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choice.

    “Abby’s dad was a flash in the pan,” he said. “Gave us Abby, and that’s his greatest donation to the world. But that wasn’t your big moment, baby girl.”

    I looked up at him and then away again before he could see my thoughts. No, Abby’s dad wasn’t my big moment. But he didn’t want to talk about who was. That boy. The thug.

    “Dad, I’m busy,” I said. “I had Abby to raise, and now I have this place to run. I’m not worried about a love life.” I sat up a little straighter. “Although if you must know, I have a date tomorrow morning.”

    I really needed to focus more on that. Get excited again like other women did. Let that work on my self-esteem and mood.

    “Oh?”

    “Yes sir, Duncan Spoon and I are having coffee across the street tomorrow.”

    He frowned. “Across the street? Where Ian McMasters is going to be?”

    I closed my eyes. Suddenly that boy had a name. “Would everyone quit worrying about him? I’m a big girl.” I took a breath and met my dad’s gaze. “And I made the date before I knew the location would be so friggin’ controversial.”

    “Just—keep your head about you,” he said, turning to go again.

    “And you just quit this nonsense about downsizing, or bigger fish, and all that crap,” I said. “Just because you changed the subject, don’t think I forgot that.”

    “I just don’t want this place to be your whole world,” he said with his wink that said he’d had enough conversation. “There’s more to life than other people’s discards.”

    “Says the man in the junk business for fifty years.”

    He turned with one last look before rounding the door. “Exactly.”

     

    • • •

     

    Gracie kept pacing.

    “Would you go land somewhere?” I said from my dresser, where I had pulled out and discarded four different outfits. “You’re making me itchy.”

    Gracie just wagged her long tail and tilted her head as I spoke, her little Groucho Marx eyebrows toggling back and forth. She didn’t understand. All she had to do to impress Duncan was stand there and look adorable. Lick him a few times. Then again, she might have something there.

    He’d seen me in all my best “looking casual” clothes, I always made sure of that. How dense of me not to hold something aside for this possibility. I needed something that said, “I’m going to work in a barn after this, so I’m not going to be silly,” but that also spoke of “Don’t you want to know what else there is?”

    I was not allowing even the tiniest inkling of a hint that any of my wardrobe dilemma had to do with someone else being there today. Not a bit.

    Three times, I’d woken up during the night to stare into the dark and wonder if he was in Copper Falls yet. All three times, I wanted to slap myself senseless. Ian had betrayed everything that we once were. Friendship, trust—love. He had led me over that fence and then destroyed me with it. Had I known what changing the rules would do to us, would bring us to, I might have acted differently. Or answered differently.

     

    “Ask me to stay.”

    “What?” The words were soft and maybe I hadn’t heard him right. I blinked a couple of times in the low light from the lamp across the room, trying to read his face.

    “You heard me.”

    It was 3:22 in the morning, and we were basking in too much sex and the exhaustion of having to keep it quiet with Abby down the hall.

    That was normal. This was not.

    “I don’t think I did,” I said.

    Ian pushed a strand of hair off my face and braced himself on his elbow. Even at thirty-two, there was no sign of slacking. But as crazy as my heart always got around a naked Ian, it was spinning in a whole new direction. Stay? What did that mean? We didn’t do that. But the look he was giving me—

    “Let’s start our own business.”

    I blinked again, whirling with the subject change and still reeling about the first question. “Jesus, are you high?”

    He pushed up