After calling Brett every name in the book, Paul stood, ripped off his apron, tossed it on the floor, and stormed out of the office. Brett glared at the doorway for a long time afterward, still filled with righteous anger. To hell with you, too, he thought, feeling fortunate to be rid of him.

But after a few minutes, that righteous anger faded, and Brett swore he was going to be sick. Had he done the right thing? He didn’t know. He only knew there was going to be fallout.

A moment later, he heard a knock. He looked over to see Andrea standing in the doorway to his office.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Paul just left.” She took a few steps into the office. “He told me you fired him.”

“Yeah. I did.”

She looked flabbergasted. “So it’s true? You actually fired him?"

Brett’s heart skipped with apprehension. “Uh…yeah."

"Are you freaking kidding me?"

Brett's stomach fell to the vicinity of his knees. Here it came. First there would be dissention in the ranks. Then murmurings of an uprising. Before long he'd have a full‑fledged rebellion on his hands.

"No, I'm not kidding you," Brett said.

To his total disbelief, Andrea's astonished expression melted into a smile of delight. "Well, it's about time."

Huh?

"Do you know how long Paul has been screwing off around this place? Since before you got here, and that’s been a while. A couple of us complained to Jerry, but he didn’t do anything about it."

Brett couldn’t believe it. “I didn’t know. You never said anything to me."

“How could we? We thought you guys were friends. We couldn’t exactly complain about him to you. He was the one who got you the job here in the first place. So when you became the boss, we thought he was here for life."

Brett had never considered that. So all this time they were pissed about Paul being a slacker and he’d never known it?

“You know, I had my doubts about you running the show around here,” Andrea said with a smile. “But not anymore.”

Before long, everybody in the place knew what had happened, and to Brett's utter astonishment, not a single person was upset about it.

A few minutes later he returned to the bar, where he found Kelsey sitting on her usual barstool watching the news on TV. He slid onto the stool next to her.

“How’s Angi?” he asked.

“Twenty minutes older and ten times smarter.”

“Did she leave?”

“Yeah. She has a date with a quart of ice cream. She’ll be fine.”

Brett smiled at Kelsey. "You're a smart woman.”

"Yeah? Well, coming from a smart man, I consider that a nice compliment. So why the sudden recognition of my intellect?"

"I fired Paul."

Kelsey blinked. "Seriously? I saw him leave, but I didn't know you’d actually fired him."

"You seem surprised."

“I guess I am.”

“You didn’t think I had the guts to do it?”

“Clearly you did.”

“Truthfully?” he said. “I thought I was going to throw up.”

“But you did it, anyway. Good for you. But aren’t you worried that people won’t like you?”

“Actually, Paul’s the only one who’s not too happy with me. Everybody else seems fine with it.”

“Now you seem surprised.”

"I am. But you know what? I found out it's not important for everyone to like me. What’s important is that the right people do.”

“That’s an excellent observation.”

“Because you gave me excellent advice.” Brett inched closer, dropping his voice to a sexy murmur. “I’ve been hot for you all day.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. I was looking over monthly financial reports earlier, and I thought about you naked. I met with Jerry about the menu, and I thought about you naked. I watched Elena sit down at the bar, and—“

“You thought about me naked?”

“God, no. Have you seen Elena?”

Kelsey drew back. “Well, then. Maybe you’d better see if Elena is free this evening.”

“No, thanks,” Brett said with a smile. “I’ve reconsidered. Women like her are a dime a dozen.”

He meant every word. Elena was all flash and no substance, the kind of woman he used to gravitate to. Now those women left him cold. Kelsey, on the other hand, made his blood run so hot it was all he could do not to rescind his rule about now sex in the workplace, clear the bar with a sweep of his arm, and have his way with her right then and there.

* * *

When Sunday came, Kelsey stood in front of her bedroom mirror for a good fifteen minutes trying on clothes. She'd bought a few new shirts, but she wasn't sure which one to wear. She wanted a balance between looking sexy for Brett and looking conservative for his family. Finally she chose a shirt she thought fit the bill, not too tight or revealing, but for once in her life, it wasn't overly modest. She paired it with jeans and sandals, telling herself she looked fine. She hoped she did, anyway, because it was pretty much the best she could do.

She heard a knock. When she opened her door, it took Brett's eyeballs exactly one nanosecond to fall straight to her breasts. Okay, so it looked as if she had the sexy part covered, at least as far as he was concerned. She sighed with resignation. “Go ahead, Pavlov. Have yourself a good, long look.”

“Why, thank you,” he said, his gaze never moving. “I do believe I will.”

He stared. And stared.

And stared.

“Wrap it up, buster. We're running late.”

“Almost done…wait…there.” He brought his gaze back up, only to lift his eyebrows with surprise. “You're wearing your hair down?"

She frowned and ran her hand along it. "It's probably going to get all windblown and look terrible by the time we get there."

"That's what I like about you, Kelsey. You're always looking at the bright side." Then he glanced down again. "But I don't know if that shirt's a good idea or not."

“Why not?”

“Because my brother won't be able to keep his eyes off you.”

“Isn’t he married?”

“Yeah, but he’s a pervert.”

Kelsey shook her head in awe. “I don’t believe it. There are two of you?”

“Yeah, but I can out-pervert Jacob any day of the week.”

“Well, get it out of your system now,” she said, moving into the hall and closing the door behind her. “I don't want you sitting in your brother's house staring at my breasts.”

“Can I stare at them on the subway?”

“Don’t tell me you're one of those subway creeps, too.”

“If getting hot by staring at you is creepy, then…yeah. Subway creep and proud of it.”

“What about Boomer?” Kelsey said, as they walked to the elevator.

“I paid Sofia ten bucks to come down in a few hours and take him to the dog park.”

“Ten bucks to walk that monster? You should have paid her twenty. Just cleaning up after him is worth that.”

“Only if he does number two.”

“Boomer doesn’t have a number two. It’s more like number twelve.”

About an hour later, the Uber car they’d taken from the train station turned onto a tree‑shaded block in White Plains. It stopped in front of a beautiful old home with a wide front porch and an actual porch swing. Sometimes Kelsey read magazines in her doctor’s office—Southern Living, Country Home, Historic New England—and found herself swallowing her usual cynicism about all things homey and sentimental. Instead she daydreamed about living in one of those beautiful, relaxing houses with broad, sunny windows, decorated with warm colors and cozy textures.

This was one of those homes.

Her gaze moved from the rose bushes beside the front door, to the ivy covered trellis between the windows, to the grapevine wreath on the front door.

“It’s so pretty,” she said.

"Yeah. I guess it is."

“You grew up here?”

“Yep.”

Kelsey couldn’t even imagine what that must have been like.

They climbed the porch stairs, but before Brett could knock on the door, somebody flung it open. A man stood on the other side, looking enough like Brett that she knew it must be Jacob.

"Hey! About time you guys got here." He stepped aside to let them in, then turned and held out his hand to Kelsey and introduced himself.

“Uncle Brett!”

From around the corner came a boy, maybe five years old, tearing toward Brett like a miniature freight train. He had tousled blond hair and scabs on both knees. Brett scooped him up on the fly and whirled him around. When he set him down again, the boy peered up at Kelsey.

“Justin,” Brett said. “This is Kelsey.”

“Hi, Justin,” Kelsey said.

“Hi,” he said, without the least bit of shyness. Then he turned to Brett. “Dad says she’s your girlfriend.”

“Your dad is right,” Brett said.

“And that you kiss her.”

“Yep. For once your father knows what he’s talking about.”

Justin screwed up his face. “Eeew.”

“Give it about ten years, buddy,” Brett told him. “You’ll eat that eeew.”

A tall, blond woman wearing shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops walked into the room. She strode up to Brett and hugged him. “Do you realize it’s been three months since you’ve been here?"

“I’m a busy man.”

“So busy you forget all about your family?”

“Will you knock it off?” Jacob said. “You sound just like Mom."

"Fine. I sound like your mother. It's still been too long." She held out her hand to Kelsey and smiled. "Hi. I’m Miranda.”

Kelsey shook her hand, hoping her own wasn’t shaking. Then Miranda and Jacob escorted them through the house to the patio. Miranda brought glasses of lemonade, and they all sat together.

"Did you guys have a good trip up here on the train?" Miranda asked.

"It was the train," Jacob said. "How good could it possibly be?"

"Well,” Brett said, “nobody talked on their cell phones at the top of their lungs, and the one guy we thought was talking to himself turned out to be wearing a Bluetooth. So yeah. All in all, it was a good trip."

“So you’re managing the bar now,” Jacob said. “How’s that going?”

“Actually, pretty well.”

He went on to tell them what was going on at Gianelli’s. That was fine with Kelsey, because it didn’t require her to talk. Justin sat on the floor playing with a couple of fearsome-looking superhero figures and their associated paraphernalia, making enough blow-up noises for ten action-adventure movies.

For a while, the conversation happened pretty much among Brett, Jacob, and Miranda. Brett occasionally stopped to fill Kelsey in on what they were talking about so she wouldn’t be hopelessly lost. They interrupted each other a lot, but somehow the flow of the conversation was seamless. To Kelsey, it was a superhighway she had no idea how to merge onto.

"You're quiet, Kelsey," Jacob said. "Tell Brett to shut up so you can get a word in edgewise."

"I'm doing fine," she said, searching her brain for small talk to add to the conversation. Finally she said, “This is a nice house.”

Okay, so her small talk was smaller than most.

“It was our parents' house," Jacob said. "Brett and I grew up here. Then Miranda and I bought it when the folks retired." He looked at Brett. “Show her the shrine.”

Brett turned to Kelsey. “It’s kinda like the Taj Mahal, or the Great Wall of China. Just the sheer magnitude of it takes your breath away.”

He led her to a hallway, and when Kelsey saw what it contained, she couldn’t believe it.

“Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?” Brett said.

Kelsey had to agree. Lining the walls were more family photos than she’d ever seen together in one place. Brett and Jacob’s lives were chronicled there as if every breath they’d ever taken was singular and special and had to be preserved for all humankind. She couldn’t help but think about the few photos she had of herself as a child. They could fit inside a single envelope.

“We’d like to take it all down,” Jacob said. “But if Mom comes and it's not here, she'll cry.”

“Cry?” Miranda said. “Your mother? She’s tough as nails. When was the last time you saw her cry?”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

“Why didn't they take the shrine with them?” Kelsey asked.

“Small condo. They wouldn't have had any wall space left.”

“Where did they move?”

“Florida,” Brett said. “Don't all old people retire to Florida?”

“Dad bitched about the weather here,” Jacob said. “His health isn't the greatest. He said he figured he'd better head for the Florida sun before he headed for heaven.” He turned to Miranda. "The grill should be hot by now. Let’s get lunch going. I’m starving.”

Miranda grabbed a plate of burgers from the kitchen and handed them to Jacob. They all went to the tree-shaded backyard, but to Kelsey’s dismay, Brett crossed the patio to talk to Jacob as he put the food on the grill, while Miranda invited her to sit on a lawn chair next to her. That meant Kelsey had to carry on a conversation by herself without Brett’s constant chatter, and she wasn’t looking forward to it.

“Brett tells us you’re a police officer,” Miranda said.

“Yeah.”

“Do you like it?”

“In a way. I mean, yeah. Most of the time.”

“What sucks about it?”

Kelsey hadn’t expected Miranda to be quite so blunt, but that quality seemed to run in their family. Now she was staring at Kelsey, expecting her to have a somewhat intelligent answer. “I don't know. I guess I thought maybe I’d be helping people. But I found out that sometimes there’s only so much you can do.”

“I hear you,” Miranda said. “I teach high school. Some of those kids already have one foot in prison.”

“I know. With the public schools the way they are these days, teachers have to be cops, too. You should get paid double.”

For the next twenty minutes, they discussed everything from truancy to gangs to graffiti. With the conversation focused on something Kelsey was familiar with, slowly she became more comfortable. Miranda was nice. Their house was beautiful.

And Brett seemed totally at home in it.

She glanced at him every few minutes. He stood next to Jacob as his brother flipped food on the grill. She couldn’t make out their conversation, but it was clear they argued over the placement of the burgers, and then which grilling implements to use. But it was good-natured arguing, and their conversation was interspersed with smiles and laughter. Just watching them made Kelsey feel all warm and tingly inside.

“So how long have you and Brett been seeing each other?” Miranda asked.

That was hard for Kelsey to answer. Was she talking about that first time they had sex? Their first date? What? Their relationship hadn’t exactly had a normal progression.

“Only a few weeks now.”

“You’re not like any of the women he’s dated before.”

Before Kelsey could worry about whether that was a bad thing, Miranda said, “Just so you know, that’s a compliment. That gorgeous face of his is a curse. He attracts all the wrong women. Screaming hot but skanky as streetwalkers. He doesn't like that. Well, he loved it years ago. Most young guys do. But now that he's an actual adult, he's looking for a little more. But most women think he’s just one of those guys out for a good time.”

Kelsey thought about how she used to see him, as a pretty face with an empty head, flirting with every hot woman who walked into Gianelli’s. God, there was more. So much more.

“I’m happy to see him with a woman who has a little more going for her than that,” Miranda said.

“Brett and I don’t exactly have a lot in common,” Kelsey said, then regretted the words. Why point out a reason their relationship wouldn’t work when she desperately wanted it to?

Miranda only laughed. “Well, thank God for that. He has a few bad habits that need breaking. Take his apartment. You’d need a snow shovel and a HazMat suit to clean that place. Just a guess, but I’m thinking you’re slightly neater than that.”

Kelsey smiled. “Yeah, I am. So he decided to clean his place up.”

Miranda blinked. “He did?”

“Then he alphabetized his record collection.”

“You’re joking.”

“I know. Surprised me, too.”

Miranda leaned in with a conspiratorial smile. “Will you do the family a favor and marry him?”

Kelsey smiled back, taking that for the joke it was. But she couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like if it actually happened. If she married him, his family would be hers, too.

Family.

For once in her life, the sound of that word didn’t conjure up thoughts about what she was missing. All she could think about were the possibilities.

* * *

“So tell me about Kelsey,” Jacob said quietly, as he turned a few of the burgers with a spatula.

Brett glanced at Kelsey as she talked to Miranda. “She’s a cop.”

“Something I don’t know.”

“She’s different from a lot of women.”

“Yeah?”

“She has a black belt in karate.”

“Ah. So she really could kill you if the need arose.”

“She’s organized. And responsible.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“But she’s sexy, too. Not like some other women are, with all the makeup and tight clothes and heels and crap like that. She’s a different kind of sexy.”

“One that’s more than skin deep?”

That was it exactly. Brett had struggled with his attraction to Kelsey, wondering why he was so interested in a woman who was so unlike any woman he’d ever dated. And it was because what he couldn’t see seemed even more interesting than what he could, which meant it could take years to understand her completely. But for some reason, that felt like a challenge he’d love to take on.

He glanced over to see her still talking to Miranda. Finally she looked relaxed, as if she was actually having a good time. She smiled at something Miranda said, then laughed, her gorgeous hair shimmering in the sunlight. The fact that she’d worn it down because she knew he liked it that way pleased him to no end.

Then she turned and met his eyes, giving him a smile. Just a tiny smile that seemed to say I’m talking to Miranda, but I’m thinking about you. Then she looked away, and he told himself her smile was just a smile and it hadn’t said anything at all. But all at once, he felt a weird kind of possessiveness he didn’t understand, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. It was a little unnerving to suddenly imagine castrating any man who so much as touched her. Why were those thoughts even crossing his mind? He’d never been insecure where women were concerned, but he sure as hell felt insecure now.

Suddenly Brett saw a lime green Nerf ball sail through the air and smack Kelsey on the side of the head. She whipped around and spied Justin on the other end of the gun.

Uh-oh. Brett held his breath, wondering if he should suggest to Justin that he needed to play with something else, and maybe apologize to Kelsey for nailing her with a giant foam bullet.

But then Kelsey turned to Miranda. She held up her finger, and Brett saw her say, “Excuse me.” Then she rose from her chair and grabbed the other Nerf gun that was leaning against the side of the house. She aimed, fired, and got Justin in the shoulder. Justin laughed and shot at Kelsey again, but she ducked hard to the right, and it missed her. She kicked off her sandals and took off toward the big oak tree in the center of the yard, and the two of them proceeded to have an all-out Nerf war. Brett watched in awe, unable to believe this was the same woman he’d known all this time.

“Uh-oh,” Jacob said. “Kelsey’s a cop. Justin is toast.”

“Don’t bank on that,” Brett said, thinking she could very well trip on a tree root, or run into a shrub, or bang her knee on his platform bed.

No, wait. He was mixing things up. The platform bed was then, this was now. But he couldn’t seem to stop all of it from running together in his mind—Kelsey playing with his nephew, Kelsey smiling and laughing, Kelsey drawing in a deep breath of pleasure as she sat on his bed and he kissed his way up her thigh. All of it was so good that for the first time, a future with her seemed less like wishful thinking and more like a dream that could actually come true.

A few minutes later the food was ready, and Justin and Kelsey called a truce. By the time they sat down to eat, it was clear Kelsey had loosened up considerably in the conversation department and was actually having a good time. As they ate, Brett looked around the house he’d grown up in and saw the kind of life he wanted to have. He remembered how he couldn't wait to leave there as a teenager, and he couldn't believe how much he wanted this life again now. He was envious of Jacob for his wife, his child and his warm, happy home.

Then he looked at Kelsey and thought, Maybe she really is the one.