She swiveled to him, green eyes giant, dark hair swishing around her shoulders. “Oh my God, she had a crush on you!”

There was the Jen he remembered, the Jen he’d once loved. The one who knew how to be fun and giggly and teasing when she stopped moving or working for a minute or two. That, more than anything, made him turn around and head back into the kitchen. There was beer in the fridge somewhere.

“You’re nuts,” he said, opening the door and hearing the satisfying clink of brown bottles along the side shelf.

Jen followed him. Of course she followed. She was laughing now and her voice hit all sorts of wonderful high notes. “I bet she watched you out that big picture window and just . . . pined.”

Thinking about Mildred spying on him while sitting in that rocking chair was plain weird, but he knew that’s exactly what she’d done. He’d caught her once. Maybe twice.

“She watched youuuuu,” Jen sang, “and she thought”—here’s where she adopted a really bad old lady’s voice—“‘That man is so fine. Maybe if I leave him everything I own he’ll sleep with me in the afterlife.’”

He snatched two beers from the fridge door and swiveled around, finger pointing around the neck of the bottle. “That’s disgusting.”

Jen showed no signs of stopping laughing. A wave of emotion hit him as they fell back into their old camaraderie as though time had never happened, and he hid it by taking a half-bottle swig of beer.

She kept going. “And when you took your shirt off—”

“Hey, I don’t ever take off my shirt when I work.”

She stopped, scrunched up her face. “Really? I bet you’d get double the work in half the time. Seriously.”

“I’m not in high school. I’m a business person.”

God, he loved her smile. All diamonds and joy. But it faded a bit as she said, “I know you are.”

Another gulp of lager. He held out the unopened bottle. “You want this one?”

She eyed the brown bottle, her eyes shifting back up to him. He had no idea what she was thinking, taking such a long time to answer. It was a beer, not a shot of Jäger.

“No, thanks. I’m presenting to the city council tomorrow afternoon.”

If he didn’t know better, he’d say she looked nervous. “Good. More for me. I need it.”

She fingered the edge of the tiny breakfast table, and for a moment he was scared it was an indication she was getting ready to head out, to walk away again. Even though she was just next door, it felt painfully far. Too soon to separate after what had broken and been reformed during this strange little conversation.

She didn’t leave. Instead she scanned the kitchen again, but this time in no joking manner. “You didn’t really answer me before. Why are you here in Mildred’s house?” There was a soft, filtered tone to her voice. “And don’t say because you inherited it.”

He scratched at the back of his neck then cracked it. “Okay.”

“I mean, you had to have lived somewhere before here. Did you have a house?”

He finished the beer, setting a new personal record. “Nah. Never owned a place of my own in Gleann, believe it or not. Been holding out for when I find the perfect house so I can do it up right. I want to work on it, create it, from the inside out.” He glanced out the dark kitchen window to the town he couldn’t see. “I guess I know all the houses in the valley and none of them are mine.”

“Huh.” A little smile tugged at one edge of her mouth. “So where did you live before here? And why’d you move out?”

He leaned his ass against the counter and cracked open the second beer. “Because I knew I had to get out of here months ago and things happened real fast. Right around the time Mildred died, Chris Weir, the last guy I have on my payroll, needed to get out of his place because things had gone south with his roommates. He’s trying to get out from a bad crowd. Anyway, I sublet my duplex to him, and moved in here because it was the smallest of the three houses and I knew I wouldn’t be here long. I packed all my shit and divided it between the three garages until I can settle elsewhere.” The second beer tasted even better than the first. “It’s a good transition, I think, to getting out of here. Living here now will make it easier when I won’t have a Gleann address.”

She cocked her head. “Is it hard now? You make it seem like it’s so easy for you to take off.”

Shit. He waved the bottle. “No, no. It’s all good. I meant financially.”

She was nodding, but in a careful way that said she didn’t quite know whether to believe him. Thankfully, she didn’t press the subject. “Do you feel bad for leaving? I mean, I can totally understand you going when the clients have dried up, but this place needs businesses.”

“Do I feel bad? Yep. Every day.” He also felt pretty crappy about the idea of staying, but he didn’t say that.

“Isn’t it weird, though? Living in this house that so clearly isn’t yours? Being here when she isn’t?”

Leith scratched at his face. His five-o’clock shadow usually came in around three, and it was past ten. “At this point, it’s hard to say what’s weird or what isn’t. I’m living in limbo. There’s weird on all sides.”

He was trying to make a joke, but realized, as soon as he said it, that he was a big fucking liar. He knew exactly what was weird, and that was having Jen Haverhurst standing within arm’s reach in the old-lady kitchen that wasn’t his.

The bottle at his lips, he regarded her as coolly as possible. “Sure you don’t want that beer?”

“I’m sure.” But her voice didn’t sound so steady.

Time to change the subject. “How’d the meeting with Sue go?”

With a hiss through her teeth, she grimaced. “Dunno. I asked her a bunch of things, tried to be cagey about possible changes, since you said she’d put up defenses if I asked too much right away, but I think she saw right through me.”

“Probably, knowing Mayor Sue.”

“She wants the same-old, same-old, but I can make the games better. I know I can. Think she’ll sway the council against me, shoot me down before I get my points across?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fuck.”

Though she wasn’t talking about the physical act, the idea of doing that, with her, zoomed in with blood-pounding strength and threatened to replace all sane thought. He drank.

There were things he could do to try to ease her mind, to make her job easier. To help her.

“Want to have breakfast with me tomorrow?” he asked.

Because he was a guy, his mind scrolled through all the events that might come before a man asked a woman to breakfast. But also, because he was a gentleman raised by a fine Scottish man who’d taught him to respect women, he tried to push them aside.

“Yeah, I can do that,” she said.

“Great. The Kafe at eight?”

She nodded and then started toward the door. Then she stopped and looked at him strangely, as though she’d seen something on his face, when he was usually so careful about not betraying his thoughts. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Kissing you.”

The truth just fell out, like one of his two-hundred-seventy-pound throwing buddies had come over and whacked him on the back, expelling the words from his mouth. He wouldn’t back down, though. He’d own that statement like he owned four unwanted houses in Gleann.

She drew the tiniest of breaths, holding perfectly still. “Like . . . now?”

Well, yes, but she looked so scared he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. Another casual gulp of beer. “Actually, I was thinking about our first.”

Her thick, dark eyelashes fluttered as she dipped her chin, and he considered that maybe she’d been thinking about that night, too. Or maybe one of the sixty other nights that summer they’d grabbed each other whenever time and circumstance allowed.

She surprised the hell out of him by saying, “It’s hard to walk past the Stone and not think about it.”