His response was immediate: Yes. Let me in and I’ll show you what pretty eyes and teeth I have.

She laughed in spite of herself and opened the front door. Wyatt’s arms were up, braced on the threshold above, eyes dark and serious. “Are we going to be stupid?” she whispered.

“Define stupid.”

“Anything that involves either one of us exposing our favorite body parts.” Or their hearts . . .

“I’m going to want to hear about your favorite body part,” he said. “In great detail.”

She felt herself flush. “I’m wearing my birth control pj’s.” Which was a relief. They’d keep her from doing anything stupid.

He took in her Mickey Mouse pj’s, and exaggeratedly waggled a brow.

She laughed. “You can’t possibly find this look attractive.”

His expression said he found everything she wore attractive, and especially everything she didn’t wear, and little tendrils of heat slid through her belly.

And lower.

Wyatt followed her inside, turning to shut, lock, and bolt the door. Then he moved to her living room window, nudging aside the shades to look out into the night. “Is this where you saw the truck pull into your driveway?”

“Yes.”

“He see you watching him?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I had the lights off.”

Wyatt stayed like that for another moment then turned to her. “Nothing since?”

“Nothing.”

“Where’s your sister?”

“Boxing lessons,” she said.

“With AJ?”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

“AJ’s got the only gym in town,” he said. “He’s a good friend.”

Emily frowned. “I hope she doesn’t hurt him. She doesn’t know her own strength.”

Wyatt laughed. “AJ’s ex-navy, tough as hell. No one gets the drop on AJ.” He moved to the kitchen and looked out that window as well. “I walked the perimeter of your house and didn’t see anything,” he said. “Your closest neighbor isn’t all that close, and that house is dark and locked up tighter than a drum.”

“It wasn’t a little while ago. There were trucks in the driveway.”

“Nothing there now.” He turned and looked at her. “You still scared?”

“Unnerved, maybe,” she said. “Not scared.” Not with Wyatt standing there, strong and watching her back.

He studied her a beat, then crooked his finger at her in the universal “come here” gesture. She didn’t even hesitate and when she got close, he tugged her into him. She burrowed deep, sighing as his arms tightened on her. Cheek to his chest, absorbing the comforting steady beat of his heart, she said, “I’m being silly, it was probably just someone who was lost.”

“It’s not silly to feel threatened,” he said, his voice rumbling against her ear. “You’re holding your breath. Breathe, Em.”

She let out a long, shuddery breath and a low, embarrassed laugh when her stomach grumbled. “Sorry.”

“You eat?”

“Not yet.”

He pulled back, grabbed her hand, and headed to the kitchen. “Dinner, then. I’m starving.”

“There’s not a lot of food in the house right now. I was actually going out to get some when I got spooked. I’ve got take-out menus to the places in town that deliver.”

“That’s a whopping total of two.” He shook his head. “Trust me,” he said, heading to her fridge. “I can make a meal out of anything.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Lived all over the world, remember? I was a professional latchkey kid. My sisters and I learned early on to make do with whatever was out there. And trust me, there was a lot of out there stuff. You know what I missed most about the States?”

Fascinated by the way his shirt stretched taut across the broad width of his shoulders as he bent low to survey the contents of the fridge drawers, not to mention how the material delineated the flex and pull of his back muscles, she took a moment to answer. “What did you miss most?”

Still crouched low, he craned his neck and flashed her a grin. “Big Macs.”

She laughed. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I told my mom once that I was going to run away. I was going to catch a train, plane, boat, whatever it took to come back here, and get a Big Mac.”

“What did she say?”

“She said that as I was a scrawny, white boy all of eight years old, I wouldn’t like the jobs I’d qualify for in order to be able to buy a plane ticket.”

“She did not tell that to an eight-year-old!”

“She did,” he said. “She never believed in sugarcoating the bad in the world.” He pulled cheese and apples from the fridge and set them on the counter. “And I already knew the world was a rough place. Being scrawny and white had some serious downsides in Uganda and parts of South America. I learned to be tough early on.”

“You got in fights?”

He laughed a little. “More like I got beat up a lot.”

“Oh, Wyatt,” she murmured. “No.”

He shrugged. “It wasn’t a surprise. I was almost always the wrong color, and then there was Darcy and her big mouth—which got us in a lot of trouble.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “But I don’t like your parents very much.”

“It wasn’t all bad.” He’d been helping himself to the pantry, opening cupboards, perusing the shelves. He added peanut butter to his growing pile, and then tortillas. “I learned how to fight dirty, and to run real fast. Oh, and if all else failed, I was a pretty damn smooth talker when I needed to be.”

This was true. She had firsthand experience at what a smooth talker he was. In bed, she’d do just about anything he asked, and all because he had a way of asking . . . She shook that off and looked at him.

His grin went wicked. “I don’t know what you were just thinking about,” he said. “But keep thinking it.”

She rolled her eyes.

He found a pan and put it on the stove top. In five minutes he’d made two grilled quesadillas, cut up the apples, and spread peanut butter on them. “Not fancy,” he said. “But high in protein, anyway.”

Q-Tip magically reappeared when the food was ready. “Meow.”

Wyatt smiled and crouched low to meet her, scratching her beneath her chin.

“Careful,” Emily said. “She usually bites after about five seconds—”

Q-Tip rubbed her face on Wyatt’s thigh and began to purr.

“Cats like me,” he said.

Yeah, and dogs. And women . . .

They sat at the table, Wyatt with his long legs spread out, nearly touching hers. “Eating peanut butter always reminds me of my mom,” she said into the comfortable silence.

He licked peanut butter from his thumb. The sucking sound made her nipples go hard. “She like peanut butter?”

“She loved the stuff. We’d watch reruns of Friends and eat right out of the jar with wooden spoons.”

“Was she sick for a long time?” he asked.

“Unfortunately. She got an MS diagnosis when I was ten. She didn’t pass away until right before I left for vet school. She fought the good fight.”

“How does your dad do without her?”

“He pretends to be fine, but I think he’s struggling. It’ll be better when I’m back in L.A. and can do more than just send money.”

“You send him money?”

She shrugged. How had they gotten here? “Sometimes.”

“And your sister,” he said. “You helping support her, too?”

“She just got a job at a local construction company,” she said. “So she’ll be pulling her own weight now.”

Hopefully . . .

“So you’re the mom, the sister, the provider, everything,” he said, nodding. “Explains a lot.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

He leaned in and gently tugged on a strand of her hair. “Don’t get all defensive.”

“Too late.”

He smiled, like she was amusing him. “It means,” he said patiently, “that I get now why you’re a little . . .”

She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“Anal.”

“I am not . . . anal.”

He picked up her cell phone from the table. Swiped his thumb across the screen and hit calendar.

“Hey,” she said.

He turned the screen so she could see, not that she needed to. The Plan—really just the calendar date with two entries: