“Everything okay?”

Riley realized she was scowling as she took her seat at the table with Lucy. She smiled and shook her head. “Sure. Derek just drives me nuts.”

Lucy nodded, playing with her pencil. She looked worried.

Riley leaned in. “What’s up?”

Lucy met her gaze. “I just…”

Oh, crap. Riley worked on not sighing. “Lucy? What’s going on?” But she knew. Derek the Debaucher had gotten to her.

That had been stupidly easy for him.

“Derek asked me out,” Lucy said.

Riley pretended she didn’t already know that. “No kidding. When?”

“Just now when I was up at the bar.”

Don’t overreact. “What did you say?”

“I said he didn’t have to do that.”

Riley felt her scowl return. “He didn’t have to do that? What’s that mean?” He shouldn’t have done it, but it wasn’t like he was doing Lucy some big favor.

Lucy shrugged. “He offered to take me to lunch before he helps out with the book signing. I thought maybe he felt like he was supposed to make the offer.”

“Why would you think that?”

Lucy pushed her glasses up her nose. “Well, I mean, he’s never asked me to do anything social before. Why now?”

“Because you’re lovely and he’s finally pulling his head out of his ass and noticing?” Riley suggested.

Lucy laughed. “Well, that would be something.”

Riley studied her friend. Yeah, it would. It would actually make her think more kindly toward Derek on one hand. If he was sincerely noticing that Lucy was great, that would say something good about him. But if he was just trying to have a perfect score with the women in Sapphire Falls…well, she’d have to kill him. And besides, it wouldn’t be a perfect score. She was living here now, after all.

“Do you want to go out with him?” Riley asked.

“Oh, geez.” Lucy sat back in her chair. “I wouldn’t know what to do with a guy like that.”

Derek was as different from Lucy as he could get, but Lucy was ten times smarter and a million times sweeter, and Derek should be the one worried about what he would do with Lucy. “What do you think you’d have to do exactly?” Riley asked. Was Lucy talking about sex? As in, she wouldn’t know what to do during sex with a guy like Derek?

She wasn’t really used to talking about guys with Lucy. They had so many things in common that there was never a shortage of topics, and they never really got around to guys. Because guys weren’t that important to them.

Riley dated, but nothing serious. There had been two types of guys in Sapphire Falls—the ones who liked her but thought she was kind of a dork, and the ones who thought her rebellious side was hot and wanted to party with her. But she hadn’t been a partier, and she hadn’t been into guys who couldn’t name at least four of the Avengers, so, she hadn’t gone out much in high school. Once she’d ended up in California, things had changed a bit. Guys who could name all of the Avengers thought she was interesting, and she hadn’t had to exert the rebellious thing as much away from her perfect big brother, so she’d found people like her and had enjoyed a fun dating life that sometimes involved sex and sometimes didn’t. Like normal people did.

But Lucy had never left Sapphire Falls. She’d inherited her bookstore from her grandmother, along with a very nice trust fund that meant the bookstore didn’t have to actually be profitable. She’d been a dork in high school too. But a happy dork. In fact, Lucy either didn’t see that she was different, or she didn’t care. And Riley loved that about her. Lucy did her thing, happily oblivious to the fact that other women their age were having relationships and getting married and having children.

“I’d have to go to ball games and stuff, right?” Lucy asked, looking at Riley through her big pink-rimmed glasses.

Riley couldn’t remember a time when Lucy hadn’t worn glasses. And they’d met in kindergarten. She shook her head and focused. Ball games. And stuff. With Derek. She nodded. “He is very into sports.”

“And he might want to take me fishing or something,” Lucy commented. She was fiddling with her pencil again.

Riley was sure that fishing with Derek didn’t involve a lot of actual fish, but yeah, he might want to take Lucy “fishing”. “He definitely likes to fish,” Riley agreed.

“I don’t know much about football or fishing,” Lucy said. Then she scrunched her nose up. “I haven’t watched football since junior high and I’ve never actually been fishing.”

Good grief, Derek Wright was getting Lucy Geller to think about football and fishing. And she had no idea that they wouldn’t be fishing at all. Riley was sure he could get her friend thinking about a lot of other things she hadn’t really tried before as well. Yes, okay, Lucy was a grown woman. A very intelligent one. And as such, she had every right to decide who she spent time with and what they did during that time. But Lucy was also a sweet, somewhat naïve, geeky virgin. No, Riley and Lucy had never said the word “virgin” to one another, but Riley would put her next month’s rent money—and she desperately needed that money, because she was saving up to get the hell out of her parents’ house—down on Lucy being one. And that made Riley feel protective of her.

Riley noticed Derek coming toward their table with their cups of cocoa, and she refrained from replying to Lucy’s comment. For now.

“Here you go, ladies.” He set the cups down. “No whipped cream for Riley and extra for Lucy.” He grinned at Lucy, then gave Riley a look that said giving Lucy extra and Riley none had everything to do with the innuendo in his tone—okay, both of their tones—when they’d been discussing whipped cream a little bit ago. Why she’d teased about not wanting whipped cream but liking melted marshmallows, she had no idea. It was as if Derek pulled flirting out of women even when they had no intention of bantering with him.

“This looks great.” Lucy dipped her finger in the whipped cream and lifted it to her mouth as she looked up at Derek.

Riley was surprised at the playful move, then realized that Lucy hadn’t meant it to be anything other than a taste of the whipped cream. She glanced up at Derek. He was staring at Lucy’s mouth.

Oh, boy. She sighed. “Thanks, Derek. We’ll let you know when we’re ready for refills.”

He looked over at her and arched a brow. He knew he was being dismissed. But he addressed Lucy when he said, “If you need more whipped cream, at any time, you know where to find me.” Then he gave Riley a wink and headed back to the bar.

She frowned after him. He was just going to mess with Lucy right in front of her? Um, no.

“I don’t think you should go out with him,” she told Lucy.

Lucy set her mug down, licking whipped cream from her lip in a way that Riley was sure Derek would find completely hot. But Lucy didn’t even realize she was doing anything flirtatious.

“You don’t?” Lucy asked.

Riley couldn’t let them hang out. Lucy would be giving off signals that weren’t signals at all, and Derek would somehow manage to talk her into…fishing. Even if he claimed that he was interested in being a better guy, she wasn’t convinced Derek could turn off the get-into-my-bed that seemed to ooze out of him.

He didn’t really want a nice girl. Riley believed that he kind of, maybe, thought he did. He was watching Scott and Kyle settle down, and he was thinking that some of that might be nice. Hell, how could anyone be around Kyle and Hannah and not think that true love forever and ever amen was the ultimate goal in life? Throw Scott and Peyton on top of that and…yeah, she could see why Derek might be having some thoughts.

But she wasn’t entirely convinced that he really, really wanted that. He might want to try it out, but that didn’t mean it would be for him. It didn’t mean that he wouldn’t get into a relationship like that and realize it was a lot of responsibility, and it came with a lot of expectations that he wasn’t quite ready to fulfill on a long-term, all-the-time basis. And she didn’t want him practicing on Lucy.

She knew that he was dependable. The whole town depended on him for things. She knew that he was trustworthy. The whole town trusted him. He was very committed to Sapphire Falls and the people here. But there had to be a reason that none of that had ever transferred to a woman.

And yes, Riley should mind her own business. But she probably wasn’t going to. Derek wasn’t going to practice the relationship thing, and realize it wasn’t for him, with Lucy. He could practice on someone else. Break someone else’s heart. And if he ever got good at it and decided he did want to be serious, then he could ask Lucy out. Maybe.

Yeah, Riley was not going to mind her own business.

“I know you don’t really like Derek,” Lucy said.

Riley shook her head. “It’s not that I don’t like him. I don’t think he’s the right guy for you though.”

“But you don’t like him.”

Riley blew out a breath and thought about that. “He just…drives me nuts,” she said. “It’s not really dislike.”

Derek had always been around. She couldn’t remember a single significant event in her brother’s life when Derek hadn’t also been there. So she’d experienced the naughty-little-boy side of him, complete with spiders in her bedroom and hiding in closets to scare her. She’d experienced the annoying-teenager side of him, when he and Kyle would raid the kitchen and eat all of her cereal, or when they’d blast the music while she was trying to study, or when they’d kick her out of the basement—her haven—so they could hang out with their friends…and debase her couch. She’d experienced the idiotic-young-adult side too. When he and Kyle would drink too much and pass out at her house—once on her bedroom floor for some reason that neither of them had ever been able to explain—or when Kyle would come home from college and they’d stay up all night…again in her basement.

He was always around. And not just for Kyle’s stuff. He’d been at every one of her birthday parties, the one time she’d gone to the Homecoming dance, and her graduation. Significant moments in her life and he’d been there like he had every right.

He just annoyed her. She couldn’t put her finger on it exactly.

But she could put her finger on why she didn’t want Derek dating Lucy. “He’s messing around, Luce. He thinks he wants to date a nice girl, someone different from his usual, but he’s never done that before and I’m afraid that…he won’t like it.” She shrugged. She didn’t think Lucy would actually take offense at that. “He doesn’t really know what a real relationship looks like. With a woman,” she added. Because she had to give him credit. He knew how to be a good friend, a good son, a good employee, and a good citizen. “I just don’t want anyone I care about getting hurt because Derek is feeling restless.”

She frowned. Derek should be able to have a good relationship with a woman. And really, if he was talking about trying something serious with a woman who had been in other relationships and had some experience, it would be okay. It wouldn’t hurt him to be in a real relationship where they talked and did things together that didn’t involve, well, any panties on any floors.

And why did she feel a little like she was blushing, thinking of the way he’d said the word “panties”? That was ridiculous. She took a sip of the cocoa.

And damn. That was good. So Derek was a Cocoa God too?

Finally Lucy nodded. “That makes sense.”

“It does?” Riley wanted it to. She didn’t want anyone getting their hearts broken, but she also didn’t want to sound like some kind of lunatic who thought she should get to say who did and didn’t date Derek. Even if she told herself she was doing a good deed for the nice women of Sapphire Falls, she realized that her concern was actually a by-product of two things—the fact that she knew Derek too well and couldn’t quite forget what an idiot he’d been over the years, and the fact that she had way too much time on her hands to sit around thinking about all of this.

“Sure,” Lucy said, with a nod. “He likes the idea of a relationship, but he doesn’t understand the reality. And I wouldn’t be a good person to teach him about dating.”

“You wouldn’t?” Riley thought, on one hand, that Lucy could teach Derek a lot about class and sincerity and, well, stuff that didn’t have anything to do with panties.

Lucy gave her a small smile. “I don’t know much about dating myself. How could I teach him?”

Teach him.

Yeah. That’s actually what Derek needed. Someone to teach him. To try out dating a nice girl, he’d have to, well, date a nice girl. And that nice girl would then be at risk for heartbreak. Riley didn’t really want any nice girl going through that. But someone needed to show him what it was like.

She looked over at Derek. Then back to Lucy. Then back to Derek again. He was laughing at something Mitch Dugan, the contractor working on expanding the Come Again with pizza ovens, had just said. She suddenly flashed back to many other times when he’d laughed. And made those around him laugh. It was a regular thing.

And he looked good doing it.

“So you’re not interested in Derek?” Riley asked Lucy flat out.

Lucy shook her head with a soft laugh. “I like Derek. I appreciate all of his help all the time. But I don’t think Derek and I have much in common.”

Okay, so that made this easier. Lucy wasn’t interested in dating Derek. But Derek thought he was interested in dating Lucy. There was really only one thing Riley could do here. At least now that she’d convinced herself that the honorable thing to do would be to keep Derek from breaking any nice-girl hearts. Honorable was good.

Torturing Derek Wright a little was too.

“Hey, I’ll be right back,” she told Lucy, shoving her chair back and standing before she could think better of her plan.

“Okay. I’ll get everything pulled up.” Lucy shifted forward in her chair and reached for Riley’s laptop.

Riley was using her master’s degree in computer science to update various websites for people in Sapphire Falls. It was slowly killing her. But at least it was something to do.

And hey, reforming Derek Wright was also, if nothing else, something to do.

“I need to talk to you.”

Derek turned as Riley walked up, grabbed the sleeve of his shirt, and started for the kitchen.

She was damned bossy. “Uh, I’m kind of talking to Mitch,” Derek pointed out. They were talking about whether jalapeno peppers ever belonged on pizza, but still.

She didn’t stop walking…or dragging him along.

“What?” he asked when the kitchen door had swung shut behind him.

She dropped her hold on him and turned, crossing her arms. She watched him for a moment, and he felt how a used car might feel when someone was taking their first good look.

“I have an idea.”

He felt a definite sense of trepidation at those four words. But trepidation had never held him back before. “About what?”

“You becoming a better guy.”

He lifted his eyebrows.

“Or, more specifically, you deserving to date nice girls. Like Lucy.”

“I have to deserve it?”

“Yes.” She didn’t even hesitate a second.

“So you’re going to test me or something?”

“Nope. I’m going to train you.”

He felt his eyes widen. “Excuse me?”

She nodded. “Seriously. You need to try out an actual relationship before you get into one with a nice girl, realize you hate it, and break somebody’s heart.”

“And you’re going to teach me?”

But that didn’t sound quite as crazy as it should have. He really didn’t know how to date a nice girl for real. He knew how to make a woman laugh. How to help her forget her troubles. How to feel more confident. But he ran the show in those situations. They were short-term. He didn’t really know how to do the two-way thing, or even what was expected of him in a relationship like that. Riley was Lucy’s best friend. She probably could teach him a thing or two. But…

“That means we’re going to have to spend a bunch of time together, huh?”

She narrowed her eyes but nodded.

It was stupid. He annoyed Riley more than anyone. And vice versa. And yet, he didn’t mind the idea of hanging out with her. With Riley, there was never a dull moment. He could tease her without worrying about hurting her feelings. He wouldn’t have to be perfect. She’d tell him he was being dick, but she wouldn’t get all hung up on it. She’d be that bratty little sister she’d always been. Riley would not only be able to tell him what nice girls expected, but she sure as hell would call him out when he got it wrong.

It all sunk in a lot faster than he would have expected. “This might work.”

She looked a little surprised. “Really?”

He laughed. “Yeah, it’s a good idea. You can show me what it’s like to date a nice girl and nobody gets hurt.”

“And I get to say when you’re ready to ask someone out. If you ever get ready.”

Yeah, yeah, he was going to have to play by Riley’s rules. He could do that. How hard could it really be to date a nice girl? “Fine. So when do we start?”

She gave him a grin and stuck out her hand. “Right now.”

He looked down at her hand, then back up.

He’d never shaken hands with a hot woman that he was going to date. Even if it was kind of fake dating.

Of course, he’d never really dated anyone since high school. He shrugged and took her hand. What the hell? Might as well start doing everything differently right now.

Riley stared into her bathroom mirror the next morning. It was seven a.m. As in five hours after she’d gone to bed. She should not be up.

But her mother was up. And making waffles. Which was, without a doubt, the loudest breakfast someone could make. Besides the banging of pots and pans, there was also the TODAY show blasting from the television that sat on the counter next to the mixer so her mom could hear it over the sound of the mixer itself—because apparently you couldn’t mix waffle batter by hand—and the horrible, piercing beeping of the waffle iron every time a waffle was done cooking.

Riley scrubbed a hand over her face and looked into her bloodshot eyes. Yeah, it was going to be a long day.

“Riley! I’m making breakfast!”

No shit. “Yeah! Coming!” She didn’t want waffles. But she wanted coffee. And lots of it. And that was upstairs with the waffles. And her parents. Kill me now.

She really needed to get a job. In California. Far from Sapphire Falls. She’d gone into computer science because it had seemed less personal, frankly, than a lot of jobs. Jobs like becoming a doctor. More specifically, the doctor for her small hometown. Kyle, had known what he wanted to do with his life since he was about eight years old. And it had always involved staying in Sapphire Falls.

Riley had been the opposite. She hadn’t known what she wanted to do until she’d taken a computer class her junior year of high school. And even then, it had simply been something she liked and was good at. It wasn’t like she had a passion for it. They were just machines. The jobs in cyber security paid well and they were far from Sapphire Falls. And being in cyber security sounded better to her mother than gamer-girl. Which she also was. She just hadn’t figured out how to make a living doing that.

Of course, getting tossed in jail—even if her name had been cleared later—for her cyber security job hadn’t sat well with her mother. Or her employment prospects.

Which meant she was jobless and homeless and on her way to penniless. For now. Temporarily. It had to be temporary. She simply couldn’t tolerate anything else. She could design websites. She could start a podcast about her favorite video game. If prepubescent boys could make good money doing that, she surely could. She could design her own video game. She knew nothing about marketing that or…really anything else that had anything to do with starting a business like that, but she could definitely design her own game. And it would be kick-ass.

“Riley! The bacon is getting cold!”

Riley blew out a breath. Sure. She could do all of that. But she needed to move out of her parents’ house yesterday. Because living in her parents’ basement and spending most of her time on her computer was pathetic and way too much like how she’d spent ages twelve to eighteen.

“Riley!”

Oh yeah, and it was annoying.

She combed her fingers through her hair, cinched the belt on her robe tighter, and took a deep breath. Then made the climb to the kitchen.

“I can’t believe they’re raising that much money for a prom,” Erika Ames was saying to her husband.

Riley’s dad, Jake, nodded. “It goes up every year.”

“But twelve thousand dollars? For a party?” Erika asked, transferring bacon from the skillet to a plate.

Riley crossed to the cupboard that housed the coffee cups. See, there was no way the bacon was getting cold. Her mom had just taken it out of the pan. Riley sighed.

“That’s scandalous,” Erika said. “The food bank could use that money. The senior center. The daycare.”

Riley filled her cup with coffee that she knew would be nice and strong. Thankfully, that was one thing she and her father agreed on. But as she turned and leaned back against the counter, taking that first sip, she had to admit that it wasn’t really her dad she had a hard time agreeing with. Her dad was a pretty laid-back guy.

Her mom on the other hand was…Kyle. Or rather, she was where Kyle got his do-gooder-save-the-world side. Not that Riley was a complete loser bitch. But she wasn’t the Boy Scout her brother was.

“That’s a lot of money,” Jake agreed, turning the page on the newspaper he held.

“You don’t think they should do something more important with it?” Erika asked. She stabbed a fork into a waffle and flopped it onto Jake’s plate.

Jake folded the paper down and eyed the waffle, then looked up at his wife of thirty-two years. “I think the kids will make some great memories in a safe and fun environment with that money, and I think that’s important.”

Erika’s shoulders relaxed a little and she gave him a smile. “You’re right, I suppose. It would be nice if they could do it for less, but that’s not the most terrible thing in the world.”

Jake nodded and reached for the syrup.

While Erika started in on something else. Something about the garden and some bugs that were eating her roses, and then Jake said something about picking up something at the gardening store in York when he went over later, and again Erika settled. It was mostly blah, blah, blah to Riley, but while she wasn’t listening to the words, she was watching her parents.

Maybe for the first time.

It was strange. All of this was how it had always been. Erika got worked up and emotional and Jake settled her down. Riley had seen that exact thing over and over in her life, but she’d never really thought about it. Now, for some reason, she found herself studying it.

It was so…normal. Her mom and dad just fit together. Sure, some of it was habit. After that long together, how could it not be? But you had to stick around with someone to establish habits. Erika and Jake Ames fit. They balanced each other.

Riley had always found that very boring. Very predictable. Her parents had met when Erika had been a sophomore in high school and Jake was a senior. They’d dated, gotten engaged, then married, then had two kids. Exactly the way everyone else in Sapphire Falls did.

That was another reason Riley had gotten out of town. It seemed that this tendency to just go along with tradition was in the water, and she was afraid to drink too much of it.

“Riley?”

She shook herself and focused on her mother. It seemed that Erika had been trying to get her attention. “Um, yeah?”

“How many waffles do you want?”

A flutter of panic rippled through her chest. For some reason, those waffles felt symbolic in that moment. She couldn’t eat the same waffles made in the same waffle iron in the same kitchen that she’d been eating all her life. She needed more. Different. And if she took a bite of those waffles, and they were amazing and comforting, then she might decide that they were good enough, and that eating them for the rest of her life wasn’t the worst thing that could ever happen…

“I have to go,” she said quickly.

Her mother’s eyes widened. No one, in her experience, walked out on waffles.

“Where? Now?”

“Yes. Right now.” She probably didn’t need to emphasize that quite so firmly.

“But…” Erika looked toward the waffle iron, then over to her husband.

Jake was watching them, seeming curious as well. But he was still chewing.

“The waffles,” Erika finally finished, as if she truly was speechless at the idea of someone not wanting her waffles.

“I know. But I have to be somewhere.” Where, she wasn’t sure, but she’d figure that out after she was out of this house. This place that was comforting and cramped at the same time. Yes, she felt pathetic about moving back home and now living her own version of Groundhog Day—a fabulous and horrifying movie. What she’d done for the past week, okay month, was pretty much what she’d done all the weeks of her summer vacations at age fourteen. With the exception of hanging out at the Come Again.

Which brought Derek to mind. And the other thing she had definitely not done in high school—giving someone advice about relationships.

Yeah, for all her rebellious tats and piercings and black clothing and hair dye, she hadn’t known crap about anything other than video games and exasperating her mother.

She was pretty much full circle here.

Except that Derek Wright wanted her to make him a better man.

She could do that. She had to do that. Because the alternative was waffles with her parents and—

“Good morning!”

Riley groaned internally. Waffles with her parents and her perfect, life-on-track brother.

“Hi, everyone.”

And his perfect, shit-together fiancée, Hannah.

“Good morning!” Erika was clearly relieved that someone was going to be eating waffles and bacon since Riley was letting her down.

Was she rebelling against waffles? Fuck yeah, she was. And normalcy and clichés and following in the perfect footsteps in front of her.

Why?

Well…because she always had. And she was happy. And…yeah, that’s all she had.

She escaped the kitchen and headed downstairs to get dressed. Okay, another difference in living at home compared to high school was that her bedroom had not been in the basement when she was a teen. She’d slept upstairs. In a room that was yellow and lavender. Now she was in the basement, where she had her own bathroom and living area and…that was it. This sucked.

She got dressed, pulled her hair up into a bun, washed her face and brushed her teeth and was back upstairs within fifteen minutes. “Bye!”

“Will you be home for supper?” Erika called to her from the kitchen table, where she was happily seated with her husband, son, and future daughter-in-law in the most normal, most cliché, most all-across-Sapphire-Falls-at-this-very-moment way. They were, of course, drinking coffee and eating the waffles. The delicious, I-can-easily-trick-you-into-feeling-like-this-is-enough-forever waffles.

Riley gripped the door handle tightly, so desperately wanting to say that no, she would not be home for supper. But where was she going to be? “Yeah. I’ll see you later.”

“Cheesy chicken and broccoli casserole,” Erika said with a big smile.

Riley groaned and pulled the door shut firmly behind her.

Her mother’s cheesy chicken and broccoli casserole was amazing. Climbing those basement stairs to eat that once a week for the rest of her life wouldn’t be horrible.

Fuck.