Chapter 4

“It’s the family name that lives on. It’s all that lives on. Not your personal glory, not your honor—but family!”

Tywin Lannister, Game of Thrones

There hadn’t been many times since he’d given it up that Ro had actually thought about having a drink, but this was definitely one of them, which was why he pulled Da’s sobriety coin out of his pocket and rubbed it between his fingers.

What the hell were they going to do? Olivia had become a huge part of the Buoys; she’d come to work for them when they needed her the most, and now there wasn’t a damn thing any of them could do for her. He’d made Jessie repeat everything Olivia’s girlfriend, Dawn, had said, word for word, and then pelted her with questions he knew she couldn’t answer no matter how often or how loud he asked them.

He’d tried not to yell, but he couldn’t help it. The more worried he was about something, the louder he got, and this…well, shit. This was more than just worrisome, because there was nothing any of them could do except wait and see—and that was something none of them, especially Ro, was very good at.

And it didn’t matter how long they talked about it or how many different ways they googled fractured L5 vertebra; they didn’t learn anything more than what Dawn had already told them.

So after dinner, Ro poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and headed outside to sit on the porch, while his brothers curled up in the great room with Kate and Jessie to watch the game—or at least that’s what it looked like. The game might be on, but Ro’d bet his left kidney that if asked, not a single one of them would be able to tell you who batted last or what the score was. The only thing any of them were thinking about was Olivia, lying in the ICU at St. Mark’s Hospital.

Worst-case scenario, she’d never walk again; best case, she’d be flat out until the vertebra mended, and then she’d still need months and months of therapy.

Either way, it was going to be a long time before she came back to the Buoys, which meant they needed someone else in the kitchen this season. It needed to be someone Olivia would trust to maintain her level of quality and someone who’d gladly hand the job back to her as soon as she was ready to take it.

Jessie could make a mean pot of stew, but that was about it, and while Kate was no slouch in the kitchen, she was more of a by-the-book kind of recipe girl and wasn’t comfortable trying new seasonings or winging it if need be. And as for Liam and Finn—well, shit, those two would live on macaroni and hot dogs if left on their own.

Sitting on the top step, Ronan leaned his elbows on his knees and looked out through the darkness toward the dock. A year ago, he never would have believed he’d be back here for good, and if he was being honest he’d have to admit that even though he was the one who’d pushed for them to reopen the Buoys, there’d always been a part of him that believed they’d never manage it. But they did.

And not only had they reopened, but Liam had exorcised the last remaining nightmare from Ro’s childhood when he ripped down that fuckin’ fish shack and rebuilt it. It was money they could have—no, should have—used somewhere else, especially since there was nothing structurally wrong with the original shack, but Liam didn’t care. He’d recruited Kate first, then Finn and Jessie, and together the four of them burned that thing to the ground and rebuilt it board by board—all for Ronan.

If he lived to be nine hundred years old, he’d never forget what they’d done. And looking at the new shack now, just like so many times before, Ro rubbed Da’s coin harder, warding off the memories that threatened to seep out.

The shack was only one item on a long list of things the other four had done to get the Buoys reopened after Da died. They’d all made the lodge their priority while Ro was stuck at his job in Calgary, and now it was his turn to step up.

Sure, he’d rather be out on the boats every day, taking guests to his favorite fishing spots, swapping stories, and discovering new tricks and different lures, but the truth was, it didn’t matter how great a guide he was—most of the guests were more interested in going out on the boats with the former MLB pitcher or the fish whisperer, and who could blame them?

So even though no one in the lodge had said as much, Ro had already accepted it; he’d take over the kitchen until Olivia came back. And with all the uncertainty that surrounded her right now, that was the one thing he didn’t question. If and when the day came that she was ready to come back, regardless of her physical abilities, they would do whatever it took to make that happen.

Without any formal training, Ronan wasn’t anywhere near the chef Olivia was, but when Maggie left them, he’d been forced to take up the cooking duties. At first he’d gone at it with a vengeance, set on proving to his brothers and Da that they didn’t need Maggie, that he could cook just as well as she ever did.

But even though he’d gone into it angry, it didn’t take him long to discover he actually enjoyed cooking. He liked coming up with new recipes, and he loved that when life started going for shit, he could lose himself in the kitchen by escaping into the scents and flavors of a few simple ingredients.

So even though he couldn’t offer the same five-star menu Olivia had, he’d make damn good and sure the guests were duly impressed with their meals.

The door opened behind him, but he didn’t have to turn to see who it was; the hesitation gave it away.

“Oh…sorry,” Hope said, her soft voice somehow easing a bit of the tension in his head. “I didn’t think anyone was out here.”

Ro was used to being alone, liked being able to think things through by himself, and yet he found himself shifting his butt over, giving her plenty of room to sit.

“Come on out if you want.” See? He could be friendly. Sort of.

He half-expected her to say no and go back inside, but she didn’t. Then again, she didn’t exactly leap at the chance to join him, either. Instead, she stayed where she was for a few long seconds before Ro finally heard the door close and felt the air shift as she sat down next to him and set her big bag between her feet.

She was still wearing the same hip-hugging jeans she’d arrived in but had traded her thin raincoat for a thick purple hoodie and a long gray scarf that wound around her neck at least three times. She’d pulled her loose braid forward so it lay against the scarf, and her hands were wrapped around a steaming mug of what smelled like blueberries.

She must have seen his nose twitch, because she smiled a little and brought the mug up to her mouth to blow across the top.

“It’s blueberry pomegranate tea,” she said. “Like heaven in a mug.”

Ro shifted his hip so he could tuck Da’s coin back in his pocket. “We have that here?”

“No. I bring my own stash with me.”

That made him snicker. “From the weight of that bag you carry around, I’m guessing you pack your own kettle, too.”

Hope’s smile widened behind her mug, but she neither confirmed nor denied anything.

With his own mug in hand, Ro didn’t say anything for a while and Hope didn’t seem to expect him to, so they just sat in the silence staring out through the darkness. He’d never been a big talker, but he should say something to her, shouldn’t he? And preferably not anything stupid or inappropriate.

The harder he tried to come up with something, the tighter his brain knotted. He didn’t usually have this much trouble making conversation with anyone, but there were two things jamming him up this time. Number one: He’d made a horrible first impression on her and the second wasn’t any better, but he’d promised Liam and Finn he’d be nice; he needed to come up with something good to say, because he couldn’t afford a third strike.

And number two: She was distractingly pretty, and every time he glanced her way, his brain misfired and he had to start the whole thinking process from scratch.

Damn it.

Okay, he could do this. All he needed to do was keep his eyes averted and find a neutral topic, but before he could do either, Hope swiped her finger across her bottom lip and looked over at him with what appeared to be genuine concern.

“The not knowing’s the hardest, isn’t it? With Olivia, I mean.” She waited until he nodded, then went on, “From what Chuck told me, you’re all pretty tight with her, eh?”

“Yeah, especially Kate and Jessie.” Ro rolled his mug between his palms and sighed. “I wasn’t here for all of last season, but the rest of them lived with Olivia twenty-four/seven for almost five months.”

“You weren’t? I saw the episode they filmed here last summer, and you—” Hope’s brow wrinkled for a second, but she shook her head. “Sorry, it’s none of my business.”

With Olivia lying in ICU, everything else seemed so trivial, so what did it matter if he told her why? His divorce was no secret; Hope could easily get copies of the court documents if she wanted to.

“As part of my divorce settlement I had to keep paying the mortgage on the house, and I couldn’t have done that if I gave up my job.”

“Oh. Right.”

“If I could’ve convinced Mandy to sell the damn thing, I’d have been back here in a heartbeat, but…” He would have, too, because despite the shit that they’d lived through, the Buoys was still home. It always had been.

“She didn’t want to sell?”

“No.” Ronan’s snort was loud, harsh. “Wouldn’t even consider it. And this place barely made enough money to pay Olivia last year, so there wasn’t a hope in hell I’d be able to keep making those mortgage payments if I moved home.”

“That must’ve been hard,” Hope said, her voice a whisper. “Being so far away.”

“Yeah.” Hard didn’t even begin to describe it. “But then Liam got offered that contract with Oakland, which meant we were going to be seriously shorthanded here, so I took all my banked overtime as paid leave instead, added it to my vacation time and came back while he was playing ball.”

“How long were you here for?”

“ ’Bout eight weeks or so.” Ro ran his thumb over the rim of his mug, trying to forget how much it almost killed him to pack up and leave that last day. He’d strapped into his seat on the Cessna and pressed his forehead against the window, not even blinking until his brothers were nothing but specks on the dock. Clearing his throat, Ro lifted his shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “And then I came back again when your people were here filming that Hooked episode, but that was just a couple days.”

Hope’s gaze skittered his way, and even though she didn’t ask, Ro figured all those crinkles on her forehead were more questions she wasn’t sure she should ask or things she wasn’t sure she should say. And even when she did finally speak again, she was hesitant, as though she didn’t want to push too far too fast.

“Must have been a big relief to finally sell the house, then, eh?”

“What?” Ro frowned. “Oh yeah—no, we still haven’t sold it.”

“But you’re here.”

It wasn’t a question, so Ronan didn’t have to answer her, but he did, and that was mostly because, of all the things he wanted to keep private, the generosity of his brothers wasn’t one of them. His eyes still burned every time he thought about it, but he wasn’t about to let Hope see that, so he blinked it away and forced a cough to clear the lump in his throat.

“The A’s paid out Liam’s contract when he blew his shoulder apart, and he used that money to pay off the mortgage.”

“He—” Hope stopped, her eyes wide before she blinked long and hard. “Wow.”

“Yeah.” It was a debt Ro didn’t think he’d ever be able to repay. The money, sure, he’d pay that back eventually, but by giving Ro the money, Liam and Kate had sidelined their plan of building themselves a proper house and starting a family, and there was no way he could ever repay something like that.

“That’s…wait, what?” Hope’s hand jerked so fast she spilled some of her tea. “You mean you paid off the house and then walked away from it?”

“Hell no!” His laugh came out more like a loud dry choke. “I might not have collected my mail there in a long time, but that place is still half mine; I just need to keep on Mandy until she agrees to sell. And I can do that just as easily from here as I could from there.”

“Why won’t she sell it?”

Ronan inhaled slowly, then released it even slower. It was something he’d practiced doing every time he thought about Mandy and that damn house.

“Because,” he said, trying to keep his voice low and even and free of any Mandy-induced rage, “she knows it pisses me off.”

Hope’s slow nod seemed knowing, almost methodical.

“One more reason to rent,” she said. “If I decide I want to take a job in Tuktoyaktuk, I can, and I’m not stuck with house payments in the city while I’m living up there.”

“Tuktoyaktuk?”

There was that smile of hers again: soft and slow.

“If they hadn’t given me this job, that’s where I would have ended up, working on a documentary about the changes in and around the Beaufort Sea.”

“The Beaufort? No shit?”

“No shit.” Hope snorted quietly. “And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it would have been an amazing project, but I really hate being cold. Like…I’m not even kidding, it infuriates me, so you can see how that might have been a problem.”

“Li’l bit, yeah.” Considering how nervous she’d been around him all day, it seemed awfully strange for her to be sitting here talking to him like this. Cool, but strange. “Does that happen a lot with your work—you picking up and leaving?”

“Enough that my apartment is on a month-to-month,” she said, shrugging. “And I only use folding chairs as furniture, because they’re so much easier to move or put in storage.”

“So what does your…I mean…are you…” Fuuuck. Could he possibly sound any stupider? Ro ground his teeth together and blinked slowly. “Your family and, uh…stuff. What do they think about you dropping everything and taking off to places like Tuk?”

“Oh.” Hope didn’t look at him, just stared down into her mug. “I lost both my parents, and I don’t have any other family to speak of, really. I mean, there’s a couple cousins back east, but that’s it.”

“No husband? Wife? Partner?” God, why couldn’t he just shut up?

“Nah. I was engaged a couple years ago, but it didn’t work out.” She released a short grunt that sounded a little strangled. “Turned out he expected me to devote my whole life to what he wanted, starting with giving up my career to build his company with him—and that wasn’t gonna happen. Not in this lifetime.”

A flash of his mother shot through Ronan’s mind, but he shoved it back into the deep dark corner where it belonged. She’d come to Canada with Da to help build his dream lodge and then walked away and left them all high and dry when they needed her most.

“What, uh…” Ronan stopped, cleared his throat. “What kind of company?”

Hope’s mouth twitched slightly before she turned her full smile on him. “Mountaineering.”

“Mountain—” Ro stopped because she was already nodding. “Are we talking hiking the Grouse Grind, or are we talking about recruiting Sherpas and heading up Everest?”

“Both. And everything in between. He has other guides working for the company, but they do the smaller hikes and treks, so he thought it’d be a great idea if I got trained up and then we could work together on the big trips like Everest—the ones with glaciers and crevasses, where frostbite occurs on a daily basis.”

Ro’s loud laugh bounced off the trees and echoed across the cove. “But you just said—”

“Thank you!” She punctuated the air with a raised hand as if he was the first person to understand the problem. “I mean, I get it, climbing’s great; I’ve even gone with him a few times, but that was on bareface rock like the Stawamus Chief. In the summer. When it was warm.”

Ronan nodded.

“There’s no way in hell I was going to do any kind of ice climbing, and when he finally got that through his thick skull, he was pretty pissed off. But then he said it was fine because his office manager had just quit, so he needed someone in the office every day to deal with the paperwork and organizing the tours.”

“Let me guess,” Ro said. “Paperwork’s not your thing?”

“Oh no, I don’t mind paperwork,” she said. “God knows there’s plenty of it in this job, but I’d rather claw my own eyes out than sit in an office all day answering phones.”

“Amen.”

“Anyway, at some point during the many things we probably shouldn’t have said to each other, he called me a selfish bitch, I called him an asshole, and, yada yada yada, I’m here sitting on your porch drinking my favorite tea and he’s leading a group up Denali as we speak.”

“So you keep in touch, then?”

“Hmm? Oh no, not really, but I’m linked in with his sister on social media, and she’s always posting updates of where he is, where he’s going next, who he’s dating…”

She didn’t seem overly upset by the whole thing, but still, it had to hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Ro muttered.

“It happens, right?” Her quiet shaky laugh floated out over the air. “You think you’ve got it figured out, you’re so sure you’re in love, and then one day—bam!—you realize it’s all just a big fat mistake.”

Hell yeah; Ronan knew all about that kind of bam.

“In hindsight and all, I know that if I’d really loved him, I wouldn’t even have hesitated to do what he wanted. I would have done whatever it took to keep us together, and I wasn’t willing to do that.”

“Doesn’t sound like he was willing to do it, either.”

“No. No, he wasn’t.” She stopped, twisted her mouth into a wry grin. “And I’m not gonna lie, that came as quite a blow, ’cause as the only child of older parents, I was raised to believe that the sun rose and set for my benefit alone and that the whole world revolved around me.”

“Yeah?” Ro smirked, liking the way she could laugh at herself. “How’s that working out for you now?”

“Not so well, actually.” That grin shifted something inside him, something he immediately pushed down, out of the way and into that dark corner where he shoved so much other shit. “And it’s not that I regret walking away from him, because most of the time I still think it was the right thing to do.”

“But?”

“But I’m thirty-four, my friends are all either married or as-good-as, and while they all have someone to go home to, I can’t even get a cat or a houseplant, because I’m not home enough to look after either one properly.” Hope shrugged slowly. “So every once in a while, like when I find myself bingeing something on Netflix or…when I see how you guys are with one another, I can’t help but wonder if I let my only chance of ever having a family slip by.”

She could keep pushing that grin all she wanted, but she couldn’t completely cover up the waver in her voice. Thankfully, before Ronan could even start to think of what to say in response, the door opened again and out stepped Kevin. With a short chin lift at Hope, he immediately turned to Ro.

“Dude. Chuck and I are gonna get a game of poker going down in our room. You guys in?”

“Uh…” Hope shot a quick look toward Ronan. “Sure.”

Ronan just snorted. Kevin and Chuck were sharing Liam’s old room downstairs, and Ro knew from experience that there was barely enough space for the two of them, let alone anyone else. If Hope wanted to squeeze in down there with them after watching them drink that many pints of Guinness earlier tonight, she was welcome to go, but not Ro. There was no way to describe what that room was going to smell like in a while other than to say it was going to be gruesome.

“Thanks,” he said, “but I’m gonna pass this time.”

With another nod, Kevin ducked back inside, but Hope stayed where she was, looking a little…nauseated? Mortified maybe. It was hard to tell.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t believe I just told you all that. It’s certainly not what I planned on saying when I first sat down here.”

“No? What did you plan on saying, then?”

“Well, actually, I wanted to ask you something.” She chewed the inside of her cheek for a second, then turned to face him, but it seemed as though it took some effort. “Other than the fact that we pretty much changed everything you guys originally agreed to, what is it specifically about us that you don’t trust?”

Ro looked down at his mug and blew out a long breath. He hated conversations like this, but if this was going to work—and he owed it to his brothers to do his part—then he at least needed to be honest with her. If Liam or Finn asked, he’d tell them it was like a mini Oprah moment.

“It’s nothing specific,” he said. “There’s only four people in the world that I trust, and they’re all sitting in the great room right now.”

“Why?” Her question, little more than a whisper through the night air, sounded confused and maybe a bit hurt.

Ro clenched and unclenched his jaw a couple of times.

“A bunch of reasons,” he said. “But here, right now, it’s simple. At the end of the day, we’re nothing but a paycheck to you guys. And I’m not slagging anyone when I say that, I’m just stating a fact, because no matter what happens with this show, when all is said and done, you’re gonna pack up and move on to something else—maybe Tuktoyaktuk, who knows? But the fallout, good or bad, will be ours to deal with, because we’ll still be here, doing what we can to keep this place running.”

He had to give her points for not trying to argue that with him.

“Fact is, Hope, we all want this to be a success, but if it’s not, your studio isn’t going to go belly-up. We actually might. And as much as we all agree that this is a business deal, it’s also personal.” He bobbed his head to the side a bit and sighed. “Do you think Luka gives a flyin’ rip that the three of us all learned to walk right here on this porch? Or that when you’re in the restaurant, if you look closely at the bar, down near the window, you can see some of the marks we made when we were stuck there doing our homework?” He waited for her to say something—anything—but she didn’t. “Nobody cares about that kind of stuff except us, so we need to protect it. Hell, I don’t think we’ve ever had a single person ask why the guest rooms inside are named after Irish counties, and I’m betting that’s because they probably think Da just picked four counties off the top of his head so he could keep the Irish theme going and that was that.”

“Okay.” Hope tipped her mug toward herself a bit and peeked inside. “But those things are all kind of personal, and you’ve made it pretty clear we need to tread lightly around stuff like that.”

He lifted his hands in surrender and grunted. “This is why I drive the rest of my family nuts. I want people to come and experience the Buoys, I want them to have fun, I want to share all this with them, and I also want them to understand it’s not easy, that it takes a lot of hard work, but I don’t want them to know the details of how much shit we went through to get where we are. And I’ll be damned if we can all agree on where that line is.”

Hope didn’t say anything for a few seconds, just rolled her mug between her palms and chewed the corner of her lip as if she was trying to sort something out in her head.

“Okay, well, hear me out on this, will you? Clearly you only agreed to do this show because it’s the means to an end, and I get that. This isn’t how you and your brothers imagined you’d get the Buoys back to its old self, but like Liam said, the old ways of doing things are gone for the foreseeable future. And I know you have absolutely no reason to trust me when I say this, but…”

She looked down at her bag, then tipped her head sideways at him, and God help him, if he wasn’t careful, those blue eyes would have him believing anything she said.

“I’ve been here one day, and when I look around, when I watch how all of you are together, I see more than a fishing lodge, more than a struggling business making sacrifices and changing things up to keep afloat. I see the family, five people doing everything they can to stay together, not just for the business but for one another, and if this show does what we hope, it’ll help you do that. It’ll give you the means to stay here with your family and build the Buoys back into what you want it to be.”

It was weird how a voice that soft could be that steady, that sure.

“But you’re absolutely right,” she said. “At the end of the day, this is just a TV show—one that we all hope will be successful but not at the expense of your family. You guys have things you want to keep private—who doesn’t?—and we’re going to respect that. Okay?”

Ro had to look away, because the sincerity staring back at him made him feel like a giant schmuck. Yeah, there were things they wanted to keep private, but it wasn’t as if they were serial killers with bodies buried in the basement. They just had things they didn’t talk about.

Like Maggie, like how often Da beat the crap out of them, or like what happened in the fish shack.

But maybe Finn was right; maybe none of that would ever come out. And maybe this new format for the show would be just what the Buoys needed to attract new guests while still keeping the old ones coming back.

If it was good for the Buoys, it was good for all of them, right? All he needed to do was learn how to accept change. He wasn’t too old to do that, was he? Nah. Thirty-five wasn’t old. Sure, twenty years ago, thirty seemed ancient, but now…

Shit.

He didn’t realize he hadn’t actually responded until Hope spoke again.

“We have a lot of information on you guys already from the forms you filled out, but I’m not going to lie to you, Ronan, we’re still going to be asking questions. So if you ever start to feel like we’re invading your space, just tell me, okay?”

Ro chewed his bottom lip for a second. “What kinds of questions?”

“All sorts. But how about this—for every question I ask you, you get to ask me the same one back, kind of a quid-pro-quo thing. That way I’m not going to ask you anything I wouldn’t want to answer myself. What do you say?”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say no, because no matter what he asked her, her answers would stay between them, but anything he said could end up televised, and he’d already proven beyond a doubt that he wasn’t exactly the most articulate guy in the world when he was rattled.

He started to say that, but he made the mistake of turning his gaze her way just as she smiled.

“Yeah, okay.” Wait, what? That’s not what he meant to say, but he didn’t have a chance to take it back, because her smile had already doubled in size and in that moment he didn’t give a shit about anything else. That smile…those lips…whew.

It was taking all of his focus to keep from leaning closer and kissing her, to taste the blueberry pomegranate on her bottom lip, and to—whoa!

“Excellent,” she breathed. “But I should warn you right up front that aside from the failed engagement, I’m pretty boring, so…yeah.”

As she spoke, she set her mug down on the step next to her and began rooting around in her bag. It took a while, which wasn’t surprising given how much crap she packed in there, but eventually she pulled out a small coil-bound notebook. She waved it victoriously before she flipped to a dog-eared page near the front and held it out to him.

“I don’t know if this makes a difference to you or not, but just so you know…”

Ro had to read it twice before his brain accepted it, but there it was in neat blue cursive:

Guest rooms—Irish Counties—Clare—Jimmy learned to fish w/g’pa; Cork—Maggie born; Meath—Jimmy born; Down—North.Ire.—J’s way to unite his country

Green cab—Wicklow pics—??check map—southeast-ish; J worked; traveled thru county

Orange cab—wildlife pics—photog?

White cab—fam pics. Maggie O’D

Fish shack—rebuilt last yr/personal

“Jessie was very helpful while she walked me around earlier,” she said, taking the notebook back. “And I think it’s details like these that will engage the viewers and make them see you as the O’Donnell family, not just a group of random people who run the Buoys.”

Ro wanted to argue, for no other reason than he still wasn’t ready to accept the changes Hooked was going to bring with it. But that was stupid, and he knew it, so instead of arguing, he nodded stiffly and pointed at the notebook.

“It was Finn.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Finn took the pictures in the orange cabin and most of the ones in the lodge, too.” The worry knot in the back of Ro’s head loosened just enough that he was almost able to smile. “He wants Jessie to see what he sees when he goes out on the boats.”

Every ounce of concern melted from Hope’s expression when she smiled like that, all gooey and girly.

“That’s adorable,” she said. “Seriously adorable.”

Ro could only shrug. It had never occurred to him or to Liam that Finn had been doing it all these years because he had a thing for Jessie. They just always assumed the two of them were close because they were the same age and they’d spent the most time together at the Buoys.

Duh!

“Anyway,” Hope said, her light laugh wavering a bit as she pushed to her feet. “I better get down to the card game before Kevin peeks at my cards.”

It was an automatic reaction—force of habit, whatever you wanted to call it—but as soon as she stood, Ronan stood, and in that instant, the limited space on the stairs shrunk, tightened, and though it might have been his imagination, it sure as hell felt as though the air crackled between them.

Did Hope feel it, too? Is that why her eyes widened like that? Is that why it took her so long to drag her gaze away from his throat, over his chin, and—oh boy—up to his mouth? Or was it just because standing the way they were, his mouth was in her direct line of sight? Whatever it was, Ro needed to put some distance between them before he did something stupid.

Crap-a-zoid, he’d only met her that afternoon, so why the hell was he getting all horned up already? She wasn’t the first beautiful woman he’d ever met, she wasn’t even the first beautiful woman he’d ever wanted to kiss, but she was the first beautiful woman he’d ever wanted to kiss so soon after meeting her.

And that wasn’t good.

Ro grabbed the railing for balance and moved down a step, but all that did was bring them almost eye level, and once again he was left stupid. The only thing that saved him this time was that as soon as their eyes met, she immediately looked down.

Swallowing back a curse, he took another step down and started to turn, but her voice stopped him.

“Did you know a canary’s heart beats seventeen times a second? That’s over a thousand times a minute.” Her eyes widened as she nodded, as though she could hardly believe it, even though she was the one saying it. “A healthy human heart only beats between sixty and a hundred times a minute, so…yeah…that’s…well, it’s a lot.”

“Uh…” Ro found himself starting to smile. Where the hell did she get these things from? And why did she pick the most awkward moments to throw them out there like that? “You’re right, that’s a lot.”

In the few seconds it took him to say that, her expression went from wonder to what seemed like mortification as she pursed her lips, inhaled a long deep breath, and blinked slowly.

He couldn’t be sure what she said, because it was a barely a mutter, but it sounded a little bit like “shut up” and “idiot.” Then, with a sigh and a sharp head shake, she stepped up onto the porch. Her gaze flashed over his but that was all it was—a flash.

“You…uh…you sure you don’t want to join us?”

“Yeah.” He waited a second, then chuckled. “But take my advice and open the window as soon as you get down there.”

She looked as if she was going to say something else, but then she sucked her lips in behind her teeth and nodded. And a second later the door closed behind her, leaving Ro by himself again.

Weird how being by himself felt different this time. A little bit empty.