandy.” He squinted at her list and crossed something off. She was fairly certain it was the cooking sherry.

“I hate going to the market, anyway,” he admitted.

“That explains the frozen bean burrito for breakfast.”

“Yes, it does,” he said unapologetically. “One-stop shopping. I stop at the freezer, fill my basket, and leave. I can be done in forty-three seconds.”

“Well, you should at least be familiar with where the ice cream is if you’re such a fan of the freezer section,” she said. She should leave it at that. Really, she should. But she didn’t. “Why do you hate going to the market?”

“These people have known me since I was six years old. They have an annoying tendency to fuss over me,” he snapped. “You’re not the first person to think my food selections are not that great. All those busybodies peering in my basket.”

Not everyone, she guessed. Women. It was a small town. He was probably its most eligible bachelor. And damned unhappy about it, too. She could just imagine them clucking over him at the supermarket.

She made a note to herself. No clucking. No fussing. He was right. She was not his mother.

“There’s only one solution,” he said.

She held her breath. Either he was going to throw out the list or reconsider her employment.

But as it turned out, there was a third option, which she had not even considered.

“You’ll have to come and do the shopping yourself.” He held out the list, and she snatched it from him, trying not to show her delight at this unexpected turn of events. “I’ll send you off to the market while I run my other errands.”

“It won’t put you out in the least to have me along,” she said. It sounded like a promise.

“Yeah, whatever.” He didn’t have the grace to appear even slightly grateful she was going to get some decent supplies for him. He glanced at his watch. “I can’t go until later this afternoon. Can you be ready around four-thirty?”

She sighed. “That means frozen bean burritos for lunch, I’m afraid.”

“You say that as if it’s a bad thing,” he said drily.

It was when she left his office that she remembered he said he went to Anslow by boat. And she had said she thought that was romantic, even though she shouldn’t have done. Anyway, she scolded herself, if that was her idea of romance, it was no wonder that her fiancé had left her for someone who wanted to live on a beach in Thailand!

Well, if she was not Jefferson’s mother, she was even less likely a romantic prospect. Luckily for her—and for tired-of-women-fussing-over-him Jefferson—she was completely disillusioned in that department. Harry, and then Winston, had seen to that.

What a relief. Because feeling romantic about her boss in any context, including a boat ride, could lead to dreadful complications, even in two short weeks.

But for some horrible reason, even as she vowed off romance, Angie thought of his lips brushing her cheek the night before. And she blushed even more deeply than she had over the mispronunciation of a word.

She squeezed as much activity as she could into the day. By the time four-thirty rolled around, the dishes and laundry were completely caught up and the kitchen was gleaming. It was hot, though. A thermometer on the outside of the kitchen window told her it was a hundred and two degrees outside when she slipped up to her room and showered the day’s grime off.

Angie had hauled her meager suitcase up the stairs to her room. She had not, in her panicked flight from Calgary, packed one thing that might impress Jefferson Stone. It was too hot to impress, anyway. She slipped on a clean white T-shirt and a very simple wraparound skirt she had designed and made herself. Then she ran a brush through hair that was springing up all over the place.

“Ready?” he asked as she came down the stairs.

“Is it always so hot here?” She regarded Jefferson. He didn’t look hot at all in a summer sports shirt and light khaki shorts. He looked cool and confident and composed—a man who did not invite fussing at the supermarket.

“This is a pretty average summer day. You could have turned on the air-conditioning.”

“I was hoping to freshen up the house by leaving all the windows open. I think I’ve succeeded only at letting the heat in. How are we going to keep the groceries from wilting?”

We. As if they were a partnership. She contemplated how easily the “we” had slipped from her lips.

He grabbed a large cooler from the storage cabinet by the back door and then led her out the back door and across the deck. She noticed he did not bother locking the door they came out. He paused before taking the stairs down, scanning the nearby mountains.

“What?”

“Just looking at the clouds,” he said.

She followed his gaze. The clouds were huge, pure white and fluffy as cotton balls, obliterating the tops of the mountains. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “Can you see anything in them?”

He cast her a glance, shook his head and snorted.

“Well, I can,” she said stubbornly. “It looks like a horse kicking up clouds of snow behind it.”

He looked back at the clouds, squinted, then shook it off.

“It’s not unusual to get a thunderstorm late in the day when it’s hot like this,” he said. “Hopefully, it will hold off.”

“I don’t know. I feel as if I’d love to stand out in the rain right now.” The heat was absolutely withering.

He looked as if he was going to say something but, with one more glance at the clouds and at her, changed his mind.

They went down a steep staircase, carved into stone, that led to a crescent of private white-sand beach and to a boat dock. It seemed with every step closer to the water, the air cooled.

“Oh,” Angie said, looking at the sleek boat bobbing at its moorings. “It looks like something out of James Bond.” Come to think of it, he looked like something out of James Bond!

He stepped from the dock to the boat with absolute ease despite the cooler in his hands and the bobbing of the boat.

“Wait,” he snapped when she tried to follow. He stored the cooler and came back. He reached out his hand to her, and she took it and leaned forward for the long and rather scary step down. He sensed her hesitation and let go of her hand. Then he put his hands around her waist, lifted her easily into the boat and set her back on her feet.

For a moment they stood there, looking at each other, his hands still cupping her waist. She glimpsed the man he had been last night. Angie had a sense of time stopping, of being highly aware of the way the hot afternoon sunshine felt on her skin and of how it looked in the crisp darkness of his hair. She was aware of the shape of his lips and the moody gray of his eyes, the strength in those hands that practically encircled her waist. She was aware of the birds calling all around them, the annoyed chatter of a squirrel, the gentle lap of water against the hull of the boat.

She was aware of feeling exquisitely alive.

Then Jefferson abruptly released her. He tossed a cover over a seat beside the wheel, and she took it, aware of the scorching heat coming up through the cover. It was the kind of gorgeous white leather she thought was reserved for higher end cars.

He was back out on the dock releasing the boat from its moorings. He tossed the lines in the boat then gave it a shove with his foot before leaping with mountain goat agility over the swiftly widening gap of water between the dock and the boat.

He took the seat beside her, put a key in the ignition and powerful engines thrummed to life.

He motioned to a sliding panel located between their seats, slid it open briefly to show her a staircase leading into the hull of the boat. “Life jackets are in here, if we should need them. And facilities.”

There was a bathroom on board? “I’ve never been on a powerboat,” she murmured. “It seems very Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

He snorted at that. “It’s the reality of living on a lake. I’m afraid the realities of living in a place like this are easy to overlook on a beautiful summer day like this.”

She cast him a glance, but his lips were pressed together as if he thought he had said too much.

He snapped the slider shut, then expertly backed the vessel out of its mooring, guided it to the mouth of the bay and opened the throttle.

“But you like it, don’t you?”

“Absolutely. But I grew up with it. I understand there are certain hardships and inconveniences associated with living in a remote place.”

There was something about the way he said I that alerted Angie of something deeper going on.

“Your wife didn’t like it,” she guessed softly.

“She thought she would, but—” He shrugged. His voice drifted away, and he squinted intently at the water ahead of them.

“But?” she prodded carefully.

He shot her a look. “But she didn’t,” he said tersely. “Look, there’s an eagle.”

The fact that he had pointed out the bird to distract her did not make it any less magnificent. She watched, awed, as the bald eagle floated on the wind current.

Then, clear of his bay, Jefferson opened it up. The nose of the boat lifted, and they rocketed across the smooth surface of the water, cutting it cleanly, leaving sprays of white foam in their wake.

“Oh,” she called gratefully over the sounds of the engines, “it’s as if the air-conditioning has been turned on.” She could feel a fine spray of water misting her skin. The wind tangled in her hair. It was glorious on such a hot day. It was so sensual it made her feel almost delirious. Angie laughed out loud.

Jefferson glanced at her, and his gaze held before he looked away. The stern line that had appeared around his mouth at the mention of his wife softened.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” she called to him over the powerful purr of the engines. “It’s fun. Oh, my gosh, this is so much fun.”

* * *

Jefferson glanced at her. Angie’s face was alight, and she laughed out loud again as he opened up the throttle even more. The boat lifted from the water and then went back down with a bone-jarring whack that sent spray right over the windshield. The wind was wreaking havoc on her curls.

It was so completely different from last night when she had awoken in terror that he gave himself over to it a tiny bit. He was trying his best to hold himself away from her, but her laughter and her genuine enjoyment were an enchantment.

He reminded himself, sternly, what he had said to her this morning.

That’s the problem with improvements. They make you dissatisfied with the way things were before.

Jefferson was well aware that Angie could be that kind of problem. She could storm his world and it wasn’t just because she was so cute with the wind tangling in her hair, and her T-shirt molded to the front of her, her slender legs shown off to advantage by a red-and-white flowered skirt. It went deeper: her vulnerability and her laughter, her recipes and ideas. She could pry secrets best left untold—like the secret of Hailey’s growing discontent with the lake life—from him. She could make him dissatisfied with the life he’d had before she had arrived.

Despite her diminutive size, he was well aware she was a powerful presence. And right now, with the wind catching in her hair and the laughter bubbling out of her? She was beautiful.

In fact, it was dangerous how attractive he found her. He reminded himself of what he had told himself last night. It was an equation, not unlike the equations he put together for companies and corporations. One plus one equals.

And this equation went like this: caring about somebody equaled pain. It left you wide-open to a world of hurt.

And yet, if he contemplated the past few years of his life, where he thought he had evaded more hurt at all costs, he saw a great stretch of emptiness that he was suddenly and acutely aware had caused pain of its own.

He hated that. Angie had been in his life one day. It was just a little over twenty-four hours since she had arrived on his doorstep and cajoled her way into his house and his life. And something was shifting. That something was his own perception, which he was aware could be the most powerful thing of all.

Even knowing that, even knowing that he was playing with fire, he could not resist her smile.

“So, you have seriously never been on a powerboat before?” he called over the powerful thrum of the engines.

“Grew up in a place that was landlocked,” she said. “It was just my mom and me. We would have never had the resources to go on a boat.”

“Where was your dad?”

The carefree look disappeared from her face. “He left when I was ten. It was a shock. Nothing had seemed really wrong between him and my mother. Someone else caught his fancy. He didn’t really factor into our lives, much, after that.”

“It may be the way of the world,” Jefferson said, and he could hear the tightness in his own voice, “but I always feel put out when I hear people have thrown away a family—for something as ridiculous as something or someone else catching their fancy—when mine was taken from me. Do they not understand the value of what they have?”

Angie reached across the space that separated them and laid her hand on his wrist. It was just for a second, a small gesture, but in that moment he felt as if she got it. She got exactly what he was saying.

“My grandparents’ generation had many things right,” he said. He had inherited strong traditional values from them. He still remembered his shock when Hailey had told him after they married that she didn’t want children. It was the kind of thing they should have discussed first, but they had been so caught up in the passion they hadn’t. And he would have never left her because of it. Never.

“They did have many things right,” she agreed.

The mood had become somber, and Jefferson realized he wanted to make her laugh again. He was ridiculously pleased by the total lack of worry and tension in her as she embraced the mild adventure of a boat racing across a lake.

He gave in to a small temptation to show her how much fun it could be, and began to cut powerful S patterns through the water. The boat was so responsive. It leaned deep into the twists.

Instead of hanging on tight, she threw wide her arms. She held out her hand to catch the spray. She chortled with uninhibited delight.

And a trip that should have taken him ten minutes took double that, as he traveled the long way, cutting big looping S’s across the mirror surface of a lake that they had all to themselves.

He finally pulled into the mouth of Anslow Bay.

“It is so beautiful,” she whispered.

He followed her gaze to the shoreline. It was beautiful. He felt as if he was looking at it with fresh eyes: the cluster of pastel-colored houses, visible through the thick greenery of trees, climbing up the hills around the bay. A church spire shone brilliant white in the afternoon sun.

But he had seen Anslow from the water a thousand times before. He was aware, again, of the sway Angie was holding on his perception. He dared to glance at her.

She was what was beautiful. He made himself look away, cut back the engines and focus on docking at the public pier that was at the heart of downtown Anslow.

He was almost afraid to look at her, again, and he was annoyed with his fear. Still, he leaped out of the boat and onto the dock to moor his boat. When he looked back at her after fastening the lines, he understood his fear completely. Angie’s skirt had ridden up her legs. Her hair was crazy. Her cheeks were bright from wind and sunshine. Freckles were darkening over that little snub of a nose. Her lips were curved up in a delighted smile. And her eyes were shining with a light that a man could live to see.

It was with reluctance that he leaned from the dock and held out his hand to her. As he suspected, when she took it, it was as if an electrical circuit had been completed. His awareness of her was jolting. Her hand was soft in his, and yet strong. He gave a little tug and she flew up onto the dock beside him. He didn’t release her. They stood staring at each other.

“There are no words for the way you just made me feel,” she whispered.

Because of the boat ride? Or the confidences they had shared? Or the way it had felt, just now, when their hands touched and the circuit was completed?

And then, he supposed because there were no words, she stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, in almost exactly the same way he had kissed hers the night before.

Her lips were as soft as a hummingbird’s wings on his skin. He felt that electrical awareness of her tingle right into his belly.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and stepped away from him, embarrassed. As well she should be!

You didn’t kiss your boss! But, somehow, the words evaporated within him. Instead, he said, “The store is right across the street. Just walk to the end of the pier, go through that gate, turn right and cross the street. Have them put everything on my account.”

She wasn’t fooled that he hadn’t been affected. It bothered him that she wasn’t fooled. Then she ducked her head and scurried away.

He touched his cheek. That moment of weakness—of wanting to make her happy—had cost him. He knew that. He knew something so small as that kiss could change everything. It could make a man dissatisfied with what he’d had before.

If he let it.

“Hellooo, Jefferson.”

He had just left the dock area and was making his way through the summer-crowded streets to the post office. He whirled around.

Maggie. He hoped she had not seen him receiving kisses on the dock.

“I’ve been hoping to run into you. Are you going to come, Jefferson? To our fund-raising event? A Black Tie Affair?”

Jefferson was annoyed with himself. He’d been so distracted by that damned grocery list, and by Angie, that he hadn’t really prepared himself for an encounter with Maggie. For him, going into Anslow was often like running the gauntlet.

He looked at Maggie’s face. In its wrinkled lines he saw wisdom and compassion and caring...for him. She was trying so desperately to try to make something good come from something bad. She was trying so desperately to bring him back from the abyss.

A few days ago, he would have made an excuse. He would not have been able to see the naked caring in her face. No. Maybe he would have seen it. But he would not have allowed himself to feel it.

But now, after he had just lectured about people throwing away the things that mattered? But now, after he had made an effort to be better man? After he had comforted the crying, terrified woman instead of walking away? After he had committed to giving her that moment’s enjoyment she had not experienced as a child? After he had committed to making her laugh? It was hard to put that particular horse back in the barn.

He reached out and touched Maggie’s shoulder. “Of course, I’m coming,” he heard himself say.

“Oh, Jefferson, that means so much to me.”

Her eyes had tears in them. He was not sure he could handle any more tears this week. He was at his quota. So, he gave Maggie’s shoulder one more squeeze and went on his way.

He wanted to believe nothing about him was changed.

But the fact that he was considering feelings—those pesky unpredictable things—meant something major had changed already, not needing any kind of permission from him.

CHAPTER NINE

ONCE JEFFERSON HAD turned back to the boat, Angie touched a finger to her lips. She had just kissed her boss.

Oh, it had been a casual thing, an impulse when words had evaded her. She had just wanted to let him know how much she had loved the boat ride, and she wanted to acknowledge she knew he had made an extra effort to make it pleasurable for her. Maybe, she had even wanted him to know, in that brief touch of her lips to his cheek, that she saw, despite how much he did not want her to see it, that he was a good man.

She could tell he felt guilty about his wife not liking the lake, that it was a burden that had become heavier because Hailey had died. Maybe she had hoped that kiss could tell him what she could not: that his guilt was uncalled-for.

It was a lot to expect of a kiss.

And it had rocked her world more than she had expected it to. She had intended a light peck on his cheek, and really, that was all it had been.

And yet she had been so aware of the rough scrape of his whiskers, the sun and water scent of him, the color of his eyes, the easy strength and confidence of him.

“No more kisses on the cheek or otherwise,” she ordered herself internally. Otherwise? How had that crept in there? But you did not kiss a man like Jefferson Stone on the cheek without wanting more, without contemplating the sweetness of his lips.

Distracted as she was by the pure and unexpected pleasure of the boat trip—and her lips on the roughness of his cheek—Angie made herself focus on Anslow. She had passed through here briefly just yesterday. It was a measure of how fraught with anxiety she had been that she had barely noticed the town.

Now, she saw the sleepy lakeside village was like something you would see on a postcard of a perfect place to be in the summer. The pier jutted out from the main street. That street had a row of single-story false-fronted stores on one side of it, facing the lake. The buildings were authentically old, mostly whitewashed, though some were weathered gray. Oak whiskey casks, cut in half, served as planters, and spilled abundant displays of colorful flowers. All in all, downtown Anslow looked like a set for a Western movie!

Along the wooden boardwalk the Emporium was front and center, but there was also a post office and a museum, an ice-cream parlor and a law office. There was a bookstore and a place to rent canoes and bicycles and, farther along, a barn-like structure that was the community hall.

Apparently, many people shared her view of Anslow’s summer perfection, because the main street was currently clogged with tourists. The general store, which billed itself as the Anslow Emporium, was packed with holiday goers. Just a short while ago, the crush of people might have made Angie panic. Today, all that summer happiness cemented her sense of well-being.

Or maybe it was knowing that Jefferson was just a few steps away, going about his errands, somewhere on that boardwalk. Though it might be silly, she felt as if his mere presence in such close proximity was protecting her. It felt to Angie as if he would never let anything happen to her. That made Angie feel as at ease as she had felt in months.

Exploring the shop, which stocked everything from clothing to lawn mower parts to groceries, Angie was taken, again, with how delightful it felt to be normal and to be shopping for normal things. She snooped contentedly through the crammed aisles of the general store with a sense of discovery instead of with the ever-present fear shadowing her.

She came to a rack, a slender portion of which had been dedicated to bathing suits. Angie hesitated. In her rush to leave her apartment, swimming had been the furthest thing from her mind.

But now the water of the lake beckoned on these sultry, hot days. The selection was tiny. The one-piece model was a leopard print with no back that was available in four sizes, small to extra-large. The two-piece selection was not much better: the scanty bikinis were available in two different prints, leopard or red polka dots, in the same four sizes.

She snatched a small red polka-dot one before she changed her mind. He never had to see it, but it would allow her to enjoy the lake. She could pay Jefferson back for it out of her first check.

She almost sighed out loud. Enjoyment had not been part of her vocabulary—or her experience—for quite some time!

After that one impulse buy, Angie focused on her list. While Jefferson had been right that it did not stock anything exotic, it did have all the basics and a nice selection of spices, too. Since getting to the store was not an easy matter, even if it was delightful, she planned several meals in advance. Was it delightful to be normal? Or was it delightful to be planning meals for Jefferson? She ignored the heavy black lines he had drawn through many of the items on the list.

When she got to the checkout counter, there was a stand of movies for rent. The rental period was a surprising two weeks. When Angie saw the movie Wreck and Me, she could not resist adding it to the purchases. As instructed, she put them on the Stone House account. The clerk looked at her with interest but asked no questions, for which she was thankful.

Her things were loaded into her cart, which she took out into the bright sunshine. The thunderclouds were building over the mountain and there was an ominous pressure in the air. The heat had become absolutely stifling. There was not a breath of wind.

She began to push the buggy toward the dock, but Jefferson materialized at her side and began to lift bags from it. Between the two of them they got everything down to the boat in just one trip. She stowed it under the deck, absently putting her frozen items in the cooler he had brought while contemplating him. Was he avoiding looking at her? Was it because of that kiss? Should she apologize?

When she came back above deck, he was eyeing the clouds and she could sense a certain urgency about him.

“Ready?” he asked tersely. He didn’t wait for her reply. She took her seat, and he ignored her completely, scanning the water and the clouds with intensity of focus. Was she a little disappointed that his terseness might be more related to the building clouds than the building tension between them?

When they came out of the protected bay in front of Anslow, she was taken aback at the change to the water. The wind was quite ferocious out in the open and the water had gone from silky smooth to choppy.

“That was sudden,” she said.

“This lake can turn in a hair,” he said. Under the gathering wind, the chop deepened. The boat began to feel as if it was climbing in and out of swells.

Angie watched Jefferson’s face. He looked grimly determined, but not in the least afraid. And then the rain began to pelt down. Lightning hit the water, seemingly right in front of them, and the thunder was so close that the boat shuddered.

The brightness of the day was swallowed in the darkness of the storm. The heavens opened up and the rain began to pelt down.

“This falls into the be-careful-what-you-wish-for department,” he told her.

She remembered saying, when they had set out this afternoon, that she had wanted to stand in the rain. “I’m not at all sorry I wished for it,” she said. “It’s exhilarating.”

He cast her a surprised glance, and she grinned at him. He returned to focusing on what he was doing.

Angie was aware she could allow herself to feel the exhilaration because of him: unruffled by the storm, radiating confidence in his ability to handle it. She experienced, again, the exquisite sense of being protected.

She could feel the electricity in the air; she could feel the pitch and power of the water beneath the boat. After the heat of the day, having the water pour down, soaking her hair and then her clothes, felt lovely and sensual in a way she was not sure she had felt before. She felt no danger at all, only the exhilaration of being on such intimate terms with the storm, of sharing this experience with him.

The boat rolled, and she rolled toward him and then away. She realized there was no one she would rather be with in these circumstances than him. Despite the powerful twin engines at the back of boat, the boat was bobbing like a cork on the stormy waters.

“Summer storms like this don’t usually last long,” he called over the noise. “I’m going to pull into one of those coves and drop the anchor. We’ll wait it out.”

The water calmed as soon as he made it past the mouth of the cove and into its shelter. He dropped the anchor, and they stood side by side watching the fury of the storm out on the main lake. The lightning show was amazing. The echo of the thunder was caught in the steep mountain sides of the forested land around the lake.

Angie was so aware of everything: her clothes plastered to her, and his to him. The rain plastering her hair to her head, and his hair to his head, the water running down her face, and his. The blessed coolness in the air after the heat of the day. The feel of the boat moving beneath them, as if it were a living thing—a dragon—that they were riding.

Finally, the thunderstorm moved by them, though they could still hear it as it pressed down the lake.

“That,” she finally said, “was amazing.”

“Yeah,” he said, “it was. We still won’t be going anywhere for a while.” Despite the storm passing, the wind remained, and the waves in the main lake were huge.

Was it wrong to love that, to love it that she could hang on to the intensity they were sharing for just a little bit longer?

“Jefferson?” Yesterday she had not even known this man. But after she had accepted his comfort, and offered him some of her own? After she had seen how the man handled a storm on a lake? Her sense of knowing him deeply was complete.

“Hmm?”

“We have a problem.”

He turned and looked at her. His eyes went dark as he took in her soaked shirt. She could see the outline of his chest through his own wet shirt.

“Please, don’t tell me the boat is leaking.” His tone suggested he knew that was not the problem.

“No.”

The problem was that the storm had passed and the electricity still leaped in the air between them.

“What’s the problem?”

She looked at the slick wetness of his hair. The problem was she wanted to run her hands through it. The problem was that she wanted to press her wet body against his. She gulped and looked away from him.

The problem, she reminded herself. Her mind was blank for a moment, and then she remembered.

“Ice cream!”

“Huh?” He ran a hand through that wet hair where her own hand wanted so badly to go. It freed droplets that ran down the line of his temple, and then his cheek and his jaw.

“You know you took the ice cream off the list?” she said in a rush. “I bought it anyway.”

“Why am I unsurprised?” he said, his voice full of irony.

“And the cooler is not going to prevent it from melting.”

“No, it won’t.”

“That’s our problem. We have to eat it now. All of it.”

“Sounds like kind of a fun problem to have,” he said.

“And since you didn’t want dark chocolate, I bought two kinds. The dark chocolate for me, and one for you. I tried to guess what you might like.”

“And?”

“Salted caramel.”

“I have to know,” he said drily, “what would make you look at me and think salted caramel?”

“The contradictions,” she blurted out. “Sweet and salty.”

“Don’t kid yourself. There is nothing sweet about me.”

But that, she knew, was a lie. She remembered his tenderness from the night before. She thought of how he had deliberately made the boat ride to Anslow exhilarating. Still, she played along with him. “It was Salted Caramel or Nutty Road.”

His lips twitched. And then he laughed. It was no less delightful because it was so reluctant.

“I hope you like Salted Caramel. A lot. Because you have to eat a whole bucket of it.”

“We don’t exactly have to,” he pointed out pragmatically.

“I should have got the Nutty Road because only a nut would even consider letting ice cream melt,. Even with the cooler it won’t last long in this heat.”

Aware that something was easing between them, Angie went below and retrieved the two containers of ice cream. She came back topside and he turned from where he had been digging through a side compartment. In his hand he had one of those Swiss Army combination knife sets. He unfolded it to reveal a spoon.

“We’re going to have to share,” he said. “Only one spoon.”

The danger of the storm had nothing on this: sharing a spoon with him. The new ease between them became laced with something else, something as sensuous and unpredictable as that storm.

Jefferson gestured to a bench seat at the back of the boat, sat down and patted the seat beside him. She took the seat, not quite touching him but close enough to be aware of the heat radiating from under his damp shirt. She set down one bucket of ice cream, put the other on her lap and popped the lid off it. She looked into a vat of chocolate the same color as his hair.

“It’s already started to melt,” she said.

“That lends a sense of urgency to the whole situation,” he said.

She glanced at him and realized he was teasing her. The ease and the electricity braided themselves together even more completely.

He dug the spoon in and then held it, heaping with dripping ice cream, out to her. She moved into the circle of his electricity and closed her lips over the spoon, her eyes locked on his.

Without breaking the hold, he took the empty spoon and dug it back into the chocolate. Seeing his tongue dart out to free the ice cream from the spoon was way too sexy. But then he was holding the spoon, filled again, out to her. She closed her lips around the spoon, aware that his lips had just touched that same place. Ever so slowly, she tugged the ice cream off.

And then she watched him take that same spoon and dip it back into the ice cream and put his lips exactly where hers had just been. His eyes met hers. He did something exquisite to that spoon with his tongue.

When it was her turn, she did something just as exquisite with her tongue. She heard him give a little gasp of surprise.

And longing.

Sharing that spoon became an exploration of sensuality almost as powerful as a kiss. She was so aware of him: the wet transparency of his shirt, the shape of his lips, the light in his eyes, the solidness of his wrists, the strong columns of his fingers as they held the spoon to her lips.

“So, would you say this ice-cream flavor—dark chocolate—is a reflection of you?” he asked.

She gulped. “In what way?”

“Sweet, but with surprising depth and a hint of mystery.”

Was he flirting with her?

“You need to be writing ice-cream labels,” she said.

“You write the next one.”

He reached over her, and took the second bucket of ice cream. He pried the lid off the salted caramel one and dipped the spoon in. He held it out to her and she took it.

“What do you think?” he said. “What would you put on the label?”

“Subtle, but sensuous with hints of salt.” Was she flirting back?

He ducked his head and dipped the spoon back into the ice cream and tasted it slowly, rolling the ice cream on his tongue as if he was at a wine tasting.

“I like it, but—” he dipped the spoon back into the chocolate and then into the salted caramel “—who knows what could happen if you combined two such different flavors?”

Was he talking about ice cream? Or was he flirting? Whatever he was doing, she liked it. She never wanted it to end.

With her eyes still locked on his, she slid the ice cream off the spoon. The whole experience was so exquisite it was almost painful. She had to shut her eyes against it.

When she opened them, he was sliding a spoonful of the mixed version between the sultry mounds of his lips.

“The ice cream tastes like ambrosia,” he said gruffly.

“What does that mean, exactly, ambrosia?”

“Food of the gods.”

“That’s what we will call this new flavor then, Ambrosia.”

And this experience, in her mind, also had a name. Ambrosia. Surely, this was the kind of experience the gods fed on? Not food but the quality of air, and the static from the storm, and the hint of danger between her and him right now.

They ate ice cream until they could not eat another bite. They put the lids on the now melted containers and put them aside. While they had been eating the ice cream, darkness had been sliding over the lake. They sat there, side by side, rocking gently on the waters of the cove, while just beyond them the lake rolled, white tipped and violent.

The waves appeared as big and violent as they had during the storm. The wind outside the cove howled a warning.

She shivered, whether from cold or from eating too much ice cream or from awareness she was not sure. Jefferson went below and came back with a blanket.

Again, he had just one. He tossed it over both their shoulders and pulled it tight around them. The warmth from him and from the blanket crept into her. They were sailors, marooned, and she loved it. Night fell and the stars winked on, one by one, studding the pure inky blackness of the sky.

It was crazy, and beautiful.

Going for groceries by boat was definitely the most romantic thing that Angie had ever done.

She was so amazingly aware of everything: the wind, and his warmth and solidness of his shoulder underneath the blanket and the flavor of ice cream in her mouth. She was so aware of how he was not watching the restless waters of the lake, but her.

“What?” she whispered.

“I’m just trying to figure you out.”

“Really?”

“Because it is apparent to me that there’s nothing about you that is a shrinking violet. It is apparent to me you are very courageous. So, I want to know what has you so frightened.”

“This morning you weren’t interested,” she reminded him.

“I was interested,” he admitted. “I just didn’t want you to know I was interested.”

“And what has changed?” Besides everything, she thought to herself.

“This morning we hadn’t eaten ice cream off the same spoon.”

She sighed deeply. And surrendered.

CHAPTER TEN

JEFFERSON WAS AWARE of the surrender, not just in her but in himself. Had he actually been flirting with his housekeeper?

No, he told himself sternly, he had not. Being with her had coaxed his more playful side to the surface. Okay, he was more than surprised that he had a playful side, but he blamed the storm for cutting down his defenses, placing them in this predicament where they had to share a spoon.

And sharing that spoon had led to this. The complete collapse of defenses. They were going to share even deeper confidences.

“I’m not a housekeeper,” Angie confessed solemnly.

“Yeah, I kind of figured that part out.”

“I’m close, though, and qualified. I’m a high school home economics teacher in Calgary.”

Jefferson contemplated that. He could feel the truth of it—he thought of her making her lists and organizing his kitchen. He thought of her home breaking up, and her longing. He was not surprised that she had chosen a career where she would teach people how to make a home. And superimposed over this knowledge of her, he thought of the taste of ice cream, mingled with her taste, still sweet in his mouth.

“Or I was a teacher,” she said pensively. “I don’t know when I can go back there.” She shuddered.

Jefferson pulled the shared blanket more tightly over their shoulders, pulling her more tightly into him. “What happened?”

“First, I need you to understand why it happened.”

“Okay.”

“I met my fiancé in university.”

“Your fiancé?” Jefferson felt the shock of it. And the relief. All the electricity between them didn’t matter. She was taken! But his relief was short-lived.

“Not anymore,” she said sadly. “We broke off. That’s what made me so vulnerable when...well, I’ll get to that. Harry and I had been engaged since the second year of our studies. We graduated at the same time, and both got wonderful jobs. I secured my dream job teaching home economics in high school, he got on with one of the banks. I assumed it was time to take the next step, but every time I tried to set a date for the wedding, Harry would become evasive.”

He heard inside himself oh-oh but did not say it out loud.

“In fact,” she said, her lips pursed with remembered annoyance, “had I been paying more attention, I would have seen the whites of his eyes rolling in pure terror at the mere mention of spending a lifetime with me.”

“A lifetime with you doesn’t seem as if it should make eyes roll in terror.”

Her mouth popped open in surprise. She studied his face, as if she was looking for the lie. She smiled. He realized he was treading very dangerous ground, indeed.

“Finally, he worked up his nerve to tell me the truth. He had discovered his career in finance was a terrible mistake. He was bored.”

“God forbid we should ever be bored,” Jefferson said. He tried to keep his tone dry, but in fact, he felt angry.

“And unfulfilled. He had just discovered he didn’t want what other people wanted. He did not want a boring life in the suburbs with two-point-five children and a bus trip into work every day. And guess what? He’d already found someone who didn’t want the very same things he didn’t want and it wasn’t me.”

“Aw, Angie.”

She held up her palm. “Please don’t feel sorry for me. I should have picked up on the signs long before I did. And, besides, this is just the story before the story.”

“Go on.”

“So, in the space of a week, he quit his job and asked me for his ring back.”

“He asked for the ring back? That’s scummy.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Thank you. I thought so, too, especially after he told me he intended to sell it to finance his tickets. Make that two tickets.”

Jefferson was forming a very low opinion of a man who would not only ask for the ring back, but tell his ex-betrothed the reason he had to have it. “Loser,” he muttered.

“Thank you,” she said, as if she had desperately needed someone else to see it. Angie looked adorable all wrapped in the blanket, her hair curling wildly as it started to dry. But when she wrinkled her nose like that? How could anyone have ever pried themselves away from her?

“Thailand,” Angie went on, tilting her chin bravely. “That’s where he and Loxi—can that possibly be a real name?”

She glared at him as if she expected an answer.

“No, I don’t think it can be a real name.”

“Not that it stopped her from traveling! How can you even get a passport with a name like that?” Her question was full of indignation.

“I’d like to know,” he agreed.

She sighed at his agreement. “Anyway, that’s where he and Loxi had a plan to live on the beach and teach yoga or some such thing.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her eyes searched his, and her chin quivered. In denial of that emotion, she said quickly, “You don’t have to be sorry. I’m just setting up why I was vulnerable. I’m over it now.”

He doubted that. He could see she carried the pain of the betrayal as if it were somehow her fault, as if she had accepted her fiancé’s abandonment as a judgment of her. That she somehow was not worthy.

“But I wasn’t over it then. Right after it happened, I was in a shocked daze. Naturally, in the staff room, my missing engagement ring was noticed eventually. I had to tell people Harry and I were no longer an item. I didn’t tell anyone the Loxi or Thailand part. It was too humiliating.”

Jefferson thought of her carrying that on her own, trying to keep her head up high, and ached for her.

“Anyway, I went from discussing wedding plans and poring over bridal magazines with two other teachers who were engaged to being the subject of gossip and pity.”

She sat very still. She pulled the blanket a little tighter around her and gazed out at the dark waters of the pitching lake beyond the cove.

“There was another teacher there,” she said, her voice strained. “Winston.”

He saw a flinch crawl along her skin.

“I can’t say I’d ever paid the least attention to him besides a casual good-morning. He was quite an unassuming little fellow, given to wearing bow ties.”

“Never trust a man who wears a bow tie,” he told her.

“Now you tell me.”

She gave him a little smack on his chest and continued. “He confided in me that the very same thing had happened to him. I could actually see the tears in his eyes when he said it. He asked me if I wanted to go for a coffee with him.

“It seemed safe enough. My God, he was a fellow teacher. I felt sorry for him. I thought maybe he just needed to talk about it. I actually thought Oh, look, other people beyond you have problems. I thought it would be good for me to get out of myself for a bit. So, I agreed. One coffee.

“But I could tell, once we were out of the school environment, that there was something a touch off about him. I’m not sure I could put my finger on it, but it made me uncomfortable, and I gulped down my coffee and left with murmured sympathies about the pathetic state of his personal life.

“The next day in the coffee room, he was entirely inappropriate, sitting too close to me, putting his hand on my knee, touching my hair. It was creepy. I took to avoiding him, even taking breaks in my classroom. But he tracked me down, and I did not want to be in my classroom alone with him.”

She stopped, troubled. Her hands were wound together and she stared down at them.

Jefferson could see they were trembling. He covered her hands with his own and felt how shockingly cold they were.

“The more I rejected him,” Angie whispered, “the more strongly he pursued me. He bugged me at school. He called me at home. He gave me unwanted gifts. He sent flowers.

“I finally had to talk to my principal about it. Winston was warned to stay away from me. He didn’t. It actually got worse after the principal talked to him. Within a few weeks, he’d been fired.

“The phone calls really started to come in then. I changed my number three times. He always managed to get it. Sometimes he’d be raging that it was all my fault. Other times he’d tell me he had forgiven me for ruining his life. Other times he would be crying. Pleading with me to come back to him. Come back to him? We’d had a single cup of coffee.

“I had to involve the police. I had to get a restraining order. He started hanging out across the street from my place, just out of range of the order. I moved to a new apartment with what I thought was better security. Despite all that, he just kept coming at me. I was a wreck. I was as jittery as if I drank a hundred cups of coffee a day. I startled if one of the children came up behind me suddenly. I barely slept, and when I did I had terrible dreams.

“I started to question my sanity. I wondered if I was overreacting. I wondered if I was making things worse than they were. I wondered what I had done to lead him on. I pondered, constantly, what I should be doing differently.

“On the last day of school before summer break, I went home to my new apartment. The door was locked. Nothing seemed amiss or out of place. I went into my bedroom. The first thing I noticed was that my dresser drawers had been opened.

“And the second thing I noticed was that there was a stuffed bear on my bed. A huge stuffed bear, a panda, almost as big as I was. It had a red ribbon around its neck that made it look as though its neck had been slashed.”

She shuddered at the memory, and Jefferson tried to contain the pure fury that was coursing through his veins.

“I called the police, and they said they would arrest him...if they could find him. I have never felt such terror or felt so unprotected. I tossed a few things in a bag, and got in my car. I let a few friends know I was going away, and why I was going away, but that I couldn’t tell them where.

“Because I didn’t even know where I was going. It seemed it didn’t matter how far I drove, it wasn’t far enough. I was so paranoid I would not use my phone or my bank card. I checked in with the police on pay phones—do you know how hard it is to find a pay phone these days—but there was no sign of him. I began to feel as if he was hot on my heels. I was running out of money and hope. And then I saw your ad.”

She was silent for a long time. “And that’s why,” she finished softly, “in a boat in the middle of a lake, right now, I feel exhilarated. Because finally, I am in a place where he can’t get at me.”

Jefferson knew he should be relieved that it was not their togetherness filling her with exhilaration. He told himself he wasn’t relieved—or disappointed—because the emotion he was feeling drowned out every other one.

He had never felt such a killing fury as he felt now at the two men who had brought Angie to this point. But he controlled himself. He could see she had had enough of men who could not put her first, whose self-centeredness was so complete they could not control their own impulses in the interest of someone else.

“You can stay,” he said gruffly.

“What?”

“You can stay at the Stone House. As long as you need to.”

“Oh, Jefferson.” Her eyes clouded with tears. “I don’t know what to say.”

And just like before, when she had not known what to say, she leaned into him. He knew what was coming. He had plenty of chance to back away from it.

“You knew,” she whispered. “You knew I wasn’t really a housekeeper. You knew I was a damsel in distress.”

That was plenty of warning. What was a damsel in distress looking for, after all? She was looking for a knight in shining armor.

And he knew he was not that, even as he could feel the storm quieting all around them. The roar of the wind dropped, and the waters of the lake quieted. He knew it was time to break away from this, but he could not.

He was caught in a moment: the intensity of the storm, the sweetness of the ice cream, the warmth of her trust, his need to protect her, his sudden aching awareness of his own loneliness. All of those things were swirling around in him, making it impossible not to take what she offered.

Her lips.

She offered him her lips.

And he leaned in close and took them.

They tasted as he had known they would. Of chocolate and salted caramel, and of something sweetly feminine and trusting.

Her lips tasted of ambrosia, food of the gods. And he, a mere mortal, could not resist it. And so he tasted her, and he put his hands in her wet curls and drew her more deeply to him and tasted her more completely.

And remembered that another woman had trusted him to protect her and keep her safe and he had failed completely.

It took all the strength he had to draw away from Angie. He staggered to his feet. He knew it was not the motion of the boat making him feel so unstable. He’d offered her the sanctuary of his house for as long as she needed it.

It was up to him to make sure she was not more damaged when she left. And that meant he had to be better at controlling his needs than the other men in her life had been. He had to be better at putting what she needed ahead of what he wanted.

Because what he wanted was to explore every road that kiss could take them down, to climb every mountain it promised, to discover every valley, to let it open the possibility of new worlds.

His voice was too harsh.

“I am not your knight in shining armor. I am not anyone’s knight in shining armor. Do you get that?”

She nodded, but she looked as if she was going to cry again. He left her sitting there, wrapped in the blanket, and he pulled the anchor and turned on his nighttime running lights. He prepared to go.

The water had calmed, and the stars were like jewels shining in a black velvet sky. The light could not even hope to pierce the darkness of his own self-awareness.

When they got to the dock, he moored the boat. In stilted silence she went below and brought up all the groceries she had bought. She passed him up bag after bag of groceries and, finally, two ruined buckets of ice cream. When he offered her his hand to get out of the boat, she refused it and scrambled up on the dock by herself.

Loaded with groceries, he went up the steep steps to the house. She followed him. In the kitchen he set them down.

“I’ll look after them,” she said tightly.

“I think you should check in with the police again,” he said. “Maybe your stalker has been apprehended.”

“I’ll do that,” she said, that same tight note in her voice. But then her forehead wrinkled. “Do you suppose it’s safe to call them from your line?”

Jefferson could not even imagine being this afraid. For a moment, his every defense was undermined. He just wanted to take her into his arms and soothe her, kiss away that furrow from her brow.

Instead, he managed to strip all the emotion from his voice. “I have no doubt your stalker is insanely clever, but I somehow doubt he has managed to tap a police line.”

She nodded. “Yes, of course you are right. I will call them in the morning. If they’ve apprehended him I can go right away.”

He barely knew her! How could he possibly be aching at the emptiness she would leave behind?

“And, regardless, I won’t stay beyond our original agreement, despite your kind offer,” she said, reading between the lines. He would shelter her as long as he had to. “I will get the house ready for the magazine, and then I’ll go. I can’t let this thing go on indefinitely.”

He wanted, again, to sweep her up in his arms, to not let her feel she had to deal with this thing by herself. But what thing couldn’t she let go on indefinitely? Her thing with the stalker or her thing with him? He wanted to finish what they had started.

But wouldn’t that be all about what was good for him? Filling some gaping hole inside him? It wouldn’t be about what was good for her. He was thankful she was putting a time limit on her stay, even though he had foolishly told her she could stay forever.

Forever.

He could imagine forever with a woman like her. He could imagine starlit boat rides and facing storms. He could, all too easily, imagine campfires on the beach. And decorating a nursery.

But again, that was about some need in him that he had managed to outrun for a long time. He did not deserve that life. He had had his chance at forever. He had even vowed it. And he had not lived up to those vows. He had blown it completely.

But for two weeks? What was that in a lifetime? For two weeks, he could be the better man. Even if that meant staying the hell out of her way.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ANGIE WATCHED JEFFERSON stalk away and heard the far-off slam of his office door. She sank into a kitchen chair, stunned by all that had transpired since she had climbed on that boat with him in the pre-storm heat of the afternoon.

She touched her lips, and it was as if she could still feel the electricity of his kiss there. The intensity that had leaped up between them had been just like that storm—just as powerful and just as unpredictable.

She could not believe she was capable of being swept away so completely in such a short time. She had known this man just a little over a full day. It wasn’t rational to feel so strongly about him.

But that was what storms did. They came unexpectedly. They swept in, sucked everything into their vortex and swept back out, leaving a trail of destruction.

Or maybe not always destruction. The storm that had just passed over Kootenay Lake had probably also left life-giving water on the surrounding forests and land.

Still, Jefferson had been right to pull away. Hadn’t he? Despite the sense of intimacy nurtured by being stranded together in the boat, by facing into the teeth of that storm, by sharing buckets of ice cream and the same spoon, they barely knew one another.

On the other hand? So what? What did knowing each other have to do with anything? Angie had been rational her whole life. She had been mapping out carefully the life she wanted since the divorce of her parents when she was a child.

She wanted the sense of safety and security that being part of a family had given her, before the split of her parents. She had determined that solid, unexciting Harry was exactly the kind of man to pin those kinds of hopes and dreams on.

She had known him. She had known he woke up at precisely seven-ten every morning. She had known he would always order grilled cheese at the university cafeteria. She had known he preferred the news over The Big Bang Theory. Angie had thought that what she had shared with Harry was intimacy and that it would lead her directly to the safety she craved. She had thought their entire lives were predictable enough to make her comfortable.

But in that boat, sharing a spoonful of ice cream with a near stranger, she had felt as if she was digging into the tip of the iceberg that was intimacy. She had felt exhilarated by the potential for danger, not afraid of it. In fact, the exhilaration was in part because, for the first time in far too long, she had not been afraid. She had been the opposite of afraid.

She had been fearless.

And she knew that feeling of being fearless was not going to go willingly back into its box.

She glanced at a clock. It was really too late to do anything and yet she felt too energized by her encounter with Jefferson to go to sleep. She unpacked the groceries and put them away, smiled at the video of Wreck and Me. If she left it out for him to find, would he watch it?

Still filled with a restless kind of energy once the groceries were stowed, Angie decided to make some blueberry muffins.

“If he gets nothing else from my stay here, he will be able to see there is life beyond bean burritos,” she muttered to herself.

* * *

Three days later, Jefferson felt like a prisoner in his own house, marking x’s on his wall. He was well aware that in the course of human history, three days was a very short time.

But in the context of having Angie aka Brook Nelson under the same roof as him, it was a torturous eternity. In his efforts to avoid her, she had driven him underground. He’d always enjoyed working at night; now it felt compulsory.

But despite seeing her only occasionally—her crazy hair hidden under a babushka obviously of her own invention, her legs looking long and coltish in shorts and skirts, T-shirts clinging to her, the sweat beading on her neck, the cobwebs sticking to the rubber gloves she always wore—there was no pretending she was not here. Even though she seemed to be avoiding him just as scrupulously as he was avoiding her, the house smelled different since she had arrived.

If it was just the smell of cleaning supplies and fresh air, it would not have been so disturbing. But no... Her scent—faintly spicy, clean, feminine—clung like a faint vapor in every room she had been in. Which, as far as he could tell, was all of them, except this room and his bedroom.

Also disturbing was the noise. If it was just the noise of the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher and the washing machine and dryer, it probably would not have been so disturbing. But, though she was probably not aware of it, the more involved she got in some task, the louder she hummed.

Christmas tunes, of all things. “Jingle Bells” and “Here Comes Santa Claus” and “Silent Night.” On more than one occasion she had burst into bloody song and it had stuck in his head—Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus lane—long after she had moved out of hearing.

The problem was she sounded so happy that he could not bring himself to tell her to stop. Even though he was avoiding her with all his might, on those occasions when he could not avoid bumping into her, Jefferson could see the tension she had arrived with had eased from her.

She was still easily startled—he’d come up behind her one day while she was vacuuming, and his eardrums were still ringing from the scream—but was losing that terrified, hunted look he’d first glimpsed on her first day when the pinecone had dropped on her car.

It was not just that the house was undergoing a transformation, which it surely was. Dust was disappearing. Cobwebs were being banished. Floors were emerging from under a layer of grime. Windows were, one by one, beginning to shine.

The biggest transformation was in his kitchen. The day’s mail was neatly sorted. Every surface was gleaming. Every dish he left there in the dark of night was swept away. The fridge had real cream in it for his coffee, and milk for the selection of cereals that had appeared. There were single-serving containers of yogurt, and lettuce and tomatoes. There was a selection of drinks. There was fresh fruit in a bowl on the counter.

Best of all—or perhaps worst of all, depending how you looked at it—were the meals that she left for him. Though the heat was climbing into the nineties and was over one hundred again, once, every day she had the oven on for something.

The rich smells tantalized him even before he took his nocturnal journey down to the kitchen to see what she had done. Muffins. Fresh bread. Cookies. Last night, she had left him a roast chicken dinner.

Tonight she had left a steak, and a tinfoil-wrapped potato with careful instructions how to grill it.

He set down her note, aware he felt like a wild animal being lured in by the promise of food. His anticipation for what she would make for him grew every day.

If she wanted to discuss things with him she left him a note. He was uncomfortably aware that he was looking forward to the notes as much as the food. He looked around for today’s and found it next to the stack of other ones.

He went through the old ones, aware he was smiling. Hers...

Have you got a ladder I could use outside?

His...

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES GET ON A LADDER.

Would tomorrow be a good day to put the furniture out on the deck for an airing?

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES TRY TO MOVE THAT FURNITURE BY YOURSELF.

I have a system figured out.

NO.

Tonight, he read her response to that, aware he was looking forward to it.

I’m going to put the couches on dishcloths, like coasters, and slide them across the floor. Must you write in all caps like that? It’s disconcerting.

NO, YOU AREN’T, he scrawled with great enjoyment. AND YES, I MUST WRITE IN ALL CAPS. I FAILED PENMANSHIP IN SCHOOL.

He hesitated. Too much information? Stop analyzing everything. Admitting he’d failed penmanship in school was not the same as admitting he’d had a terrible row with his wife, and she had gone out into a storm...

He shook that thought off. A gentleman would offer to help Angie move the furniture.

But no, the two weeks minus the time elapsed would be so much easier to get through if he stayed on his path of avoidance. It was good, anyway. He was way ahead of schedule on the Portland project.

He went out to the deck and lit the barbecue as per her instructions. He stood there for a moment, taking in the dark surface of the lake, the lights across the way, the night sounds. It occurred to him it had been a long time since he had felt something like this: just simple enjoyment.

It occurred to him, even though she wasn’t beside him, that she was here. In his house. And somehow, it was changing everything. He wished she was down here with him.

He forced himself to suck it up. To repeat his mantra. Two weeks. Two weeks. Two weeks.

* * *

Angelica surveyed the kitchen with satisfaction. The early-morning light poured through the windows. Jefferson had eaten his steak dinner and gobbled up the cookies she had made yesterday.

She looked for his note, read it and smiled. He’d failed penmanship? Really, it was hard to imagine him failing anything. She put that note with the others, aware she was collecting them.

She went over to the grinder, and put in coffee beans. In a few minutes fresh coffee was dripping into the pot. She savored the smell of it and the light and the birdsong—and Jefferson’s note. She felt so supremely rested. She felt alive and happy.

The phone rang, as she poured herself that first cup of coffee, and she felt herself tensing. Jefferson’s house phone rarely rang. For too long, the phone ringing in her life had meant the sound of breathing on the other end. Or a hang-up. Or a sobbing explanation. Or a begging plea.

She reminded herself she was fearless now and, coffee in one hand, she picked up the phone without checking the call display.

“Stone House,” she said cheerfully.

A moment later the cup, filled with coffee fell from her hand and shattered on the floor. She stared at the mess, put the phone receiver back in its cradle. She wondered, dazedly, if proclaiming herself fearless had been like a challenge to the gods.

Jefferson appeared at the kitchen door. “I heard a crash.” He took in the smashed coffee cup. “Thank God,” he said. “I thought you’d finally managed to fall off a ladder.”

She shook her head mutely.

He crossed the room in a single stride and gazed down at her.

“What is it?”

“The police just called,” she managed to croak. “The Calgary police. I took your advice and called them after...”

That magical night shimmered, momentarily, between them, like a mirage.

And that’s what it was, she told herself. A mirage. Real life was different. “Angie?” He took her shoulders and gave her a gentle shake. She looked up into his eyes, and tried to feel the sense of safety she had felt that night, and really ever since. But maybe that had been part of the mirage, feeling safe in an unsafe world.

“Tell me what’s happened,” he ordered her.

“You know that girl Winston told me he had been dating? The one who supposedly dumped him at the same time Harry dumped me?”

He cocked his head at her, frowning, still holding her shoulders, thank God, anchoring her to his kitchen and him and not allowing her to fly toward her fear.

“She’s missing. The police suspect foul play. And they suspect Winston is connected to it, and no, they have not located him yet.”

He said a word under his breath that should have appalled her. Instead, for a reason she couldn’t decipher immediately, it made her feel reassured, but still she trembled. She could feel panic quaking within her, just below the surface.

“I feel I need to do something,” she said. “But I don’t know what it is. Scream? Cry? Lock myself in the bathroom? Run away?”

“You aren’t doing any of that.” He pulled her in close to him and held her tight.

In the circle of Jefferson’s arms, she could feel the trembling begin to subside. “I’m not?” she whispered.

“You aren’t going to scream, or cry. You aren’t going to lock yourself in the bathroom, and you most certainly are not going to run away.”

She sighed against him. She wasn’t so sure she wasn’t going to cry. “I—I—I guess you’re stuck with me for a little while longer, then.”

He put her away from him, at arm’s length.

“Well,” he said, all business, “let’s make the most of it, shall we? Did you want to move furniture today?”

She stared at him, stunned by his sudden change in demeanor. “What?”

“Look, I’m not letting you move it by yourself. The last thing I need is a Workers’ Compensation claim. And I happen to have a clear day as far as my schedule goes.”

Her mouth worked soundlessly. Suddenly, she knew exactly what he was doing. Somehow he knew if he left her alone or even let her make her own decisions, they would all be bad ones. He could probably tell she was a hair away from dissolving into hysterics. Somehow he knew he had to get her focused on something else.

“You should have something to eat. I can recommend the chocolate chip cookies,” he said it as if it was an ordinary day.

“Chocolate chip cookies are not breakfast!”

A tiny smile played along his lips, satisfied. He had managed to distract her, and he was pleased about it.

“I had them. I seem to be okay,” he said. He held one out to her, wafted it underneath her nose.

She grabbed it from him and took a bite. Surprisingly, it felt as if it might not be such a bad breakfast, after all. She gobbled down three of them. Surprisingly, it felt as if the knots of anxiety in her stomach were eased. By the cookies, or by him, she couldn’t quite be certain.

While she ate cookies, he went and surveyed the living room.

“I have a plan,” Jefferson announced. “I have a furniture dolly out in the shed. I think it might work better than the dishrag system you outlined.”

She was ashamed of it, but she could not even let him out of her sight when he went to get the dolly.

“You might as well come with me,” he said, as if it was his idea, as if she was not already stuck to his heels like glue. “There are other things we might need from the shed.”

She followed him outside into the morning. She stopped for a minute, gulping in the freshness, the call of the birds, the chatter of an indignant chipmunk.

At the shed door, he stopped and looked back at her.

“Something else?” he said quietly. “He’s not coming for you here. And if he did, he’d have to get past me. And you know what?”

She shook her head.

“He’s no match for me.”

And she knew, looking up at him, that that was absolutely true. She knew why she had been reassured instead of appalled by that dreadful word he had said.

Because in that single syllable had been this message.

Jefferson Stone would lay down his life for her. And though Angie had lost the lovely sensation of fearless that she had felt over the past few days, something in her relaxed as she watched him fling open the shed door.

“There it is.”

She saw the red handles of a dolly poking out from behind a weed whacker, a sack of lawn seed and several boxes. It seemed to her that her idea of sliding the furniture out of the living room was better than his, but she said nothing.

She reached to take the first dusty box from him. Their hands touched. His closed around hers and squeezed. She realized Jefferson was offering her his strength until her own returned.

CHAPTER TWELVE

ANGIE WAS FEELING STRONGER, already, as she set down the first box, and Jefferson passed her another. Finally, he unearthed the dolly and managed to wrestle it out of the shed.

He brushed himself off while she looked at the dolly. “It’s covered in spiderwebs. We just need to—”

She caught Jefferson taking a giant step back out of the corner of her eye.

“What?”

“I don’t like spiders,” he said.

“You’re kidding, right?”

He made a face. She was aware he was not kidding, not entirely.

“For someone who does not want to be mistaken as a knight in shining armor, it was a very brave thing to go inside that shed if you’re afraid of spiders.”

“I don’t recall using the word afraid.”

“Maybe we’re all afraid of something,” she said gently.

He rejected her gentleness. “I’m not afraid of them. I just don’t like them.”

“Look! There’s one crawling up the handle. It’s huge.”

“Don’t touch that!”

She ignored him and let the spider crawl onto her hand.

“Put that down.”

“He’s cute. Look.” She held out her hand.

Jefferson stepped back. She stepped forward. He scowled. She giggled. She took another step forward. He retreated, then turned on his heel and darted through the trees.

She shrieked with laughter and went in hot pursuit of him. He plunged through the trees and leaped over fallen logs, shouting his protests.

She followed on his heels, shouting with laughter.

Finally, when they were both gasping for breath from running and laughing and leaping logs and dodging trees, Jefferson put the huge trunk of a live tree between them. He looked out from behind it. She lunged one way. He went the other.

Then his hand snaked out from behind the tree and grabbed her wrist.

“You made me drop him,” she protested. In actual fact, she was pretty sure she had dropped the spider a long time ago.

“Thank God,” he said. He threw himself down on the forest floor and lay on his back, his hands folded over his chest as if he was monitoring the hard beating of his heart. “It’s already hot,” he said.

It felt like the most natural thing in the world to lie down on the forest floor beside him. It smelled of new things and ancient things, blended together perfectly. She looked up through the tangle of branches at a bright blue sky. And then she turned her head to look at him, drinking in his strong and now so familiar profile.

New things. The way she felt about him.

Ancient things. The way men and women had come together for all time and against all odds.

“Are you really afraid of spiders?” She suspected he wasn’t. He wouldn’t be lying here in all this forest duff if he was afraid of creepy-crawly things, would he? “Or were you just distracting me from my own fear?”

“Maybe you were right. Everybody’s afraid of something.”

“What are you afraid of? Really?”

He was silent for a long time. “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked quietly.

She thought of that. She thought of him being an orphan and first losing his grandparents and then his wife. She thought of his extreme isolation. Of the fact that he didn’t even want a housekeeper who was chatty.

He was afraid to let anyone in. He was afraid to lose anything else.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s obvious.”

“It’s too hot to move furniture today,” Jefferson announced, obviously not prepared to probe his fears any further, obviously fearing he had already said way too much. And so there it was. Full retreat.

Except it wasn’t. She recognized a miracle when it was presented.

“You want to go out on the boat?” he asked softly.

Angie thought of the boat and how safe she had felt there through the storm, and how much it must have taken for him to offer her this. She thought of the boat as the place where pure magic had unfolded between them.

“Yes,” she said. “I want to go out on the boat. And suddenly, I’m starving. I knew cookies were not a good breakfast! Should I pack a lunch?”

“Sure. And don’t forget your bathing suit.”

“How do you know I have one?”

“It was on the bill.”

She thought of that bathing suit. She was pretty sure she did not have the guts to wear it in front of him. On the other hand, he was testing his courage. Maybe all of it, all of life, was a call to courage.

He got up and held out his hand to her. She took it and he never let it go as they walked to the house together.

* * *

“What is that?” Jefferson asked, when Angie met him at the boat a half hour later.

“What?”

“What you are wearing.”

“It’s a bathing suit cover.”

“It looks like a cross between a monk’s frock and Mexican serape. Where did you unearth it?”

“I made it,” she said, as if she was quite pleased with herself. “I mean I didn’t sew it. I didn’t have time. I just found some fabric and cut it. I’ve always been good at making things.”

“Hmm, good might be a bit of a stretch,” he said, and realized he felt comfortable teasing her. It was a terrible thing, but he felt glad about that phone call this morning. It had broken the impasse he had created between them.

He wanted to give her—a woman who had suffered just a little too much—carefree days of summer. He wanted to do that, even if it cost him.

He took the boat out onto the lake, and they did a tour of some of its hundreds of miles of coves and inlets and arms. And then he brought them back to a place that was not that far—and yet a world away—from where his house was located.

“Let’s go ashore here for lunch,” Jefferson suggested.

“What is this place?” Angie asked, handing him the picnic basket and then taking his hand and letting him help her out of the boat.

“Watch the pier. It’s a bit rotten. This is where my grandparents’ house used to be. You can still see the foundation.”

She wandered over and looked at the crumbling stone foundation. “What happened to the house?”

He went and stood beside her, nudged a stone with his foot. “It burned down a few years ago. It had been abandoned for some time.”

“What a beautiful spot.” She reached for the basket and pulled a blanket from it. She set it out and they both settled on it. “I’m surprised you didn’t build your new house here.”

“It wasn’t practical. This spot is nearly inaccessible by land. My great-grandfather ran a trading post here for lake traffic. When I came here, my grandparents were still almost exclusively using a boat for transport.”

“How did you go to school?”

“Until high school, by correspondence. Then, my grandparents bought a place for us in Anslow. They said it was because they were getting older, but I know it was so I could have a normal high school experience, make some friends.” He grinned at the memory. “Meet a girl. My grandfather was always concerned about me meeting a girl.”

It occurred to him his grandfather would be very pleased, indeed, to see this girl eating a picnic lunch by the old homestead.

“What kind of normal did you have here?” she asked.

He thought he should probably stop talking, but on the other hand, it was good to distract her and to see her growing more relaxed by the minute.

“The best kind,” he said. “I grew up using a boat, and chopping wood and hunting and fishing. I knew every inch of these woods. It helped me. It healed me.”

He was shocked to hear himself say that. He was not sure he had ever said it before. If he had been able to say it to Hailey, would she have understood?

“I could never sell it,” Jefferson heard himself say.

“Sell it?” Angie looked at him, astonished. “I think it would be criminal to sell it.”

As they ate lunch, she seemed to know all the right questions. And so he found himself talking of things he had not spoken of for years. He told her of the basset hound named Sam who had followed him through the days of his boyhood, and of a baby squirrel he had bottle-fed. He told her of the winter the snow had piled up past the roof, and of being on the lake in twenty-foot swells. He told her of bear encounters and afternoons in the hills picking gallons of huckleberries that his grandmother turned into pies and preserves.

“People see this place as magical in the summer, but my favorite time of year here was Christmas,” Jefferson said.

“Really? Why?”

“My grandmother used to have a Christmas gathering every year, right on Christmas Day. She sent out a blanket invitation. Everyone was invited, and everyone came. My grandfather and I were put to work a month in advance. We had to find the perfect Christmas tree, and make sure there was enough wood to have a bonfire down by the lake. The main body of this lake never freezes, but sometimes the arms do, and I can remember my grandfather going out there with a saw, every day in December, to check the depth of the ice. We were allowed to skate if the ice was over four inches thick. The day he pronounced it safe was better than Christmas for me. I can remember skating on it when the ice was so clear it was like skating on a sheet of glass over the water.

“It could be hard to get here in the winter, but they came for the Stone Christmas, anyway. There were no gifts allowed at her gathering—my grandmother said the gift was each other. And so people came from miles around, and the women got around her gift rule by bringing pies and homemade bread and buns and jars of preserves.

“Families prepared skits, and we sang songs, and we ate food until we could barely move. We kept a bonfire going, and there was sledding and snow fights and snowman building competitions. Lots of times people came prepared to stay, and there were sleeping bags on the floors, and the gathering lasted for days.”

It seemed, as he spoke, he was being restored to some part of himself that he had forgotten.

“It sounds wonderful,” she said wistfully. “What happened to it?”

“We had a smaller version of it once we moved into town. My grandparents got older, families grew up and people moved. It just kind of faded away.”

They sat there in silence for a long time.

“Are you up for a bit of a hike?” he asked. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

He contemplated that invitation, even as he took her hand. He’d never taken anyone to his secret place before. Hailey would not have wanted to go. She would have complained incessantly about bugs and branches snagging her clothes. She would have worried about bears and cougars and wolves.

He guided Angie to a trail that was sadly overgrown, though the animals still used it, so it was passable. Even though her footwear was entirely inappropriate—a flimsy pair of flip-flops, she was uncomplaining as they wound their way steadily upward through the forest growth and the steadily increasing afternoon heat.

The trail ended an hour later at a waterfall. It cascaded out of a rock outcropping fifty feet above them and ended in a gorgeous green pool.

He watched, not the waterfall, which he had seen a thousand times, but her.

Her face was a study in wonder.

“This,” she declared softly, “is the most beautiful place in the world.”

They were both hot and sticky after the hike, so he stripped off his shirt.

“Ready to swim?” he asked her.

She hesitated and then tugged the hem of that serape/frock invention over her head.

He was aware his mouth fell open. He snapped it shut. He ordered himself to look away. He didn’t.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s all they had at the Emporium.”

Sorry? She was a goddess. She was a vision. He had to turn from her and dive into the water to break away from the spell she was casting on him in that tiny polka-dot bikini.

He surfaced. She was standing at the edge of the pool. Her arms were wrapped around herself. She was a self-conscious goddess.

“Come in,” he called.

She stuck her toe in and emitted a very un-goddess-like shriek. He swam over to her, took the flat of his hand and splashed her.

“Hey! I’m getting in my way. It’s very cold.”

“It’s mountain fed. Of course it’s cold. Get in.”

“Quit being bossy.”

“I’ll be bossy if I want. I’m the boss.”

She giggled at that. “I’ll have to look at my contract,” she said, putting a finger to her chin and tapping. “I’m not sure if you’re the boss here, or just in the house.”

He exploded from the water, wrapped his arms around her, and fell backward into the pond, taking her with him.

She broke from his embrace and the water, sputtering wildly and shaking water droplets from her curls. She glared at him. She stomped toward him. He moved away. She moved after him.

“Come back here,” she demanded.

“That seems as if it would be foolish,” he said, moving a bit farther from her.

What he knew, and she didn’t was that the floor of the pond dropped away suddenly. He took one more step and was treading water.

She took one more step and was in over her head. When she came up for air, paddling to keep her head above water, the laughter rumbled up from someplace deep inside of him. It felt so pure and so good.

“I’m going to get you,” she said.

“If you can catch me. You couldn’t this morning. I don’t see what has changed.”

“You are infuriating.”

“Yes, I know.” He splashed her.

“Oh!” She plunged after him.

Now that the bathing suit—or lack thereof—was hidden by the cool, pure water, the same playfulness that had been between them with the spider erupted again.

He wanted to keep her from thinking of that phone call. And he wanted to make her laugh again.

Soon they were chasing each other around, splashing and shrieking. Their laughter rang off the walls of the mountains surrounding them and echoed in the rocky cavern behind the waterfall.

Finally, he allowed himself to be caught, and good-naturedly suffered a decent splashing. He guided her under the water of the falls. They could stand up here, and he helped her find her feet. He put his arms around her naked midriff to steady her against the pummeling of the water. She lifted her face to it. And he lifted his.

He stood there, in awe of it, of being baptized by mother earth, cleansed, purified, as if he was being prepared for a new beginning.

Finally, cooled, drenched, pleasantly exhausted, they dragged themselves out onto a huge sun-warmed rock beside the pond. They lay there side by side, until their breathing had returned to normal.

She reached out and laid her hand on his naked back as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

“I never want to leave here,” she said.

And he heard himself saying, “I don’t, either.”

He closed his eyes. He let the energy ooze from her hand like heated oil, thick and healing, onto his back. And then through the skin of his back and inside of him, bringing light to a place that had been in darkness.

And days later, he knew the place had not been about the waterfall, because they had left the waterfall and yet that feeling of a warm energy, of something deeply comfortable and playful, remained between them.

Jefferson told himself he was allowing this to happen only because he was being a better man. He was distracting Angie from the pure terror of discovering her predecessor in Winston’s affections had gone missing.

But somehow it wasn’t a job he was doing. There was a kind of joyous discovery of the world they were sharing. His world was boats and water and woods and waterfalls. They took the boat out; they swam, they picnicked, and one memorable afternoon he taught her how to catch a fish. In the perfect marriage of their worlds, she taught him how to cook it.

After the success of that, she invited him into her world even further. He could see what an amazing teacher she must be as she taught him how to make cookies and the correct way to do his laundry and how to sew on a button.

“When I have young guys in my class?” she said. “I consider it my obligation to their future wives to make sure they have a few rudimentary skills.”

Who would have guessed gaining a few rudimentary skills would be so much fun? And so intense?

The awareness between them was like a storm circling. The electricity crackled around them. It was in their eyes meeting and in the accidental brushing of their hands. It was in everything.

And yet, he would not allow himself to follow it. He was always the one who pulled back, reminding himself, sternly, that she was here under his protection and that she was as vulnerable as she had been after her fiancé had left her.

He could not take advantage of that.

It was Angie who reminded him they had a house to get ready for a photo shoot.

And somehow, doing that, was also a journey in discovery.

A few days later, Jefferson watched as Angie settled back into the deepness of the couch and sighed with contentment. The house was nearly ready. They were sitting outside on his deck in the comfort of his living room furniture. It was the last big job they needed to do, get the furniture out. She had insisted on spending a very hot afternoon scrubbing the floors and waxing them.

Now, as they waited for them to dry, the sun was going down. Jefferson, without asking, had placed a glass of wine in her hand.

“I should have thought of this before,” Jefferson said, looking out over the lake. “This furniture is great out here. Very comfortable. I think I’ll leave it out here.”

They were sprawled out on the sofa. He was covered in sweat, and so was she.

As far as romantic moments went, moving furniture was probably way down the scale. But honestly? If you wanted a woman to see your muscles? Woo-hoo.

“You will not leave it out here,” she said. “You’d wreck it.”

“Who cares? I barely use it anyway.”

“Don’t you like it?”

He was silent.

“You don’t like it.”

“Hailey picked everything for this house.”

“Ah, so it has sentimental value.”

“The funny thing? I don’t think she much liked it, either.”

“But why, then?”

“It’s a long story.” He did not feel ready to tell it. For when he told her the truth about his marriage, all this magic between them would dissipate. She would see who he really was, that there was nothing remotely heroic about him. But for now, he was not strong enough to break the enchantment between them.

“I think I can hook up the TV to work out here,” he said. “You want to watch Wreck and Me?”

“Yes!”

And so, as the stars winked on in a glorious night sky, they sat on his couch outside and watched the movie about a solitary ogre who reluctantly falls in love.

Jefferson found himself frowning. That ogre, living alone in his cave, enjoying his life of solitude, reminded him of someone. The beautiful princess, who so desperately needed the reluctant ogre’s help, reminded him of someone, too.

He had refilled her wineglass several times, and when the final song, “A Night for Us,” came on, it made her bold.

“Dance with me,” she whispered. “There’s nothing in the living room. The wax is dry. It makes for a perfect dance floor.”

“I’m not much of a dancer.” He had to stop this nonsense before he created a problem worse than the one she was running from.

“I love to dance,” she said.

“Did you dance with him? With your fiancé?”

She smiled, a touch wryly. “No. He hated dancing. I don’t think we ever danced together. Once, I bought tickets to a ball. They were very expensive. He said he would go, but then he was conveniently ill that night.”

Jefferson contemplated that. If you loved a woman and you knew she liked something, was it not part of what you had signed up for—to put yourself out a bit?

“What did you love about him?” he asked. He wished he could take the words back. Why did he want to know?

She sighed and took the last sip of her wine. “Looking back on it now? It’s more like I selected a candidate than fell in love.”

“Selected a candidate?”

“I wanted the things I lost when my father abandoned our family. I wanted to feel secure and safe. Now, I’m not so sure what that has to do with love.”

Jefferson felt a shiver along his spine. Why would she know more about love now than she had then?

“It seems to me,” she said softly, “maybe love is a leap into the unknown rather than retreat into the known.”

This was not going well, Jefferson thought. He was sitting out on his deck on a star-studded night, discussing love with a beautiful, beautiful woman.

The well-known female vocalist’s voice soared out over the lake. It seemed to mingle with the stars and the warmth of the summer breeze.

“‘We have come through every valley, we have come through every plight,

“‘Let me take your hand and show you the magic of the night...’”

Jefferson did the worst possible thing. He needed to avoid this discussion. At the same time he felt a deep, masculine desire to show her he was a better man than Harry.

In his haste to do both, he held out his hand to her. He said to her, his voice a hoarse whisper, “Let’s dance.”

He realized, too late, he had just taken that great leap into the unknown.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ANGIE DID THE worst possible thing. Even though she had instigated this, even though she knew Jefferson had asked her to dance because he felt sorry for her that Harry had been such a boob on the subject, even though she knew it was moving them toward uncharted territory, she put her hand in Jefferson’s.

She let him lead her into the house. With the doors of the living room folded open to the night, they swayed together to the hopelessly romantic music. She gazed upon the face she had become so fond of and contemplated what she had revealed, not just to Jefferson, but to herself, about the nature of her and Harry’s relationship.

She hadn’t loved Harry. She had picked him as the most likely to give her the life she had wanted ever since her father had walked out the door with hardly a glance back.

She knew that now. She had not known it then.

She thought about why she knew it now when she had not known it then. Because now she had eaten ice cream during a storm. Now she had chased a man with a spider, the air ringing with their laughter. Now, she had stood under a waterfall. And squealed as a slippery fish had landed in their boat. Now she had watched Wreck and Me under the stars.

Now, she was dancing in an empty room with no one watching.

She stared up at Jefferson and drank in the face that had become so familiar to her. She felt the heat of his body and the strength of it where it was pressed into her.

It occurred to Angie exactly why she knew now that she had not fallen in love with Harry when she had not known it before, even when he left her.

She stopped dancing.

Jefferson stopped dancing.

“Would you like to come to a real dance with me?” he asked. “The town is having a fund-raiser in Hailey’s memory.”

She knew it would be craziness to say yes.

“It’s going to be very hard for me to go alone.”

Which made it impossible to say no.

“It’s called A Black Tie Affair.”

There was her excuse. She did not have a single thing to wear to a function called A Black Tie Affair.

She started to say it and then snapped her mouth shut.

That was the Angie she had been, before. Before she had driven down that long and winding road and knocked on the door that had led her to this man. To Jefferson.

That was the Angie who had been afraid of everything. Even before she had been stalked she had played it safe, tried to arrange a life that would make her feel comfortable and secure.

Playing it safe, she realized, had not gotten her one single thing that she wanted. The exact opposite was probably true.

“I’d love to go to the dance with you,” she said.

“It’s on Saturday.”

“What day is it today?”

“I have to think about it,” he said wryly. “I’ve lost track of time. Tuesday. Today’s Tuesday.”

She broke away from him. “That’s only four days away. And the photographer from the magazine is coming on Monday. I have a great deal to do.”

Not being swayed by the bemusement in his eyes, she fled from Jefferson and went up the stairs to her room.

She knew she should say no to going to the dance, but she could not. She sat down and did a sketch, and stared at it.

It was even more beautiful than the wedding dress she had designed. It had a strap over one shoulder, the other shoulder bare. The upper portion of the dress, bodice to waist, was fitted. And then it flared out in a cloud of whimsy. She had only a few days.

It occurred to her she really did only have a few days. It had been their agreement that she would leave after the photographer came. Her job here would be done. Her time here.

But she felt as she had lying on the sun-warmed stone by the waterfall.

I want to stay here forever.

She reminded herself that Jefferson had broken that spell. That Jefferson broke all the spells. She wanted things to deepen between them. He did not.

And that was good. It was a good thing that one of them could be pragmatic when the storm was building all around them, threatening to pull them right into its vortex of power.

She looked at the dress again. If ever a dress could challenge a man’s best intentions, it would be this one. Is that what she wanted to do?

It was what she wanted to do. She did not want to be safe anymore. She wanted to fling herself into the storm, to put herself at the mercy of love.

Love.

She looked at her drawing again and let that word wash over her, felt the power of the feeling that accompanied it. Could she really pull this off?

She thought with longing of the woman she had been, ever so briefly, when that storm was over.

Fearless.

She wanted that again. She wanted to be fearless.

What about getting his house ready for the photographers? She was going to have to do both. She was going to have to be fearless and pragmatic.

Well, anyone who could coax cookies and a sewing project out of thirty reluctant teenagers could most certainly handle the pragmatic aspects of the assignment she had given herself.

She got up from her desk. She went over to those cubbies filled with fabric and sorted through them. They were swatches. It was almost as if they had been put here for show—to add splashes of bright color to the room—rather than to be of use. Angie had managed to scavenge her bathing suit cover from these, but the dress in the sketch was another matter.

She went to the window and stared out at the darkened lake. The breeze lifted a curtain and it caught her eye.

Angie laughed out loud. It was pure white silk. She caressed it with her fingers. She couldn’t use his curtains for a dress, could she?

The old Angie might not have been able to. The new Angie got on a chair and tugged the draperies down off their hooks.

* * *

Jefferson would not admit how much he missed Angie. Since that night they had danced in the living room, and in a moment of weakness when he had wanted to give her everything she wanted, and had invited her to a real dance, he had barely seen her.

She was a flurry of motion—racing through the house, cleaning crazily, organizing for the photo shoot and then disappearing up the stairs to her room.

She was making meals—in the middle of the night?—and leaving him notes on how to cook them, but he missed her. He was glad they were going to have a whole evening together to just enjoy each other.

On Saturday evening, he came out of his room. He and Hailey had often gone to events that required this kind of garb—the opera, plays, fund-raising balls. He had not dressed like this for a long time. He had never felt like this about it, either. Strangely awkward, almost shy. Standing in the hall, he put a finger between his collar and his neck, trying for a bit of breathing space.

He heard a sound on the stairs that led to Angie’s room.

He turned slowly. He dropped his finger from his collar. It was hopeless. He was never going to be able to breathe. Every thought of the impression he was going to make on her fled him as the sight of her—the impression she was making on him—filled his every sense and stole his breath away.

Could this woman be Angie?

Even in that ultra-sexy bathing suit, he had never seen her look like this.

She floated down the staircase toward him on a cloud of white. The dress hugged her upper body, showed the sensuous curve of her recently sun kissed shoulders, then flared out, sweeping around her. She looked like a princess in a fairy tale.

“What?” she asked, pausing on the stairs.

Could she not know what a vision she was?

“Where on earth did that dress come from?” he managed to choke out when that was not what he wanted to say at all. “I’m pretty sure the Emporium does not stock anything like that.”

“Have you ever seen The Sound of Music?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Curtains,” she said. “I’m afraid I owe you a set of curtains.”

He vaguely recalled a scene in that movie where curtains had been transformed into play clothes. It was a movie. They would have had a team of tailors and seamstresses working on that.

“How did you do this?” he asked. Another movie came to mind. Cinderella, where the cleaning girl was transformed.

As if drawn to her by an invisible cord, he went and stood before her, looking up the stairs at her, at the sweep of the dress, the delicacy of her naked shoulder, the formfitting bodice.

“This is what I always wanted to do,” she said. “I wanted to design clothes.”

“And you didn’t, why?” He could hear the astonishment in his own voice.

“Because I was told to pick a practical career, and that’s what I did. Instead of following my own heart.”

She was looking at him with an unnerving intensity, as if that was all changed now. As if she fully intended to follow her own heart from now on.

He realized it was not the dress, alone, that made her beautiful. He realized it was her radiance. He had invited her to go to the dance as a gift to her, to give her something she had always wanted.

Jefferson contemplated the nature of gifts.

For this one had come back to him. It felt as if what he had given her since she arrived, the gift of sanctuary, had unveiled her bit by bit.

Now she stood before him, confident and radiant, the woman she really was, the woman she had always been meant to be.

And so the gift was returned to him. In leading her back to herself, it was he who had come fully alive. This gift of awareness did not fall gently against him. No, it smashed into him with all the force that was needed to take what was left of the severely compromised armor he had put around his heart and leave it in shards.

It felt as though he was stepping over that shattered armor as he reached for her, as her hand came into his, as he placed his kiss of recognition and welcome first on the top of her hand and then on her cheek.

He could fight no more.

They went by boat to Anslow. That journey, through inky waters, the spray from the boat white against blackness of the sky and the lake was the beginning of the magic. When they arrived he had to squeeze in to find a place to tie up, there were so many boats at the dock. A horse and carriage were at the end of it, waiting to take guests who had arrived by water to the community hall.

The interior of the hall had been transformed with thousands of bright fairy lights. They illuminated the line of the roof, climbing the walls like vines, tracing the outlines of linen-covered tables.

The place was packed. The people of Anslow loved an occasion—weddings, graduations, fund-raisers—they kept finery that would not have been out of place in New York City for these community events.

There were no speeches, just a dinner followed by a clearing of the tables, a bar being set up, a band taking their places on the raised stage at one end of the room.

He introduced Angie to people who had been his family and his friends and his neighbors since he was six years old.

They welcomed him into the fold of their lives as if he was a soldier who had been away from home for too long. They extended their acceptance of him to Angie. But almost too much so! He could not get near the woman he had escorted to the dance.

She quickly became the belle of the ball. For the first set, every old geezer in Anslow had to claim a dance with her. By the second set, the young men who had been fortifying their courage at the bar were jostling to have a turn around the hall with her.

Angie, amazing in that dress, was an astonishing dancer. Her movements were fluid and natural and unconsciously sensual. Her laughter carried through the hall. Her face was flushed. Her eyes were radiant. She was a princess, casting an enchantment.

Watching her, dance, watching her shine, Jefferson had a sense of having done the right thing. This is what she had led him to again and again since she had arrived at his door.

She required him to do the right thing. She forced him to be a better man.

And then, for the third set, he wearied of all the attention being paid to her and went and claimed her for his own. When Gerry Mack tried to cut in, he told him no. By the time the fourth and final set of the evening arrived, no one was trying to cut in anymore.

They danced until their feet ached. They danced until they could hardly breathe. They danced until the last dance, when he held her tight, rested his chin on the top of her head and realized something had happened that he thought would never happen again.

He was happy.

The evening broke up, and the poor old horse and carriage could not keep up with people flocking down to the dock, so he and Angie walked along the boardwalk, hand in hand. The night was filled with the laughter and chatter of the crowds. They were not the only ones walking.

As they turned at the entrance of the dock, a flurry of farewells filled the air.

“So good to see you, Jefferson. Angie, nice to meet you.”

“Safe journey over the water, Jeff. Angie, thank you for coming.”

Finally, he helped her into the boat and settled her in her seat. He went and got the blanket from below and tucked it over her shoulders.

“They love you,” Angie said, tugging the blanket around herself. She was glowing.

He contemplated her words. How right it seemed for the word love to have floated into the enchantment that was tonight.

He started the engine, put on the running lights, backed away from the dock and pointed the nose of his boat toward the dark main body of water of Kootenay Lake. Driving at night was extraordinarily beautiful, but it held some extra challenges.

“Jefferson?”

He turned his focus from the water, looked at her.

“They love you. And so do I.”

For the second time that night, it felt as if his breath had quit and his heart had stopped. What was he doing? Hadn’t he known all along this is where it was going?

“They only think they love me,” he told her. “And so do you.”

“No,” she said stubbornly.

Rather than respond, he checked for other boats leaving the harbor and, seeing none, opened up the throttle. Everybody only thought they loved him. If only they knew how unworthy he was.

He realized he could give the boat all the gas he wanted, but he could not go fast enough to outrun what had to be done.

He had to tell her. He had to put this to a stop right now, before he undid every bit of good the past two weeks had done for her.

He didn’t respond to her at first. He drove them over the quiet lake—so much of it now held memories of their times together—and pulled into the cove where they had taken refuge from the storm. He stopped the boat and put out the anchor.

The boat rocked gently. The night air was as warm as an embrace. He could still hear voices and laughter drifting over the lake. Angie sat looking at him, the dress a dream around her, so beautiful it made him ache.

“It is a perfect night,” she said. “Or would be if I had ice cream.”

It had been. It had been a perfect night. But it wasn’t going to be anymore. Because every good memory he had of this night would be overridden by what was going to happen next. This was the night it was all going to end.

“I have to tell you something,” Jefferson said quietly.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I HAVE TO tell you something.

It seemed to Angie as if every horrible event of her whole life had begun with those words.

Her mother looking at her with red, swollen eyes, her voice broken. “I have to tell you something. Your father and I are getting divorced. He moved out this morning.”

Harry, biting his lip and then looking away, before clearing his throat and saying in a firm voice, “I have to tell you something. It’s not good news, I’m afraid. I’m not happy. I can’t be happy here. I’ve met someone.”

Her father had met someone, too, not that she had known it at the time. If she had known, maybe she could have been more prepared for how her life was about to change.

And then Harry turned out to be exactly like her father, as if she could spot a philanderer across a crowded room, when what she was looking for was the exact opposite.

So, what did Jefferson have to tell her? Selfishly, she wished he would wait until morning. She did not want to end what had been one of the nicest nights of her life on a sour note! How cruel of him to park the boat in the middle of a lake where she had no option to run and hide once he had told her.

But that’s what she got for declaring her love. That’s what she got for being fearless when she was the person least inclined that way. Why hadn’t she just accepted who she was instead of pushing her boundaries?

“I had no right to enjoy tonight as much as I did,” Jefferson announced quietly.

She felt suddenly panicky. “You can spare me the details,” she said. “I think I can guess. You have a girlfriend tucked away somewhere, don’t you? I should have known, really. A man like you—so gorgeous and so much fun and so successful—could not possibly be alone for so long. I—”

“Angie. Stop it! Of course I don’t have a girlfriend.”

Her relief was short-lived. “A horrible ailment,” she decided. “Are you dying?”

“No. Angie, just let me speak. Please.”

“I’m trapped on a boat. What choice do I have?” How could she have been so dumb? How could she have declared her love for him? Now, he had to make excuses. She braced herself for it. She could imagine what was coming. He didn’t love her. He was going to try and let her down gently. I like you very much. I hope we can remain friends.

“Are you listening?” he asked.

“No, I’m contemplating jumping off the boat. Unfortunately, the weight of the dress, wet, would probably drown me.”

“As if I would ever let you drown,” he said, annoyed.

That made her look at him. There was a protective fury in his voice. And there was something tortured in the way he was looking at her.

“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I’m listening.”

“Those people, who you so correctly pointed out love me, are trying to help me. They were so insistent I come tonight, because they are trying to bring me back to their world. But I feel their love is with an illusion, because they have no idea who I really am.”

She stared at him. He was standing at the back of the boat, his weight rocking easily from foot to foot with the boat’s motion. How could he believe people had no idea who he was when he radiated who he was?

All that quiet confidence and strength.

“Everybody is trying to make me feel better about what happened that night with Hailey. They’re trying to make me feel better, they want me to get on with my life. But I would have to absolve myself, and I can’t.”

“Absolve yourself?” she whispered.

“Here’s the truth no one knows,” he said harshly. “Here’s the truth you need to know before you make your declaration of love.

“We fought that night. That’s what sent her out onto those terrible roads. We had had a terrible fight. And I was so mad, I didn’t go after her. I knew she didn’t know those roads. I failed her. I failed to protect her. Isn’t that what I swore I would do, when I said those vows to her?”

“Jefferson, what happened?”

He looked out over the lake, pensive. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. Angie had to strain to hear it.

“I could not believe my ears when Hailey said she wanted to build a house on the land I’d inherited from my grandparents. My grandparents’ house had already burned down by the time I met her, so our trips to the property were not exactly successes. We tried camping once. That was a disaster. We stayed at the hotel in Anslow twice, and that didn’t meet her standards.

“That’s nothing against her—she was a big-city girl, with a high-powered career that was just reaching its pinnacle. I knew that when I married her.

“I was fine with our life. I loved my wife. We had a swanky apartment in downtown Vancouver. Both of us traveled a lot with our careers. When we were together it was fancy dinners and theater and entertaining friends. I was content with all of that.

“Until she said she wanted to build a house here, on my land, on Kootenay Lake. And then I knew how much I had missed it and how much I wanted to come home. Then, I knew I harbored other dreams beyond the amazing success I was enjoying. Of having a family, and of campfires on summer nights and long days on the boat.

“We started building in the spring. It was a huge undertaking. Summer was the best part of the whole project. We lived in a holiday trailer, but everything seemed exciting—things were happening, the house was taking shape. We’d work all day, then swim and sit around a little campfire roasting hot dogs.

“But, right from the start, there were disagreements. She picked an impractical location for the house because it would “showcase” her skills. The whole project very quickly seemed to become about showcasing her skills. Budget went out the window with the building of the road to the house site, and it went downhill from there.

“Double ovens in the kitchen? She didn’t even cook. A craft room? You could not meet a person less interested in being crafty than Hailey.

“Then the build went into the fall. It was wet and grim. By the time we finished and moved in, Hailey hated it here. It’s cold that close to the water. It’s foggy. Because of where she chose to put the house, it was incredibly difficult to get in and out of it.

“But, finally, we were nearing completion. That’s when she started picking furniture. Every single thing seemed to be about how it looked instead of how it felt.

“And that night when we fought, she was placing furniture and it slipped out that she was staging the house. Staging. That’s what you do to manipulate people’s impressions of a space—it’s like you’re creating a fantasy they can walk into. It’s not what you do if you’re planning on living there.

“So, I pressed her on that, what she meant by staging, and she admitted all of it had really been with an eye to a future sale. The property, by itself, is probably worth millions. With the house on it?

“She figured with the proceeds of this sale we could buy a piece of property in any big city in the world that we wanted, and she could build our real house there. Our real house, the house for the busy professional couple, with no children. She actually laughed when I asked her where our kids fit into the picture.

“I’m not proud of what happened next. I lost my mind. I started smashing all her little staging items—her expensive vases and her pictures that didn’t mean anything to anybody. I’m not sure I have ever been so angry.

“And she left. She left in the middle of a snowstorm and drove away. And I didn’t go after her.

“No, I sat and brooded over the mistake I’d made, and asked myself how I couldn’t have seen sooner what was coming. I didn’t think—not once—about all the things I loved about her. The way she laughed, and how smart she was, and how she liked to play jokes on me. I didn’t think about all the good years we’d had before we started to build that house, or all the things we had in common. No, I got rip-roaring drunk, and I passed out on the couch.

“I woke up to a knock at the door. It was the police. She’d made it up our road to the highway. But she had tried to take a corner too fast. It was slippery. She’d gone off the road. She died on impact, when the car hit the water.”

Angie could feel the tears streaming down her face. She got up from where she had been sitting and stood behind him. She wrapped her arms around him and leaned her head into his back.

He jerked away from her. He spun and looked at her. His eyes were dark with a fury that made her take a step back from him, even though it was obvious the fury was directed at himself.

“That’s the me that nobody knows,” he said grimly. “I killed her. She had nowhere to go when I got mad like that. I might as well have put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”

Angie gasped at that, but he wasn’t done.

“You were right. Those people love me. They’ve loved me since I was a six-year-old boy. But they don’t know me. And I don’t think they’d be trying so damned hard to make something good come out of something bad if they knew the full truth.”

“Jefferson,” Angie said, her voice a croak of pure pain, “it was an accident. You did not kill your wife. That is a terrible burden you’ve been carrying. You are a good man.”

He looked at her long and hard. And then he pushed past her and took his seat at the controls of the boat. He flicked it on and gave it full throttle. The nose lifted so quickly, she was thrust into one of the back seats. They shot over the still water like a rocket that had been launched.

When they arrived at his dock and he helped her out of the boat, his face remained grim.

“Don’t love me,” he said. And then he turned and walked away.

Angie watched him go. It was already too late for that. She already did love him, beyond reason. The fact that he carried this terrible burden of guilt, along with his grief, did not make her love him less.

But it did make her see the truth. Perhaps it was the truth he had already seen.

She was hiding here. Cowering, really, from what life had handed her. To love him, to lead him through everything that love meant she could not cower.

She had to face her life head-on.

She had to show him she did not need his protection. He had set himself up in that role, a role he already thought he had failed at.

And she had allowed it. She had taken great comfort in it.

But it had done what it needed to do. It had helped to heal her. Now, to love him, she had to come to him whole, not in fragments of fear and not a hostage to her own history. She had to dig deep within herself and be the person he had shown her she could be. She had to give him back what he had given her. She had to lend him her strength, just as he had lent her his.

And she could see only one way she could do that.

Angie had to be fearless.

* * *

Jefferson went to his room without waiting to see how Angie would react to all he had told her. In the morning, he expected she would look at him with the disdain of someone who had been shown a truth that was different from what they had believed.

He expected he might see signs she had been crying.

Instead, when he ventured out of his room in the morning, he saw Angie was already busy. The muffins were fresh baked, as always. He heard her in the living room.

“The photographer is coming tomorrow,” she called to him.

He resisted an impulse to yell he didn’t give a damn about the photographer. Was she going to pretend he hadn’t said anything last night? He grabbed a muffin and went and stood in the door of the living room.

The princess was gone, and Cinderella was back, her hair hidden under one of her babushka creations, her shorts showing off the slenderness of her legs, her T-shirt clinging. She had a small mountain of pillows on the floor.

“Where did those come from?” he asked gruffly.

“I made them.”

How was it possible to like this as much as the goddess she had been last night? How was it possible to love this as much.

Love.

There was that word again. And the truth smashed into him. He loved her. Enough to let her go on to the life she deserved.

“When?” he asked.

“Last night. I couldn’t sleep.”

So, she was more distressed by what he had told her than she was letting on. He could see that now. She was avoiding looking at him.

He stuffed the entire blueberry muffin in his mouth, as if somehow, that could help him stuff back the terrible sensation of loss that was sweeping through him, even though she was standing right here.

“You need to go see if you can find some flowers,” she said, placing a pillow on the couch. She scowled at it, then karate chopped the top of it. “I should have asked to have the ones from the dinner tables last night.”

He scowled. He had just laid an earth-shattering truth about himself at her feet, and she was going to talk about flowers?

Well, fine, he’d go along with that. He’d go find some flowers. He didn’t want to be around her anyway. It caused an ache in him that felt as if it would never go away.

Grabbing another muffin, he went out the door.

He made sure he was gone a good long time. He emptied Anslow of flowers and then, as an afterthought, he pulled off the lake and picked a bouquet of wildflowers from the hills. The wildflowers, he somehow knew, would delight her more than the ones he had gotten from the tiny flower shop in Anslow.

Why, he asked himself, was he picking wildflowers for her.

Because, at the very core of every man, was a little light that flickered, that would not be put out, not even if you threw pails of water on it.

That light was hope.

But that light died in him when, laden with flowers as she had requested, he went back into his house.

Maybe, subliminally, he had registered that her car was not parked under the tree where it had been since the day she arrived.

Maybe, subliminally, he had registered there was no movement in the windows, no lights on, as he had come up the staircase from the lake.

Whatever it was, he knew the instant he walked in the door. He knew before he called her name and walked room to room looking for her. He knew before he took the stairs, two at a time, up to her room and found the closets empty and her suitcase gone.

The wildflowers fell from his hand and scattered across the bleached hardwood floor.

He had known before having evidence, because it was as if her essence was gone from the house.

He walked back through, more slowly. It was strange, because the house was as perfect as it had ever been. As he went from room to room, he saw it looked exactly as Hailey had dreamed it would look. Staged, to give the illusion it was someone’s home.

There was a throw over the couch, and a wooden apple crate beside it filled with magazines. There was a hardcover book, turned over, open, making it look as if someone had sat here reading and they had just gotten up for a second. The fireplace, that had never been used, was laid for a fire as if it was just waiting for a match.

The kitchen had a platter of cookies on the island and a basket of the small green apples that grew wild on the road down to the house. He knew them to be inedible, but they were a delight to the eye and created that illusion of homeyness. On the counter, there was a cookbook open on a reading rack, and a bottle of wine with two glasses.

She had disobeyed him and gone into his bedroom. There were candles on the bedside tables, and the scent of freshly laundered sheets filled his nostrils. And right underneath that scent was one that reminded him of her. She didn’t know that he had saved Hailey’s pillow, and he went to it and pressed it to his face.

Hailey’s scent was gone from it. And after what he had revealed last night, that seemed fitting.

There was not a nook or corner of his house that had not been cleaned to sparkling. The little details were everywhere, but she was not.

Angie was gone.

And he did not blame her for going. She had fulfilled the letter of her agreement with him. She had refused his further protection, which given his failure to Hailey, was understandable.

Jefferson fought down the feeling of panic rising in him. There was a nut job out there who wanted Angie and who was most likely responsible for the disappearance of another woman.

He scoured his house for a note from her that would leave him a clue to where she was, but he found nothing.

Even though he had brought this on himself, he felt furious with Angie for the impotence he felt. He had known last night’s revelations would force her to leave if she was smart, which he knew she was.

But, somehow, he had thought he would engineer the exit plan, so that he could know she was safe. How dare she wake him up—to the point he could feel again—and then leave him with this sense of abject helplessness? Leave him to face his demons: he had failed to protect Hailey, and now he could not protect Angie either.

No doubt, she would go into deeper hiding than ever. She was clever. If she didn’t want to be found, he was pretty sure Winston would not find her.

But he wouldn’t, either. For his own sanity, he had to know she was all right. How was he going to do that? He was a man with resources. And plenty of them.

Within an hour, he had the most elite private detective agency in the world looking for Angie. Vibrating with tension, needing something to occupy him, he turned his attention to the final stages of getting the house ready for the magazine.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ANGIE SAT AT the window of the coffee shop, sipping a cup of tea, waiting. She should have felt nervous. But she didn’t. She felt strangely and wonderfully elated.

She had experienced an epiphany that night of A Black Tie Affair, coming home on the boat with Jefferson. He had told her everything about himself, exposed what he perceived as his weaknesses to her. She knew he had been trying to chase her away.

What he had done was the exact opposite. Angie realized she had pursued love for all the wrong reasons for her whole life. She had wanted to feel safe and secure. It had always been all about her.

But what she felt for Jefferson—what had grown over their two weeks together and culminated on his boat that final night—was so much bigger than that.

It made her realize who she had to be to love that man. And that realization made her feel bold and fully alive for the first time in her life. The realization that she loved the man beyond reason required her to fearlessly embrace the unknown, not retreat into safety. It required her to be whole and strong, not to go to Jefferson weak and afraid and filled with neediness.

A voice crackled in her ear. It startled her, but she resisted the urge to reach up to her ear and adjust the tiny bud that had been planted there.

“We have the subject parking his car. He’s out. He’s coming to the door.”

“Okay,” she whispered.

Hidden in a brooch she had attached to the lapel of the suit jacket she was wearing was a microphone. She was “wired” just like in the movies.

Angie watched as the door to the restaurant slid open. She felt her heart begin to beat hard. Up until this point, they had not even been sure the message she had left on Winston’s Facebook page had reached him or if he would respond to it if it had.

Winston stood there, scanning the room. Angie’s sense of confidence evaporated. He was innocent enough looking: an ordinary bespectacled man in a sports jacket and jeans. The bow tie, and blue-checkered shirt, added to the air of benign befuddlement, as if he was a professor trying to figure out which class he was supposed to be in.

But underneath that, when he narrowed his eyes and caught sight of her, Angie saw the truth of him. His gaze was that of a predator who had spotted prey. There was the glint of pure malice before it was masked with a smile. She fought a desire to shudder and, more, to get up and bolt.

She took a deep breath. She reminded herself she was in a crowded room. She reminded herself that the police were right outside, and that they would listen to every word. She reminded herself that this wasn’t just about her. Or even about Jefferson. It was about putting away a dangerous man; it was about protecting another unsuspecting woman, or maybe even more than one.

She had, with police help, rehearsed a script. She needed to put Winston at ease enough to talk about the woman who was missing.

Winston sat down across from her. A little smile flickered across his face as he looked at her. What was it? Suspicion? Hope? Slyness?

“Hello, Angie,” he said.

She took another deep, steadying breath. She reminded herself of the fearless woman she had been on the deck of that pitching boat. Her lips stretched into what she hoped was a smile of amiable greeting.

“Hello, Winston.”

It was a game of cat and mouse, luring him into her confidence. After a few pleasantries, she began to talk about Harry and his new girlfriend. She claimed she had gone away because she needed to think, to recover from Harry’s betrayal. She had to manufacture indignation, because these days, she saw Harry as a necessary step to being put on the most important road of all. The road to herself.

Once she had talked about Harry, it was an easy enough thing to turn the talk to Winston’s ex, to follow a carefully crafted script that led him deeper and deeper down a road he could not retreat from.

As his barriers dropped, Angie had the chilling feeling Winston wanted her to know what had happened to his ex. That he was pleased with himself. That he wanted her to know what he was capable of, so that he could use it to control her.

He told her everything. He trusted her. He incriminated himself. He, no doubt, thought that even if she wasn’t so frightened she would never speak of this again, no one would ever believe her if she repeated this chilling tale.

“Good job. We’ve got him,” the voice said in her ear. “Tell him you have to leave now.”

She looked at her watch. “Oh! Look at the time. I have to go, Winston. It’s been nice catching up.”

He looked stunned at this easy dismissal. And then he looked angry. He was seething as he followed her to the cashier.

“I’ll get it,” he snapped, when she reached for her purse.

But the thought of his money paying for one thing she had ingested nauseated her. She shook her head. She was pretty sure he noticed her hand trembling as she passed the bills to the cashier.

“When am I going to see you again?” he demanded.

“I’m just not sure.”

He stared at her. “There’s someone else,” he said. “Isn’t there?”

She was not safe yet. She edged toward the door.

“I can see it in your face,” he said. And then he sighed with what might have seemed like defeat if she was not so wary of him. “I’d like to give you something. To remember me by.”

She was sure that was true.

“Just walk out to my car with me.”

She had no doubt he would love her to accompany him to his car, that he would look for an opportunity to overwhelm her.

“Sure,” she said, and went out the door. He was gloating over her acceptance. She had rehearsed this part with the police, too. Get out the door. Go instantly right. A policeman grabbed her and pulled her out of the way.

Winston, still gloating over the fact she had agreed to accompany him to his car, did not even see it coming. He was on the ground in a sea of blue in the blink of an eye. Then he was yanked to his feet.

Panting, he pulled against the arms that held him, glaring at her, radiating pure malevolence. “I’ll get you, you bitch,” he promised.

Angie stared at him. And then she actually threw back her head and laughed. “Don’t you get it? I got you. Your game is over.”

And then, feeling as free and as fearless as she had ever felt in her life, she turned and walked away.

Now, she was worthy to love Jefferson.

* * *

Jefferson’s phone rang. He snatched it out of his pocket and felt a whoosh of pure relief at the number on the screen. He had been waiting for this call for three days.

He had not been able to work. Or sleep. Or eat. The photographers had come and gone with him hardly noticing their presence. He was not sure if he had ever experienced the sense of helplessness that had gripped him over the past few days.

“Have you found her?” he demanded.

“Yes, we’ve located her.”

“Is she safe?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Jefferson felt as if he had been holding his breath and was finally allowed to breathe. He was not sure what to make of the cavalier tone in the PI’s voice.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“She’s more than fine. Angelica Witherspoon is quite the woman.”

“Excuse me?”

“I tracked her down through a source at the Calgary Police Service. She was at the center of a sting. They got that bastard. Because of her.”

“Huh?”

“My source says he’s been doing police work for twenty-two years and has never seen anyone perform like that. She was so calm and cool, and confident. She walked him right into a trap. He’ll never breathe another free breath.”

“She did what?” Jefferson sputtered. “We’re talking about Angie? Angelica Witherspoon?”

His detective repeated the whole story with great relish and more detail.

Jefferson tried to make this line up with the woman who had arrived at his door four weeks ago.

He couldn’t make it happen.

But as he thought of who she had become over their two weeks together, he knew what he was hearing was true.

She was braver than he had ever believed. And she was stronger than she had ever believed.

Still, when he hung up the phone, what he felt was an abject sense of loss. He felt the desolation of a man who had somehow touched heaven and was being sent back to earth.

Her foolhardiness only reminded him of what he already knew. Life was capricious. Things had turned out well, but they could have just as easily gone the other way. He could have gotten a phone call that reminded him, again, of his impotency. Of his failure to protect.

His phone rang again.

He saw Angelica Witherspoon flash across the screen. He wanted to talk to her more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. He wanted to scream at her for her foolishness and tell her to come home.

Home.

The place that both held hope and dashed hope. The place that tantalized with a vision of love, and then could take it all away.

He didn’t answer her call. And when he listened to her message and heard her words, he was so glad he had not.

I love you.

He clicked it off without listening to the rest of the message. She loved the one who could not protect her. Had he heard her speak those words, his every strength would have fled him. He would have begged her to come and fill this empty void his life had become.

Instead, he turned off his phone and tucked it away. He would get about the very serious business of proving to himself and to her he could go on without her.

It felt like a mission as he made his way to the kitchen, opened the freezer, remembered some particularly wonderful thing she had done with chicken breast. He had seen in her eyes, that first day, when she had looked at his tinned collection of food, that she had felt pity for him.

And one thing about Jefferson Stone? He despised pity. He had been on the receiving end of too much for his entire life. His parents. His grandparents. Hailey. He was not going to be the object of anyone’s pity, ever again.

He probably had some kind of curse on him. The curse of loss.

His resolve to stand on his own, to not ever invite anyone else into his wretched life, firmed. If he truly wanted chicken dinner and muffins, he was quite capable of doing that for himself. He did not need Angie Witherspoon aka Brook Nelson. He did not need anyone. It was safest that way.

He returned to his office, but only to pick up his electronic tablet. He put what he needed into the search engine, and snorted to himself at how ridiculously easy it was to cook a rosemary chicken breast. Buoyed by that success, he also looked up muffins.

It occurred to him that he didn’t know where the mixing bowls were or even if he had any. Wasn’t it high time he found out?

Whistling with grim determination—and not Jingle Bells, either—Jefferson renewed his vow of complete independence. He found the bowls and some rudimentary ingredients. He began to slap things together.

* * *

Angie set down the phone. Jefferson had not answered. She felt the first real fear she had felt since she had returned to snare Winston. She looked at her watch. She could be back at the Stone House in a matter of hours.

But what if he didn’t want to see her? What if it was over between them? What if she could not restore his faith in himself?

This, she told herself, was not the time to allow her courage to fail her.

She made the trip in what she imagined was record time. She was surprised she had not gotten a speeding ticket.

Now, she stood outside that door where she had stood just a few weeks ago, when she was a totally different person. She took a deep breath, and she gripped the knocker firmly in her hand.

She could hear him coming.

The door swung open.

She stared at Jefferson.

Oh, beloved, she thought to herself. He had regressed. His shirt was rumpled, and his hair was uncombed. He didn’t look as though his face has seen a razor since she had left. He looked utterly exhausted.

She loved him more than she had ever loved him, more even, than that night of enchantment when he had been dressed so beautifully in a formal suit, and she in a gown suited to a princess.

“Nope,” he said.

It was hardly the declaration of undying love she had hoped for after her absence!

He started to close the door, but not as firmly as he would have if he really did not want to see her. Come to that, if he really didn’t want to see her, he wouldn’t have even come to the door.

She stuck her foot in it before he managed to get it closed all the way.

He reopened it and glared at her foot, before lifting his eyes to hers. There were walls up that a less determined person—a less courageous person—might not be able to scale.

“Are you burning the house down?” she asked. “Because it smells as if you are.”

“What’s it to you? You didn’t even leave a note.”

She saw the hurt in him before he quickly masked it with a scowl. “Yes, I did. I left it right on the kitchen counter where you would be sure to see it.”

“There was no note. What did you say in it? That you were going to single-handedly apprehend a very dangerous person?”

“How did you know that?” she asked.

He glared at her.

“It wasn’t single-handed,” she said. “I had an entire police team working with me. Jefferson, something is burning. Could we—”

He turned from her, and she followed him through the living room to the kitchen.

It was a shambles.

“No wonder you couldn’t find the note,” she said.

“It didn’t look like this, then.”

Black smoke was pouring out of his oven.

“Hell’s bells,” he snapped.

She was not sure how it was possible the room could be in worse shape than the day she had first seen it, The overhead lights were on, shining an unforgiving light on the disaster and illuminating the thin wisps of smoke that layered the air despite windows opened wide.

Gooey bowls were over on their sides. The countertops dripped mysterious substances onto the floors. A muffin tin—which looked suspiciously as if it was filled with partially cooked muffins—was upside down on the island.

And Jefferson Stone stood, with his back to her, cursing. His hair was silky and just a little too long, and it touched the collar of that same rumpled denim shirt. The shirt showed off the incredible breadth of his shoulders and how the wideness of his back tapered to narrowness at his waist. The untucked shirttails, thankfully, covered most of the enticing curve of his bottom but clung to strength of his legs, set wide. His feet were still sexily bare.

Angie felt an almost animal awareness of how beautifully he was made, how mouthwateringly masculine he was. It made the mess all around him fade.

He turned from the oven to her. She hoped it wasn’t the little gasp of pure weakness that rose in her throat and escaped past her lips, like a sigh of longing, that turned him.

He swung around to her, and her sense of being too aware of how beautifully he was made, intensified. The shadow of whiskers on his cheeks and chin had darkened even more. His features were honed and masculine and perfect.

She knew she had been traveling, and her appearance was probably disheveled. She had been so eager to see him she had not even stopped to run a comb through her hair or dab a bit of lipstick on her lips. She put a hand to her tangled hair. His eyes followed her hand, his gaze so dark and direct it sent a delighted shiver up and down her spine.

Stop it, she ordered herself. They had things to say to each other. Or at least, she had things to say to him. But the awareness that hissed in the air between them, like static, like the coming of a storm, was distracting.

A blackened, smoldering chunk of something was dangling from a fork in his hand.

“Is that on fire?” she asked, dragging her eyes away from the piercing gray-blue of his eyes to the welcome distraction of what he held in his hand.

He looked down at the chicken breast, turned quickly and tossed it into the sink before swiveling back to her. “Of course not.”

She sniffed the air and raised an eyebrow at him.

He frowned. “Smoldering.”

“Ah.”

“Prefire, at best.”

“Of course.”

“The smoke detectors didn’t even go off.”

“Maybe they aren’t working properly,” she said, and that earned her a scowl. “Have you tested them recently?”

He was silent.

“I’ll add it to my list of things to do,” she decided out loud.

“Your things to do?” he sputtered.

“How did the photo shoot go?”

“Swimmingly,” he bit out.

She hazarded a few steps in, stopped at the kitchen island and lifted the upside-down muffin tin with cautious fingers. Gluey strings tried to hold it to the counter top, but she succeeded at flipping it over. She stared down. The openings were filled with half-cooked batter that had evidently risen over the confines of the wells provided for them.

“What on earth were you trying to accomplish?” she finally managed to ask him, lifting her eyes to his.

“I had a sudden inexplicable need to lower my sodium intake,” he said, crossing his arms defensively over his chest and glaring at her as if this was all her fault.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I went away.”

He lifted a shoulder as if he didn’t care. “You can go away again,” he said, his voice hoarse, his posture so stiff it looked as though the tiniest nudge would break him in two. “Clearly, I don’t need you.”

“Clearly,” she agreed softly.

He glared at her with suspicion. He nodded at his mess as if it were a success. “Your presence is unnecessary,” he said, lifting his chin in defiance of the wreckage all around him. “I am quite capable of looking after myself.”

“Yes,” she said soothingly. “Yes. I can clearly see—”

A terrible little giggle escaped her. She tried to stifle it by putting her fist to her lips. It didn’t work.

“I wanted the chicken like that. Blackened.”

She swallowed hard and spoke over her fist. “Of...course...you...did.” Between the words were the strangled remnants of suppressed laughter. She really had said quite enough, but she felt compelled to add, “And the desire to cook...muffins came from?”

“Men,” he informed her proudly, “are extremely suggestible animals, particularly when it comes to food. I wanted a muffin, I saw no reason I should not make one for myself.”

“A statement of independence,” she said.

He looked annoyed at her deduction.

Laughter. It had become, until a few weeks ago, as foreign to her as a forgotten language. Her life had been so strained. She had lived with the extreme tension of feeling hunted and not safe. All that had changed. Her laughter died when she realized that Jefferson was not in any way, shape or form sharing her enjoyment. In fact, Jefferson Stone looked downright grim.

“I wasn’t laughing at you,” she said, contrite. “It’s just that it feels so good to be here. And so right.”

Jefferson frowned at that. In case she mistook his silence as an invitation to exchange confidences, he looked long and hard at her, and then gave his head a shake. “I can’t see how this is possibly going to work,” he muttered.

“We could give it a free trial,” she suggested softly.

“I already told you. I don’t need you.”

“If you decide it’s not what you want, I’ll refund your misery.”

“I told you,” he said, “I don’t need you.”

“What if it’s not about need, Jefferson? What if it’s not about what either of us needs?”

He didn’t say anything.

“What if it’s about want? About wanting a different kind of life, not needing it?”

He looked unimpressed. How he reminded her of the man who had first stood in his doorway, arms folded over his chest, his one word—nope—hanging between them.

She hadn’t let his attitude stop her then, and she wasn’t going to let it stop her now. Just like then, it felt as if her life depended on changing that nope to something else. “Can I tell you what I see?”

“Please don’t,” he said, his voice hard and cold.

She smiled, because she had already seen beyond that mask. She had already seen the strength and the decency that were at his very core.

“I see a man,” she said quietly and firmly, “who despite his dizzying career and financial success, lives with an abject sense of failure. I see a man who viewed himself as helpless when it counted the most, when he most wanted to be powerful.

“I see a man who has suffered way too much loss, and all that loss has left him feeling guarded about love, unwilling to risk such terrifying powerlessness and loss again.

“I see a man who doesn’t need love but who wants it desperately. And yet he’ll say no to that—to rediscovering the richness of his emotional life, to learning to laugh again—because the risk of pain seems like too great a risk.”

“It is. Too. Great. A. Risk. And I don’t want to talk to you about risks. How could you have done that? Put yourself in the path of that psychopath?”

“I had to.”

“But why?”

“Because I was like the Cowardly Lion, I had to find my courage.”

He snorted.

“Because there is no love without courage. To choose love? Even though it has wounded you? That is the greatest courage of all.”

Angie heard the firmness in her voice, the new strength of a woman who had found the courage to face down her own fears—all of them. “It’s the only risk worth taking. The tremendous payoff is worth the risk. The payoff is love.”

* * *

When Angie had laughed he had known the gig was up. The minute he had let her in that door, all those weeks ago, he had opened up a whole world of danger to himself.

Her laughter had shown him, all too clearly, who she really was.

And who she really was? Vivacious and fun, alight with life. Smart. Capable. And now this added element: pure, unadulterated courage. What could be more dangerous to his shut-down world than someone like her who was willing to grow and change, to let life teach her all its lessons, both easy and hard? What could be more threatening to the comforting darkness he had come to live in, than her promise of light?

Still, he tried. He cleared his throat.

“Let’s look at the facts,” he said.

She wrinkled her nose at him. He hated it that she did that. It made her look so adorably cute.

He cleared his throat. She had been back in his house less than three minutes and he was already reacting to her.

“That moment of madness when I decided I was capable of making muffins?”

“You totally miss me,” she said.

He scowled at her. “It is the result of your intrusion on my world, influencing me, filling me with a desire to prove things that did not need proving a mere month ago!”

He had thought, when she had first arrived, that it was only for two weeks. That was all. He’d been clear about that. A man could handle anything for two short weeks.

She moved toward him. He had plenty of opportunity to move away. Plenty. But he did not.

She came and stood before him. Everything she was, was before him. It was in her eyes, sparkling with unshed tears, and in her posture and in her exquisitely beautiful but tentative smile. She was courage and she was delicacy. She was strength and she was tenderness. She was tears and she was laughter.

She was offering him a world that would go from black-and-white to full color; she was offering him a world that would go from bleak to glorious. All of that was in her as she reached out her hand and cupped his jawline, her fingers stretching out to touch his cheekbones.

He froze. He could feel the utter tenderness of her touch. In her shining eyes was love and acceptance. He understood every man dreams of such a thing, without knowing that it was his greatest longing.

Jefferson Stone’s strength completely failed him, crumbled like rock from an ancient wall.

Or maybe that was not it. Maybe that was not it at all. Maybe it was that his strength was replaced with the courage she had talked about. And that courage unfurled within him like a flag that had felt the wind.

The wind was her love, showing him all that he could be and all that they could be and all that their world could be.

Because, instead of moving away from the promise of her touch, he moved toward it. He covered her hand with his, and then he guided her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingertips with the reverence of recognition.

Of who this amazing woman was and what she was offering him.

She felt his moment of surrender. Her eyes widened, and the tears were finally freed. Her mouth formed the most delectable little O. And then she was crying, and laughing at the same time.

He gathered her in his arms and felt the pure homecoming of his heart finding its way back. He whispered his thanks to her and to the universe and to whatever forces had guided them toward this moment.

This exquisite moment, when all the world stopped, when every other single thing fell away in insignificance, when all the world bowed before the glory of it.

When all the world acknowledged that there really was only one truth.

And that one truth was love.

EPILOGUE

JEFFERSON STONE WENT and stood at the window for a moment. The moody waters of the main body of the lake were swathed in the chill gray cloud of winter, but the water at the edges of the sheltered bays was freezing up nicely.

The wind howled under the eaves of the house and tossed pebbles of slanting snow against the window. Here, inside, the contrast was sharp and delicious. The house was warm and cozy. He could smell pumpkin pie cooking. December would not be everyone’s favorite time to be on the lake, but it was his.

Had December always been his favorite month, with its mercurial weather changes, and with skating on the lake and Christmas right around the corner? Probably it had not been. Once, he had wandered away, like a man lost, from the magic of all those things.

He and Angie had married on Christmas Day. He had offered her the big spring wedding, knowing that dream had been yanked from her once without warning.

But Angie had said no, that wasn’t her dream anymore. She said a big wedding was about a day, but loving each other was about a lifetime. And she had been so impatient! She was not about to wait until spring.

So, instead of a church and a dinner, instead of all those traditions she had once longed for, they had done as his grandmother had once done, and sent out a blanket invitation to spend Christmas with them. It had been like the days of old, the house filled to overflowing with joy and love. The wedding had been a surprise for most of their guests. A few, like Maggie, had been in on the secret.

So, after dinner, with only a few in the know, they had gone outside and lit a bonfire against the gathering darkness. Jefferson stood at the bonfire, down by the shores of the freshly frozen edges of the lake.

He still smiled with remembered delight as he thought of the surprised faces of their friends and neighbors when Maggie’s granddaughter had begun to play the wedding march on her flute. The notes had been so clear and beautiful on the crisp air that it had stunned their guests into silence. And then Pastor Michael had appeared, on cue, in his full vestments.

And then, the music had fallen away, and a pregnant sense of waiting had filled the gathering with a delightful sense of anticipation. Snow had fallen from the limb of a tree and landed with a poof of magic that had drawn all eyes there.

And there Angie had stood, at the edge of the old-growth forest, looking like an enchantment, looking every inch the angel he had always known she was, splendid in a white dress and a beautiful fur cape. Those curls had been sewn with tiny snowdrops, and she had come to him, through a path in the snow, her eyes never leaving his face, holding promises he could not have ever anticipated for himself.

They had spoken their vows on the shores of the lake, and now that spot was, forever, the most sacred of places. He could see it from where he stood at the window, now.

They had lit torches around the lake and strapped on skates, and that was where he had had the first dance with her. That year, the lake had frozen like glass, and they had been able to see the dark water far beneath them as they glided along. They had fire-roasted marshmallows instead of cake, and one of their friends had brought a guitar. They had sat by the fire singing and listening to the guitar and the flute dance with each other as the stars came out. He could not think of that day without his throat closing with pure emotion at how real every single moment of it had been.

Could it really have been three years this month? Sometimes he longed to stop the race of time, to hold each moment in his hand so that he could feel it more deeply, savor what he had been given.

He heard a shriek of laughter and grimaced good-naturedly. He turned back to what he was doing: painting this room a delicate shade of white that had the faintest blush of pink in it.

“It’s the very same color,” he had groused to Angie when she had shown it to him.

“No,” she had said, “it’s not,” and so that had become the color of the nursery. He slid a little glance at the crib he had assembled yesterday and he gulped.

Were they ready for this? Could you ever be ready?

Angie had said to him once, on the most important day of his life, that there was no love without courage. She had said that to choose love, even though it wounded, was the greatest courage of all.

But in a month, they were going to have a baby in this room, in that crib with its bumpers and blankets with vivid pink monkeys cavorting across the fabric as if it was all fun, somehow. Fun? A real, live, breathing, cooing, little girl. He was not at all sure he had the courage for this.

Not just for bringing the baby home, but for the first day of kindergarten, and for wiping away tears because some boy had been mean to her, and for deciding whether she should be in hockey or ballet.

Was he ready to be a daddy? So much potential for love. And so much potential for loss. And so much potential for the place where those two things met.

Because even now, with his baby girl still safe in the womb of her mother, Jefferson ached with awareness.

That there would come a day, when she might want a long, dress of white or she might not, but there would come a day when she would stand in a place of sanctuary, looking at a man who was not her daddy, with an aching love in her eyes.

The laughter came again, floating up the staircases as if the house was overflowing with it.

Jefferson contemplated that. His house, once a lonely fortress on a rock, was filled with the sounds of his friends and neighbors, gathering from far and wide to celebrate Christmas here at the Stone House. It was remarkably easy to breathe new life into an old tradition. But then, really, Angie made so much look remarkably easy.

Angie had never returned to teaching home economics in high school. Instead, after they had married, she had started an organization called Prom-n-Aid.

She remembered, so clearly, being the child of a single parent, unable to afford what other girls could have. Trust Angie to turn this into her gift to the world. She proudly headed an organization that did not give girls dresses, but showed them how to create them.

“I don’t just want to give them a dress,” Angie had told him in that earnest way of hers. “I want them to discover the power of their own creativity—their ability to use the force of creativity to make the world match their dreams.”

But really, for all those words, it was just a variation on love.

It had grown unbelievably. Angie taught seminars to teachers and clubs all over North America, showing them how to get sponsors to donate everything from thread to tiaras, how to reach out to the girls who needed this the most.

“There you are!”

Jefferson turned slightly. His wife—would he ever get accustomed to those words in relation to Angie—was glowing. For some reason, pregnancy had made her hair even curlier. How he loved the wild chaos of her hair. The maternity dress was of her own design, proudly hugging the huge roundness of her belly. She had been talking lately about starting a maternity division of Prom-n-Aid.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered of the color.

“It’s the same as it was before,” he said, just for the sake of argument, even though he could clearly see it wasn’t. The new shade had a delicacy and warmth that the old one had not had.

“Are you hiding?” she demanded, ignoring his invitation to argue with him, her eyes twinkling with the knowledge that she had his number.

“No. I just wanted to finish it, in case.”

She did not accept his answer, watching him.

“Maybe,” he admitted. “Maybe I’m hiding.”

“Why?” she whispered.

He put his hand to his face and pinched his nose at the bridge, as if he could stop the emotion he was feeling. “I don’t want everyone to see how scared I am to have this baby.”

Angie came and tugged his hand away and looked at him in that way of hers that made him feel as if he was the strongest man in the universe.

And just like that, something flared between them, the something that never cooled or grew old. That allowed his wife to wrap him around her finger!

He carefully balanced the paintbrush on the open tin and left his hand in hers.

He heard the noises from downstairs again, and Maggie’s laughter rose, joyous, above the others. She was so happy for him. They all were. It was as if he and Angie’s love had become a part of the house, and it drew people here, into its circle. This is what love did.

It expanded. It gave back. It served.

It made the world better in ways that were too numerous to count, in ways that were as infinite as the stars in the sky.

Suddenly, he didn’t feel afraid of having his own little girl at all.

Suddenly, he knew the biggest truth. His wife, his beautiful, wise, funny wife, could be wrong sometimes.

She had said, on the day she had come back for him, on the day she had refused to sacrifice him to the abyss of loneliness he would have chosen, that there was no love without courage. She had said to choose love, even when it wounded you, was the greatest courage of all.

But now, Jefferson saw a deeper truth.

It wasn’t the greatest kind of courage, after all.

Choosing love was the only kind of courage.

“Are you ready?” Angie said.

She could have meant anything. Was he ready to join the others? Was he ready for Christmas dinner? Was he ready to welcome a baby into their lives?

“Yes,” Jefferson said. He said it to the bigger question, the one that required the only kind of courage.

He said yes, again, just as he had three years ago, to the force that humbled a man completely, that was so much larger than anything he could ever be, that had plans for him that were so much bigger than anything he could have ever planned for himself. Jefferson Stone said yes to love.

* * * * *

Larenzo’s Christmas Baby

Kate Hewitt

‘What are you hiding from me, Emma?’

‘Nothing …’ But it sounded feeble.

Larenzo took another step towards her. ‘Tell me the truth. You’re hiding something. I don’t know what it could be, but—’

‘What do you think I’m hiding from you?’ She cut him off scornfully. She nodded towards the stairs. ‘A baby?’

The words hung there, seeming to echo through the sudden silence of the room. Larenzo stared at her, saw how bloodless her lips were as they parted soundlessly. The thought hadn’t fully formed in his mind until she’d said the words. He’d sensed she was hiding something, had felt her panic and fear, had heard a baby cry … And yet it hadn’t all come together for him.

But it did now, crystallising with shocking clarity, and without a word for her he turned from the room and bounded up the stairs.

‘Larenzo—’ She hurried after him, one arm flung towards him in desperate supplication. ‘Larenzo, please, don’t—’

He could hear the child crying, the voice pitiful and plaintive.

‘Mama. Mama.’

He threw open the door and came to a complete and stunned halt as he saw the baby standing in her cot, chubby fists gripping the rail, cherubic face screwed up and wet with tears.

And Larenzo knew. He would have known just by looking at the child, with her ink-dark hair and large grey eyes, the cleft in her chin. He turned to Emma, who was gazing at him with undisguised panic.

‘When,’ he asked in a low, deadly voice, ‘were you going to tell me about my child?’

One Night With Consequences

When one night … leads to pregnancy!

When succumbing to a night of unbridled desire it’s impossible to think past the morning after!

But, with the sheets barely settled, that little blue line appears on the pregnancy test and it doesn’t take long to realise that one night of white-hot passion has turned into a lifetime of consequences!

Only one question remains:

How do you tell a man you’ve just met that you’re about to share more than just his bed?

Find out in:

Nine Months to Redeem Him by Jennie Lucas January 2015

Prince Nadir’s Secret Heir by Michelle Conder March 2015

Carrying the Greek’s Heir by Sharon Kendrick April 2015

Married for Amari’s Heir by Maisey Yates July 2015

Bound by the Billionaire’s Baby by Cathy Williams July 2015

From One Night to Wife by Rachael Thomas September 2015

Her Nine Month Confession by Kim Lawrence September 2015

Look for more One Night With Consequences coming soon!

If you missed any of these fabulous stories, they can be found at millsandboon.co.uk

After spending three years as a die-hard New Yorker, KATE HEWITT now lives in a small village in the English Lake District with her husband, their five children and a golden retriever. In addition to writing intensely emotional stories she loves reading, baking, and playing chess with her son—she has yet to win against him, but she continues to try.

Learn more about Kate at www.kate-hewitt.com.

CHAPTER ONE

THE SOUND OF the car door slamming echoed through the still night. Emma Leighton looked up from the book she’d been reading in surprise; as housekeeper of Larenzo Cavelli’s isolated retreat in the mountains of Sicily, she hadn’t been expecting anyone. Larenzo was in Rome on business, and no one came to the villa perched high above Sicily’s dusty hill towns and villages. Her employer liked his privacy.

She heard brisk footsteps on the stone path that led to the villa’s front door, an enormous thing of solid oak banded with iron. She tensed, waiting for a knock; the villa had an elaborate security system with a numbered code that was only known by her and Larenzo, and the door was locked, as Larenzo always insisted.

She held her breath as she heard the creak of the door opening and then the beep of buttons being pressed, followed by a longer beeping indicating the security system had been deactivated. As her heart did a queasy little flip, Emma tossed her book aside and rose from her chair. Larenzo never came back early or unexpectedly. He always texted her, to make sure she had everything ready for his arrival: his bed made with freshly ironed sheets, the fridge stocked, the pool heated. But if it wasn’t him...who was it?

She heard footsteps coming closer, a heavy, deliberate tread, and then a figure, tall and rangy, appeared in the doorway.

‘Larenzo—’ Emma pressed one hand to her chest as she let out a shaky laugh of relief. ‘You scared me. I wasn’t expecting you.’

‘I wasn’t expecting to come here.’ He stepped into the spacious sitting room of the villa, and as the lamplight washed over his face Emma sucked in a shocked breath. Larenzo’s skin looked grey, and there were deep shadows under his eyes. His hair was rumpled, as if he’d driven his hand through the ink-dark strands.

‘Are you—are you all right?’

His mouth twisted in a grim smile. ‘Why, do I not look all right?’

‘No, not really.’ She tried to lighten her words with a smile, but she really was alarmed. In the nine months she’d been Larenzo’s housekeeper, she’d never seen him look like this, not just tired or haggard, but as if the life force that was so much a part of who he was, that restless, rangy energy and charisma, had drained away.

‘Are you ill?’ she asked. ‘I can get you something...’

‘No. Not ill.’ He let out a hollow laugh. ‘But clearly I must look terrible.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact, yes, you do.’

‘Thank you for your honesty.’

‘Sorry—’

‘Don’t be. I can’t bear lies.’ A sudden, savage note had entered his voice, making Emma blink. Larenzo crossed the room to the liquor cabinet in the corner. ‘I need a drink.’

She watched as he poured himself a large measure of whisky and then tossed it back in one burning swallow. His back was to her, the silk of his suit jacket straining against his shoulders and sinewy back. He was an attractive man, a beautiful man even, with his blue-black hair and piercing grey eyes, his tall, powerful body always encased in three-thousand-euro suits.

Emma had admired his form the way you admired Michelangelo’s David, as a work of art. She had decided when she’d taken this job that she wasn’t going to make the mistake of developing some schoolgirl crush on her boss. Larenzo Cavelli was out of her league. Way, way out of her league. And, if the tabloids were true, he had a different woman on his arm and in his bed every week.

‘I wasn’t expecting you until the end of the month,’ she said.

‘I had a change of plans.’ He took out the stopper in the crystal decanter of whisky and poured himself another healthy measure. ‘Obviously.’

She didn’t press the point, because, while they’d developed a fairly amicable working relationship over the last nine months, he was still her boss. She couldn’t actually say she knew Larenzo Cavelli. Since she’d taken the job as housekeeper he’d come to the villa only three times, never more than for a couple of days. He mostly lived in Rome, where he kept an apartment, or travelled for work as CEO of Cavelli Enterprises.

‘Very well,’ she finally said. ‘Will you be staying long?’

He drained his glass for a second time. ‘Probably not.’

‘Well, the night at least,’ she answered briskly. She didn’t know what was going on with Larenzo, whether it was a business deal gone bust or a love affair gone bad, or something else entirely, but she could still do her job. ‘The sheets on your bed are clean. I’ll go switch the heating on for the pool.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Larenzo answered. He put his empty glass on the table with a clink. ‘There’s no need.’

‘It’s no trouble,’ Emma protested, and Larenzo shrugged, his back to her.

‘Fine. Maybe I’ll have one last swim.’

His words replayed through her mind as she left him and walked through the spacious, silent rooms of the villa to the back door that led to a brick terrace overlooking the mountains, a teardrop-shaped pool as its impressive centrepiece. One last swim. Was he planning on leaving, on selling the villa?

Emma gazed out at the Nebrodi mountains and shivered slightly, for the air still held a pine-scented chill.

All was quiet save for the rustling of the wind high up in the trees. Larenzo’s villa was remote, miles from the nearest market town, Troina; in the daylight Emma could see its terracotta-tiled houses and shops nestled in the valley below. She went there several times a week to shop and socialise; she had a couple of friends amidst the Sicilian shopkeepers and matrons.

If Larenzo was planning on selling the villa, she’d miss living here. She never stayed anywhere long, and she would have probably started feeling restless in a few months anyway, but... She glanced once more at the night-cloaked hills and valleys, the mellow stone of the villa perched on its hill gleaming in the moonlight. She liked living here. It was peaceful, with plenty of subjects to photograph. She’d be sad to leave, if it came to that.

But maybe Larenzo just meant a swim before he left for Rome again. She switched on the heating and then turned to go inside; as she turned a shadowy form loomed up in front of her and her breath came out in a short gasp. She must have swayed or stumbled a little, for Larenzo put his hands on her shoulders to steady her.

They stood like that for a moment in the doorway, his strong hands curling around her shoulders so she could feel the warmth of his palms through the thin cotton of her T-shirt, and how her heart pounded beneath it. She didn’t think he’d ever actually touched her before.

She moved one way, and he moved another, so it was almost as if they were engaged in a struggle or an awkward dance. Then Larenzo dropped his hands from her shoulders and stepped back.

‘Scusi.’

‘My fault,’ she murmured, her heart still thudding, and moved quickly through the kitchen to flick on the lights. Bathed in a bright electric glow, things felt more normal, even if she could still feel the imprint of his hands on her shoulders, so warm and strong. ‘So.’ She turned to him with a quick smile, a brisk look. ‘Have you eaten? I can make you something.’

He looked as if he was about to refuse, and then he shrugged. ‘Why not? I’ll go change while you cook.’

‘What would you like to eat?’

Another shrug as he turned away. ‘Whatever you make will be fine.’

She watched him disappear down the hallway, her lips pursed in an uncertain frown. She’d never seen Larenzo like this. Not that they’d actually had that much conversation, beyond discussing pool maintenance and house repairs. But even when talking about such mundane matters, Larenzo Cavelli had exuded a compelling charisma and energy, a life force. He was a man who, when entering a room, made everyone turn and take notice. Men tried to suppress their envy, and women undressed him with their eyes. Emma counted herself as wilfully immune to the man’s magnetic vitality, but its absence now made her uneasy.

Her frown deepening, Emma opened the fridge and stared at the few items inside. She always did a big shop right before Larenzo arrived; she bought all the ingredients for gourmet meals for one and made them for him to eat alone, usually out on the terrace overlooking the mountains.

Now she glanced askance at the half-dozen eggs, a few slices of pancetta and the end of a wedge of cheese that comprised the entire contents of the fridge. With a sigh she took it all out. A bacon and cheese omelette it was.

She was just sliding it onto a plate when Larenzo came downstairs, dressed now in faded jeans and a grey T-shirt, his hair damp and spiky from a shower. She’d seen him casually dressed before, many times, but for some reason now, perhaps because of how different Larenzo seemed, her heart gave a weird little flip and she felt awareness shiver over her skin. Clearly he still possessed some of that charisma and vitality, for she felt the force of it now.

‘Sorry it’s just an omelette,’ she said. ‘I’ll do a big shop tomorrow.’

‘That won’t be necessary.’

‘But—’

“Aren’t you going to join me?’ He arched an eyebrow, nodding towards the single plate she’d laid out, a challenge simmering in his eyes.

In the handful of times he’d been at the villa, Larenzo had never asked her to eat with him. The two of them alone on the terrace would have been awkward, intimate, and Emma happily ate leftovers in the kitchen, one of her photography books propped against the salt and pepper shakers.

‘Um...I’ve already eaten,’ she said after a second’s pause. It had to be past ten o’clock at night.

‘Come have a glass of wine. I don’t feel like being alone.’

Was that a command? Emma shrugged her assent; she wouldn’t mind a glass of wine, and perhaps Larenzo would tell her what was going on.

‘Okay,’ she said, and she fetched two glasses while Larenzo selected a bottle of red wine from the rack above the sink.

While Larenzo took his plate of eggs out to the terrace, Emma retrieved her sweater from the sitting room, slipping her arms through the sleeves as she stepped outside. The moon was high and full above the pine-blanketed hills, the Nebrodi range’s highest peak, Mount Soro, piercing the night sky. Larenzo was already seated at a table overlooking the pool, the water glimmering in the moonlight, but he rose as Emma came forward with the two glasses and proffered the bottle of wine. She nodded her assent and sat down while he poured.

‘This is very civilised,’ she said as she accepted the glass.

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Larenzo answered. ‘Well, let’s enjoy it while we can.’ He raised his glass in a toast and Emma lifted hers as well before taking a sip. The wine was rich and velvety-smooth, clearly expensive, but she put her glass down after one sip and gave her boss as direct a look as she could.

‘You’re sure everything is all right?’

‘As right as it can be,’ Larenzo answered, taking a sip of wine.

‘What does that mean?’

He set his glass down and stretched his legs out in front of him. ‘Exactly that. But I don’t want to talk about myself, not tonight. For a few hours I’d just like to forget.’

Forget what? Emma wondered, but clearly Larenzo didn’t want her to ask.

‘You’ve been my housekeeper for nearly a year and I don’t really know the first thing about you,’ he continued, and Emma stared at him in surprise.

‘You want to talk about me?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because...well, because you’ve never expressed an interest in knowing anything about me before. And actually, I’m quite a boring person.’

He smiled, his teeth gleaming in the darkness. ‘Let me be the judge of that.’

Emma shook her head slowly. This evening was becoming almost surreal. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Where did you grow up?’

An innocuous enough question, she supposed. ‘Everywhere, really. I was a diplomat’s kid.’

‘I think I remember you mentioning that in your interview.’ He’d interviewed her in Rome, where she’d been working as a chambermaid in a hotel, just one in a string of jobs she’d had as she moved from city to city, exploring the world and taking photographs.

‘And you haven’t minded being stuck up here in the hills of Sicily?’ he asked, his wine glass raised to his lips. ‘All by yourself?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m used to being on my own.’ And she preferred it that way. No ties, no obligations, no disappointments. The occasional bout of loneliness was not too high a price to pay for that kind of freedom.

‘Even so.’

‘You obviously like it,’ she pointed out. ‘Since you own this place.’

‘Yes, but I travel and spend time in cities. I’m not up here all the time.’

‘Well, as I said, I like it.’ For now, anyway. She never remained anywhere for too long, always preferring to move on, to find new experiences, and from the sceptical look on Larenzo’s face he seemed to guess a bit of her natural wanderlust.

‘Have you met anyone up here?’ he asked. ‘Made friends?’

‘A few people down in Troina.’

‘That’s something, I suppose. What do you do for fun up here?’

Emma shrugged. ‘Walk. Swim. Read. I’m easily entertained, fortunately.’

‘Yes.’ He gazed out at the mountains and Emma had the sense he was thinking about something else, something painful.

‘But it’s not the kind of job you’d stay in for ever,’ he said at last.

‘Are you trying to get rid of me?’ she asked lightly. She’d meant it as a joke but Larenzo took the question seriously.

‘No, definitely not. But if something were to happen...’ He trailed off, his gaze still on the hills, and Emma set down her wine glass.

‘Larenzo, are you thinking of selling this place?’

‘Not selling it, no.’

‘But something,’ she pressed. ‘What’s going on, really? Do I need to start looking for another job?’

He let out a long, low breath and raked his hands through his hair. ‘Whatever happens, I’ll make sure to give you a good reference.’

‘What are you talking about, whatever happens?’ Emma shook her head. ‘I don’t understand you.’

‘I know, and I don’t want to explain it now. It will all become clear soon enough.’ He nodded towards the pool. ‘How about a swim?’

‘A swim?’ Emma glanced at the pool, the water glimmering in the moonlight. ‘It’s a bit cold for me.’

‘Not for me,’ he said, and she watched in amazement as he stripped off his shirt and jeans and, clad only in his boxer shorts, dived into the pool.

The splash echoed through the still air and Emma watched, shivering slightly, as Larenzo swam the length of the pool before surfacing and slicking back the wet hair from his face.

‘Come in,’ he called. ‘The water’s lovely.’

Emma shook her head. ‘I only just turned the heating on. It’s got to be freezing.’

‘Even so.’ He arched an eyebrow, his mouth curling in a smile that was pure temptation. Emma’s gaze was inexorably drawn to his bare chest, all lean, rippling muscle, his bronzed skin beaded with water. ‘Dare you.’

Emma hadn’t thought this evening could get any more surreal. But swimming with her boss in a freezing pool?

‘Come on, Emma.’ He held out his hand. ‘Just jump in.’ Heat simmered in his eyes and she felt an answering stab of lust through her middle.

This was so foolish, so dangerous, and yet...the sight of Larenzo in the pool, nearly naked with moonlight streaming over his body and droplets of water twinkling like diamonds on his bronzed skin, was hard to resist. And already this evening felt separate from reality, a time apart.

‘Chicken?’ he taunted, his eyes and teeth glinting in the darkness, and Emma laughed.

‘You really want to get me in that pool.’

‘I want someone to swim with.’

Excitement licked through her veins. She didn’t think Larenzo was coming on to her; he never had before. And yet...

‘Fine,’ she said, and, shrugging off her sweater, she dived fully clothed into the deep end.

She surfaced, sucking in a hard breath, because the water really was cold. ‘And now I’m getting out,’ she told him as she trod water. ‘It’s as freezing as I thought it would be.’

‘I didn’t think you’d do it,’ he said, laughter threading his voice, and Emma was glad that she’d managed to distract him from whatever had been bothering him, even if she got hypothermia in the process.

‘You thought wrong,’ she said, and swam towards the edge of the pool. With her wet clothes weighing her down it was hard to haul herself up on the pool’s edge.

And then she felt Larenzo behind her, his hands on her shoulders, the strength and heat of him just inches from her back. She sucked in a shocked breath as he slid his hands to her waist and helped her up.

She flopped inelegantly on the side of the pool and then scrambled to her knees, amazed at how much that one little touch had affected her. She shivered, for with her soaked clothes the night air now felt icy.

‘Here.’ Larenzo hauled himself up and went to the heated cupboard for several towels. ‘Wrap yourself up.’

‘I should really change,’ she said. She glanced down at herself and saw that her T-shirt was sticking to her skin, revealing even the floral pattern on her bra, her nipples peaked from the cold. ‘Thanks,’ she muttered, and clutched the towel to her chest.

Larenzo’s gaze hadn’t dropped to her chest, but his mouth curved all the same and again Emma felt another kick of excitement. She retreated back to the table, the towel still clutched to her chest.

‘I should go to bed.’

‘Don’t go quite yet,’ Larenzo answered. He slung the towel over his shoulders and sat down across from her, pouring them both more wine. Emma eyed the full glass and Larenzo’s bare chest, his perfectly formed pecs flexing as he moved, and felt as if she’d just jumped into the deep end of an entirely different kind of pool.

‘I’m freezing—’ she began and he nodded towards the cupboard.

‘There are towelling robes in there. Change out of your wet things. I don’t want you catching cold.’

‘Larenzo...’ Emma began, although she didn’t know what she was going to say. Why was she protesting so much, anyway? Chatting in the moonlight with a devastatingly attractive man was no hardship. And it wasn’t as if Larenzo was going to make a move. He might have dared her to jump in the pool, but she was pretty sure her boss didn’t mix business with pleasure.

Even if she wanted him to...

‘Fine,’ she said, and retreated to the towelling cupboard. With the door serving as a screen between her and Larenzo, she tugged off her wet clothes and wrapped herself in the heated dressing gown. The sleeves hung past her hands and the sash trailed the ground, but at least she was warm again. She doubted she’d provide any sort of temptation to Larenzo now.

‘Tell me your favourite place you lived in as a child,’ Larenzo commanded as she sat down across from him and picked up her wine glass—he’d filled it again, while she’d been changing.

Emma considered for a moment. Answering questions, at least, kept her from gawping at Larenzo’s chest. Why on earth she was feeling this unwelcome attraction for him now, she had no idea. Perhaps it was simply the strangeness of the evening, his unexpected arrival, his demand for her company. ‘Krakow, I suppose,’ she said finally. ‘I spent two years there when I was ten. It’s a beautiful city.’ And those years had been the last ones where she’d felt part of a family, before her mother had announced her decision to leave. But she didn’t want to think, much less talk, about that. ‘Where did you grow up?’ she asked, and Larenzo swirled the wine in his glass, his expression hardening slightly as he gazed down into its ruby depths.

‘Palermo.’

‘Hence the villa in Sicily, I suppose.’

‘It is my home.’

‘But you live most of the time in Rome.’

‘Cavelli Enterprises is headquartered there.’ He paused, his shuttered gaze on the darkened mountains, the moon casting a lambent glow over the wooded hills. ‘In any case, I never much liked Palermo.’

‘Why not?’

He pressed his lips together. ‘Too many hard memories.’

He didn’t seem inclined to say anything more, and Emma eyed him curiously, wondering at this enigmatic man who clearly had secrets she’d never even guessed at before.

Larenzo gazed round the terrace, the patio furniture now no more than shadowy shapes in the darkness, and then turned to look once more at the mountains. ‘I’ll miss it here,’ he said, so quietly Emma almost didn’t hear him.

‘So you are thinking of leaving,’ she said, and Larenzo didn’t answer for a long moment.

‘Not thinking of it, no,’ he said, and then seemed to shake off his weary mood, his gaze snapping back to her. ‘Thank you, Emma, for the food and also for your company. You’ve done more for me than you could possibly know.’

Emma stared at him helplessly. ‘If there’s anything else I can do...’

To her shock he touched her cheek with his hand, his fingers cool against her flushed face. ‘Bellissima,’ he whispered, and the endearment stole right through her. ‘No,’ he said, and dropped his hand from her face. ‘You’ve done enough. Thank you.’ And then, taking his plate and his glass, he rose from his chair and left her sitting on the terrace alone.

Emma sat there for a few moments, shivering a little in the chilly air despite the dressing gown. She wished she could have comforted Larenzo somehow, but she had no idea what was going on, and she wasn’t sure he’d welcome her sympathy anyway. He was a proud, hard man, caught in a moment of weakness. He’d probably regret their whole conversation tomorrow.

Sighing, she took the wine bottle and glasses from the table and headed inside. Larenzo had already gone upstairs; the lights were off, the house locked up. After rinsing out the dishes and switching on the dishwasher Emma went upstairs as well.

She paused for a moment on the landing; Larenzo’s master bedroom was to the right, her own smaller room the last on the left. She heard nothing but the wind high up in the trees, and she couldn’t see any light underneath Larenzo’s doorway. Even so she had a mad urge to knock on his door, to say something. But what? They didn’t have that kind of relationship, not remotely, and knocking on Larenzo’s bedroom door, seeing him answer it with his hair rumpled and damp, his chest still bare...

No. That was taking this strange evening a step too far.

Still she hesitated, glancing towards his doorway, and then with a sigh she turned and went to her own bedroom, closing the door behind her.

CHAPTER TWO

HE COULDN’T SLEEP. Hardly a surprise, considering all that had happened in the last few days. Larenzo stared gritty-eyed at the ceiling before, with a sigh, he sat up and swung his legs over the side of his bed.

All around him the house was still and silent. It was nearly two in the morning, and he wondered how long he had left. Would they come for him at dawn, or would they wait for the more civilised hour of eight or nine o’clock in the morning? Either way, it wouldn’t be long. Bertrano had made sure of that.

Letting out another sigh at the thought of the man he’d considered as good as a father, Larenzo slipped from the bedroom and walked downstairs. The rooms of the villa were silent, dark, and empty, and he was loath to turn on a light and disturb the peacefulness. He could have stayed in Rome, but he’d hated the thought of simply waiting for the end, and he’d wanted to have a final farewell for the only place he could call a home. Bertrano would tell them where to find him; the police in Palermo had most likely already been alerted. He had a few hours at most.

And for those few hours he wanted simply to savour what he had. What Bertrano Raguso had given him, although Larenzo had worked hard for it. Ironic, really, that the man who had saved him would also destroy him. Fitting, perhaps.

He ran his hand along the silky-smooth ebony of the grand piano in the music room; he’d bought it because he loved music, but he’d never found the time to learn to play. Now he never would. He played a few discordant notes, the sound echoing through the silent villa, before he moved onto the sitting room, stopping in front of the chessboard on a table by the window, its marble pieces set up for a game he would never play.

He picked up the king, fingering the smooth marble before he laid it down again. Bertrano had taught him how to play chess, and Larenzo had savoured the evenings they’d spent together, heads bent over a chessboard. Why had the man who had treated him like a son turned on him so suddenly? Betrayed him? Had it been a moment’s panicked weakness? But no, it had gone on longer than that, perhaps even months, for Bertrano to lay the paper trail. How had Larenzo not known? Not even guessed?

He glanced at the pawns neatly lined up. In the end he’d served no more purpose than they did. With a sudden burst of helpless rage he struck the pawns, scattering them across the board with a clatter.

The realisation of all he was about to lose hit him then, with sickening force, and he dropped his face in his hands, driving his fingers through his hair, as a single sob racked his body.

Bertrano, how could you do this to me? I loved you. I thought of you as my father.

‘Larenzo?’

He stiffened at the sound of Emma’s uncertain voice, and then he lifted his face from his hands, turning to see her standing in the doorway of the sitting room. She was in her pyjamas, nothing more than boy shorts and a very thin T-shirt; Larenzo could see the outline of her small breasts and he felt an entirely inappropriate stab of lust, just as he had when he’d seen her soaked and dripping in the pool. He hadn’t spared much thought for his housekeeper before tonight, but now he envied her freedom, her ease.

‘Couldn’t you sleep?’ she asked as she came into the room. She glanced at the scattered chess pieces, a silent question in her eyes.

‘No, I couldn’t.’ He turned to the fireplace, where the kindling and logs were already laid for a fire. ‘It’s cold in here,’ he said, and reached for a match to start the blaze. From behind him he could hear Emma righting the chess pieces.

When the fire was cheerily crackling in the hearth he turned to face her; she was touching the pawns he’d knocked over, her head bent, her hair swinging down to hide her face.

‘Fancy a game?’

She looked up in surprise. ‘What?’

He nodded towards the chessboard. ‘Do you play?’

‘I know the rules.’

‘Well, then. It appears neither of us can sleep. Shall we play?’

‘All right,’ she said after a pause, and she sat down in one of the chairs as Larenzo sat in the other.

‘White goes first,’ he told her and she bit her lip, studying the board with a concentration so intense he found it endearing. Again he felt the powerful thrust of attraction. These few hours of enjoyment would be the last pleasure he had for a long while.

Finally she moved her piece, her slender fingers curling around the figure. She glanced up at him, a smile lurking in her eyes, playing with her lips. ‘Why do I have a feeling you’re going to crush me?’

‘You can always live in hope,’ he answered lightly, and moved his pawn.

She laughed, shaking her head. ‘That would be foolish in the extreme.’

‘Perhaps.’ He liked watching her, seeing the way the firelight played over her golden skin, how humour lit her golden-green eyes. He stretched out his legs and his foot brushed her ankle, sending another throb of desire through him.

He thought she felt something too, for her eyes widened and her body tensed briefly before she moved another piece on the board.

They played in silence for a few minutes, the tension spooling out between them. Larenzo brushed her foot again with his own, enjoying the silky slide of her skin. She sucked in a quick breath, her fingers trembling as she moved her rook.

‘I’m four moves away from checkmate,’ he told her, and she let out a shaky laugh.

‘I knew this was going to happen.’ She glanced up at him wryly and he held her gaze, felt the force of the attraction between them. He’d never considered his housekeeper as an object of desire before; employees had always been off limits, and he’d seen her so rarely. But tonight he craved that human connection, the last one that might ever be offered to him. To touch a woman, to give and receive pleasure...

Setting his jaw, Larenzo turned back towards the board. Making love with Emma tonight would be an entirely selfish act. He couldn’t drag her down with him. It was bad enough that he was here at all.

He moved his bishop, and then stilled as he felt Emma’s hand on his own, her skin cool and soft.

‘Larenzo, I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong.’ He didn’t answer, simply stared at her fingers on his. He stroked her palm with his thumb and she shivered in response but did not remove her hand.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said in a low voice, and stroked her palm again. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it, and it’s my own fault anyway.’ For trusting someone he’d loved. For believing someone could have pure motives. For being so bloody naive. So damn stupid.

‘Are you sure I can’t help?’ Emma asked softly. She squeezed his fingers and Larenzo closed his eyes. Her touch was the sweetest torture he’d ever known. He thought of telling her the one way she could help, the one way she could make him forget what dawn would bring. He resisted. He could not be that selfish, not even on the threshold of his own destruction.

‘No, I’m afraid not. No one can.’

Her gaze searched his face and then she rose from her chair. ‘Perhaps I should leave you alone, then.’

‘Wait.’ The single word was wrenched from him. ‘Don’t go.’

He felt her surprise as the silence stretched on. She didn’t move, either backwards or forwards. He bowed his head.

‘I don’t want to be alone tonight,’ he confessed, his voice low, and then she took a step forward, laid her hand on his shoulder once more.

‘You aren’t,’ she said simply.

* * *

Emma didn’t know whether it was Larenzo’s obvious pain or the attraction that had snapped through the air that had compelled her to stay. Perhaps both. She wanted to comfort him, but she couldn’t deny the yearning she had felt uncoil through her body when Larenzo had looked at her with such blatant desire in his eyes. No man had ever looked at her like that before, and it had thrilled her to her core.

The moment stretched on between them as she stood there with her hand still on his shoulder, his head bowed. His skin was warm and smooth underneath her palm, and slowly Larenzo reached up and covered her hand with his own, his fingers twining with hers. The intimacy of the gesture rocked her, sent heat and need and something even deeper and more important spiralling through her. They were simply holding hands, and yet it felt like a pure form of communication, the most intimate thing she’d ever done.

Finally Larenzo broke the moment. He took his hand from hers and turned. Emma could feel the heat rolling off him, inhaled the tangy scent of his aftershave, and desire crashed through her once more. This man was more than a work of art. He was a living, breathing, virile male, and he was close enough for her to touch him. To kiss him. Which she wanted to do, very much.

‘Do you have family, Emma?’ he asked, startling her out of her haze of desire.

‘Y-y-y-yes.’

‘Are you close to them?’ He gazed at her, his silvery eyes searching her, looking for answers. ‘You must not see them very often, living here.’

‘I...’ How to answer that seemingly innocent question? ‘I see my father sometimes. He’s currently posted in Budapest, and we’ve met up occasionally.’

‘And your mother?’

Why was he asking her all these questions? She didn’t want to talk about her family, and certainly not her mother, yet in the darkened intimacy of the room, of the moment, she knew she would answer. ‘No, I’m not close to my mother. My parents divorced when I was twelve, and I didn’t see her much after that.’

‘That must have been hard.’

A small shrug was all she’d allow on that subject, but Larenzo nodded as if she’d said something important and revealing. ‘And siblings? Do you have any sisters or brothers?’

‘One sister, Meghan. She lives in New Jersey, does the whole stay-at-home-mom thing.’ The kind of life she’d deliberately chosen not to pursue or want. ‘We’re close. We Skype.’ She shook her head in confusion. ‘Why are you asking me all this, Larenzo?’

‘Because I never had a real family of my own, and I wondered.’ He turned, his back to her as he gazed at the fire. ‘I wondered how families are. How they’re meant to be.’

‘What happened to your family?’

‘I don’t know. My mother left me to fend for myself when I was young, maybe two or three. An orphanage took me in, run by a convent. Not the nicest place. I ran away when I was eleven. Spent the next few years on the street.’

He recited these facts dispassionately, without any self-pity at all, and somehow that made it all the more terrible. ‘That’s awful. I’m sorry.’ Emma would never have guessed such a past for this man, with his wealth and power and magnetism. ‘Was this in Palermo?’

‘Yes.’

‘Those are hard memories.’

‘Yes.’ He let out a long, low sigh. ‘But let’s not talk about that tonight.’

‘What do you want to talk about?’

‘Anything.’ He sat down on the sheepskin rug in front of the fire, and patted the floor next to him. Emma came to sit across from him, folding her legs underneath her, conscious of the strangeness of this situation: both of them in their pyjamas, the firelight casting pools of light over their skin, and yet of the ease of it too. It felt weirdly natural to sit there with Larenzo, in the dark, with the fire. Surreal and yet somehow right.

‘What do you want to do with your life, Emma?’ he asked as he tossed another log on the fire. ‘I assume you don’t want to be a housekeeper for ever.’

‘Would there be something wrong with that?’

He gave a faint, bemused smile. ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you are a beautiful, capable young woman, and I imagine you want to see more of the world than a remote Sicilian hilltop.’

‘I like to travel,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve moved around a lot already.’

‘As a diplomat’s kid.’

‘Yes, and since I finished school. Itchy feet, I suppose.’

‘What did you study at school?’

‘I did a photography course just for a year, and then I got a backpack and a rail pass and went to see the world.’ Determined to enjoy everything life had to offer, never to be tied down, never to be hurt.

‘Sounds fun.’ He turned to her, an eyebrow arched. ‘I think I’ve seen you with a camera round the place. Have you taken photos here?’

‘Yes...’

‘May I see them?’

She hesitated, because no one had ever seen her photographs. No one had ever asked. And showing them now to Larenzo felt even more intimate than when they’d held hands. She’d be showing him a part of her soul. ‘Okay,’ she finally said. ‘I’ll go get them.’ She hurried up to her bedroom, and then leafed through several folders of photos before selecting a few of her favourites. She brought them back to Larenzo, handing them to him silently.

He studied each one carefully, a slight frown puckering his forehead as Emma waited, nibbling her lip. She realised she wanted him to like them, to understand them, and she held her breath as she waited for his verdict.

‘They’re not holiday snaps,’ he said finally and she let out a little laugh.

‘No.’ She preferred to take candid shots of people, strangers and sometimes friends caught in an unexpected moment, held in thrall by an emotion, whether it was happiness or sorrow or something else.

‘This one.’ He gestured to a portrait of Rosaria, one of the shopkeepers in Troina. She was sitting on a stool in the back of her bakery, her hands on her thighs, her head thrown back, her face a mass of wrinkles as she let out a deep, belly laugh. ‘That’s joy,’ Larenzo said quietly, and Emma’s heart swelled with the knowledge that he did understand, that he’d seen what she’d been trying to capture.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt that.’ He turned to give her a swift, dark glance. ‘Have you?’

Shock rippled through her at the question, and the answer that slipped from her lips without her even realising she was going to say it. ‘No,’ Emma whispered. ‘I don’t think I have.’ She’d travelled the world, climbed mountains, scuba-dived, done a million and one adventurous and amazing things, had always considered herself a happy person...and yet joy? That kind of deep, abiding, real joy?

It had remained beguilingly elusive. And she hadn’t realised it until Larenzo had asked her the question.

‘You have a skill,’ Larenzo said as he turned back to the photographs. ‘A true talent. You shouldn’t squander it.’

‘I’m not—’

‘I mean you should exhibit these.’ He glanced at her, his eyebrows raised. ‘Have you shown them to anyone, to a professional?’

‘You’re the first person who has seen them.’

He held her gaze, his own darkening. ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly, and wordlessly Emma nodded.

The moment spun out, stretching and shifting into something else as their gazes remained locked and Emma’s breath shortened. A log popped in the fireplace and embers scattered across the hearth, but neither of them so much as twitched.

The desire Emma had felt before now crashed over her in an overpowering wave, obliterating rational thought, obscuring everything but this moment. She wanted this man more than she’d ever wanted anything or anyone before, and as she saw the heat blaze in his eyes she realised with a thrill he felt the same.

Slowly, deliberately, Larenzo reached one hand out towards her, his fingers first skimming her cheek and then his palm cradling her face. The warmth of his palm against her cheek felt electric, every nerve ending she had tingling and quivering with awareness. Larenzo’s thumb brushed her mouth, and her lips parted in expectation as a tiny gasp escaped. If he kissed her, she’d be lost. And she knew she wanted to be lost.

His hand tensed briefly against her cheek, and for a terrible second she thought he was going to drop it and move away. This glorious moment would be over. Then he brought his other hand up to frame her face, cradling her between his palms before pulling her inexorably towards him, his lips coming down on hers, soft and hard, cold and hot, everything all at once as a thousand new sensations blazed through her and her mouth opened to his kiss.

Larenzo hauled her towards him, her legs sliding across his as she straddled him, felt the hard press of his arousal against the juncture of her thighs and excitement pulsed hard inside her.

He was kissing her deeply now, with a hungry urgency that Emma felt in herself as she drove her fingers through his hair and pressed even more closely against him, her body arching instinctively as Larenzo pressed back.

After an endless moment that still didn’t seem long enough, Larenzo broke off the kiss, his breath coming out in a rush.

‘I wasn’t going to do that.’

‘I wanted you to do it,’ she whispered. She couldn’t bear it if he stopped now.

He leaned his forehead against hers, their bodies still pressed together, both of their hearts thudding. ‘I want you, Emma. I think I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anyone before.’

A thrill ran through her at this simply stated fact. ‘I want you too.’

‘But I can’t offer you anything other than this night.’ He closed his eyes briefly. ‘A few hours at most. That’s all. That’s all it could ever be.’

‘I know,’ she said softly. When he’d kissed her, she hadn’t thought of anything but the moment, yet she acknowledged now that she’d never have expected some kind of commitment from a man like Larenzo. ‘I don’t want more than this night,’ she told him. ‘I’m not looking for some kind of relationship, Larenzo, trust me. I just want you, tonight.’

He leaned back a little so he could look into her face. ‘If you’re sure...?’

She nodded, amazed at just how sure she was. Everything about this night had been surreal, even magical. This felt, bizarrely and yet completely, like the logical and necessary conclusion. ‘I’m sure.’

‘Then come with me.’ He untangled himself from her and rose from the rug in one fluid movement, holding his hand down to help her up. With their fingers linked he led her silently upstairs to his bedroom.

Emma gazed at the king-sized bed with its navy silk sheets she’d changed herself and felt a tremor of—what? Not fear. Anticipation. And a little nervousness, because, while she was sure, this was still a new experience. An entirely new experience, and she didn’t want to admit to Larenzo just how new it was, how unlike her this decision had been.

He glanced back at her, his fingers still twined with hers. ‘Having second thoughts?’ he asked quietly, his gaze sweeping over her. ‘Cold feet? I wouldn’t mind.’ He let out a ragged laugh. ‘Well, I’d mind, but I’d understand.’

‘I’m not having second thoughts.’ She swallowed, lifted her chin. She wouldn’t tell him about her inexperience. It didn’t matter to her, and she didn’t want it to matter to him, or put him off. ‘Are you?’ she challenged, and he let out a soft huff of laughter.

‘Definitely not.’ He tugged her towards him. ‘Come here, Emma.’

And she came willingly, her breasts pressing against his bare chest as his mouth came down on hers once more and for a few blissful, buzzing seconds she forgot everything but the hunger and need for this, for him.

Larenzo reached down and with one swift tug he had her T-shirt up and over her head; the feel of her breasts brushing the crisp hair on his chest was so intense it almost hurt. She’d never felt so much, felt so alive, not when she’d been on top of a mountain or deep in the ocean. All her adventures paled in light of this.

She let out a gasp that he muffled with his mouth, his hands sliding down her back and then cupping her bottom as he settled her against his arousal.

He moved his mouth from her lips to the curve of her neck, the touch of his tongue against her sensitive skin making her shiver.

Then he drew her to the bed, laying her down on top of the silken sheets and covering her body with his own.

She twined her arms around his neck and arched up towards him, craving the connection of their bodies fused in every place. Of being that close to another person...even if it was just for a single night. A few hours. And she knew Larenzo needed it too, craved it as much as she did. She was giving him herself, the only comfort she could offer him now.

Larenzo slid a hand between her thighs, slipping her pyjama shorts down her legs and then tossing them on the floor. The feel of his fingers against her most sensitive flesh had Emma arching upwards again, her head thrown back as sensations fizzed and popped inside her.

And then they exploded and her breath rushed out on a ragged cry as Larenzo worked magic with his fingers and left her boneless in his arms.

‘Oh...’

‘That’s just to start,’ he promised with a soft laugh, and then he tossed his own pyjama bottoms aside before he slid seamlessly inside her—and then stopped. ‘Emma...’

She saw the confusion on his face, the uncertainty, and knew he’d guessed her inexperience. ‘You haven’t...’ he began slowly and she answered by tilting her hips up.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said fiercely, and as her body found its instinctive rhythm Larenzo matched it, burying his head in the curve of her shoulder as his body surged into hers.

If she’d felt any pain or discomfort, it was long gone as the exquisite friction of Larenzo’s body created a pleasure deeper and fiercer than what she’d already felt at his experienced hands.

She let out another long, ragged cry as the sensations exploded inside her again and with a shudder Larenzo emptied himself into her and then was still.

They lay like that for a few seconds before he wrapped his arms around her and rolled onto his back.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you were a virgin?’ he asked quietly.

Emma could still feel him inside her, still feel the bone-melting ripples of pleasure that had utterly rocked her moments before. ‘Because like I said, it didn’t matter.’

‘I might have done things differently...’

‘I liked the way you did things.’

He laughed softly then, his arms tightening around her. ‘Thank you, Emma,’ he said quietly, and she wasn’t quite sure what he was thanking her for. She propped herself on her elbows to gaze down at him, and saw the ravages of both grief and pleasure on his face. She had no regrets, and yet she still wished she could smooth the furrows of worry from his forehead. She brushed his hair from his eyes instead, savouring the feel of him.

‘I should be thanking you,’ she said, and Larenzo smiled faintly before glancing out at the night sky; the moon was on the wane, dawn only an hour or two away. ‘You should sleep.’

Did he want her to leave? Uncertainly Emma started to roll off him, but Larenzo clasped her to him once more.

‘Stay,’ he said, his voice rough with emotion. ‘Stay until morning.’

And so she did.

CHAPTER THREE

THEY CAME AT DAWN. Larenzo heard the first car drive up, the crunch of gravel, the sound of a car door shutting quietly, as if they were trying to hide their presence. As if they could.

He stilled, every muscle tensing, Emma still in his arms. Emma. He would spare her an ugly scene. She deserved so much more than that, but that was all he could give her now.

Slowly he slipped from the bed, doing his best not to disturb her. She sighed in her sleep and turned, her tousled hair falling across one cheek, a tendril lying across her breast.

He gazed at her for a moment, drinking her in: the golden, freckled skin, the wavy golden-brown hair, her lashes fanned out on her cheeks, although he knew if she opened her eyes, they would be golden-green. His golden girl for a night, gone in the morning.

At least he would be gone.

Quickly Larenzo turned, reaching for his jeans. He pulled on a rugby shirt and ran his hands through his hair, took a deep breath. And looked one last time at Emma, at freedom and happiness, pleasure and peace. He’d known them all with her last night, and now they were nothing but memories. Resolutely he turned from her and left the room.

* * *

Emma awoke to the thud of boots on the stairs, the sound of stomping down the hall. She was still blinking the sleep from her eyes, one hand reaching for the sheet to cover herself, her mind barely processing what she’d heard, when the door was thrown open and three men crowded there, all of them glaring at her. Her heart seemed to still in her chest, everything in her going numb with horror as she stared at these strange men.

‘What—?’

They spoke in rapid Italian, too fast for her to understand, although during her two years in Sicily she’d become fairly conversant in the language. Still, she understood their tone. Their derision and contempt.

She clutched the sheet to her breasts, her whole body trembling with indignation and fear. ‘Chi sei? Cosa stai facendo?’ Who are you, and what are you doing? They didn’t answer.

One man, clearly the leader of the pack, ripped the sheet away from her naked body. Emma gasped in shock. ‘Puttana.’ He spat the single word. Whore.

Emma shook her head, her mouth dry, her body still trembling. She felt as if she’d awakened to an alternate reality, a horrible nightmare, and she had no idea how to make it stop. Where was Larenzo?

One of the men grabbed her by the arm and yanked her upwards. She came, stumbling, trying futilely to cover herself. He reached for her T-shirt and shorts discarded on the floor and threw them at her.

‘You are English?’ he asked, his voice clipped, and she nodded.

‘American. And my consulate will hear—’

He cut her off with a hard laugh. ‘Get dressed. You’re coming with us.’

Quickly, clumsily, Emma yanked on her clothes. Dressed, even if only in flimsy pyjamas, she felt a little braver. ‘Where is Signor Cavelli?’ she asked in Italian.

The man eyed her scornfully. ‘Downstairs, at the moment. But he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison.’

Emma’s mouth dropped open. Prison? What on earth was he talking about? Were these awful men police?

‘Come on,’ the man commanded her tersely, and with her mind spinning she followed the men downstairs.

Larenzo stood in the centre of the sitting room, his eyes blazing silver fire as he caught sight of her.

‘You are all right? They didn’t hurt you?’

‘Shut up!’ The words were like the crack of a gunshot as one of the men slapped Larenzo across the face. He didn’t even blink, although Emma could see the red imprint of the man’s hand on Larenzo’s cheek.

‘They didn’t hurt me,’ she said quietly and the man turned on her.

‘Enough. Neither of you are to speak to one another. Who knows what you might try to communicate?’

‘She has nothing to do with any of it,’ Larenzo said, and he sounded scornful, as if he were actually in control of the situation. With an icy ripple of shock Emma saw that he was handcuffed. ‘Do you actually think I’d tell a woman, my housekeeper no less, anything of value?’

The words, spoken so derisively, shouldn’t have hurt. She knew, intellectually at least, that he was trying to protect her, although from what she had no idea. Even so they did hurt, just as the look Larenzo gave her, a look as derisive as those of the carabinieri, did.

‘She’s nothing to me.’

‘Even so, she’ll be taken in for questioning,’ the man replied shortly and Larenzo’s eyes blazed once more.

‘She knows nothing. She’s American. Do you want the consulate all over this?’

‘This,’ the man snapped, poking a finger into Larenzo’s chest, ‘is the biggest sting we’ve had in Sicily for twenty years. I don’t give a damn about the consulate.’

They’d been speaking Italian, and, while Emma had caught the gist of it, she still didn’t understand what was going on.

‘Please, let me get dressed properly,’ she said, her voice coming out croaky as she stumbled over the Italian. ‘And then I’ll go with you and answer any questions you might have.’

The man turned to glare at her with narrowed eyes. Then he gave a brief nod, and, with another policeman accompanying her, Emma went upstairs to her bedroom. The man waited outside the room while she pulled on underwear, jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a fleece. She brushed her teeth and hair, grabbed her purse and her passport, and then, just in case, she took her backpack and put a change of clothes, her camera, and her folder of photographs in it. Who knew when she’d be able to return? Just the realisation sent another icy wave of terror crashing through her.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, she left the room. The man accompanied her downstairs; the front door was open and she saw several cars outside. Larenzo was being shoved into one. She turned to the man.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Palermo.’

‘Palermo? But that’s nearly three hours away—’

The man smiled coldly. ‘So it is. I’m afraid you’ll have to be so inconvenienced.’

Three hours later Emma sat in an interrogation room at the anti-Mafia headquarters of Palermo’s police department. She’d been given a paper cup of cold coffee and made to wait until finally the man who had made the arrest back at Larenzo’s villa came and sat down across from her, putting his elbows on the chipped tabletop.

‘You know your boyfriend is in a lot of trouble.’

Emma closed her eyes briefly. She was aching with exhaustion, numb with confusion and fear, and she missed Larenzo desperately even as she forced herself to remember she hadn’t actually known him all that well. Until last night. Until he held me in his arms and made me feel cherished and important. ‘He’s not my boyfriend.’

‘Whoever he is. He’s going to prison, probably for the rest of his life.’

Emma licked her dry lips. ‘What...what has he done?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I have no idea. All I know is he was—is—CEO of Cavelli Enterprises.’ And that when he kissed her her mind emptied of thoughts. He made her body both buzz and sing. But then words began to ricochet through her, words Larenzo had spoken to her last night. It’s my own fault. What had he done?

The man must have seen something of this in her face for he leaned forward. ‘You know something.’

‘No.’

‘I’ve been doing this for a long time.’ He sounded almost kind. ‘I can tell, signorina. I can tell when someone is lying.’

‘I’m not lying. I don’t know anything. I don’t even know what Cavelli Enterprises did.’

‘And if I told you Larenzo Cavelli was involved with the Mafia? You wouldn’t know anything about that?’

Bile rose in her throat and she swallowed hard. ‘No, I certainly wouldn’t.’

‘It didn’t concern you, the amount of security he had for that villa?’

She thought of his insistence on locking the doors, the elaborate security system. ‘No.’

‘Don’t play dumb with me, signorina.’

‘Look, maybe I was dumb, but I really didn’t know.’ Emma’s voice rose in agitation. ‘Plenty of people have detailed security systems.’

‘Cavelli never said anything to you?’

Again his words raced through her mind. The grief on his face, the resignation she’d heard in his voice, the sense that everything was over, that this was his last night. He must have known they were coming to arrest him. He must have realised his activities had been discovered. Even so she couldn’t reconcile the man she’d known, however briefly, with the Mafia. And yet as tender a lover as Larenzo had been, he was still virtually a stranger. She had no idea what he’d got up to when he’d been away from the villa. No idea at all.

‘Signorina?’

‘Please,’ Emma said wearily. ‘I was his housekeeper. I barely saw him. I don’t know anything.’

Eight endless hours later she was finally released from the police. When she asked about returning to the villa, the man at the desk shook his head.

‘The villa is being searched by the police. Everything there is potential evidence. You won’t be able to go back for some time.’

And so Emma headed out into the busy streets of Palermo, mopeds and sports cars speeding by, her mind spinning as she tried to think what to do now. She had no real reason to go all the way back to the villa. She had nothing of value there but a few clothes and photography books.

But where could she go?

She ended up at a cheap hotel near the train station; she sat on the single bed, her backpack at her feet, her whole life in tatters.

She told herself she was used to moving on, and it would be easy enough to look for a new job. She could spend some time with her father in Budapest while she decided where she wanted to go, what she wanted to do.

And yet that prospect seemed bleak rather than hopeful; she might be used to moving on, but she hadn’t been ready this time. She’d liked her life in Sicily. The villa had been the closest thing she’d ever known to a home.

And as for Larenzo...

She’d known, of course she’d known, that their one night together wasn’t going anywhere. But it had still meant something. She’d felt a deep connection to him last night, an understanding and a tenderness... Had it all been false? According to the police, he was a Mafioso. The inspector had told her they had incontrovertible evidence, had said there were photos, witnesses, files. Everything to convict Larenzo Cavelli of too many horrible crimes. Extortion, the police had said. Theft. Assault. Organised delinquency, which was the legal term for involvement in the Mafia.

Faced with all of it, Emma knew she had no choice but to believe. Larenzo Cavelli was a criminal.

The next morning, after a sleepless night, Emma went to an Internet café to arrange her passage to Budapest. Yet as she clicked on a website for cheap airfares, she realised she didn’t want to go there. She didn’t want to traipse around Europe, taking odd jobs, at least not yet. She wanted to go somewhere safe, somewhere far away from all this, to recover and heal. She wanted to see her sister. Quickly Emma took out her mobile and scrolled through for Meghan’s number.

‘Emma?’ Concern sharpened her sister’s voice as she answered the call. ‘You sound...’

‘I’m tired. And a bit overwhelmed.’ She didn’t want to go into the details of what had happened on the phone; they were too recent, too raw, and she was afraid she might burst into tears right in the middle of the Internet café. ‘My job in Sicily has ended suddenly, and I thought I’d come for a visit, if you don’t mind having me.’

‘Of course I don’t mind having you,’ Meghan exclaimed. ‘Ryan will be delighted to see you.’

Emma pictured her tousle-haired three-year-old nephew with a tired smile. It had been too long since she’d seen him or her sister. ‘Great. I’m going to book a flight for tomorrow if I can.’

‘Let me know the time and we’ll pick you up from the airport.’

Twenty-four hours later Emma touched down in New York and, after clearing immigration, she walked straight into her sister’s arms.

‘Is everything okay?’ Meghan asked as she hugged her tightly. Emma nodded wordlessly. Nothing felt right at that moment, but she hoped it would soon. All she needed was a little time to get over this, and then she’d be back on the road, taking photographs, looking for adventure, as footloose as ever. The prospect didn’t fill her with anything except a weary desolation.

She spent the next week mainly sleeping and spending time with Ryan and Meghan; she wanted to shut the world out, but she couldn’t quite do it, and especially not when her sister looked up from The New York Times one morning, her eyes narrowed.

‘I’m just reading an article about how business CEO Larenzo Cavelli was arrested for being involved in the Mafia.’ Emma felt the colour drain from her face but said nothing. ‘Wasn’t that your boss, Emma?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s why your job ended?’

Emma nodded jerkily as she poured some orange juice. ‘Yes.’

‘You were working for someone in the Mafia?’

‘I didn’t know, Meghan!’

Meghan sat back in her chair, her eyes wide. ‘Of course you didn’t know. But good gracious, Emma. I’m so glad you’re here, and you’re safe.’

Emma closed her eyes briefly. She could picture Larenzo as he braced himself above her, his face suffused with tenderness as he gave her more pleasure than she’d ever known or thought possible. And then just hours later, when she’d heard the thud of the boots in the hall, the men glaring at her as they ripped the sheet away from her body...

‘So am I,’ she said quietly. ‘So am I.’

After that she couldn’t shut out the world any more. She read in the newspaper that Larenzo had confessed to everything, and there would be no trial. Within a month of her arrival he’d been sentenced to life in prison.

Two days after that, Emma realised she hadn’t got her period that month. One three-minute test later, she discovered the truth. She was pregnant with Larenzo Cavelli’s child.

CHAPTER FOUR

Eighteen months later

‘LOOK AT ME, Aunt Emma!’

Emma waved to her nephew as he clambered to the top of the climbing frame at the playground near her sister’s house. It was late October, and the leaves of the maple trees in the little park were scarlet, the sky above a cloudless blue. It was a beautiful, crisp day, and yet even so she couldn’t keep herself from picturing the mountains of Sicily, and remembering how clear and pure the air was up there at this time of year.

Shivering slightly in the chill wind, Emma told herself to stop thinking about Sicily. She would never go back there. Never see the Nebrodi mountains again. Never see Larenzo Cavelli again.

Which was just as well, considering the man was a criminal.

Instinctively her gaze moved to the stroller a few feet away, where her daughter Ava was sleeping peacefully. She was ten months old, born on Christmas Eve, and Emma still marvelled at her. Still marvelled at the way her own life had changed so drastically.

When she’d discovered she was pregnant, she’d been shocked and numb for days, as well as embarrassed that she hadn’t even thought about birth control when she’d been with Larenzo. That was how much he’d affected her. How much she’d wanted him in that moment.

Meghan, as eagle-eyed as ever, had guessed she was pregnant within a matter of days, and Emma had ended up telling her sister everything.

‘What do you want to do?’ Meghan had asked in her direct way as they’d sat at her kitchen table, Emma shredding tissues while Meghan got up to make tea. ‘I love babies,’ she continued as she switched on the kettle, ‘and I think each one is a blessing, but I’ll support you no matter what.’

‘Thank you,’ Emma had answered, sniffing. ‘Truthfully, I don’t know what to do. I never planned on marrying or having a family...not that marriage is a possibility in this case.’

‘Why haven’t you?’ Meghan asked, one hip braced against the counter as she fixed Emma with a thoughtful stare. ‘Most people think about being with someone, at least.’

‘I don’t know.’ Emma shredded another tissue, avoiding her sister’s perceptive gaze. ‘You know me. I like to be on the move. See new things. I don’t want to be held down.’

‘And a baby is the ultimate in being held down,’ Meghan answered with a sigh.

‘Yes...’ Which made it seem simple, but Emma felt as if nothing was.

‘I know Mom leaving affected you badly, Em,’ Meghan said quietly. ‘More than it did me. I was at college. I was already out of the way.’

‘She was your mother too,’ Emma answered, still not looking at her sister. By silent agreement she and Meghan had never really talked about their mother. Emma hadn’t even seen her in at least five years. Louise Leighton had moved to Arizona with her second husband when Emma was still in high school; Emma had spent a wretched few months out in Arizona with her, but it had been awkward and stilted and just generally awful, and she’d left pretty quickly, after one blazing argument. Her mother hadn’t protested.

Since then, beyond a few pithy emails, her mother had never made any attempt to contact her. She didn’t know if Meghan was in touch with her or not; she’d never asked, told herself she didn’t care.

‘Anyway,’ Meghan resumed, ‘what I’m trying to say is, I understand if motherhood scares you. You didn’t have the best example.’

‘I’m not scared,’ Emma answered. She pressed a hand against her middle, almost as if she could feel the tiny life moving inside her. ‘I just feel like my whole life has been upended. Everything that happened in Sicily...’ She trailed off, fighting against the memories that continued to swamp her, and Meghan came over to give her a hug.

‘It’s hard,’ she said. ‘And you have some time.’

As the days slipped by Emma had come to accept this new life inside her, and realise that, to her amazement, she actually welcomed it. She watched her sister with Ryan and knew she wanted that same kind of bond, that closeness with another person. Already she felt a surprising and unshakeable love for this person who was a part of her.

Once she had pictured her life unspooling like a rainbow-coloured thread as she traipsed about the world, having adventure after adventure. But perhaps motherhood would be the greatest adventure of all.

It had been that, she thought now as she gazed at her sleeping daughter. From the moment she’d been born, dark-haired and grey-eyed, Ava had possessed the Cavelli charisma. Whether she was screaming to be fed or simply demanding to be heard, the force of her personality could not be denied. She was her father’s daughter.

And her father was serving life in prison.

Emma had had a year and a half to become accustomed to the fact that Larenzo was a Mafioso, and yet the knowledge still had the power to stun her. She couldn’t look back on their one night together without experiencing a shaft of bittersweet longing, as well as a sense of bewilderment that the man she’d thought she’d known, at least a little, was someone else entirely.

‘Are you almost ready to go?’ Meghan asked as she walked up to her in the park. Her cheeks were red with cold and she cradled a thermos of coffee. ‘Ryan will want his lunch before playgroup, and, if I’m not mistaken, your little madam is going to wake up soon and want hers.’

‘Undoubtedly.’ With a wry look for her sleeping daughter, Emma reached for the handles of the pram.

‘Emma...’ Meghan began, and Emma tensed instinctively. She’d known a conversation was coming; she’d been living with Meghan and her husband, Pete, for over eighteen months now. They’d been happy to support her through her pregnancy and she’d taken a few odd cleaning jobs until she’d been too ungainly to manage it, in order to contribute to the household expenses.

Then Ava had been born, and her life had become a sleepless whirlwind; she’d stood in its centre, dazed and helpless to do much other than care for this baby that still managed to startle her with her existence.

But her daughter would be a year soon and Emma knew she needed to find her own way. Make her own life, for her own sake as well as her sister’s.

‘I know,’ she said quietly, her gaze on Ava sleeping in the pram, the pink blanket pulled up to her chin, which had a cleft the same as Larenzo’s. ‘I need to get a move on.’

‘No.’ Meghan put a hand on Emma’s arm. ‘I wasn’t going to say that. I’d never say that, Emma. You’re welcome to stay with us as long as you like. Always.’

Emma shook her head. She knew her sister meant well, but she also knew that she couldn’t stay. She hadn’t contributed anything to the household finances since Ava’s birth, and she and Ava had taken up the spare bedroom for far too long. Meghan and Pete wanted more children, and they needed the space.

‘I’ve been meaning to get my act together for months now,’ she told her sister. ‘I’ve just—’ she let out a long, low breath ‘—felt frozen, I suppose. And keeping Ava fed and changed has taken more energy than I care to admit.’ She let out a shaky laugh. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’

‘Motherhood is never easy, and Ava is a demanding baby,’ Meghan answered. ‘But this isn’t about me or Pete, Emma. It’s about you. What’s best for you. I want you to have your own life. Maybe meet someone...’

Emma shook her head. She couldn’t even think about meeting someone. She might not have loved Larenzo Cavelli or had her heart broken, but even so something in her felt a little dented. A bit bruised. And she’d never been interested in a serious relationship anyway. She was even less so now, with a bad experience and a baby in tow.

‘I know I need to get a job.’

‘It’s not about money—’

‘But it is, Meghan, at least in part. As wonderful as you are, you can’t support me for ever. I’m twenty-seven years old, and I chose to have a child. I need to step up.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I know I seem like a sleep-deprived zombie most of the time, but I have been thinking about possibilities. Maybe moving to New York and getting a job there, something to do with photography.’

As far as a plan went, it wasn’t very sensible, and Emma could tell her sister thought so from the look on her face. ‘New York? But it’s so expensive. And I’m not sure there are too many jobs in photography going...’

‘I know, but...’ The other option was staying in New Jersey, finding some poky apartment she could afford on the salary she’d get as a waitress or cleaner, the only kind of job for which she was qualified. ‘I like to dream,’ she admitted with a wry sigh, and Meghan nodded in understanding.

‘What about another job as a housekeeper? A live-in position, so you could have Ava with you?’

‘I’m not sure there are many of those going around.’

‘You only need one.’

‘True.’ Emma glanced down at her daughter, who was starting to stir, her little face turning red as she screwed her features up in preparation for one of her ear-splitting howls. ‘We’d better get going,’ she told Meghan. ‘Princess Ava needs her lunch.’

Back at the house she and Meghan fed Ava and Ryan, and then ate their own lunch while the two children played nearby.

‘All right, let’s do this,’ Meghan said, ever practical, and resolutely Emma nodded as her sister pulled her laptop towards her and brought up the webpage for an agency that supplied jobs in the cleaning and hospitality industries.

Emma suppressed a groan as some of the available jobs scrolled by: night-time cleaning at a business park in Newark, janitorial work in a local elementary school.

‘I don’t...’ she began, but Meghan cut her off with a quick shake of her head.

‘We’ll find something. Something perfect. There’s no rush.’

But there was a rush, Emma thought glumly, even if she didn’t want to say as much to her sister. Meghan might be happy to have her stay indefinitely, but she wasn’t always so sure about Pete; as the breadwinner he surely felt the strain on the family finances more than anyone.

And she also knew she wanted more for her life than living in a spare bedroom, changing diapers and dreaming of sleep.

Maybe a poky apartment and a job cleaning school toilets would be it, at least for the interim. If she was careful she could save enough money to go somewhere, maybe travel again, this time with Ava. She pictured herself working her way through Europe, her baby in a backpack, and, while it held a certain quirky charm, she was also realistic enough to acknowledge how difficult that would be.

She could, she supposed, go to stay with her father, but he had been decidedly nonplussed about his unmarried daughter having a baby by a man who was serving a life sentence in prison, and in any case her father was immersed in his work, as he had been since his wife had left him fifteen years ago. He hadn’t even seen Ava yet.

No, she needed to do something on her own. Stand on her own two feet, however wobbly she was.

‘Let me have a look,’ she said, and pulled the laptop towards her. She browsed the jobs for a few more minutes, taking down details, until Ava started crying, ready for her afternoon nap.

‘I’ll take her upstairs,’ Emma said, scooping her protesting daughter into her arms. Ava wrapped her chubby arms around Emma’s neck and snuffled against her chest. Her daughter was demanding, even difficult, but she still managed to make Emma’s heart melt with love. She’d never regret her decision, even if she ended up cleaning toilets for the rest of her life.

Life could still be an adventure, she told herself as she settled Ava in her crib. It was all about attitude. No matter where she was or what she did, she could still enjoy her daughter, maybe even try photography again. She hadn’t picked up her camera since Ava’s birth, except to take a few photos of her daughter. The spontaneous, candid moments she’d captured on film all over the world had been hard to find here, and Emma had been too exhausted and overwhelmed to look for them.

She was just coming downstairs, Ava asleep hopefully for at least an hour and Meghan at playgroup with Ryan, when the doorbell sounded. Hoping the noise wouldn’t wake Ava, ever a light sleeper, Emma went to answer it.

And stared straight into the face of Larenzo Cavelli. Shock blazed through her as she looked at him; he was thinner, the angles of his cheekbones a little sharper, everything about him a bit harder. A faint scar ran down one cheek, starting by his eyebrow and ending at his jaw. She noticed these changes distantly, her mind dazed and spinning; she could not actually believe it was him. He was here. How? And why?

‘Larenzo...’ she finally managed, her voice a rasp, and his face didn’t show so much as a flicker of emotion as he answered.

‘Hello, Emma.’

* * *

Larenzo gazed at Emma dispassionately; she was clearly shocked to see him, but he felt nothing when he looked at her, except perhaps a twinge of remorse, a flicker of bittersweet memory. That night they’d shared so long ago felt as if it had happened to someone else. It had happened to someone else. Eighteen months in prison changed you. For ever.

‘May I come in?’ He took a step towards her and she drew her breath in sharply, one hand fluttering to her throat.

‘Don’t—’ she began, and he stilled. She almost looked afraid. Afraid of him.

‘Do you think I’m going to hurt you?’ he asked, wondering why he was surprised. Everyone else had believed the worst of him. Why shouldn’t she?

Emma’s eyes widened, her hand still at her throat. ‘I don’t—I don’t know. Why are you here, Larenzo?’

Her voice wavered; she really was afraid. She thought he was dangerous. It should have occurred to him before, of course. He’d thought all of his naive delusions about humanity had been stripped away, but clearly he’d clung to this last one. The memory of his one night with Emma had sustained him through prison. He didn’t like having it tarnished now.

‘I’m here,’ he finally said, his voice cool, ‘because I felt I owed you something.’

‘You don’t.’

‘Considering your employment with me ended so abruptly, I thought you deserved some recompense,’ he continued as if she hadn’t spoken.

‘Recompense...’

He stepped past her and dropped the envelope with the bank draft onto the hall table. ‘Six months’ pay. I thought you should have it.’

She stared at the envelope with something like revulsion. ‘I don’t want your money,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I don’t want anything from you.’

‘This money was honestly earned,’ Larenzo informed her coldly. ‘I can promise you that.’

‘Why should I believe anything you say?’ she shot back. ‘How are you even here? The judge gave you life in prison—’

‘I was released last week. Clearly you don’t read the papers.’

‘No, I...’ She licked her lips, her gaze still wide. ‘I haven’t had time.’

‘Well, if you’d read them,’ Larenzo said, his voice coming out in a cold drawl, ‘you would have known that all the charges against me were dropped.’

‘They were?’ She looked bewildered, her gaze darting between him and the stairs. Was she thinking of making a run for it, barricading herself in a bedroom? Did she really think he was going to hurt her? He was caught between fury and despair at the thought, and then he blanked out both emotions. He might have held onto the memory of Emma through prison, and their night together might have compelled him to find her now, but he didn’t actually feel anything for her. He couldn’t feel anything at all.

‘Yes, they were. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Obviously. Unless you thought I’d escaped?’ He arched an eyebrow, smiled as if this were all so very amusing. ‘Stage-managed some sort of breakout?’

‘I...I don’t know what I think.’ She walked slowly past him, to the small sitting room at the front of the house. Larenzo followed her, watched as she sank onto the sofa, her head in her hands.

‘How did you find me here?’ she asked after a long, silent moment, her head still bowed.

‘This was the address you gave on your employment application.’

She glanced up at him, her eyes widening once more. ‘And you came all the way to America to give me six months’ pay? If you really possessed such a conscience to see me adequately recompensed, you could have just deposited it in my bank account. You should have my details from when I was in your employment.’

Larenzo’s mouth tightened. ‘I was in America anyway.’ She shook her head slowly, still dazed. Larenzo let his gaze rove over her, remembering her golden skin, her laughing eyes that looked so serious and dark now. She looked different, he realised. More womanly. She must have gained a little weight, and yet it suited her. Her breasts were fuller under the soft pink sweater she wore, and her face was a bit rounder. Her skin was as golden as he’d remembered, her golden-brown hair wavy and tousled about her face. His golden girl. What a joke.

‘Why are you in America?’ she asked and Larenzo snapped his gaze away from her.

‘I’m relocating to New York.’

‘New York—’

‘Is that a problem?’ he enquired coolly. ‘I only came here to give you your pay.’

‘I know, but...’ She glanced up towards the stairs once more, and Larenzo’s gaze narrowed. That was the second time she’d done that. What was upstairs? Was Emma hiding something from him? God knew he’d learned to become suspicious of everyone and everything. Trust was a concept he no longer even remotely considered.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said quickly, as if coming to a decision. She rose from the sofa. ‘Thank you for the six months’ pay. That was...kind of you, considering.’

‘Considering?’ he repeated, his gaze narrowing. ‘Considering what?’

Colour washed Emma’s cheeks. ‘Just the situation...’

‘You mean considering I’m a criminal? Is that what you mean, Emma?’ He didn’t know why he was pushing her, only that he was. That he wanted her to say it, admit what she thought of him. Perhaps it would be like lancing a wound.

Emma lifted her chin, her eyes flashing in challenge. ‘And what if it was?’

‘I thought you knew me better than that.’

‘I didn’t know you at all, Larenzo. You were my employer, and I saw you a few times. We never even had a proper conversation before—’ She stopped abruptly, the colour deepening in her cheeks as she looked away.

‘Before what?’ he demanded, his voice low and insistent. He was punishing himself as much as her by raking this all up, bringing the memories he’d tormented himself with to the fore. ‘Before I made love to you? Before you wrapped your legs around my waist and—’

‘Don’t.’ The single word came out in a suffocated whisper. ‘Don’t remind me.’

Larenzo’s lip curled. ‘You don’t want to remember?’

‘Of course I don’t.’ She glared at him, her golden-green eyes full of misery. ‘I don’t know why you were released from prison, Larenzo, or why the charges against you were dropped, but I just want you out of my life.’ She pressed her lips together as she held his stare. ‘I trust that won’t be an issue.’

‘An issue?’ he repeated. Fury beat through his veins, fired his blood. ‘I came here as a matter of courtesy. Clearly the effort was wasted.’

‘I think it’s best if you go now.’

‘Fine.’ He nodded curtly and curled his hands into fists at his sides, not trusting himself not to grab her by the shoulders and demand to know what he’d ever done to make her think he was a mobster. A Mafioso. Mio Dio, how could everyone he’d ever known have judged him so harshly and completely?

Because the evidence had been there, thanks to Bertrano. Because he’d confessed, even if he’d felt he had no choice.

She held his gaze, her chin still lifted, her shoulders thrown back, standing proud and defiant even though he knew she was afraid. Of him.

He opened his mouth to say something of his innocence, but then he closed it. Why claim something she would never believe? ‘Goodbye,’ he said instead, and turned towards the hallway.

A child’s cry suddenly echoed from upstairs. From the corner of his eye he saw Emma freeze, her face drain of colour. He wouldn’t have thought anything of the cry, considering he knew Emma was living with her sister and her family. And yet...

The child cried again, the plaintive wail of a baby. Emma didn’t move. Neither did Larenzo. Every sense he had was on alert, although for what he could not say.

‘Aren’t you going to go to the child?’ he asked, his voice deliberately mild as the baby continued to cry, the sobs becoming louder and more urgent.

Emma swallowed, and he watched the workings of her slender throat. ‘I will. When you leave.’

He gazed at her for a taut moment, saw how her eyes had become huge golden pools in a face drained of colour. ‘Is it your sister’s child? Why is she not going to fetch the bambino?’

‘She’s not here.’ Emma licked her lips, and Larenzo thought he saw panic in that wide gaze. ‘Please, Larenzo. Just go.’

‘I will.’ He cocked his head towards the stairs. ‘But maybe you should get the bambino first.’

‘No.’ The word came out like a gunshot, fast and loud. Larenzo raised his eyebrows. Emma stared him down. ‘I told you, I don’t want you here. Now go.’ Her voice rose in a raggedy edge of terror, and Larenzo took a step towards her.

‘What are you hiding from me, Emma?’

‘Nothing—’ But it sounded feeble. He took another step towards her.

‘Tell me the truth. You’re hiding something. I don’t know what it could be, but—’

‘What do you think I’m hiding from you?’ she cut him off scornfully. She nodded towards the stairs. ‘A baby?’

The words hung there, seeming to echo through the sudden silence of the room. Larenzo stared at her, saw how bloodless her lips were as they parted soundlessly.

The thought hadn’t fully formed in his mind until she’d said the words. He’d sensed she was hiding something, had felt her panic and fear, had heard the baby cry...

And yet it hadn’t all come together for him. But it did now, crystallising with shocking clarity, and without a word for her he turned from the room and bounded up the stairs.

‘Larenzo—’ She hurried after him, one arm flung towards him in desperate supplication. ‘Larenzo, please, don’t—’

He could hear the child crying, the voice pitiful and plaintive. ‘Mama. Mama.’

‘Please,’ she said again, choking on the word, and Larenzo ignored her.

Mama. Mama.

He threw open the door and came to a complete and stunned halt as he saw the baby standing in her crib, chubby fists gripping the rail, cherubic face screwed up and wet with tears.

Emma came into the room behind him, breathing hard, and the baby flung her arms out towards her. ‘Mama.’

And Larenzo knew. He would have known just by looking at the child, with her ink-dark hair and large grey eyes, the cleft in her chin. He turned to Emma, who was gazing at him with undisguised panic.

‘When,’ he asked in a low, deadly voice, ‘were you going to tell me about my child?’

CHAPTER FIVE

EMMA STARED AT Larenzo and saw the fury blazing in his gaze. Why, oh, why had she said that about hiding a baby? She’d meant to be bold, to pour scorn on the presumption, but she’d seen how she’d given him the idea instead. She’d told him about Ava.

Now she sagged against the doorway, completely at a loss as to what to do or say. Larenzo took a step towards her, his hands balled into fists.

‘So this is why you were so desperate for me to leave—’

‘Mama,’ Ava called, her arms still outstretched, and Emma straightened and walked swiftly towards her daughter, scooping her up in her arms, and pressed her cheek against Ava’s downy hair.

‘Please,’ she murmured to Larenzo. ‘Let me settle her and then we’ll talk.’ Although what she could tell him, she had no idea. She’d never imagined this happening, ever. She’d never expected even to see Larenzo again.

Ava continued to snuffle against her chest and Emma soothed her mindlessly, her mind spinning in futile circles. She settled her back in the cot as Larenzo waited in the hall and hoped her daughter might drift off to sleep once more. She’d slept for only twenty minutes, which unfortunately wasn’t that uncommon, but on a good day Emma could count on an hour.

Quietly she slipped out of the room and closed the door. Larenzo stood there, arms folded, eyebrows raised. He opened his mouth to speak but Emma shook her head and pressed a finger to her lips, cocking her head to indicate he should follow her downstairs.

In the kitchen she wiped the counters and tidied up the last of the lunch dishes, needing to keep busy, to keep from thinking how on earth she was going to handle this. Handle him. Larenzo watched her, one powerful shoulder propped against the doorway, everything about him arrogant, assured and definitely intimidating. She couldn’t handle this man at all.

‘You do not deny she’s mine,’ he said finally, and Emma shook her head.

‘How can I? She looks just like you.’

‘Yes.’ He raked a hand through his hair, his gaze shuttered and distant as he shook his head slowly. ‘We didn’t use birth control.’

‘No.’

‘I never even thought...’

‘Nor did I. Obviously.’

‘She must have put a dent in your plans,’ he said after a moment, his voice turning sharp, and Emma narrowed her eyes.

‘What do you mean?’

‘All your travel plans. You told me you liked to move around. Itchy feet, you said.’

She was surprised and weirdly gratified that he’d remembered what she’d said, but also piqued that he was throwing it back in her face now. ‘That changed when I became pregnant.’

‘You never considered a termination?’

Her mouth dropped open. ‘Is that what you would have preferred? Because—’

‘No.’ He shook his head, one swift, violent movement. ‘No. But I could understand if—’

She let out a rush of breath. ‘I thought of it at first, I suppose, but never seriously. I never thought I wanted a husband or children, but I couldn’t...she was a part of me.’ A lump formed in her throat and resolutely she swallowed past it. ‘I loved her even before she was born.’

‘And you’ve been living here since her birth?’ His gaze moved around the small kitchen, and Emma prickled.

‘My sister has been very kind—’

‘Yes, of course. But what about your father? Is he still in Budapest?’

So he remembered that too. ‘Yes, he is, but I wanted to be here. And frankly he wasn’t thrilled about me being pregnant, unmarried, and the father—’

‘In prison,’ he finished flatly, and Emma nodded.

‘In any case, we’re fine here.’

‘But you can’t stay here for ever.’

‘Meghan is happy for us to stay,’ Emma shot back. She wasn’t about to admit to Larenzo that she might need to move out. ‘Anyway, I don’t see how this concerns you, Larenzo—’

‘Are you serious?’ He cut her off, his voice harsh. ‘She’s my daughter.’ He paused, struggling to control his emotions while Emma watched in apprehension. ‘What’s her name?’ he finally asked.

She hesitated, reluctant to part with even that much information. What if Larenzo wanted to be a part of Ava’s life, of their lives? How on earth could she cope with that?

‘Emma, I deserve to know her name!’ His voice came out raggedly, and with a shaft of guilt Emma remembered how he’d told her about his childhood in Palermo, how he’d never had a real family. And with that came other memories of their night together, tender ones that she’d tried to keep herself from remembering. They tumbled through her mind in a bittersweet rush of poignant longing and she was helpless against it. No matter what Larenzo had done, she’d loved this man. For a night.

‘Ava,’ she said quietly.

‘Ava,’ he repeated, and she closed her eyes against the wonder she heard in his voice. ‘How old is she?’

‘Ten months. She was born on Christmas Eve.’

‘Would you have ever told me about her?’ he asked after a moment.

She opened her eyes and stared at him helplessly. ‘Larenzo, you were in prison. You were convicted of about a thousand charges all related to being in the Mafia. How could I tell you?’

He gazed back steadily, unmoved by her argument. ‘The charges were dropped.’

‘I didn’t know that. And I still don’t know why they were dropped—’

‘You still think I’m guilty?’ he cut her off, his voice hard.

‘I don’t know,’ she cried. ‘Larenzo, you have to understand how it was for me. The day you were arrested...those men...’

Even now, a year and a half later, the memory of that night made shame and fear roil through her. ‘It was horrible. And then I spent the whole day in the anti-Mafia headquarters in Palermo while they told me you were involved in the Mafia, how they had all this evidence...what was I supposed to believe?’

‘Me. You could have believed me.’

‘You confessed,’ she shot back. ‘I read it in the papers. So I did believe you.’

He pressed his lips together, his gaze narrowed and hard. ‘Of course you did.’

‘And yet you still seem to think I should have believed in your innocence.’

He didn’t answer, and Emma bit her lip. She felt cold inside, so terribly cold. For a year and a half she’d been so certain of Larenzo’s guilt, and yet now, having seen him only for a few minutes, she felt doubt creep in along with the bittersweet memories. Who was the real man—the Mafia monster or the one she’d made love to?

‘But just now,’ he finally said. ‘You wanted me to leave. Even now, when you knew the charges had been dropped, that I was free, you were trying to keep me from my child.’

‘Because as far as I know, you’re still a dangerous man,’ Emma retorted. Larenzo’s eyes narrowed and she almost took a step back. Yet even now she realised she wasn’t actually afraid of him. She didn’t think he’d hurt her, but...

What was she afraid of, then? Because she certainly felt the cold claws of terror digging into her soul, icing over her mind. ‘Even if you are innocent of the charges they laid against you,’ she continued more calmly, ‘you must have Mafia connections, something that made the police—’

‘Not in the way you think,’ he bit out, and Emma just shook her head, overwhelmed with too many terrible emotions to respond. ‘I am a free man,’ Larenzo said in a low voice. ‘And you can’t keep me from my daughter.’

Emma pressed her hand to her forehead. ‘We can’t talk about this now,’ she said. ‘My sister will be home in a few minutes, and Ava is going to wake up soon. I never even expected to see you again, Larenzo. Having you turn up out of the blue...’ She shook her head. ‘It’s a lot to take in.’

‘I understand,’ he answered levelly. ‘But know this. I will be back, and I will see Ava again. Don’t think for a moment you can keep me from her.’

His mouth compressed and his eyes flashed silver and Emma’s stomach did a sickening little flip. She had no idea what to think, to believe.

‘We’ll talk,’ she managed. ‘Soon.’

Larenzo held her gaze for an endless, agonising moment, and then with one swift nod he turned and left the room. Emma heard the click of the front door closing and she sagged against the kitchen counter, utterly emotionally spent.

‘Emma?’ A minute later her sister’s voice, lilting with curiosity, floated down the hall. ‘Who was that leaving the house?’

Emma straightened as her sister came into the kitchen with Ryan in tow, her eyebrows raised, a smile playing about her mouth. ‘Do you have a secret admirer?’

‘Hardly.’ Emma took a deep breath. ‘That was Larenzo Cavelli.’

‘What?’ The smile slid clear off Meghan’s face and numbly Emma explained the events of the last hour. Ava woke up just as she was finishing and she hurried upstairs, grateful for a moment to collect her thoughts, few as she had.

‘Mama.’ Ava wound her arms around her neck as Emma closed her eyes and breathed in her daughter’s scent, baby powder with a hint of the banana she’d eaten for lunch. Ava pressed her cheek against Emma’s chest, letting out a snuggly sigh, and Emma’s heart gave a painful squeeze. She would do anything for Ava. Anything to keep her safe...even if it meant keeping her from her father.

Yet how could she do that? And should she, if Larenzo were really innocent?

‘Ava, sweetheart,’ she whispered against the baby’s silky hair. ‘What are we going to do?’

She stayed upstairs for a few moments, cuddling Ava and then changing her diaper, wanting to put off the conversation she’d have to have with Meghan. Wanting to put off thinking about Larenzo Cavelli and what she was going to do.

Yet even in the dim quiet of her and Ava’s bedroom, memories invaded. Memories not of Larenzo as he’d been only moments ago, coldly angry, clearly ruthless, but as he’d been the night their daughter had been conceived. The tenderness he’d shown, as well as the despair. That sorrow and resignation she’d felt in him, had yearned to take away, and the aching, reverent gentleness of his touch...

Remembering that man made all the certainties she’d cultivated over the last eighteen months scatter like ash.

What if he wasn’t guilty?

But what if he is?

‘Emma?’ Meghan’s voice was sharp with concern as she called up the stairs. ‘Are you coming down?’

‘Yes, I’ll be there in a moment.’ Taking a deep breath, Emma settled Ava on her hip and headed downstairs. Ryan was playing in the playroom adjoining the kitchen and she put Ava on the floor with him, scattering a few blocks and soft toys around. Knowing her daughter as she did, Ava would throw all the toys across the room and then try to grab the trains Ryan was playing with. Her daughter knew what she wanted...just like her father.

‘I can’t believe Larenzo Cavelli came here,’ Meghan said, her voice hollow with shock. She filled up the kettle, shaking her head slowly. ‘How did he even know...?’

‘The address was on my employment application.’

‘And he wants to see Ava?’

‘I don’t know what he wants exactly, but he told me I couldn’t keep him from his daughter.’

Meghan was silent for a moment, her face pale with strain. ‘So do you think he is innocent, if the charges were dropped?’ she asked and Emma bit her lip.

‘I don’t know anything any more, Meghan. For a year and a half I thought I knew the truth. I didn’t like it, of course, and at times I couldn’t believe it, but I thought I knew.’

‘And now you think you didn’t?’ Meghan sounded sceptical, and rightly so. How could Emma take anything Larenzo said at face value?

‘I don’t know. But I suppose I should find out why the charges against him were dropped.’ She reached for the laptop they’d left lying out on the kitchen counter, the browser still on the employment agency’s listings. Had it only been a couple of hours ago she’d been worried about what sort of menial job she’d take? It almost seemed laughable.

Quickly Emma typed in the browser’s search engine Larenzo Cavelli charges dropped. Hundreds of results came up within seconds. She clicked on the first one, and began to read the news article.

All charges have been dropped against convicted felon Larenzo Cavelli when new evidence came to light that business partner Bertrano Raguso was in fact behind the illegal activities...

Meghan peered at the article over her shoulder. ‘Do you think it’s true?’ she asked in a low voice.

‘I have no idea.’ Emma scanned the rest of the article, skimming over the terrible list of Larenzo’s alleged crimes that she’d read in the paper once already. Once had definitely been enough.

‘If his business partner really was guilty, why would Larenzo confess?’ Meghan asked as she nibbled her lip.

‘I don’t know.’ Emma gazed at the photograph of Bertrano Raguso, a silver-haired man in his sixties, his face set into haggard lines. ‘But if they let Larenzo go...’

‘But they’d have to, if they have another confession.’

‘I don’t know if it’s that simple.’ Emma rubbed her forehead, felt the beginnings of a headache. From the playroom she heard the clatter of blocks being flung across the room, and then Ryan’s yowl as one connected with his head. ‘I need to see to Ava,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to think about this later. About what I’m going to do.’

‘You should consult a lawyer—’

Emma flinched at the thought. She didn’t want to get involved in some messy, drawn-out custody battle that would no doubt be splashed across the newspapers, due to Larenzo’s notoriety. But what if the alternative was granting him access to Ava? Exposing her to God only knew what kind of danger?

Unless he really was innocent...but how could he not have known about his partner’s activities? And why would he have confessed?

Emma let out a tired sigh. Her mind was racing in circles and she knew she had no answers now. ‘He might not actually want to be involved with Ava,’ she said, trying to convince herself as much as her sister. ‘He might just want to see her once...’

‘You need to be prepared,’ Meghan answered swiftly. ‘Emma, the man is—’

‘We don’t know what he is.’

‘Can you really doubt—?’

‘I told you, I don’t know.’ And yet if there was any chance Larenzo was guilty, any chance of putting Ava in danger...

‘I’ll talk to a lawyer,’ Emma said. ‘I should do that much, at least. Just...just in case.’

Ava and Ryan had both started crying and so Emma scooped her daughter up and distracted her with a few board books before rejoining Meghan at the laptop. Her sister had typed custody lawyers into the search box, and, with her heart thudding sickly and her head still spinning from all that had happened in such a short span of time, Emma watched the results come up, and then she reached for her phone.

CHAPTER SIX

NERVOUSLY EMMA SMOOTHED her hair, straightened her skirt, and then opened the door to the restaurant where she was meeting Larenzo. It had been three endless days since he’d shown up at her sister’s house, and Emma had almost started hoping that Larenzo had decided to leave them alone. Yet tangled up in that hope had been an absurd disappointment that he might have given up so easily.

She’d spoken to a lawyer two days ago, and he’d told her that since the charges against Larenzo had been dropped, he would most certainly have a legal right to see Ava. Access could be limited or denied if a court decided there was any danger to her daughter, but it was by no means clear cut or simple.

The next day Larenzo had called and Emma’s heart had actually lifted at the sound of his voice. They’d set up a meeting over dinner at a local restaurant, and Emma knew she had no idea what she wanted from this meeting. Her emotions and thoughts were all over the place, and no matter how she tried to order them they raced off in all directions as soon as she thought of Larenzo, remembered how he’d once been with her.

The atmosphere, she saw as she came into the restaurant, was elegant and understated, candlelight flickering over snowy white tablecloths. It almost seemed romantic, which didn’t help her disordered thoughts, her clamouring emotions. No matter what she and Larenzo decided about Ava, romance had no place in their lives any more.

She gave her name to the maître d’ and he showed her to a table in the back, set in a private alcove. Larenzo was already seated, and he rose as she approached. He wore a white button-down shirt and plain grey trousers, and yet he still seemed bigger and darker and more magnetic than any other person in the room.

Once, only once, she’d allowed herself to be drawn by that magnetic force. Now she knew she needed to be immune. To stay strong.

Emma sat down across from him, busying herself with putting her napkin in her lap as Larenzo settled back into his seat, seeming to take up too much space, too much air. Why had it become hard to breathe?

‘Thank you for coming,’ he said.

Emma took a deep breath, letting the air fill her lungs. ‘I didn’t really have much choice, did I?’

He pressed his lips together and Emma could almost feel the tension crackle between them. ‘This doesn’t have to be unpleasant, Emma.’

‘And how do you figure that?’ she shot back. She’d wanted to stay calm for this meeting but already her composure was cracking, revealing the fear and uncertainty underneath. ‘I’m here to discuss a man with Mafia connections being involved with my daughter—’

‘My daughter,’ Larenzo cut across her, his voice low and intense. ‘She’s my daughter too. Never forget that.’

‘Unfortunately, I won’t.’

He sat back in his chair, his fingers laced together as he gazed at her. ‘Do you hate me?’ he asked, as if it was a matter of academic interest, and Emma could only stare at him, flummoxed. Where had that come from? ‘Because,’ he continued, ‘you seem as if you hate me.’

‘I...’ She searched for words, disconcerted by how much his question had unsettled her. ‘I don’t hate you,’ she said finally. ‘I don’t feel anything for you.’ Which was a bold-faced lie. She didn’t know what she felt for Larenzo Cavelli, but it was definitely something. ‘But I love my daughter,’ she continued shakily, ‘and I want to protect her—’

‘And you think I don’t want that?’

‘I don’t know what to think about you, Larenzo. I have no idea what to believe.’

‘How about the truth?’

‘Which is?’ she demanded, her voice rising. ‘Eighteen months ago you confessed to a long, sordid list of crimes. A week ago, your business partner was convicted of those same crimes, thanks to new evidence, but what am I meant to believe? How on earth do you expect me to trust you?’

Larenzo expelled a long, low breath. ‘I don’t,’ he said flatly. ‘You can’t trust anyone in this world. That’s one thing I’ve come to realise.’

‘Why did you confess if you weren’t guilty?’

He pressed his lips together as he flicked his gaze away. ‘Because there was overwhelming evidence to convict me.’

‘How?’

‘Look, I don’t want to get into all that now. I left that life behind—’

‘And I’m supposed to just accept that?’

Larenzo leaned forward, his gaze glittering. ‘Emma, do you honestly think I’d put my own child in danger? Do you think I’d be here if I thought I’d be hurting Ava?’

Emma bit her lip. She didn’t think that, but she was still afraid. Still reluctant to relinquish control, to let Larenzo into Ava’s life. Into her life, in any way at all, and with a jolt she realised it wasn’t just because of his possible criminal connections. It was because this man affected her. And she was afraid to let him do that again.

Larenzo leaned back in his chair. ‘I left Italy for good and severed all ties to Cavelli Enterprises. Bertrano Raguso is in prison for the crimes he committed. That is all you need to know.’

‘Why New York?’ Emma asked. The waiter came forward to take their order, and she gazed blindly at the menu. She had no appetite at all. Finally she picked a relatively plain chicken dish, and Larenzo ordered for himself, before they were left alone again and he answered her question.

‘I wanted a new start. Cavelli Enterprises had no holdings in America.’

‘What’s happened to Cavelli Enterprises?’

‘Its assets were seized by the government. Everything’s frozen while the investigation continues.’

‘So even though there was evidence...?’

Larenzo’s mouth hardened into a flat line. ‘Bertrano is claiming he is innocent, but the evidence is incontrovertible.’ His mouth twisted. ‘In the meantime the company will most likely be liquidated, and its remaining assets distributed to shareholders.’ He spoke dispassionately, as if it was a matter of indifference to him. Emma searched his face, saw a hardness underneath his bland expression that she didn’t think had been there before.

‘Were you close to him? This Raguso?’

Larenzo hesitated, one hand resting flat on the tabletop. ‘A bit,’ he finally said.

‘And do you think he did it?’

‘I know he did.’ He shifted in his chair, his gaze arrowing in on her. ‘While I was in prison, my staff investigated and found proof of his guilt. But enough talk of what is past. It’s the future that concerns me.’

‘The past is important, Larenzo—’

‘I’ve told you all you need to know,’ he cut across her. ‘I want to talk about Ava.’

She knew it was coming, and yet she still resisted. ‘What about her?’

For a second his face softened, his mouth curving into something almost like a smile and just that little look made Emma start to melt. ‘What is she like? From the little I saw of her already, it seems like she knows her own mind.’

‘She does. She’s a force to be reckoned with, that’s for sure.’

‘Her strength will serve her well later in life.’

‘So I keep telling myself.’ To her shock Emma realised she was smiling, and Larenzo was actually smiling back.

‘I want to see her,’ Larenzo said firmly, and Emma took a deep breath.

‘There’s a playground near the house—’

Larenzo’s expression darkened, his eyes flashing silver fire. ‘A playground? Do you think you can fob me off with an hour or two at a local park?’

‘It’s a start, Larenzo—’

‘I’ve missed the first ten months of my daughter’s life. I want to spend time with her, Emma. Real time. Not be introduced to her as if I’m some stranger in a park playground.’

Emma stared down at the table, conscious of how quickly Larenzo had torn apart her suggestion. She’d wanted to stage-manage his entrance into Ava’s life, to exert some control over the proceedings, and hopefully to limit them. She should have known Larenzo wouldn’t let her do that. He was a man who was in control. Always.

‘Very well.’ She took a deep, even breath and let it out slowly. ‘What do you suggest?’

‘I’ve taken an apartment in New York, and it has plenty of room. I suggest you and Ava move there with me.’

Emma gaped at him, stunned into silence for a few seconds. ‘You want me to move in with you?’ she finally managed, her voice ending in something close to a squeak.

‘I’m not suggesting we have some sort of relationship,’ Larenzo clarified coolly. ‘I have no interest in that. But I want to see my daughter as much as possible, and be a real presence in her life. Your current living arrangements are neither sustainable nor suitable.’ He lifted one powerful shoulder in a shrug. ‘The answer seems obvious.’

‘To you, maybe.’ Emma nearly choked. She shook her head and reached for her glass of water. She’d never expected Larenzo to suggest something like this. To live with him...to be that near to temptation...

‘I don’t see an alternative,’ Larenzo answered. ‘I want unlimited access to my daughter—’

‘Unlimited? Larenzo, be reasonable—’ At the very most she’d thought she’d have to have some kind of joint custody arrangement with Larenzo. But this?

This was dangerous. Impossible. Tempting...

‘I don’t really see what the problem is,’ Larenzo replied calmly. ‘Surely you agree it’s better for Ava to have two interested and loving parents in her life?’

Emma swallowed. ‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean we have to live together—’

‘What, precisely, do you object to?’ Larenzo asked. His voice had gone quiet, dangerously so. ‘You’ll have your own room, your own bathroom, and your quarters will be far more comfortable than they are currently.’

Emma stared at him helplessly. He made it all sound so simple, and yet it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. ‘Everything’s changed so quickly,’ she finally said. ‘I can’t process it all—’

‘Then take your time,’ Larenzo answered. ‘You have until tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow—’

‘I want to see my daughter, Emma.’

‘I know you do.’ Except she hadn’t expected Larenzo to feel this strongly, this fiercely, about his role as a father. That he did surprised her, but she realised she couldn’t resent it. She knew what it was like to have a parent who chose a life without you. Who walked away from her child. Despite all the obstacles, all the unknowns, she realised she was, amazingly, glad Larenzo wanted to be involved...even if she was scared about what it meant.

‘I can’t just live with you,’ she finally burst out.

Larenzo arched an eyebrow, all arrogant assurance. ‘Why not?’

‘Because...because...’ Because she was afraid of this man, and it had nothing to do with any criminal connections. She was afraid of his power over her, her need for him. ‘I need to have my own life, Larenzo. I was planning on moving out of my sister’s house for that reason. I’m twenty-seven years old and I’m not going to freeload off people for ever.’

‘So this is a question of money?’

‘Not just money,’ she returned. ‘It’s about independence and autonomy. I need to be my own person—’

‘And you can’t do that living in my apartment?’ He made her feel ridiculous, and yet she couldn’t just fall in with his plans, fit into his life without having one of her own.

‘I can’t believe I’m even thinking of moving in with you,’ she said, shaking her head slowly.

‘It makes sense.’

Emma didn’t answer. It did make a certain kind of bizarre sense, which both aggravated and alarmed her. Three days ago she’d thought Larenzo Cavelli would spend his life in prison. Two days ago she would have fought tooth and nail to keep him out of her daughter’s life.

And now she was thinking of living with him? She pressed her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes. ‘This is so crazy.’

‘Maybe so,’ Larenzo agreed with a shrug, ‘but it’s our reality. I won’t take no for an answer, Emma.’

She opened her eyes and stared at him, saw that coldness in his eyes, the hint of how hard he could be. ‘What would you do if I did say no, Larenzo?’

‘It won’t come to that.’

‘But if it did?’

He hesitated, then stated flatly, ‘I’d sue for custody.’

Emma jerked back, appalled. ‘So this is basically blackmail.’

‘No.’

‘Then what would you call it? “Live with me or I’ll take your child.” That’s what you’re saying, Larenzo.’

‘And what are you saying?’ he answered, a hint of anger in his voice. ‘“You’re my child’s father and I don’t want you involved in her life,” even though you know I am innocent.’

‘I didn’t say that—’

‘You’ve been saying that for ten months, Emma.’

She took a deep breath. Arguing would get them nowhere. ‘Things have changed, Larenzo. I recognise that. But you can’t expect me to fall in with your plans without a second’s thought—’

‘I haven’t. I told you, you have until tomorrow.’

‘Well, thanks for that,’ she answered sarcastically. There was no reasoning with this man. No swaying him. So what was she going to do?

The waiter came with their meals, giving Emma a few minutes’ respite from the intensity of their conversation.

She picked at her chicken, her gaze lowered; she didn’t think she could swallow a single mouthful. Then, to her shock, she felt Larenzo’s hand on her own, his palm warm and strong just as it had been a year and a half ago, when he’d covered her hand with his own and she’d felt, for a moment, closer to this man than anyone else on earth.

‘Why are you fighting this, Emma?’ he asked quietly, and his voice was as sorrowful as it had been back on that night. His touch and his words catapulted her to that time when she’d felt so much for this man, had longed to comfort him. Had seen tenderness and understanding in his eyes, had felt it in his arms.

A lump rose in her throat and she blinked rapidly, swallowed past it. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, and it sounded like a confession.

‘I want to be with Ava. I never had a family of my own, except...’ He stopped, his voice choking, and shook his head. ‘I don’t want this to be acrimonious, God knows. I want to get to know my daughter and love her. Please let me do that.’

She gazed up at him, saw the sincerity and emotion in his eyes, and felt her last reservations melt away. She believed Larenzo. She believed he was innocent, but, more importantly, she believed he wanted what was best for Ava.

She only hoped it was best for her too.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘I CAN’T BELIEVE you’re doing this.’

Meghan stood behind Emma as she finished packing her suitcases—just one for her and one for Ava, really not much at all to bring to her new home. Her new life.

‘It makes sense, Meghan,’ she said, which was what Larenzo had said to her last night. Last night she’d lain in bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep as she’d thought about her future, when she’d heard Meghan’s and Pete’s raised voices downstairs, and had known they were talking about her. She’d crept to the top of the stairs, everything in her stilling as Pete had declared,

‘She can’t stay here any longer, Meghan. I’ve been patient, God knows, but two more mouths to feed is expensive, and if this Cavelli character has connections to—’

‘He was cleared of all charges,’ Meghan had cut across her husband.

‘Even so—’

‘She doesn’t have anywhere else to go, Pete.’

‘Then she needs to find somewhere,’ Pete had answered grimly, and Emma had crept back to her bed.

Pete was right. She couldn’t stay here any longer, for too many reasons. And she no longer wanted to deny Larenzo access to his daughter, even if she was afraid of what that might mean. Not for Ava, but for her.

‘You could stay here,’ Meghan persisted, and Emma met her sister’s eye in the mirror hanging over the bureau.

‘You know I couldn’t,’ she said quietly, and Meghan flushed and looked away.

‘I was afraid you might have heard that conversation—’

‘Pete’s right, Meghan.’

Meghan bit her lip. ‘I like having you here, Emma. You’ve been away for so long—’

‘New York City isn’t that far. I’ll visit lots, I promise.’

‘I’ll worry. I still don’t trust Cavelli. Even if he was cleared of charges...’

‘What happened to innocent until proven guilty?’ Emma asked lightly. ‘I trust him, Meghan, and I know he wouldn’t hurt his daughter.’ She paused, her gaze on the clothes she was folding. ‘He was good to me when I worked for him.’ She bit her lip as a pang of bittersweet longing assailed her. ‘He was very good to me.’

‘But can you really trust him?’ Meghan persisted, and Emma thought of what he’d said last night at dinner. You can’t trust anyone in this world. That’s one thing I’ve come to realise. When had he realised that? When he was a child at the orphanage, or when he’d been sent to a prison for crimes he might not have committed? A lifetime of betrayal, perhaps, and yet there was still so much she didn’t understand.

‘Yes, I can,’ she answered Meghan. ‘At least when it comes to Ava.’

Twenty minutes later Larenzo pulled up in front of Meghan’s house in a luxury sedan, a car seat already installed in the centre of the back seat. He loaded the two suitcases in the boot, glancing at Emma.

‘That’s all you have?’

‘I travel light.’

‘But Ava—’

‘The crib and changing table and things belonged to Meghan. They’re hoping for another baby someday, so...’

‘You don’t need to worry about any of that,’ Larenzo said. ‘I’ve taken care of it.’

‘Okay,’ she murmured, and Larenzo held out his arms for Ava.

‘May I?’

Wordlessly she nodded and handed him their daughter. He held her awkwardly, clearly not used to the chubby bundle of arms and legs that was an almost toddler. ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ he murmured, smiling into Ava’s inquisitive face. She gurgled and grabbed his chin in her chubby fists and Larenzo laughed, the sound rusty and surprising and also achingly wonderful. Emma realised she hadn’t heard Larenzo laugh before. It reminded her of the photo she’d shown him, back in Sicily; it was a sound of joy. Suddenly she felt almost near tears. She swallowed hard and watched as Larenzo buckled Ava into her car seat; he fiddled with the straps and with a laugh that managed to clear the tears away Emma helped him.

‘These things are impossible,’ she said. ‘Especially when Ava is resisting.’ She buckled the straps over Ava’s tummy, conscious of Larenzo standing so close to her, his head bent near hears. She closed her eyes, willed herself to develop a little strength. A lot of resistance. Otherwise she was going to have way too many difficult moments with Larenzo. ‘There.’ She patted the buckled straps and straightened, her breast brushing against Larenzo’s arm as she did so. Desire shot through her veins and she quickly turned away and got in the car, deeply unsettled by her own reaction to this man who had catapulted so suddenly back into her life.

* * *

Larenzo started the car; Emma was in the passenger seat, her face turned towards the window. He had no idea what she was thinking, if she still resented his presence in Ava’s life.

He’d told Emma he didn’t trust anyone, and, while that was true, he was conscious of how he was asking her to trust him with the most precious thing of all: their child. But he also knew he couldn’t change who he was, who he’d become. Trust was now an alien concept, and always would be. Even so, he could appreciate what Emma was doing.

‘Thank you,’ he said abruptly, and she turned to him warily.

‘For what?’ she asked and he cleared his throat.

‘For agreeing to live with me.’

‘When the alternative is having you sue me for custody,’ she answered after a moment, ‘there wasn’t really any question, was there?’

Guilt needled him at the realisation of how effectively he’d blackmailed her. Was he really any better than Bertrano, when he resorted to such tactics? And yet Emma would have denied him his own flesh and blood, the child he’d never expected to have, the family he’d longed for since he was a child himself.

‘Well,’ he said after a moment, ‘I’m still grateful.’ Emma did not reply.

They drove in silence for the entire hour’s journey into the city; Ava babbled and gurgled in the back seat, and by the time they approached the Lincoln Tunnel she was tired of the car and began to protest, straining against the straps of her car seat.

Emma tried to distract her with a few toys and then a rice cake, all of which entertained Ava for about three seconds before she hurled each item to the floor.

‘Sorry,’ Emma said as she glanced down at the floor of the back seat. ‘You have a sea of rice cake crumbs down there.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Are you sure you’re prepared for this?’ she asked as Ava drummed her heels against the seat. ‘Ava is a force to be reckoned with.’

‘So I can see—and hear,’ Larenzo answered dryly. ‘I don’t know if I’m prepared. But I’m willing to take it on.’ She need never doubt him in that.

‘Did you ever want children?’ Emma asked. ‘I mean, before...’

‘Before I went to prison?’ Larenzo filled in flatly. ‘I don’t know if I really thought of it. I didn’t have time for a relationship.’

‘Yet you’ve certainly had your share of women.’

His mouth tightened as he slid her a sideways glance. She’d spoken without expression, and he had no idea what she thought of that aspect of his past. Not that it actually mattered, since there would never be anything like that between them. He had nothing to offer Emma, or anyone. Not in that way. ‘I don’t deny it,’ he said after a moment.

‘Having a baby in your apartment, as well as her mother, might cramp your style a bit.’

Larenzo shook his head. ‘I’ve no interest in anything like that any more.’

Emma raised her eyebrows, clearly sceptical. ‘Larenzo, you’re what? In your mid-thirties? Surely you’re going to want a woman again.’

Want a woman. The last woman he’d been with had been Emma, and he’d wanted her almost unbearably. Just remembering the sweetness of her touch, the innocent and utter yielding of her body when he’d needed her so badly, made lust shaft through him with a sudden, painful intensity.

He shifted as discreetly as he could in his seat and kept his eyes on the road. He might have told Emma he wasn’t interested in relationships or sex any more, and in truth his libido had disappeared while he’d been in prison, along with all of his other feelings and desires. But he could feel it returning in force now.

‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘You might meet someone.’ A thought that he disliked instinctively, although he knew he had no right to.

‘I can’t even imagine meeting someone,’ Emma said with a small sigh. ‘Ava takes up all my energy.’

‘She won’t be a baby for ever.’

‘No,’ Emma said slowly. ‘But, Larenzo, this...situation can’t last for ever.’

He turned to her sharply, his eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t live with you for ever. I accept that it’s expedient for now, and of course it gives you time to get to know her, but eventually...I need my own life. You’ll need yours. When Ava is a little older, we can come to a custody arrangement we can both live with.’

Larenzo didn’t answer for a moment. He knew she was talking sense but everything in him rebelled against it. Ava was the only family he’d ever had. He wasn’t going to give her up, not even in part, as easily as that.

‘We’ll discuss the future when it is relevant,’ he said, making his tone final. They’d driven through the Lincoln Tunnel and now came out into midtown Manhattan, all of them blinking in the bright sunlight. Even Ava had stopped protesting against the hated car seat as she gazed curiously at the gleaming skyscrapers and the streets teeming with people.

Emma turned to stare out of the window, and Larenzo saw she looked almost as wide-eyed as her daughter. ‘Have you spent much time in New York before?’

‘Not really. As a kid I always lived abroad. My apartment is on the Central Park West, right near the Natural History Museum. It’s a good area for children.’

‘You’ve only been in America for a week, haven’t you?’ Emma asked. ‘How did you manage to secure an apartment so quickly?’

‘Money talks.’

‘And even though the assets of Cavelli Enterprises are frozen, you have money?’

‘I had my own savings, which were released to me when the charges were cleared.’

She turned to give him a direct look. ‘Are you ever going to tell me the whole story, Larenzo?’

His hands tensed on the steering wheel and he stared straight ahead as he navigated the roundabout at Columbus Circle. ‘I’ve told you what you need to know, Emma.’ Perhaps it was foolish to keep the truth from her about Bertrano; it was shaming that he still felt a loyalty to a man who, despite years of shared history, of happy memories, had completely and utterly betrayed him. And he knew that telling Emma his part of the story, how he’d been duped and deceived, wouldn’t make much difference. Yet it would make a difference to him. He didn’t want to admit how naive he’d been, how hurt he’d been. Not to Emma. Not to anyone.

And maybe Emma sensed some of what he felt, for to Larenzo’s surprise she laid a hand on his arm, the touch of her fingers as light as a butterfly’s. ‘I hope you will be able to tell me someday, Larenzo. For your sake as much as mine.’

They didn’t talk after that until Larenzo had pulled up to the elegant brick building that faced Central Park. A valet came out to deal with the car, and a doorman went for their bags.

Larenzo turned to get Ava out of her car seat; she practically flung herself into his arms and Larenzo held his daughter to him, breathing in her clean baby scent as her dark hair tickled his face. His daughter. Even now he nearly reeled from the shock and force of that knowledge. He had a family.

‘Do you want me to take her?’ Emma asked, reaching for Ava, and Larenzo shook his head.

‘She’s okay with me.’ Although he wasn’t so sure about that when Ava began to flail, scrambling to get down.

Emma laughed and reached for her, and reluctantly Larenzo gave Ava over to her. ‘I guess she wants her mother.’

‘Actually, I think she just wants to crawl all over this marble floor and get really dirty,’ Emma answered lightly. She smiled at him, and he thought he saw sympathy in her eyes. ‘She’ll get used to you.’

He nodded, his throat too tight for words. He’d thought he had nothing left inside him; he’d been sure he was broken and empty inside. But knowing he had a daughter, knowing he could have someone to love and be loved by, filled him up to overflowing.

* * *

Emma followed Larenzo into the sumptuous foyer of the apartment building, all marble floors and glittering chandeliers. A doorman nodded respectfully to Larenzo as they passed, and then they stepped into a large wood-panelled lift, complete with a sofa and gilt mirror.

‘Fancy,’ Emma murmured as they soared upwards to the penthouse and then stepped into the huge foyer of Larenzo’s apartment.

‘This marble is a bit hard for a baby,’ she said, tapping the black and white chequered marble with one foot. ‘I wouldn’t want Ava to fall and hurt herself.’

‘I’ll arrange to have it carpeted immediately,’ Larenzo answered without missing a beat, and Emma wondered if she’d been challenging him. How far would Larenzo go to accommodate his daughter? Did she even want to answer that question?

She felt a churning mix of emotions as she stepped into the living room, its large windows overlooking Central Park, now ablaze in autumn colours. On one hand, she was grateful that Larenzo was interested in his daughter. How could she not be? And yet she was also afraid. Afraid of the darkness of his past, the secrets he wasn’t telling her. But more than that: she was afraid of feeling too much for him, of getting too used to this. To him. Of caring for a man who had no intention of reciprocating her feelings. Surely she wouldn’t be so weak. She wouldn’t let herself.

‘Would you like to come see the nursery?’ Larenzo asked, coming to stand behind her at the window, Ava in his arms.

Emma turned. ‘There’s a nursery?’

‘I had it all delivered yesterday.’

Wordlessly she nodded and followed Larenzo down the luxuriously carpeted hall to the bedrooms.

‘My bedroom is here,’ he said, indicating a door on the left. ‘And your bedroom is here.’ He pointed to a door directly across from his. ‘The nursery is adjoining yours. I thought you’d prefer that.’

‘I do,’ Emma said, although the thought of having her own bedroom after ten months of sharing cramped quarters with her daughter was a luxury she intended to enjoy. ‘Thank you,’ she added belatedly, and Larenzo just nodded as he opened the door to the nursery.

She’d been expecting something basic and expedient, ordered and set up in a hurry, but the room she stepped into looked as if it had taken months of planning. The walls were painted a pale lilac, and matching curtains framed the deep window that overlooked the park. Deeper purple accents were scattered around the room: a throw pillow on the rocking chair, a silk-patterned lampshade, a close-up photograph of a violet on the wall. It was a lovely, creative room that was perfect for a baby without being cloyingly sweet or infantile.

‘I thought you might like something other than the standard pink,’ Larenzo said, and Emma heard a surprising note of uncertainty, even vulnerability, in his voice. ‘But of course if you don’t like it, you must change it. You can redecorate anything in the apartment as you like.’

‘I don’t want to redecorate,’ Emma answered honestly. ‘I love it. It’s perfect, Larenzo. Thank you.’

‘Good.’

Emma set Ava down on the plush carpet and she crawled towards a purple rocking horse—actually, Emma saw, a unicorn with a glittery horn—set in the corner, reaching up to grasp the handles as she pulled herself to standing.

‘She’s clever, isn’t she?’ Larenzo said with pride. ‘She’ll be walking soon.’

‘And then there will really be no stopping her.’ Emma gazed round the room again, noting all the unique touches. ‘So did you hire an interior decorator?’ she asked, and Larenzo shook his head.

‘No, I did it myself. I enjoyed picking out all the things.’

‘It must have taken an age—’

‘No, just an afternoon. I hired painters to come and do the walls, and I put the furniture together myself.’ He paused and then added, ‘I told you I wanted to be involved, Emma.’

‘I know, but...’ She shook her head, overwhelmed by the thought and consideration Larenzo had clearly put into the nursery. She pictured him with an instruction leaflet and a set of tools, laboriously putting the crib and changing table together, and felt as if a fist had clenched around her heart. ‘I suppose I didn’t really think you’d be a hands-on dad,’ she confessed, and Larenzo raised his eyebrows.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. You were so busy with work when I was your housekeeper. You hardly had time to come to the villa. And your lifestyle...’

‘Things are different now.’

‘Yes.’ Emma swallowed, trying to banish the images that had sprung into her mind, memories of the last night Larenzo had come to the villa, had come to her. She had to put that behind her. Heaven knew Larenzo had. ‘Yes,’ she repeated more firmly. ‘Things are different now.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

AFTER SETTLING AVA in her new crib for an afternoon nap, Emma went to her bedroom and began to unpack her few possessions. She could hear Larenzo moving around in his bedroom across the hall, and the closeness of the quarters made her feel...aware.

She was still overwhelmingly attracted to Larenzo. It was a fact she had to acknowledge, and perhaps acknowledging it would help her to deal with it. Larenzo had made it abundantly clear that he had no interest in her that way any more, and she didn’t even want him to. At least, she shouldn’t want him to. Emma let out a rueful sigh as she acknowledged the truth—and strength—of her feelings. But she also knew their relationship, if they even had one, was way too complicated already.

And yet the tenderness he’d shown with Ava, the consideration he’d shown her...they chipped away at her defences. Made her remember. Made her want things she had absolutely no business wanting.

She might believe in Larenzo’s innocence, but that didn’t mean he was safe.

Ava was still sleeping after she’d unpacked, and so Emma headed out to the living room. The room was spacious and luxuriously appointed, if a little bland. No personal photographs or mementoes, but then Larenzo had bought the place only a week ago. It had probably come furnished.

She prowled around the room, glancing at the antique vases, the gilt mirrors, feeling restless and not quite knowing why.

She gazed out of the window at the leafy enclave of Central Park and as she imagined taking Ava to one of the playgrounds there, exploring the city with her daughter, her spirits lifted a little. She could make this work. She had to make this work, at least for a little while.

‘Was your room adequate?’

Emma spun around to see Larenzo standing in the doorway of the sitting room. He’d changed from his more casual clothes of this morning to a well-tailored suit in navy-blue silk, and he looked, as he always did, devastatingly attractive. Even from across the room Emma felt the force of his magnetism, and it nearly propelled her forward, towards him. She held onto the window sill for balance as she answered him.

‘Yes, thank you. More than adequate. This is a beautiful apartment, Larenzo.’

‘You must change anything you don’t like.’

She thought of telling him she wouldn’t be staying long enough to warrant such changes, but somehow she couldn’t make herself say the words. She just nodded instead, and Larenzo turned towards the door.

‘I have to go out now, for some business meetings, but I should be back this evening.’

‘Okay.’ Emma wasn’t sure why this surprised her, but it did. What had she expected—she and Larenzo would spend the day together? Larenzo had made it clear they would be living separate lives, brought together only by Ava, which was how she wanted it. How she had to want it. ‘Do you—do you want me to make something for dinner?’ She saw surprise flash across Larenzo’s face and she wondered if she’d pushed some undiscussed boundary, crossed some invisible line. Maybe Larenzo had no intention of eating with her or Ava. She had no idea how this was meant to work, how it was going to work.

‘If it’s no trouble, that would be fine,’ he finally said.

‘It’s no trouble.’

With a nod of farewell, Larenzo left the apartment and Emma stood there for a moment, feeling the emptiness all around her, not able to decide if she was relieved he had gone...or disappointed.

She made her way to the kitchen, which was huge, a hymn to granite and stainless steel, with every possible kitchen gadget and appliance. There was, however, no food. She stared into the empty depths of the enormous sub-zero fridge and wondered what Larenzo had been eating for the last few days.

When Ava woke a little while later Emma buckled her daughter into the top-of-the-line stroller that she found in the foyer.

Outside on Central Park West, a brisk autumn breeze blowing and Ava thankfully distracted by all the sights and sounds around them, Emma headed towards Columbus Avenue and the local shops. She felt better with every step she took, the city’s vibrant life seeming to infuse her with energy and purpose.

At a local grocery she bought all the ingredients for lasagne, a simple but warming meal on this cold autumn day. She paused in front of a wine shop and then recklessly bought a bottle of Chianti to go with it. She’d already pushed the boundaries of their arrangement by suggesting she cook for Larenzo. Why not own it?

This was her life, at least for now, and she wanted to enjoy it. Ava started getting restless in the stroller, so Emma headed back. Once she was up in the apartment she brought the groceries into the kitchen and settled Ava onto the floor with a few wooden spoons and copper pans. While her daughter made as much noise as she possibly could, Emma bustled around, assembling the lasagne and tossing a salad.

She started to relax as she worked; she’d always enjoyed cooking, and it actually felt good to be mistress of her own kitchen, instead of an interloper in Meghan’s. As much as her sister had made her feel welcome, Emma had been conscious of how much of an imposition she really was. Here, at least, she had a job to do, a potential role. Perhaps she could act as Larenzo’s housekeeper. It would be a way of earning her keep and making herself useful.

She was just sliding the lasagne out of the oven when Larenzo appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. He’d taken off his suit jacket and loosened his tie, and his jaw was darkened with five o’clock shadow, all of it making him look deliciously rumpled and sexy.

He paused, taking in the sight of the kitchen, and Emma realised what a mess it was, with pots and spoons all over the floor for Ava’s entertainment, and the detritus from her cooking all over the counters.

‘Sorry, I’m not very good at cleaning up as I cook,’ she said.

‘No, it’s fine.’ Larenzo glanced around the room again, and Emma couldn’t tell anything from his expression. ‘I like it,’ he said at last. ‘Shall I set the table?’

He was already getting the forks and knives from the drawer, and Emma watched him, a strange pressure building in her chest. This was all so...normal. So cosy.

Ava had noticed her father and abandoned her pots and spoons to crawl over to him and pull herself up, clutching his legs. Larenzo glanced down at her, his whole face softening into a smile that made that pressure in Emma’s chest turn painful.

‘I’m afraid she’s dented a few of your pots and pans,’ she said stiltedly, turning her gaze to the salad she was needlessly tossing. ‘She doesn’t know her own strength.’

‘I don’t mind.’ Larenzo scooped Ava up with one hand, settling her on his hip as he took the cutlery to the table in the dining nook of the kitchen. ‘This is a bit more manageable than the dining room,’ he said as he laid the table. ‘I think the table in there seats twenty.’

‘Planning on having any dinner parties?’

‘No. I don’t think I know twenty people who would come to a dinner party I hosted, unless it was to gawp and gossip.’ He spoke tonelessly, without self-pity, and Emma eyed him curiously as she brought the lasagne to the table.

‘You don’t have many friends in America?’

‘I don’t have many friends, full stop,’ Larenzo answered. ‘A stint in prison shows you who your true friends are, and mine turned out to be rather few.’

He tried to put Ava in the high chair he’d brought to the table, but the toddler shrieked and arched her back, sticking her legs straight out. Emma watched, amused, as Larenzo tried his best before looking up with a wry smile.

‘She’s really quite strong.’

‘Yes, and she doesn’t like being strapped in.’ Emma plucked Ava from the chair and put her back down on the floor. ‘She’ll want to join us when we sit down.’

‘I suppose I have a lot to learn.’

‘Fortunately Ava provides a steep learning curve,’ Emma answered with a smile.

Emma brought the meal to the table and they both sat down. Just as she’d predicted, Ava crawled over to them, wanting to be part of things.

Larenzo glanced down at his daughter, smiling when she lifted her arms for him to pick her up. He settled her in her high chair this time without Ava making any protest. ‘Tell me about the last ten months,’ he said to Emma when he’d sat down again. ‘Or even before that. How was your pregnancy?’

‘Mostly uneventful, thankfully,’ Emma answered. ‘I was pretty nauseous for the first three months,’ she continued. ‘But then it settled down. She was quite the kicker, though. I couldn’t sleep most nights because it felt like she was playing football inside of me.’

Larenzo smiled at that, his whole face lightening, and Emma quickly looked down at her plate. Larenzo’s smile was dangerous.

‘And the birth? It went well?’

‘As well as these things go,’ Emma answered frankly. ‘It hurt. A lot.’

‘Why didn’t you get pain relief?’

‘No time. She came a week early; she wasn’t due until New Year’s Eve. And I didn’t think I could actually be in labour, because the contractions were irregular and they didn’t hurt all that much.’ She let out a sudden, embarrassed laugh. ‘I can’t believe I’m telling you all this.’

‘Why not? I want to hear it.’

‘Really?’ She heard the scepticism in her voice, and Larenzo must have too, because he nodded firmly.

‘Absolutely. I missed this, Emma. I want to know now.’

But would he have wanted to know then? If Larenzo hadn’t gone to prison, would he have been an involved father? Would they be dating or even married now? Emma’s cheeks heated at the thought. She was glad Larenzo had no idea the turn her thoughts had taken. She cleared her throat and continued. ‘Well, Meghan had been telling me how first babies take for ever, and as it was Christmas Eve I was hoping the contractions might die down. I didn’t want to be in the hospital over Christmas.’

‘Understandable.’

‘But they didn’t, and by the time I realised we needed to go to the hospital, Ava was almost ready to make her arrival.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘Meghan was pushing me in a wheelchair into the delivery ward, and I was bellowing at the top of my lungs. I’m not so good with pain.’

‘I wish I could have been there,’ Larenzo said quietly, and Emma knew he meant it.

Before she could think better of it, she asked the question that had been dancing through her mind. ‘What do you suppose would have happened, if you hadn’t gone to prison?’

Larenzo frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I would have stayed on as your housekeeper. I would have told you I was pregnant right away.’ She held her breath, waiting for him to say something, although she didn’t know what.

Larenzo sighed and leaned back in his chair. ‘The truth is, Emma, if I hadn’t gone to prison, if I hadn’t known I was going to go to prison, there wouldn’t have been a baby. That night happened because I knew I was going to be arrested in the morning.’

‘Oh.’ Emma blinked, stupidly feeling hurt by this, and not quite sure what to do with that emotion. ‘I see.’

‘You gave me something precious that night.’

‘My virginity?’ she filled in, trying to joke, but it came out flat.

‘No, I didn’t mean that, although that of course is precious too.’

She really didn’t want to be having this conversation. She kept looking at her plate, focusing on the food she no longer felt like eating.

‘I meant comfort,’ Larenzo said quietly. ‘Human connection. Pleasure, not just physical pleasure, although there certainly was that. But pleasure in talking to you, and being in your company. Playing chess, seeing your photographs...that night made a memory that sustained me through many dark days in prison.’

‘Oh.’ And now she didn’t feel so hurt. She felt...honoured that she’d been that important to him, and deeply thankful that their one night together had meant something to him, as it had to her. ‘Well, I’m glad about that, I suppose.’

‘And look at the result.’ He glanced at Ava, who now had tomato sauce in her hair, before turning back to Emma with a smile. ‘I don’t have any regrets, since she came out of it. But I think she needs a bath.’

‘Do you want me to—?’ Emma half rose from her chair as Larenzo unbuckled Ava from her high chair.

‘I can do it,’ he said.

‘She can be pretty tricky in the tub—’

As if to prove her point, Ava started wriggling out of Larenzo’s grasp, and soon his shirt was splattered with tomato sauce.

Larenzo looked rather endearingly amazed by his daughter’s gymnastics and Emma rescued him. ‘I’ve found this is the best way sometimes,’ she said, and, tucking Ava under her arm as if she were a parcel, she took her to the bathroom.

Larenzo followed, standing in the doorway while Emma put Ava down and turned the taps on. ‘Fortunately she likes her bath,’ she said, and turned to look over her shoulder. Her breath dried in her throat as she saw he was unbuttoning his shirt. What, she wondered distantly, was so mesmerising about his long brown fingers sliding buttons out of their holes? Something was, because she couldn’t tear her gaze away from the sight.

‘I’d rather not get my shirt wet,’ Larenzo explained. ‘I have a feeling Ava is a splasher.’ He shrugged out of his dress shirt, revealing a plain white T-shirt underneath that clung to the defined muscles of his chest and abdomen.

‘She is,’ Emma answered, and finally managed to drag her gaze to Larenzo’s face. She couldn’t read the emotion in his eyes, and she hoped that he hadn’t noticed how she’d been staring. Wanting.

She knew she should go back to the kitchen and clean up their dishes, but she felt as if her feet were rooted to the floor, and all she could do was watch as Larenzo battled Ava out of her clothes and then plopped her in the tub, one strong hand resting on her back to keep her steady.

‘Is this right?’ he asked, and the uncertainty in his voice made Emma’s heart ache.

‘Yes...yes, that’s perfect.’ She felt as if her feelings were a kaleidoscope that Larenzo twirled every time he spoke. In these unguarded moments of honesty everything in her swelled with feeling, ached with loss.

What if things could have been different? What if that night had still happened, without the arrest, and she and Larenzo had built a relationship? What if they’d become a proper family, rather than this awkwardly constructed temporary one?

Emma knew she shouldn’t torment herself with such thoughts. She’d never been looking for that kind of relationship, and, in any case, there was no going back. And yet as she gazed helplessly at Larenzo bathing their daughter, she almost wished there were.

Half an hour later Emma had cleaned up the kitchen when Larenzo emerged from the nursery with Ava in her pyjamas.

‘You’ve buttoned up her pyjamas wrong,’ she remarked in amusement as Larenzo raked a hand through his hair.

‘Those things are worse than a straitjacket. There are a million buttons.’

‘It’s a learned skill.’

‘Clearly.’ He pulled his damp T-shirt away from his chest, and Emma tried not to stare at his perfect musculature, or remember how warm and satiny his skin had felt, how she’d once put her lips to his taut abdomen...

‘She’s ready for bed, I think,’ Emma said. ‘I’ll get her bottle ready.’ She’d brought a can of infant formula from Meghan’s, and now she poured cooled boiled water into a bottle and added a few scoops of the white powder. ‘You were a little low on groceries, by the way,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there’s anything for breakfast.’

‘I can arrange for food to be delivered, unless you’d prefer to do it yourself.’

‘Actually, I was thinking about that,’ Emma said. She’d finished making the bottle and Ava was reaching for it with both hands. ‘I’m not comfortable just living off your generosity, and one thing I know how to do is be a housekeeper.’

Larenzo stilled. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘I could be your housekeeper. You don’t have to pay me, but at least it will make up for mine and Ava’s room and board.’

Larenzo’s face had darkened as she spoke. ‘Ava is my daughter, Emma, and you are her mother. This isn’t a question of room and board.’

Emma took a deep breath, knowing she needed to say this even if part of her didn’t want to. ‘It is for me, Larenzo.’ He didn’t answer and she continued, keeping her voice steady with effort, ‘Look, you said yourself you aren’t interested in a relationship. You want to get to know Ava, and I respect that. But the only reason I’m here is because Ava is. So it makes sense for me to have a role. A job.’

Still Larenzo didn’t speak, and Emma could see the emotions battling on his face. She just didn’t know what they were. Did he want there to be more between them? Or was that just her foolish, wishful thinking? Sighing, she hoisted Ava more firmly on her hip. ‘I’m going to put her to bed. Think about it, at least.’

She was at the door when Larenzo finally bit out, ‘Fine, you can act as housekeeper. But I don’t want any responsibilities you needlessly put on yourself to take away from Ava’s care.’

‘Many women manage a home and a baby,’ Emma answered, doing her best to keep her voice mild. ‘I think I can too.’ Larenzo said nothing and as she headed to the nursery with Ava, Emma wondered why this didn’t feel more like a victory.

CHAPTER NINE

ANOTHER SLEEPLESS NIGHT. By now Larenzo was well used to insomnia. He’d slept badly in prison, on a thin mattress in a tiny cell with a thousand other prisoners shifting, coughing, and groaning around him. Ironic that he slept just as badly now that he was free, lying on a king-sized bed with the apartment quiet and still.

And Emma sleeping across the hall.

Although he knew he shouldn’t, he imagined rising from his bed, opening his door, and going into Emma’s room. Watching her sleep, her golden-brown hair spread across the pillow, her lithe body clad in those scanty pyjamas he remembered from their night in Sicily.

Then he imagined sliding into that bed with her, taking her in his arms, burying his face in her sweet-smelling hair, burying himself inside her body...

With a groan Larenzo rose from the bed and went to the en-suite bathroom to splash some cold water on his face. He had no business thinking of Emma that way. His libido might have leapt to life since he’d seen her again, but he had nothing left in his heart to give her. No ability to have a relationship, to trust or to love someone.

He loved Ava, because she was sweet and innocent, and she was his. His love for his daughter was rock solid, utterly unshakeable. But loving a woman? Trusting someone with the heart that had shattered into tiny fragments of nothingness?

Impossible.

And the alternative, some kind of fling or affair, would only further complicate what was already a tenuous arrangement. His face settled into a scowl as he thought of Emma’s suggestion. Housekeeper. He didn’t want her here as a housekeeper. She wasn’t his damned employee. She was here because she was the mother of his child, because she belonged—

Larenzo let out his breath in a hiss as he bowed his head. Emma belonged with Ava, but not with him. Not like that. Never like that.

So perhaps, much as he had instinctively disliked the idea, it was better that she act as housekeeper. Perhaps having a clearly defined role would help them navigate this arrangement with a minimum of awkwardness.

A soft cry interrupted the wrangling of his own thoughts and Larenzo realised that Ava had woken up. Quickly he left his room and went to the nursery. His daughter was standing up in her crib, her face streaked with tears. Larenzo’s heart twisted with a powerful mixture of love, protectiveness, and sorrow. Sleeping in a strange place had to be a frightening experience for the child.

He picked her up, and again his heart twisted as Ava settled against his bare chest, her cheek resting over his heart. Larenzo stroked her back and without even realising what he was doing, he began to croon a lullaby in Italian. ‘E dormi, dormi, dormi, bambin de cuna. To mama no la gh’è la a-sé andà via.’

The words came to him unbidden, from a deep well of memory. He stroked Ava’s hair and watched as his daughter’s eyelids eventually drooped.

After several minutes when he was sure she was deeply asleep, he laid her back in the crib and watched her for a moment, her thick, dark lashes fanning her plump baby cheeks.

‘That’s a beautiful lullaby.’

Larenzo stiffened, his gaze moving from his sleeping daughter to the woman standing in the doorway of the nursery. Emma’s hair was tousled about her shoulders, her golden-green eyes wide and luminous. Larenzo dropped his gaze and saw with a hard kick of desire that she was wearing just what he’d imagined: a thin T-shirt that moulded to the shape of her breasts and a pair of boy shorts. He felt his body respond, and in only a pair of drawstring pyjama bottoms he knew Emma would be able to tell if she lowered her gaze just as he’d lowered his.

‘She’s asleep,’ he whispered, and moved quietly out of the nursery, brushing past Emma as he did so. He sucked in a hard breath as her breasts nudged against his chest, and her hair whispered against his cheek. He inhaled the scent of her, sweetness and sleep, and he averted his face from the temptation of hers.

Emma closed the door behind him and they stood in the hallway, only a few inches separating them, the only light coming from a lamp Larenzo had left on in the living room, its warm glow spilling onto the floor.

It was so reminiscent of that night in the villa, the way things had shifted between them in the quiet and dark. Barriers had disappeared, defences had dropped. In that bubble of solitude and intimacy there had only been the two of them, seeking and finding both solace and pleasure.

And there were just the two of them now, standing so close together, the only sound the sigh and draw of their breathing.

‘What did it mean?’ Emma asked in a whisper, and Larenzo forced himself to meet her gaze, to hold himself still, when all he wanted to do was drag her into his arms, forget everything but this, them, for a little while.

‘What did what mean?’

‘The lullaby. I couldn’t make out the Italian. I’m rusty, I suppose.’

‘Oh... Sleep, sleep, sleep, cradle baby. Your mother is not here, she has gone away.’ Belatedly he realised how it sounded. ‘It’s the only lullaby I know. I didn’t even realise I knew it until I started singing.’

‘Is it from your childhood?’ Emma asked, and Larenzo blinked.

‘I suppose it has to be. But I don’t remember anyone singing me any lullabies.’ He heard the note of bitterness that had crept into his voice and he tried to shrug it off. No point in dwelling on the past, just as he’d told Emma. ‘Anyway, Ava seemed to like it.’

‘Thank you,’ Emma said softly, and she reached out and laid a hand on his arm. The touch of her fingers on his skin was electric, jolting his senses as if he’d stuck his finger into a socket. He held himself still, staring down at her hand, her slender fingers curled around his biceps.

She’d touched him like this back in Sicily. And he’d put his hand on hers, and for a moment he hadn’t felt alone. He’d felt as if someone was on his side, someone actually cared...

But that was a lifetime ago, and it hadn’t been true anyway. Their night together had been a moment out of time, out of reality. An aberration.

Larenzo forced himself to shake off her hand. ‘It was nothing,’ he said and without saying anything else he turned and went back to his bedroom.

* * *

Emma woke to sunlight pouring through the windows of her bedroom, and the sound of Ava gurgling with laughter from the adjoining nursery. She stretched, savouring the moment’s relaxation before the day with all of its demands began.

Then she heard Larenzo’s answering laughter and realised he was in the nursery with Ava. Just the rumbling sound of his voice as he talked to their daughter brought the memory of last night back with slamming force. Emma didn’t think she’d seen or heard anything as beautiful, as desirable, as Larenzo cradling their baby to his bare chest as he sang her a lullaby in lilting Italian.

Watching him in the darkened nursery, she’d wanted him almost as much as she’d wanted him that night back at the villa. Wanted to feel his hot, hard skin against hers, his lips on hers as he treasured and cherished her with his body...

For a few seconds, when she’d touched his arm, simply because she had no longer been able to keep herself from it, she’d thought he was battling the same kind of temptation. Thought, and even hoped, that he might give in to it. In that moment she’d known if he’d kissed her she’d be lost, just as she had been before. Nothing would have kept her from him.

But he’d walked away instead, and Emma had spent a restless night trying to banish the ache of longing inside her. Now she got out of bed and hurriedly dressed in jeans and a sweater before going into the nursery.

Larenzo was dressed in an elegant and crisp suit, and he’d already changed Ava’s diaper and was now wrestling her into a bodysuit. Ava was resisting him, her whole body rigid as she stared up at him in stubborn determination.

‘I think she’s winning,’ Emma said, and Larenzo glanced up, his mouth curving wryly.

‘There’s no thinking about it. It’s definite.’

‘Do you want me to—?’

‘Please.’ He stepped aside and with a smile Emma finished dressing Ava, who saw that the jig was up and relaxed her body as she blew a raspberry.

‘Clearly you have the touch,’ Larenzo observed.

‘Years, or rather, months of practice.’ She turned to face him, her heart bumping against her ribs as she realised how close he was. The woodsy scent of his aftershave tickled her nostrils and made heat lick low in her belly. ‘You look smart. Are you going somewhere?’

‘I have a few meetings at the office. But...’ He hesitated, a note of uncertainty creeping into his voice. ‘We can have breakfast first, if you’d like. I went out early this morning and bought some bagels and coffee.’

‘Okay.’ Emma followed him into the kitchen, Ava balanced on one hip. The smell of freshly brewed coffee and toasted bagels made her mouth water. ‘So if you’re not CEO of Cavelli Enterprises,’ she asked, ‘what are you doing exactly?’

‘I’m starting a new company,’ Larenzo answered as he poured them both coffees. Emma settled Ava into her high chair with a few torn-off pieces of bagel. ‘LC Investments.’

‘And what are you going to do?’

‘I hope to invest in start-up businesses, the kind of places that might have trouble getting loans from one of the big banks.’

‘That sounds rather noble.’

He shrugged and handed her a mug of steaming coffee. ‘I have some sympathy for the underdog.’

Because he could relate? And yet Larenzo Cavelli was so powerful, so charismatic, so arrogant. He’d even seemed so back in Sicily when he’d been handcuffed and at the police’s mercy. Standing there now, one hip braced against the counter, his large hands cradling a mug of coffee, he managed to look like the lord of all he surveyed, his confidence careless and yet utterly assured. And yet this man had come from the street.

‘Did you feel like the underdog as a child?’ she asked after a moment.

Larenzo pursed his lips as he considered. ‘I suppose I would have, if I’d thought about it. I was just trying to survive.’

‘I’m amazed at how far you’ve come. You should be incredibly proud of yourself, Larenzo, going from street orphan to CEO.’

His mouth tightened and he shook his head. ‘I had some help.’

Who from? she wanted to ask but decided not to. ‘Even so.’

Larenzo put his empty coffee mug on the dish drainer. ‘I should go,’ he said shortly, and Emma felt his emotional withdrawal like a palpable thing. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be home,’ he added. ‘Don’t wait for me.’

Emma nodded, feeling the rejection even though she knew she shouldn’t, and Larenzo left. He kissed the top of Ava’s head before he went, and Emma sat down at the table to finish her coffee, caught between missing Larenzo and enjoying the prospect of a day spent in the city. She was looking forward to going out and exploring New York, and yet, even though he’d just gone, she already missed Larenzo. She was so curious about him—this man who was hardened and suspicious, who could be so ruthless and cold, and yet also showed such gentleness and kindness.

Her cell phone rang and Emma slipped it out of the pocket of her jeans, and saw that it was Meghan.

‘Hey,’ she said as she answered the call and Meghan drew her breath in sharply.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Am I okay? Yes.’ Emma gazed out of the window at the view of Central Park, and then glanced at the remains of her perfectly toasted bagel. ‘I’m fine. Just finishing breakfast.’

‘Cavelli isn’t...he’s being decent to you?’ Meghan asked cautiously.

‘More than decent. He already has a bond with Ava. He even got up with her in the night.’ Emma pictured Larenzo wearing nothing but his pyjama bottoms, the lamplight washing over his bronzed skin, and she suppressed a shiver of desire.

‘Really,’ Meghan answered, the disbelief audible in her voice.

‘Yes, really. I told you before, Meghan, Larenzo wants to be a part of his daughter’s life.’

‘I didn’t realise you’d become his champion,’ Meghan retorted, and Emma sucked in a breath.

‘Meghan...’

‘Seriously, Emma, you’ve changed your tune since yesterday.’

‘I haven’t—’

‘How do you know Cavelli isn’t just pretending he’s interested in Ava—?’

Emma recoiled at the suggestion. ‘He’s not. Anyway, why would he?’

‘I don’t know, maybe he’s trying to polish his image for the public? Whatever it is, I don’t trust him, Emma, and you shouldn’t either. I know the charges against him were dropped, but you know the saying, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’

‘And sometimes there’s just smoke.’ The fierceness of her response surprised them both. ‘In any case,’ Emma continued, ‘you know as well as I do that I can’t keep Larenzo from seeing his daughter.’ And she didn’t even want to any more. Not when she’d seen how tender he was with her.

‘You still don’t have to live with him. I talked to that lawyer again and mentioned that Cavelli had practically blackmailed you into living with him. It could provide evidence that he’s unfit—’

‘Meghan.’ Shock as well as anger blazed through her. ‘You have no right to talk about my business with a lawyer.’

‘I’m looking out for you,’ Meghan cried. ‘Emma, obviously you still have some feelings for this man. That’s understandable, considering your shared history. But I think you’re in over your head. You don’t know Cavelli, or what he’s capable of. And someone has to be responsible and think about Ava—’

‘I am thinking about Ava,’ Emma shot back. Her voice shook with the force of her feelings. ‘Trust me, I am. And Larenzo is very good with her. I don’t want to keep him from Ava’s life, no matter what happened in his past.’

‘And what if it turns out he really is dangerous?’

‘It won’t. I trust Larenzo in that.’

‘How can you trust—?’

‘I just do, Meghan,’ Emma cut her off, knowing she meant it. ‘And I need to go now. Ava’s starting to fuss.’

Ava, who was happily chewing on a bagel, looked at her curiously. Emma disconnected the call and flung the phone onto the kitchen counter. Her whole body was trembling.

She wanted to deny everything her sister had said; she wanted to scrub her brain and pretend she’d never heard it. And yet beneath Meghan’s older-sister I-know-best attitude, Emma knew there was concern and perhaps even truth.

She still didn’t know Larenzo at all. It just felt as if she did.

Ava threw the bagel onto the floor, and Emma decided it was time to go out for the day. All of New York was waiting for her to explore, and she could certainly use the distraction.

She fetched Ava’s coat and hat and then buckled her into the stroller, armed with an arsenal of snacks and toys to keep her daughter entertained. Then she hit the streets.

Central Park on a crisp autumn day was one of the loveliest places on earth, Emma decided as she wheeled Ava along the twisting, tree-shaded pathways. She could hear the distant laughter of children on a playground, and some tourists were posing for photographs in front of the statue of Christopher Columbus. Every colour seemed sharp and bright, as if the whole world had been brought into crystalline focus.

As Emma strolled along Ava watched everything avidly; they made it all the way to the Central Park Zoo where they both watched the animal statues dance around the iconic clock. Emma bought a hot dog from a cart and shared it with Ava, enjoying people watching from a park bench, and then when her daughter fell asleep in her stroller she walked back uptown, stopping in front of the gorgeous esplanade with Bethesda Fountain as its magnificent centrepiece.

Every step she took felt as if she were breathing life back into her soul. She hadn’t realised until then just how much of a rut she’d been in, living with her sister and staggering through her days. It had taken Larenzo’s suggestion to get her out of it, and for that she was grateful.

Ava was starting to stir, and so Emma walked back towards the apartment on Central Park West. She stopped at the playground directly opposite the park’s entrance and unbuckled Ava from her stroller before putting her into one of the baby swings. Ava chortled with glee as Emma pushed her, enjoying the autumn sunshine on her face.

She didn’t know how long she spent in the playground with Ava, savouring the day, but it must have been more time than she’d thought for the sun was starting to sink behind the buildings on Central Park West when a hand suddenly clamped down hard on her shoulder.

Emma whirled around, her heart seeming to leap right into her throat, and saw Larenzo glaring at her ferociously.

‘Where have you been?’

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