She mimicked his drawl. “Ditto, darlin’.”

After a moment, he asked, “Do you ever miss Kansas?”

“Not the place so much as what it represents.”

Home. Family. Simpler times. At least, that was what Chicago meant to him. Truth was, he hadn’t realized how much it meant to him until he had to leave it.

“Are you ever going back there to live?”

“I don’t know.” She folded her arms across her chest as if chilled. “Probably not, though my mother wonders how I could even consider raising her grandbabies in any other state.”

“Planes fly to all fifty of them. You’ll visit.” But he understood. His parents had chosen to make their new home in Savannah in part because it was only two hours from Copper Lake. She might never see Josh again, his mother had sniffed, but she would always be close enough to spend an afternoon with Joe’s kids.

Assuming he found someone to marry and have them with, and no way was Liz that someone.

“Try telling my mother that a visit with her only grandchild is sufficient.” She tucked her feet into the seat of the rocker. “Is it different with sons? Does your mother nag you? Has she already got plans for the son or daughter you don’t yet have?”

“Of course. She intends to do all the things we did with our grandmothers-teach him to cook, have Saturday night sleepovers, let him get away with breaking all the rules we had to abide by.”

“Rules you abided by,” Liz pointed out. “Not Josh.”

“Yeah.” He tilted his head back, letting his eyes close. Besides Bear’s snuffles and the steady drip of the rain, distant music drifted. Country, with the dominant whine of a steel guitar. “Nat’s got the blues.”

The rocker creaked as Liz presumably twisted to see the other house. “I invited her to dinner, but she said no. She’s an interesting girl.”

“Girl? She’s just a few years younger than you.”

“But she seems so young.”

He knew exactly what she meant. Natalia pretended to be tough, but she was one of the most vulnerable women he’d ever met. The people who should have protected her and made her feel safe had done a lousy job of it, and he felt as if he needed to make up for it but didn’t know how other than by being friends with her. He suspected the damage already done was so great that a little thing like friendship couldn’t begin to repair it.

“I didn’t figure you for the waif type.”

It took a moment for Liz’s comment to sink in, and when it did, he grinned. He liked Natalia a lot, maybe even sort of loved her in a big-brother-kid-sister way, but when it came to steamy, hot, wicked sex, it wasn’t big-eyed vulnerable Nat who turned him on. She didn’t even enter the picture, thank you, God. Just the thought struck him as perverse.

“Nat and I are buddies.” He emphasized the last word. “My type is…” He glanced at her peripherally: black curls, outfit that was neither particularly snug nor revealing but sexy as hell anyway, killer legs, bare feet, expression guarded-not too open, not too friendly, not too invested. Yeah, right.

He left the sentence hanging as the breeze freshened, and she shivered, rubbing her hands over her arms. He stood, gathered the pizza boxes and glasses, then opened the screen door. Elizabeth and Bear shot past him, rocketing through the living room and into the kitchen. “Want to come in?”

It was a stupid invitation that she had luckily refused the first time. He no more wanted her inside his house, touching his things, leaving her scent on the air, than he’d wanted her in his car with Josh two years ago. If he’d turned down his brother’s request, he wouldn’t have gotten shot, at least not that day.

Would Josh have been shot instead? And maybe Liz, too, because she was with him? Would either of them have been as lucky as Joe had? Or would one or both of them be dead now?

He touched one wrist to his ribcage, where a scar marked the entrance wound of the second bullet. That was the first time in two years that he’d considered himself lucky.

She hesitated so long that he thought she was going to turn him down again, but then she got up and walked to the door, slipping past him with so little room to spare that he’d swear he felt the air ripple between them.

His house was laid out exactly like hers: living room, eat-in kitchen, bedroom, bath. He hadn’t brought any furniture from Chicago. All the leather and chrome stuff had sold with the condo. Instead, he’d borrowed a few pieces from Miss Abigail in the beginning while he looked for what he wanted: old oak and pine for the wood pieces, overstuffed comfort for the upholstered ones. Color brightened the walls, and rugs warmed the wood floors. It was cozy, his mother had proclaimed on her one visit. He preferred to think comfortable.

What did Liz think?

She hardly glanced at the television that dominated one corner of the living room but turned her attention instead to the bookcases. They were filled with books, both fiction and nonfiction, and stacked in one shelf corner was a pile of magazines. He watched stiffly as she picked up the top one, glanced it, then laid it back. He usually recycled magazines as soon as he finished with them, but he’d kept these to camouflage the one at the bottom. Alone, it would rouse interest. Just part of a pile, no one noticed it.

Next she glanced at the wicker basket that stored paper for recycling, then a group of pictures on the wall: his parents on their wedding day, both sets of grandparents and all of his great-grandparents in their youth. Everything more recent-everything including Josh-was packed in a box in the attic.

She stopped in the kitchen door. The dogs had checked their food dishes, upended now in the middle of the floor, then vacated. They were probably on his bed, seeing what other trouble they could cause, but Joe didn’t go looking for them. He watched Liz’s gaze skim the counters as if nothing there held any interest to her, besides possibly the coffee maker. She scanned the walls, with their photos and framed recipes, handwritten by various long-gone women in his family, and the square oak table that took too much room. “You actually live here,” she remarked.

“Did you think I slept in the storeroom at the shop and just changed clothes here?”

“Didn’t you pretty much use your condo for just changing clothes?”

He smiled ruefully as he brushed a patch of Bear’s fur from the sofa cushions before sitting down. “I didn’t like the condo much. Cold and sterile wasn’t my idea of home.”

“That’s what you get for giving an interior decorator free rein.” She sat, too, in the armchair, drawing her feet onto the cushions, wriggling into its depths. “The only place to sit in my house is the wicker sofa that belongs on Mrs. Wyndham’s porch. It’s nice, but I do miss solid furniture.”

“I used that sofa, too, when I moved in.” Had sat on it, eaten dinner on it, slept on it with his feet hanging over the arm. “But you’re not staying long enough to need real furniture.”

Her only response was a shrug.

He didn’t move-sprawled on the sofa, one arm resting along its back, legs stretched out underneath the coffee table-but the tension ratcheting through him made him feel as if he’d compressed in place. “If I knew where Josh was, I’d tell you.”

“To get rid of me?”

To save me. “But I don’t know.”

“He’ll come here.”

“He’ll go somewhere. He’s got a lot of friends and relatives who haven’t moved in the last two years. It’ll be easier to get help from them than to bother finding me.”

“Relatives who know where you are? Where your parents are?”

Joe stared at a painting on the wall, an oil done decades ago by a great-great-grandmother he’d never met. It was one of the few possessions her daughter had been able to bring to the U.S. when she fled Havana. It wasn’t very well done, the brush strokes too heavy, the perspective too fuzzy. It was like looking at the city through cloudy glass, but it held sentimental value.