Owen had fucked up monumentally. Not that he knew how or why or precisely when—but at some point between the dinner at his house and the nearly two days that had followed, Cate had gone the all-business route on him. Despite their great start the other night, she hadn’t even stayed for dessert, claiming to be stuffed after having picked through most of her meal. She’d been polite enough, thanking him for dinner and ducking out with a lukewarm smile and a wave. While Owen had tried not to overshoot in the expectations department, he had to admit, he’d been hoping for a repeat of Sunday morning’s slow and sexy goodbye kiss. But not only had Cate all but dashed out of his place as soon as they’d finished eating (fine. He’d eaten. She’d pushed her food around her plate), but she’d mastered the art of holding up her end of all their conversations since then with as few cordial yet boring words as possible, including the quick “have a nice night” and corresponding “you, too” they’d exchanged ten minutes ago.

Bracing his hands over the kitchen counter in the main house, he dropped his chin to his chest. Cate might have been distant, but he knew her far better than to think she’d keep it to herself if he’d pissed her off outright. As much as Owen hated it, that probably meant one thing, and one thing only.

For whatever reason, she wasn’t interested.

“Wow. And here I thought you couldn’t get any more serious.”

Owen’s head whipped up at the sound of Marley’s voice coming in from the entryway to the kitchen. “I’m not that serious,” he said by default. But the argument rang hollow in his ears, and Marley’s expression was proof she wasn’t buying it, either.

“Okay.” Her tone slathered the word with a double-coat of sarcasm as she moved toward the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. Instead of hightailing her way back upstairs like she usually did, though, she lingered, her stare flickering over the last piece of pound cake sitting wrapped up beside the coffee pot.

“Is that pound cake?” Marley asked, and Owen nodded.

“Yeah. Why?”

Her chin hiked in a stubborn lift. “Cate said if I wanted some, I should tell you guys to save me a piece, so I thought…it would be okay to try some.”

“You’ve talked to Cate?” Owen asked, utterly stunned.

Marley snorted, although more softly than usual. “Uh, yeah. She’s in the house pretty much every day.”

“Oh. Right.” He shook his head, although more at himself than anything else. Of course, it figured they’d have crossed paths a few times. “She just didn’t mention having met you.”

“Huh.” Marley’s lips parted in surprise, but only for a second before her mouth pressed right back into its perma-frown. “So, what’d you do to make her mad?”

“I beg your pardon?” Owen asked, his heart clapping against his rib cage.

Marley made a sound that was half snort, half laughter. “God, you’re so polite. I was just asking what you did to Cate. I mean”—she moved around him to pick up the pound cake, unwrapping it for a tiny bite—“Hunter’s too nice to piss anyone off, and you work with her way more than anyone else, so I figured it was you.”

“I didn’t do anything to piss her off,” Owen said, his brain scrambling to process exactly how observant Marley had been. “Why, did she, ah, say something to you about it?”

Marley took a bigger bite of pound cake and shook her head. “She didn’t have to,” she said after a few seconds of chew and swallow. “But she only bakes the really hard stuff when she’s got her panties in a twist, and those macarons she brought in yesterday? Let’s just say they’re one of the top ten hardest desserts to make.”

Owen plucked the first question from the pile of them growing in his head and sent it down the chain of command to his mouth. “How do you know that?”

“Duh. I Googled it.”

“No,” he said, quietly so he wouldn’t scream in frustration. “I meant, how do you know she only bakes the really hard stuff when she’s…” Do not talk about Cate’s panties. Seriously, dude. Don’t do it. “Upset?”

Marley paused, only for a heartbeat or two, but it was enough. “Lucky guess.”

The silence drew out between them, growing heavier by the second. Owen sucked at this sort of thing—truly, Hunter, or even their father, who Marley avoided like every strain of the plague, would know what to say here. But this was the longest conversation he and his sister had ever shared, and, frankly, Owen was pretty fucking desperate for advice.

So he said, “Cate’s not shy about letting people know when she’s mad, so I don’t think I pissed her off.” He looked at the counter, where the giant plastic container full of brightly colored macarons sat, and, yeah, Marley didn’t seem to be wrong about Cate’s baking jags. “But she does seem a little, ah, distant lately, and I’m not sure why.”

“Have you asked her?”

“What?”

Marley sent her gaze skyward and shook her head. “It’s not advanced algebra, Owen. If you think there’s something bothering her, just ask her what it is.”

Owen turned to lean against the counter beside him, parceling through the thought. “Okay, but what if she doesn’t tell me?”

“Then she doesn’t want to tell you. But you’re not going to know unless you ask.”

He opened his mouth to argue, but quickly found he couldn’t. He and Cate had agreed to be honest with one another. As tight-lipped as she’d been for the last two days, she hadn’t broken that agreement.

And as much as it was going to crush his comfort zone, if he wanted to know what was going on with her, he was going to have to find the words to ask.

Owen realized Marley was still looking at him with that shrewd, sharp-edged stare of hers, and he straightened as tall as his six-foot-one frame would allow.

“Are you going to eat that for dinner?” he asked, gesturing to the now half-gone piece of pound cake in her hand.

Marley’s frown deepened. “I’m twenty-four. I don’t need parenting, thanks.”

Shit. Shit. Why didn’t he hear his words before they came out? “I didn’t mean—”

“And in case you didn’t notice,” Marley interrupted, breaking off a huge chunk of the pound cake to pop it into her mouth. “This cake is really good, so yes. I am totally having it for dinner. In my room.”

“Awesome,” Owen said under his breath as she turned on her heel and marched out of the kitchen, the admittedly awkward invitation to go grab a burger at Clementine’s Diner disappearing from his lips. A burst of odd emotion pressed up from his chest, and he turned to grab his keys from the spot where they sat on the counter. He was done fumbling his way through conversations. He might not be able to fix his mess of a relationship with his sister—God knew that wasn’t going to happen in a night. But there was something he could go fix.

And he was going to do it right now, come hell or high tide.

* * *

Owen knocked on Cate’s door hard enough to make his knuckles sing. He knew turning up on her threshold unannounced, wearing dirt-streaked jeans, a T-shirt that had seen months’ worth of better days, and a look of sheer determination was just shy of crazy. But he also knew Marley was right—he wasn’t going to get any answers unless he had the balls to ask for them.

If Cate shut him down, so be it.

She opened the door, her dark brown curls loose around her face and her bare feet peeking out from beneath the cuffs of her faded, body-hugging jeans, and for the love of Christmas, how did she manage to look prettier every fucking time he saw her?

“Um, hi?” Cate’s whiskey-brown eyes went wide, but not even her obvious shock was enough to deter him.

“Hi. I want to know what’s bugging you.”

She made a small noise of heightened surprise, but nope. Owen had come all this way. She might slam the door in his face when he was done, but he wasn’t going to stop until he’d aired out everything he’d come to say.

“Look, we agreed we were going to be honest with each other, so that’s what I’m going to do. I know you work at Cross Creek, and the last thing I want is for you to feel uncomfortable there. With me. Because we kissed. And then I asked you to dinner.”

He paused long enough for her to—thank God—shake her head. “Good. Okay. So, what happened between us over the weekend wasn’t very conventional, or planned, or anything, but I thought we had a good time together, and I really enjoyed our dinner. Clearly, I did something to mess with that, and I’m not sure what, and we have this honesty policy, like you said, so I came out here to find out what’s bothering you.”

Owen’s words kept pouring out in an artless rush, and, what the hell, he was already in for a penny. Might as well go for the whole goddamned pound. “Look, if you’re not interested, that’s okay. It won’t stand in the way of us working together. But spending that time with you at my place, and those talks we had…I liked that. I like you. And now you’re barely speaking to me unless you have to, so if I did something to upset you, I just want to know.”

The quiet that followed was punctuated by the persistent whump-whump-whump of his pulse against his eardrums. The longer it drew out, the faster the rhythm became, until finally, Cate stepped back to swing the door open wide.

“Come in.”

“Thank you,” Owen said. About two steps over the threshold, he realized that, while he’d known where she lived for over a decade—hello, benefits of small-town living—he’d never actually been inside the place. Between the limited square footage and the sparse furnishings, taking in the foyer/living room was a two-second job. Although meticulously clean, everything from the carpet to the curtains easily dated back to the year he’d gotten his driver’s license. Cate led him deeper into the house, not surprisingly stopping in her galley kitchen, where an aging laptop and a Styrofoam cup of instant noodles sat on the slim stretch of chipped Formica that served as a breakfast bar.

“Oh.” A pang of guilt stabbed at Owen. Of course, he’d probably interrupted her dinner. It was six o’clock, for God’s sake. “I apologize.”

Cate followed his gaze to the cup a few feet away, and she waved off his worry with one hand. “Oh, please don’t. That stuff isn’t all too great, and, anyway, I was pretty much done.” She clicked her laptop closed, clearing the remnants of the soup to the single-bowl sink before gesturing to the dining area off the back of the kitchen. “We should probably sit.”

“Okay.” Owen waited for Cate to pull out a chair at the four-person table that took up ninety-percent of the space before origami-ing himself into the seat across from her. As much as he’d run off at the mouth after she’d opened the door, something cautioned him to give her some breathing room right now, so even though it damn near killed him, he waited out the handful of seconds before she finally spoke.

“I didn’t want to come work at Cross Creek, at first.”

Okay, so not what he’d been expecting. “But you offered,” he said, and Cate nodded in agreement.

“I know, and please don’t misunderstand. I’m really grateful for the job.”

The flash of genuine emotion in her stare backed up the claim one hundred percent, so Owen waited for her to continue without protest.

“I told you, not everything about my marriage was what it looked like,” Cate said. “We had—have—a lot of debt I didn’t really know about until after the accident. Brian didn’t want me working outside of our house. It was really important to him that I be here for Lily all the time. So much so that he maxed out a home equity line of credit he opened without my knowledge, along with all of our credit cards.”

Oh, hell. “I’m so sorry,” Owen said, because it was the only thing he could come up with that was both true and appropriate. Her former marriage was none of his business, but damn. No wonder she was so insistent on honesty now.

Cate’s smile was bittersweet. “I’m sorry, too. I went from high school to marriage to motherhood so quickly. I loved my daughter.” Her voice caught, the sound jabbing into a part of Owen he couldn’t quite name, and it took every ounce of his willpower not to reach out and grab her hand. “But I don’t exactly have a lot of career skills, so when I first scraped up the courage to ask you for a job, I was really nervous. In fact, I was pretty sure you’d fire me before the week was out.”

“You’re wrong,” Owen said, and, yeah, so much for his gruffness going on any sort of sabbatical. “You have plenty of career skills.”

She laughed in a soft, humorless huff. “And not a lot of social skills, as it turns out. I like spending time with you, too. You’re the only person who treats me like me no matter what the topic of conversation is, and I shouldn’t have pushed you away without at least telling you why.”

“Is it work?” he asked, unable to keep the concern tamped down. “Because if it is, we can—”

“No.” Cate reached over the small section of the table that separated them, her fingers wrapping around his forearm in enough of a squeeze to tell him she really meant it. “Owen, we kissed on our own time, and it would’ve happened regardless of whether I work at Cross Creek or not.” Looking down, she withdrew her hand, but rested it on the table instead of back at her side. “It’s just that long-term commitments are…a big leap for me.”

He paused. Retraced his steps through the conversation they’d had at his place the other night.

And promptly wanted to bitch-slap himself.

“God, I’m kind of an idiot,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. Cate might have clearly grieved the loss of her husband and be ready to move on, but that didn’t mean she wanted to jump into another relationship with both feet first. Of course, all that talk about weddings and serious girlfriends had probably rattled her. Hell, in its own weird way, the idea still rattled him, too.

Cate’s laugh surprised him, but it also took the steely edges off the unease that had opened up in his rib cage. “You’re not an idiot, Owen. There’s nothing wrong with you wanting a serious relationship. But it was hard enough for me to take a full-time job with you. A commitment like a relationship…”

She trailed off, leaving Owen to fill in the blanks. The topic was loaded with conversational potholes, each of which had the potential to torpedo him and his ingrained gruffness in less than a second. He hadn’t come this far to scale back now, though, so he took a deep breath and a giant fucking leap.

“Look, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure I’m up for that, either. Don’t get me wrong—I meant what I said the other night. I don’t want to be alone,” he clarified. “But the idea of going from zero to married with someone, especially for the sake of settling down, isn’t really appealing, either. I guess I just want to find someone who I like hanging out with and see how it goes.”

One slender brow arched, quickly accompanied by a smirk that had enough brass for a marching band. “Unless you want to end up hitched to Lane, you might want to narrow that game plan down.”

Yeah, serious topic or not, if she was going to flirt with him, there was a zero percent chance Owen wasn’t flirting back. He leaned forward in his chair, just slightly, until his hand was two inches away from hers. “Mmm. Lane’s a cool guy and all, but he’s sort of taken now that he and Daisy are seeing each other. Plus, he’s not really my type.”

“Ah.” Cate shifted, and now only an inch separated their fingers. “And what is your type, exactly?”

“Female, for starters. Smart. Likes to bake. Dark hair. Very pretty eyes.” He let his stare linger on hers for just a beat before his half-smile took over. “Unbelievably brash mouth. You know anyone who fits the bill?”

The blush that stained her cheeks made Owen want to taste every part of her just to keep it there. “This is going to get complicated,” Cate said softly. But she didn’t pull away—in fact, she angled even closer—and, God, he didn’t even think twice. With one finger, he traced a line over the back of her hand from her knuckle to her wrist, and even though his darker, baser instincts screamed for more contact, more heat, more everything, he lifted his hand from hers, letting it hover over her skin after only the one slight touch.

“No, it’s not,” he said. “And here’s why. If we do this, we’re going to be honest with each other. Straight up. No bullshit. Everything on the table. When we’re at Cross Creek, we work.”

“Of course, work should stay separate.” She paused, her pupils dilating and her voice taking on a breathy quality that traveled directly to his cock. “But what about when we’re not there?”

With careful control, Owen leaned in just a fraction closer. “That ball is in your court, Cate. I promised not to tiptoe around you, so I’m going to give it to you straight. I think you’re sexy as hell, and I’d love to spend more time with you. If that’s not what you want, I’ll understand, no harm done. But if you do want it”—Owen smiled, and even though it took every ounce of willpower he owned, he forced himself to get up from the table—“you’re going to have to come and get it. In the meantime, I’ll see you tomorrow.”