I know it’s her at my door even before I open it. Nothing mystical—my ears just know the rhythm of her footsteps. I can’t stop the part of me that loves that level of connection, even knowing that what’s about to walk in my door might wreak havoc with the rest of me.

Watching her slip out of Sam and Leo’s yard yesterday afternoon was hell. The twenty-eight hours since have been a place I didn’t even know existed.

She smiles when I open up. “Hi. I’m glad you’re home. I followed your neighbor in.” She waves down the hall at the elderly man who lives in the condo at the far end and obviously finds Chloe charming. “Do you have some time to talk?”

I’d do surgery on my day if I didn’t. On my life. “Yes.” I back up so she can walk in my door, trying to read her body language. Which is about as effective as trying to stare at the zucchini in my fridge and learn where it grew. Body language needs context, and I don’t have any for this conversation yet.

I do, however, have zucchini. “You hungry? I was just about to make a stir fry.” Which names all the things I can cook, but fortunately stir fries come in infinite flavors.

She grins. “Still making those?”

“Yes.” I tweak her nose as I turn toward my kitchen, stupidly grateful for small comforts. “Still pretending you don’t know which end of a knife is the business end?”

She laughs. “I’m forty-two. I could only delay the inevitable for so long.”

I wish we felt inevitable. The romantic in me wants it to be so, but the man who’s been happily single for the last twenty-six years is well aware we’re two people totally capable of walking away from this. Even if it turns us into emotional spaghetti.

I open my fridge and pull out all the veggies that look decent. Which includes two zucchini, some cipollini onions, and a somewhat questionable eggplant. I put the eggplant back and pull out beef strips instead. The veggies might be a little sketchy, but the tiny woman who runs the Asian market down the street and thinks I need a wife keeps me well supplied in things that stir fry with very little fuss. I reach back into the fridge for the sprouted beans and a bottle of the all-purpose sauce I use when I’m feeling lazy. Or distracted.

Chloe has already found my knife collection and is demonstrating the impressive skills she’s acquired in the last twenty-six years. There’s a nice mountain of zucchini toothpicks, and onion slivers coming up right behind them.

Right. I pull out a wok that might be older than I am. It’s seen as many countries too, and it kept me well fed in most of them. I give it less time than I probably should to warm up and pull the lid off the rice cooker while I wait. Lots there. “Food in five minutes.”

She grins and pushes a cutting board piled high with veggies my way. “Does your place run to a bottle of wine on short notice?”

I shake my head, amused at my suddenly sixteen-year-old manners. “I spent two decades in Europe.” I nod at the end of the counter. “The high-tech contraption for storing wine is under the end there. Pick any bottle you like. French on the top racks, more adventurous stuff lower down.”

It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest when she sticks her nose in the very bottom.

I breathe into that. The knowledge that Chloe has always been brave. The comfort of having her here, perusing my wine collection. I push the beef around, searing it in the high heat. Chloe mutters something I can’t hear and emerges with a bottle. I leave her to it—I assume she’s learned how to boss a cork around in the last couple of decades too.

She sets the open bottle on the counter to breathe just as I pour a cascade of chopped zucchini and onion into my wok, and sniffs appreciatively as the sauce lands a few seconds later. “That smells yummy.”

I grin. “Four ingredients in a jar, and they all love beef.” I kiss her forehead. “Thanks for chopping.”

She leans into me, arms around my waist, hanging on lightly as I push beef and veggies around a wok and wish stir fry took a lot longer to cook. “Thanks for letting me in your door.”

I kiss her forehead again. “Always.” I mean it, in so very many ways I don’t know how to put into words. Which, for right now, I can live with. I reach for the sprouts, which my tiny Korean shopkeeper assures me make for very virile sperm, and drop a heaping handful on top of everything else. “Cashews?”

It takes her a minute to figure out what I’m asking, which is good for my ego. She can get lost in the touch and feel of my chest any time she pleases. “Sure.”

I reach for a canister and throw on some of those and a little more sauce, and then, because this is a really fancy establishment, I scoop the rice straight out of the rice cooker and into the wok. Asian grannies everywhere roll over into their graves, but I want my rice warm and I don’t want to unwind from Chloe to do it.

She grins as I pile two plates high. “You don’t eat it straight out of the wok anymore?”

Not when I want to hold a really sexy woman in my lap while I eat. “Chopsticks or forks?”

She gives me a dirty look. The kind that says a fork will be turned into origami along with my eyeballs.

I laugh and pull out two sets of beautiful ironwood chopsticks with cherry bark overlays that I acquired from their maker the last time my tour bus took a left turn through Japan.

Chloe hums appreciatively and runs her finger along the grain of the wood.

I hold back a growl. I know I’m in deep trouble when I’m jealous of a chopstick.