“He already took it off.” She frowned and poked at her rice.

“What does that matter?” Farrah’s expression was troubled. “I know that look in your eyes . . . you’re already falling. You don’t need to be falling for a guy who’s still carrying a torch for his dead wife.”

“I don’t think he’s still pining for her.” How did she explain this? Yeah, the ring was an issue, but there was something powerful between her and Trey. “I get a feeling that ring was just as much of a security blanket for him as anything else.”

She stopped and shook her head. “No, not even that. It was a shield. I think he uses it to keep people at a distance—women, at a distance.”

“I guess that could make sense.” Farrah’s voice was neutral.

Ressa looked up.

“Honey . . .”

“Stop worrying.” Ressa didn’t know what Farrah was dancing around, but whatever it was, she just wanted her to get it over with. “You don’t have to baby me, okay?”

“I can’t help it.” Farrah wrinkled her nose. She took her time over another bite of noodles and then put the box down. “Listen, she was young. So was he. I think I read once that they’d been together since their first year in college—they just hit it off. And if she died right after the baby was born—”

“During,” Ressa said, her voice soft. “She had to have a C-section and she died during the surgery. Clayton . . .”

She stopped as Farrah’s eyes widened.

Oh, she hadn’t gotten around to explaining that part, had she?

“Clayton . . . what?”

Wincing, Ressa said, “I didn’t tell you about that, huh?”

“No, you did not!”

“Ah. Yeah.” She put her food down and got up, taking only her wine as she started to pace. “Well. It turns out that he’s actually been coming to your library for a while. Isn’t that funny?”

Seconds ticked away. Finally, Farrah said, “Are you telling me that Mr. Tall and Tattooed, the daddy of that adorable little boy who just about broke your heart is Trey Barnes?”

“Well.” Ressa shrugged. “We thought he looked familiar, right?”

Farrah all but wilted back against the couch. “I can’t take this. Please. Just . . . I think I’m going to faint.”

“Let me just go get my smelling salts.” Ressa understood, though. She had to fight the urge to toss back the plum wine like it was two-dollar whiskey. “Now stop being so dramatic.”

She huffed out a breath. “Clayton . . . he almost died. I read about what happened to his wife—there was a drunk driving accident. Apparently it almost killed his son, too. After all of that, I think it just made him all but shut down.”

Farrah got up to pace. “The baby was born early,” she said after a minute. She gave Ressa a sheepish smile. “You know how obsessed I get with these things. Anyway . . . I know he all but lived at the hospital for a while. I think his son was sick a lot.”

“Makes sense,” Farrah said, shaking her head. “His wife dies, he almost loses his son. The baby didn’t even leave the hospital for the first couple of months, I don’t think. He went from being this super social guy to a recluse. That poor guy. Ressa, he had the media hounding him non-stop. It got to the point where his twin was even running interference half the time, pretending to be him just so he could get in and out of the hospital without people harassing him. And when the media figured out what they were doing, they gave him even more grief . . . they came up with these bullshit stories about how he couldn’t really be grieving if he and his twin were playing games with the media.”

“Assholes,” Ressa muttered. She couldn’t imagine how hard that must have been for him. And yeah, it made sense why he’d gone into the hermit mode.

Then Farrah came back to her, held out her hands.

Ressa accepted them, a knot swelling in her chest.

“I get it.” Farrah’s eyes were dark and kind and gentle, so full of understanding, it made Ressa’s throat get tight. “I do—and sweetheart, if I were you, I’d be all over him. A crazy weekend with a beautiful man like that?”

“But . . .” Ressa waited.

“But . . .” Farrah squeezed her hands. “You’re already twisted up about him. You were months ago, and you’re just as crazy about Clayton as you are about him. What if he is still in love with her? And . . .” She bit her lip and then hurriedly asked, “And are you sure he’s ready to handle everything else that comes with you?”

Ressa tugged her hands away and started to pace. She thought about the way he looked at her. The way he touched her and how everything inside her lit up, and how everything inside seemed to just slow—and wait. It was like she’d been waiting. Just for him.

She thought about the way his eyes lingered on her, how he stared at her as if nobody else existed.

When he looked at her, it wasn’t the memory of his dead wife he saw. And he wasn’t caught up in the memory of anything else either. He saw her and only her.

“I’m complicating this,” she said, swearing. Then she glared at Farrah. “We are complicating this. We like each other. I like how I feel when I’m with him and I know he likes being with me.” Then she paused in front of the mirror and added, “If nothing else, when he’s with me, I know he’s not seeing me as some sort of replacement. I saw pictures of her—she was like some Nordic princess. She was this tall, elegant thing, all legs and boobs and yards of ice blonde hair.”

Farrah grinned and her gaze dropped to Ressa’s chest. “Well, you’re not short . . . and you’re definitely not lacking in the curve department, Ress.”

“Ha-ha.” Ressa continued to study her reflection. A black woman stared back at her, her hair done in soft curls around her face, her mouth a deep wine red. The tank top she’d paired with her pajama pants had ridden up, revealing the outline of the newest tattoo design she was working on. It was a tower of books, one that threatened to topple over. It started on her hip and climbed up to just under her right breast. And when she looked in her own eyes, she saw the shadows and the insecurities she’d fought to hide for so long. “I’ve got tits, yeah. But he won’t look at me and see Nordic anything.”

After a moment, Farrah came up to stand next to her, leaning in so that her head rested against Ressa’s arm. “So what do you think he sees when he looks at you?”

“I don’t know.”

If she knew the answer to that, this would be a lot easier.

“Are you two going out?”

“I think so.”

There was a world of caution in Farrah’s eyes.

“Okay . . . then answer this. If he sees all of you, is he going to be okay with it?”

She heard the warning. She heard the love that came with it. If she was smart, she’d pay attention to it.

The phone rang and in the time it took Ressa to grab her phone from the coffee table and see his name on the display, she decided the time to be smart had come and gone.

Heart hammering, she hit talk and lifted the phone.

“Hello?”

Chapter Seventeen

It had been so long since he’d been out on a date, Trey wasn’t entirely certain he remembered how they worked.

Okay, in theory, yeah.

He could remember in theory.

Unlike Zane, Travis, and Sebastian, Trey hadn’t ever had the revolving door thing with females. He hadn’t pined for one woman for most of his life like Zach—Zach had only ever loved one woman and all the relationships he’d been in had been casual. Trey had had two serious girlfriends in high school—and then on a trip to Canada with Travis the summer after graduation, there had been this ballet dancer . . . Giselle had pretty much destroyed his mind. He couldn’t recall much about their time outside the bedroom, because he doubted they’d spent much time together outside of it.