God, he was a mess.

As Gage sat in his truck, eyes on Mayberry, he realized it to be true. What thirty-four-year old hauled ass during an adult conversation?

Obviously, you’re the winner on this one. Congrats, man.

Gage snapped his palm against the steering wheel, threw his hat onto the dashboard, and focused on evening out his breath. Get a grip.

Over the years, he’d come to accept that there were a few topics that succeeded in clamming him up. Michelle. His father. His mother. Owen preferred to talk about them now—he’d sung a different tune during his early years in and out of jail—but that wasn’t Gage’s style.

He didn’t want to discuss Ben and Bethany’s deaths, and he sure as hell didn’t want to think about Michelle walking out on him—after he’d proposed to her, no less.

The passenger’s side door creaked open, the hinges rusty and in desperate need of oil. Quietly, Lizzie took her seat, set her camera in her lap, and flicked the AC vents away from her face.

“I don’t know what happened to your mom,” she said after a moment, eyes straight ahead on the Greek Revival mansion, “but I’m glad you loved her. I can tell.”

What did that have to do with anything? Of course he loved his mother. He’d loved her, even when she’d made a decision that tore his and Owen’s lives apart by the seams.

In a wry tone, she continued, “Not everyone’s so lucky, you know. My dad? The biggest prick you’d ever meet. Think city-slicker with a penchant for booze, and you’ve got him to a T. He, uh”—her fingers flew into an uneven tap-tap-tap on her thighs—“he used to beat my mom and Danny.”

Gage saw red at that, and he found it hard to breathe. “Tell me that he didn’t touch you,” he growled, “Lizzie, tell me that he didn’t—”

“Not once.” A ghost of a smile crossed her lips. “Danny always cut him off. Told me to go play with my dolls upstairs. Sometimes, he pretended that my friends were at the back door, begging me to come out and play—only, I didn’t have any friends back then.”

His heart ached with the image she painted of her as a little girl, both for her and for Danvers. He’d known the guy for years now, and never once had he suspected what lay beneath his affable, relaxed exterior. “It’s good he protected you. That’s what big brothers do, sweetheart, they protect their little sisters.”

The tapping stopped. Her palms pressed flat. “When Danny was fourteen, my dad tried to kill him. The details have always been sketchy—Dad, of course, faked concern and worry, and Danny passed out during the attack, so there’s not much to go on from his side of things. But you should have seen my dad, parading about in front of EMS, claiming that Danny had attempted suicide.”

The word lodged in Gage’s head. Lodged and rotated, and his stomach heaved like he’d been sailing the choppy Mississippi River, instead of being seated in a beat-up truck that hadn’t moved in an hour. With shaking hands, his fingers went to his face. Knuckles dug into his eye sockets, hoping to release the pressure. Palms dragged down his face.

Oblivious to his anxiety, Lizzie went on in a low voice, wrapped up in the memory. “My father died the same way he lived. Drunk. Behaving recklessly. I guess I’m telling you all of this because sometimes, even if we’ve lost someone, we have to celebrate the love we had for them. I don’t love my father; I never did.” Her blue eyes blinked, and then she glanced his way. “I can tell that you love your mom, Gage, and it’d be a shame if you went the rest of your life unable to talk about her. People like that . . . they deserve to be mentioned from time to time.”

“And your father?” he rasped.

Her chuckle was dark. “Deserves to rot in hell, which I’m sure he’s doing even now as we speak.”

The vehemence in her tone didn’t lighten his mood, but it did go a far way in softening the panic threading through his veins. “I see cases like yours at work all the time,” he told her. “I have for years. But I’ve never . . .” Gage swallowed. “I’ve never known a single person to grab life with as much . . . fuck, I don’t even know the word. Zest? Determination? How do you approach life, ignoring all the shit that happened to you and your brother and your mom, and not feel jaded every step of the way?”

By the time he’d hit the streets as a beat cop at twenty-one, Gage hadn’t known how to look at the world with rose-colored lenses any more—if he ever had. He might as well have worn a cloak of distrust, for all the benefit of the doubt he gave to the general public.

And then Lizzie had burst into his life with her talk of dating challenges and redeeming bad boys, and Gage had been hooked instantly. Her vitality. The excitement always brewing just beneath her surface.

He craved her. Even when she sat inches away, beside him in his truck, he craved that enthusiasm for himself, as though through her, he could dare to feel something more than brimming anger for the cards he’d been dealt.

“It’s easy,” she said finally, “I choose to be happy. Sometimes there are speed bumps along the way, but each day that I wake up, I’m determined to make good of what I’ve been given. If I don’t like something, I change it.”

I choose to be happy.

So simple. So easy.

And something so entirely foreign to Gage.

The closest he’d come to it was with her, from that very first moment that he’d met her, and she’d flashed those startling blue eyes at him.

“I need to touch you, sweetheart.” It was so wrong of him to need her like this again, to pull her in because he wanted her light to wash away his dark. “How far away is that inn we booked?”

Her breathing hitched into a slight gasp when his hands cupped the back of her neck. “It’s just over there, less than a mile, I think. Not far.”

As much as he wanted to take her in the backseat of his truck, he didn’t need any folks from the lemonade stand pulling a Peeping Tom.

Didn’t mean that he couldn’t kiss her, though, here and now.

Their lips met in a frenzy. It wasn’t soft and it wasn’t slow. He felt frantic, searching for something only Lizzie could give him. Her mouth parted beneath his, drawing him in, touching her tongue to his when he swept through, claiming ownership.

No, not ownership.

“I want you so badly,” she whispered against his mouth.

He wanted her, too. More than was healthy for his piece of mind. More than he should, when he knew, now more than ever, that Lizzie Danvers actively sought out her happiness . . .

And Gage had spent the last fourteen years existing in the dark.