“So, how is this going to work?”

I’m standing in my parents’ foyer in my work clothes—a sensible pair of slacks and a violet sweater that’s just the right weight for a day in the office. Not so much for digging through an entire houseful of possessions, but by the time I thought of it, I was already pulling into the driveway in the back of Levi’s town car. The most powerful air conditioning unit on the planet couldn’t have cooled the friction between us, even though we barely spoke.

He insisted on using his driver—for the first time out, anyway—and picked me up promptly at five-fifteen outside of the building where Drawstring has its offices. Levi was absorbed in something on his tablet when he arrived. The first thing he did was turn it off and look me in the eyes, his gaze a little guarded.

“Do you mind if I finish what I was doing? If you’d rather talk, we could do that instead.”

I wanted to do a lot more than talk to Levi. There’s just no way I’m ever going to say that out loud. The disaster of the last trip to my parents’ house was almost too much to bear on top of everything else. I wasn’t about to play this any way but cool and professional, with maybe a hint of gratefulness for all the extra work he’s doing.

“No, it’s completely fine.” I pulled the latest manuscript to squeeze its way into my evening schedule out of my purse. “I’ve got work, too.”

He gives me a smile and swipes at the screen on the tablet.

For the rest of the trip, I tried to read. It was impossible. Not only was Levi’s delicious scent filling the back of the town car and making me hot between my legs, I couldn’t stop stealing glances at him. I spent too much time thinking about the way he sits in the car, as if he’s the only man alive in the entire world. The way he’s totally at ease in this situation, flipping through images on his tablet—pieces he’s thinking of collecting, I bet—and tapping notes out on the screen.

Then my thoughts moved on to far dirtier things than a suited man—even a hot suited man—sitting in the back of a car. There are just so many other options when you’re going to be in close proximity in rush-hour traffic.

The one silver lining, even though he never so much as looked at me again, much less reached out and tried to touch me, is that my thighs got a fantastic workout from squeezing them together so hard in an attempt to keep myself under control.

Levi put his tablet down the moment we pulled up to the house. “Sorry about that,” he’d said with a smile that was more professional greeting than wicked grin. “Shall we?”

Now I’m waiting for him to tell me how this whole...process is supposed to go. The moment we walked in, something tightened in my chest. It’s only been a couple of days since we were here last, but I don’t feel any better about letting any of this go, and now my mother’s words are ringing in my ears.

“I think we should start with some of the bigger pieces.”

I think we should start with your...

The thought is so filthy that heat rises into my cheeks. “Okay.”

We step into the living room, and my heart wrenches again. Maybe this isn’t a great idea. Maybe, despite how much I love the way he moves in his clothes, the way my heart thuds when he gets close to me, the way he stirs up the filthiest fantasies in my mind, I hate this too much to go through with it.

Levi pulls out his phone and brings up an app.

That’s how it starts.

We go through every piece of furniture in the formal living room. He snaps pictures with his phone and taps notes onto the screen. It reminds me of what he was doing in the car, when I couldn’t tear my eyes off him to save my life. Only now he’s cataloguing my things, making notes. Or it would have been mine, one day, if...

There’s no point in dwelling on what might have been, but when we step through to the den, the next item up makes my throat go tight.

Levi snaps the picture, starts making notes, and then turns back toward me, his lips parted like he’s about to ask me a question.

And here I am, standing in the center of the room, swallowing hard and trying my best not to cry.

He’s at my side in an instant. “Ruby?”

“Yes?” I force the word to sound as normal as possible. I’m not going to put on a show right now. I’ll save that for the privacy of my shoebox of an apartment. 

He slips the phone into his pocket. “Did something happen?”

“Not at all.” The smile I manage to put on my face is probably just a hideous mockery of a real one. “Just—walking in here hit me in a weird way, I guess.”

“What about it? Was it the dollhouse?”

It was the dollhouse, but I don’t want to have to say that to Levi.

It’s an odd place for the piece to be, in what used to be my father’s den—he was in charge of decorating, and liked to sit in here to watch football on the weekends—but it must have made sense in terms of the estate sale. The antique itself is more than a hundred years old, and whoever owned it at first really dedicated themselves to making it a perfect replica of a nineteenth-century mansion in 1:24 scale. Roughly, anyway. Whatever the actual scale is, this dollhouse has been in my family for generations, and cared for as well as any of their other properties.

I open my mouth to say that it’s nothing and the truth escapes instead. “It’s so stupid, isn’t it?”

He wrinkles his forehead, his gray eyes mesmerizing, holding my gaze. “What’s stupid?”

“Being so in love with a dollhouse.” The sob I have to choke back is a shock, even to me. “I was going to have this one day, and now I’m not.” I laugh, but it sounds strangled and false. “I don’t even have room, you know? Anywhere I’d choose to move, I’d have to lug it around. It would be such a pain in the ass.” More laughter frees itself from my chest. “I don’t want to have to deal with it, but I was going to have to. It was going to be mine.” Mine, and maybe my daughter’s. It’s so absurd that it makes me laugh harder. I don’t have a daughter. I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t even have one of those sperm-donor plans for when I turn thirty-five and decide not to wait any longer. But the dollhouse? That’s the thing that’ll make me crack up, right here in front of Levi.

I wipe frantically at the tears spilling over my cheeks, trying to get the hell over this, when Levi makes a decision.