“Regan. You’re doing it again,” Chloe announced, straining to reach the uppermost corner of the dining room with her paintbrush.

“Sorry,” Regan muttered, trying to keep the smile out of her voice. The humming was driving her sister crazy, but she couldn’t help it. She was happy. Really happy. Waking in Gavin’s bed, wrapped up in his strong arms, was unlike anything she’d expected. He made her feel things she’d long thought were fairy tales.

If someone had told her a month ago how things would be when she moved back to Sapphire Creek, she’d have checked them for a head injury.

Letting out another dreamy sigh, she turned to shove her roller back into the paint. She’d nearly forgotten about the work date she and her sisters had planned, to start working on the inside of the house. Chloe’s call asking where she was had launched her from Gavin’s bed to search for her clothes.

Gavin had laughed at her distress as he rolled over and pulled on his own clothes, instructing Chloe on how to break into the house, which was shockingly easy from what she could overhear. When he dropped Regan off, he said he’d be back with a couple of deadbolts to install before dinner. The implication that they’d be having dinner together had her toes curling in her Uggs. She couldn’t wait.

“The Snow Bowl was last night?” Chloe asking, dragging Regan from her thoughts.

“Yeah. Gavin showed up and dragged me up to the meadow in the middle of the night. I don’t know how I didn’t know about it before.”

“Who all was there?” Chloe’s voice sounded odd, but she hadn’t turned around, so Regan wasn’t sure if it was her imagination or something else that was prickling at her senses.

Keeping her eyes on her sister’s back, Regan went through the names, noticing a slight tensing in her sister’s shoulders when Erin’s bodyguard was mentioned. She waited for Chloe to say something, but when her sister didn’t, she dived in. “Is there something going on with you and Mitchell?”

Chloe turned around so quickly she nearly fell off the stool. “Why would you ask that? Did he say something?”

“No.” Turning so she could roll more paint on her roller, Regan tried to hide her smile. “I didn’t talk to anyone but Bethany, Erin, and Gwen. Have you seen him? Since the thing at the café?” Regan asked.

Chloe shook her head. “I don’t know what to do, Regan. I’ve never felt this way. He makes me feel…different somehow.”

Regan studied her usually unflappable sister, who looked so much younger than her twenty-two years, standing there with her hair pulled into two low ponytails. “Just be yourself, Chloe.”

“Right, because that has worked so well for me so far.”

Regan dropped her roller back in the pan and planted her hands on her hips when she turned to face her sister. “You know he’s not going to be staying, right? As soon as Erin heads back to LA or out on tour, whichever comes first, he’ll be going with her.”

“Sure.” Chloe’s voice was bright, full of what Regan suspected as false certainty, and she felt her heart clench for her sister. “I’m not a ninny, Regan, no matter what you think.”

“I don’t think you’re a ninny.”

Chloe stepped down from the step stool and sat. “I’m not looking for forever. But I want to explore what might be available for the next couple weeks, at least.”

“Then you should,” Regan told her with more certainty than she’d felt even the day before. “There’s no harm in exploring what’s out there.”

Chloe nodded. “I wish I’d been more like you,” she said, surprising Regan. “Unafraid to find out what was beyond the mountains. To do whatever you wanted.”

Unsure what to say to that, Regan simply stood there, mouth agape. Never, in all the time she’d been away, did she think her sisters would wish to follow in her footsteps and leave Sapphire Creek. Honestly, she hadn’t thought much about them at all.

After several seconds of silence Chloe stood to go back up onto the step stool, but Regan stopped her. “You know that’s not how it went, right?”

“What?”

“My leaving,” Regan clarified. “It wasn’t that I was brave enough to leave or went looking for adventures. Softball was my way out of Sapphire Creek. Not the mistake made by Mom and Dad when they were young that nearly derailed their careers. Not the older sister, the good girl, the babysitter, whatever else people thought of when they saw me.”

Regan paused. “Going out on my own allowed me to be me, for the first time in my life.” Realizing the truth of what she was telling Chloe, she sank into a dining chair. Leaving had been a matter of survival. Not in the physical sense, but emotionally. It had been self-preservation.

Before she knew it, Chloe had pulled out the opposite chair and reached out to grip her hand. “What happened?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

“I hadn’t realized,” Regan confessed.

“Realized what?”

“That I’d needed to leave. And that once I’d left, I was overwhelmed by all the possibilities, so I fell right back into the same thing, only this time it was with Todd who had expectations and dreams I needed to live up to, not Mom and Dad.” She gave a faint smile, trying to make light of the realization.

Chloe returned to the stool. “For a smart person, you can be incredibly dense sometimes.”

Regan laughed, tears springing from her eyes. “Yes, I suppose I can be.”

She took a step back to look over their handiwork. The buttery yellow brightened the dated room into something cheerful. She could imagine Gavin’s kids helping her make cookies in here, a thought that made her pause. Was she getting in over her head? Again?

“You’re pathetic,” Becca announced as she sauntered into the room, her arms full of bags of food from Lucy’s. “Has she been like this the whole time I’ve been gone?”

Chloe came down from the step stool and tossed her brush onto the drop cloth while she reached for one of the bags of sandwiches. “Worse,” she said, turning a mock glare toward Regan. “She’s been humming and sighing over everything. I’ve turned it into a game, trying to guess what she’s thinking. But it’s not that challenging,” Chloe pitched her voice into a falsetto. “Oh Gavin! You’re so dreamy.” She and Becca both burst into laughter while they unloaded the bags.

Regan picked up Chloe’s brush and wrapped it in plastic wrap to keep it from drying out. “I haven’t been that bad.”

“Really?” Chloe challenged. “Judging from the sigh followed by the blush when you looked at the table just now, I’m going to guess you did the nasty there. And to repeat what you said to me, ‘Eww!’”

Regan started sputtering, which made Becca laugh even harder.

“You’ve been a little wrapped up in your own stuff, Regan. Even before you got home and became wrapped up in Gavin, which we love, really. It’s much better than everything you went through before.” Becca nodded at her and set out the paninis. “It’s okay to have some fun now. You deserve a guy who treats you well.”

“And it’s even better to have one who does things to you that make you blush and sigh,” Chloe added.

“Girls?”

Their mother’s voice rang through the house and spurred them all into immediate action, shoving the sandwiches back into their wrappings and into the bags, which Chloe quickly disappeared down the hall with. “There you are,” Joyce announced as she strode into the room, wrinkling her nose at the smell. Regan hoped it was the paint her mom was smelling, not the greasy food they’d been about to eat. Their mom had always been strict about her family’s diet. Lean proteins and loads of veggies. That was it. While Regan didn’t argue with the diet as a rule, her mom took it, like most things, to the extreme.

Her trench coat was perfectly pressed and the winter white of her pants didn’t show a speck of the sludge that had formed on the streets with the melting snow. Even the slush wouldn’t dare smudge Joyce Sinclair’s perfectly organized world.

“Hi Mom.” Regan stood to give Joyce a hug, hoping to distract her from searching for the food or lecturing them about their suspected eating habits. It was the first time she’d come to the house since Regan had confronted her parents about their invitation to Todd. Regan was doing everything she could to ignore the dread coiling in her gut. “I wasn’t expecting you to stop by.”

“Catherine mentioned that you three were going to be here painting,” she said, referring to her sister who was letting Regan stay at the house rent-free in exchange for labor. Joyce turned her glare on her youngest daughter. “You could have told me. I don’t like looking the fool in front of your aunt.”

Becca shrugged. “I’m sure you didn’t look even a little like a fool.”

I still should have known where you were, instead of finding out from your aunt. What if something had happened?”

“I’m with my sisters,” Becca reminded her, pointing to Regan. “One of whom is a nurse, remember?”

Regan inwardly groaned. Not for Becca standing up for herself, she wanted to cheer about that, but as her mother’s laser focus turned her direction she had to stop herself from fidgeting like she had as a child. “How could I forget?”

“Mother.”

“Don’t use that tone with me, Regan. You’re doing housework for your aunt instead of trying to patch things up with your husband. You gave up medical school for him and now you won’t even talk to him.”

The air seemed to be sucked from the room as her sisters’ gazes swung her direction like they were watching a tennis match.

“I never wanted to patch things up with Todd,” Regan reminded her mother, struggling to keep her voice even. “I was the one who filed for divorce. And I did that after finding him having sex with one of my friends. It’s cliché, but they were going at it in the doctor’s lounge. You need to get over the fact that I’m not a doctor, nor am I married to one any longer,” she said, as kindly as she could under the circumstances. “And, to tell the truth, I never wanted to be one.”

“It was your dream,” her mother repeated stubbornly, “and you gave it up for a man. And now, apparently, you’re doing it again.” Joyce reached to the counter and picked up the pile of brochures and the information on trauma nursing Regan had printed out.

Regan tried to keep her temper in check. She loved her mother, and knew that part of her mom’s opinions was formed in her own regrets. But it didn’t give her the right to be insulting.

“Mom,” she began in a warning tone, but was halted when her mother cut her off.

“I’m not criticizing you, Regan.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Chloe muttered, earning a swift glare in her direction.

“I’m concerned about you,” their mother declared, acting like she hadn’t heard Chloe at all. “You were so anxious to leave Sapphire Creek—not that I blame you at all—that you raced into everything college had to offer, including boys. I’m afraid we didn’t prepare you very well for that temptation.”

Regan was trying hard to follow the conversation, but was almost afraid to ask for clarification. Was her mother really going to have the sex talk with her? Now?

“Mom. I really don’t think it’s necessary—“ Since she had no idea what she’d been about to say, Regan was almost relieved when her mother waved again to cut her off. From the corner of her eye she could see Becca and Chloe staring as though their mother had lost her mind. She was sure she wore a very similar expression.

“We’ve never been very demonstrative,” her mother began again, and Regan admitted to herself that it was like a train wreck. She couldn’t not stare as her mother held court. “We just never thought to worry about you, Regan. Not even when you decided to give up med school to be with Todd. We always knew you’d do the right thing, even if we couldn’t see it at the time.”

Regan straightened, unsure how to steer this conversation back to safer waters. “I didn’t give up on med school, because I never wanted to go. And I’m not going to talk about Todd,” she added. Might as well just lay it out and see what happened. That certainly seemed to be the approach her mother was taking with this bizarre conversation. “Nor am I going to talk about my current love life.”

Her mother straightened her shoulders, wrapping her dignity around her and making Regan feel like a heel. “I didn’t even know you had a current love life until I ran into Anita McCabe at the grocery store. She was so pleased that you and Gavin are finally having your chance that she couldn’t wait to share the news and ask what I thought. Do you have any idea how humiliating it is to find out other people know more about your child than you do while you’re standing at the deli counter? It leads me to all sorts of conclusions that I’d really rather not think about.”

Chloe took a slurp from her soda, making the gurgling noise that drinks made when you hit the bottom, effectively breaking their mother’s concentration and avoiding the histrionic tears that Regan was sure were about to be shed. The “bitterly disappointed in you” tears. Not to be mistaken with the angry tears, although there would have been some of those mixed in as well. She hadn’t been on the receiving end of one of these lectures in a long time and was out of practice on how to diffuse the situation.

Setting her to-go cup aside, Chloe kindly picked up the conversational gauntlet for her. “Then don’t think about it,” she offered helpfully, earning yet another glare from their mom. She shook her head, her pink hair swinging around her face, which Regan was sure just irritated their mother more. “I’m being serious. If you don’t want to think about Regan and Gavin together, then don’t. But you don’t have to jump to all sorts of conclusions. Regan’s been driving his truck a lot ever since that tree fell on the Mini. It’s a friendly thing for him to offer, right?”

Regan closed her eyes against the screech her mother let out. “I didn’t mention that, did I?”

“Regan Christine Sinclair. You were in an accident and didn’t tell me?” All that was missing was the back of her hand tossed dramatically against her forehead and she’d be striking the perfect pose for an all-suffering woman who was about to faint.

“I didn’t want to worry you,” Regan said, knowing there was no use. Sliding past her mother, she passed through the archway and into the kitchen where she started filling the kettle for tea. But her mother followed.

“Worry me?” Joyce had slumped into a kitchen chair and was fanning herself with her hands. “Why would I worry about a tree falling on your car?”

“She wasn’t in it at the time,” Becca called helpfully, while Regan wished the kettle would whistle instantly and give her something to do.

“I should hope not. Although if you had been, maybe someone would have told me about it.”

Regan looked through the doorway and caught Becca’s eye and had to stifle a laugh as her younger sister rolled her eyes at their mother’s dramatics. For a woman who was a solid academic, teaching ancient civilizations at the University of Montana, she had a flair for the dramatic. Regan often wondered if her mother hadn’t secretly had ambitions for the stage instead of the classroom.

The kettle let out its shrill alarm and Regan went about making tea, hoping to take her mother’s mind off fallen trees and her love life and anything else she might want to give her unwanted opinion about. “Here you are,” she announced, setting the mug of tea on the table. “Was there a reason you came by today? Or did you want to help paint?”

Bobbing the tea bag into the water, Mom shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous. I really wish you three wouldn’t encourage Catherine by doing all of this for her.”

“She’s doing me a favor by letting me stay here.”

“Which is another thing I don’t understand,” Mom muttered, lifting her mug to her lips before taking a small sip. The house was a point of contention between Regan’s mother and her aunt. Catherine had originally purchased the small house for their parents, taking over the larger, family home outside of town when it became too much for them to keep up and keeping the little house as a rental. It had been an arrangement that had worked well for everyone, but for some reason it had always rankled Regan’s mother that she hadn’t been able to do it instead of her sister.

“It’s a fine house. It just needs a little TLC and it’ll be good as…well, not new.” Still out in the dining room, Becca wrinkled her nose at the thought, making Chloe laugh. “Better than it was.”

“Those last renters didn’t take care of it like they should have,” Chloe commented.

Their mother waved her hand again, wiping away their words. “It’s done. I don’t know why you girls feel the need to get involved in this but you’re right, that’s not why I’m here.”

Regan waited. So did Chloe and Becca.

“Thanksgiving is next week.” Joyce made the announcement as though they’d forgotten her birthday. When no one said anything, she sighed and picked up her mug again. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t going to be off with your new boyfriend and would be with us for the family dinner.”

“Oh.” Regan felt a stab of guilt. She’d been so focused on everything else, she hadn’t thought about Thanksgiving at all. “Of course I’ll be there. I don’t know what Gavin has going on, if the kids will be with him or Kathy,” realizing too late that she was confirming their relationship. She quickly shifted gears. “Do you want me to bring anything?”

Some of the tension seemed to leave her mother’s shoulders at the question. “You can bring a pie. We can discuss your job options over dinner. Among other things.”

Regan nodded, understanding that her mother had felt slighted when she’d decided to stay at her grandparents’ old house when she returned to Sapphire Creek, but there was no way she was going to sit still for a conversation where her parents told her everything she was doing wrong and what they thought she should do.

Looking over at Chloe, she saw the mischief in her sister’s eyes and grinned in return. Maybe she could count on a suitable distraction after all. If nothing else, maybe she could come up with a case of food poisoning or something equally bothersome to keep her from attending.

Their mother left just as Bethany pulled her car over in front of the house. “Am I late?” she called as she climbed out.

“Not late enough,” Becca answered. “There’s still plenty to do.”

Bethany laughed as she came up the walk. “I’m going to take some pictures of the carpentry you want done. Zach should be home by Christmas at the latest, so he can get started whenever he’s settled,” she said, referring to her brother, who was currently serving in the Army.

“Are you sure he won’t mind?” Regan asked, leading the way to the back bedroom where the closet needed to be built along with some repairs where there’d been water damage along the baseboards.

“Are you kidding?” Bethany asked, taking her phone from her purse and moving around the room to try to get some decent photos showing the extent of the damage. “He’s been talking about starting this business for years. Being able to work for himself, use his hands for something other than—well, other than whatever he’s been doing for the past fifteen years. Zach will love the challenge.”

Regan only vaguely remembered Zach. He’d been one of the football players a couple years older than them in high school and hadn’t held her interest at all. Not like Gavin. She shook her head. She couldn’t go ten minutes without thinking of the man. Her phone blared the train whistle from her pocket and she grabbed for it, hoping Gavin was calling.

She was pathetic. She glanced at the phone and froze. Not Gavin. Todd. There was no reason for him to be calling her. A little pit of alarm settled in Regan’s stomach. She ignored the call.

“I wanted to ask you something.” Bethany’s voice held an odd note that cut into Regan’s thoughts.

“What?”

Bethany looked around making sure they were alone before asking, “Will you go shopping with me?”

Regan blinked, not sure why that request sounded so ominous. “Um. Sure.”

“I need to find something really sexy for when I tell Connor about…” her eyes cut to the door and she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Well, you know.” She waved her hand in front of her midsection.

It was obvious that Bethany was worried, although Regan had no idea why. Connor was as crazy about Bethany now as he was when they’d been teenagers. Anyone could see it. “And you need to find something sexy why?”

When Bethany’s eyes filled with tears Regan became alarmed. “What’s wrong? Has something happened?”

“No, it’s nothing. I’m just terrified that he’s not going to be happy.” She flapped her hands in front of her face. “Pregnancy hormones. Ignore me.”

“Good Lord,” Regan said. “Are you this emotional all the time?”

“We ran out of peanut butter yesterday and I cried.”

“Holy cow.”

Bethany shook her head, a small smile on her face. “I think part of it is the stress that I haven’t told him yet. So I have a plan. Get him drunk and sex him up before I tell him things are going to change. Again.”

This time Regan couldn’t hold back her laughter. “Did you really just say you were going to ‘sex him up’?” Soon Bethany was laughing along with her, holding her sides as she bent over.

Regan was relieved that her friend’s tears had disappeared. “So what do we need to go shopping for to help you sex up your husband?”

Bethany wiped her own cheeks with the backs of her hands as her laughter died down. “I was thinking we could get some lingerie. Maybe some lotions or massage oils or something. Something to knock him on his ass.”

“Of course.”

“And you can get some too,” Bethany added. “It’ll be easier if I have some moral support.”

“Oh boy.” Regan breathed as her cheeks burned at the images that flooded her mind. Shoving her phone back into her pocket, she nodded. “Count me in.”