As much as Jonathan liked being Howie’s go-to organizer for mixers, wielding tools and getting dirty was a hundred times more satisfying. Especially when it meant he got to work so closely with Calliope.

“We need to rip out all these cabinets so that we can install the new ones,” he said, handing her a sledgehammer.

Calliope took the sledgehammer, her arm immediately jerking down with its weight. “Wow. You mean we should just go to town and smash everything up?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.” Jonathan grinned broadly and winked at her. He stepped out into the hall—which was filled with the sound of hammering, wood splintering, and nails being removed, not to mention the local country station playing over it all—to grab another sledgehammer.

He’d divided his team of eight into four groups of two, one for each of the major rooms that needed renovating. Since he was the team leader, he’d paired up with Calliope and assigned them to work on the kitchen. That way, they could work closely, but he would still be available for anyone who had questions.

And he was certain people would have questions. Kathy McVee had some strong ideas of what she wanted to see in the Silver Dollar apartment when it was done. From paint colors to fixtures, they would have their work cut out for them giving her what she wanted. He loved a challenge like that, though. Call him crazy, but his memories and anxieties never bothered him when he had a purpose. He was as jazzed up about creating Kathy’s version of perfection as he was about working side-by-side with Calliope.

He stepped back into the kitchen just as Calliope slammed her sledgehammer into the side of one of the outdated, old cabinets. The wood splintered, and Calliope let out a sigh of satisfaction. She pulled back and smashed into the cabinet even harder.

“You look like you’re enjoying that,” Jonathan said, crossing to the cabinet at the other side of the room.

Calliope gave her cabinet another whack, and the whole thing dislodged from the wall. “I think maybe this was just what I needed,” she said.

“Therapeutic, isn’t it.” Jonathan bashed his sledgehammer into the nasty cabinet in front of him.

“I was going to ask if there was a reason we’re bashing these things to pieces instead of carefully unscrewing them from the wall,” Calliope said, interrupted herself with a grunt as she took another swing at the cabinet, then continued. “But I totally get it now.”

She put so much emotion into her words that Jonathan glanced over his shoulder at her. Her face was set in a frown as she slammed the hammer hard into the almost unrecognizable pile of splintered wood in front of her. What did Calliope have to be so fired up about? Things had been going great between them in the last week.

Okay, maybe she was a little frustrated that, since the teams for the renovations were announced the day before, they hadn’t really had a chance to spend time together. The rest of Saturday was spent planning, and everyone had gone home from their group meeting late. That had wrecked their plans for dinner. But one foiled dinner plan couldn’t cause that much frustration.

Calliope let out a satisfied breath as the last of the cabinet she was destroying came away from the wall. “Ah! That was fun. I’m ready to start on the next one.”

Jonathan laughed. “Hold on there, sport. We have to clear away the junk or else we’ll drown in wood.”

Calliope turned to him, one hip jutting to the side, her brow arched. “I don’t know whether to demand you never call me ‘sport’ again or to make a joke about wood.”

Jonathan sputtered with laughter, letting his sledgehammer drop instead of taking out the last of his cabinet. His whole body heated. That was one of the things he liked so much about Calliope. She was so free and uninhibited, whereas he was far more straight-laced than he liked to let on. His wood liked that about her too.

Satisfied that the cabinet in front of him was smashed into submission, he strode over to Calliope. Sledgehammer in one hand, he slipped his free arm around her waist and pulled her close. “The wood joke is an easy one, all things considered. I’m more interested in you making demands of me.”

“Really?” She tilted her face up him, her eyes flashing. Maybe all that frustration he saw in her was the garden variety sexual frustration he’d been dealing with since pulling her out of that crevasse.

He bent closer, eyes zeroing in on her mouth, to see if he could find out.

“Hey boss, do you know where the other sledgehammer—oh.” Linus Pettigrew stepped into the doorway and immediately stopped.

Jonathan let go of Calliope, cheeks hot, and stepped back. He cleared his throat. “You mean this one?” He held up his sledgehammer.

“Sorry, yeah. Sorry.” Linus inched into the room, sending an apologetic glance Calliope’s way. “Um, thanks. I just need it to start knocking down that wall where we’re going to expand the master bedroom. But I can work at pulling up the floorboards with dry-rot instead.”

“Nah, it’s okay.” Jonathan handed over his sledgehammer, doing what he always did and trying to put Linus at ease. “Let me know if you need any help in there.”

“Thanks. I’m good.” Linus nodded, glanced to Calliope—who had turned back to the last remaining cabinet—then rushed out of the room.

Jonathan winced at being caught in the middle of a PDA, but what could you do? He turned back to Calliope—just as she brought her sledgehammer smashing into the cabinet with a particularly loud grunt. His brow flew up. Oh yeah. That was frustration of the sexual variety, all right. He studied her with a sheepish grin, wondering if they would have a chance to be alone soon.

“Good thing Howie gave everyone the day off for Columbus Day,” he said, moving to pick up an armful of shredded cabinet from the middle of the floor. “It means we’ll have plenty of time for dinner tonight.”

Calliope’s swing at the cabinet softened at the last minute. There was only a minor crunch as she bashed the side in. “That would be great,” she said with a relieved smile.

Smiles told a thousand stories, and Calliope’s confirmed his speculation that she wanted to spend more time with him. Good. He wanted to spend more time with her too. There was definitely something between the two of them, and he wanted to find out how far it could go.

“Speaking of dinner,” she said, crushing the last of her cabinet, then turning to him. “Want to come to my house for dinner on Friday?”

The warm feeling of promise in Jonathan’s chest spread downward. Dinner at Calliope’s place? Yeah, that was some serious wood. “I’d love to,” he said, visions of everything he wanted to do with her flooding his imagination.

“Great.” Calliope stepped over the pile of smashed cabinets toward him. “Mom usually cooks curry on Friday, so you’re in for a real treat.”

Everything that had been flowing with possibility moments before seized up. “Oh. Dinner with your family?”

Calliope’s expression tightened and her lips flattened. “Yeah. You do know about the way our apartment is set up, don’t you?”

He hesitated, not sure how the apartment was relative to dinner with her parents. “You guys attached two buildings together and built a huge, connected apartment, right?”

“Right.” Calliope stepped closer still, brushing a hand along his arm. “Mom and Dad mostly live on one side, and Melody and I—and, well, Will now too—live on the other side. It’s a lot more private than it sounds.”

He had the bad feeling that he was going to say something wrong, but that didn’t stop him from saying, “So Friday is a ‘meet the family’ dinner.”

Calliope’s face pinched more, and her shoulders went tight. “Is that a problem?”

Big step. Big, big step.

But he took a breath, disengaging from the suddenness of the whole thing and looking at it from an analytical point of view. He liked Calliope. A lot. He wanted things to go somewhere with her. He worked with Will, although not on the same team, and he’d already met Calliope’s parents, at least peripherally. It wasn’t as big a deal as his gut reaction tried to make it out to be. And like he always told people, saying yes to things had provided him with some of his greatest adventures.

“It’s not a problem at all,” he said with a smile, relaxing. He stepped closer to Calliope and, with his arms half filled with broken boards, gave her a quick kiss on the lips. It was nothing earth-shattering, but she smiled all the same. “Now let me just get some of this debris out of the way and we can work on cleaning up the walls.”

He stepped away and continued gathering pieces of cabinet. Okay. This was good. Things were headed in the right direction. Maybe they were heading there a little fast, but it was cool. They were going right where he wanted to be.

Calliope wished she had another cabinet to smash. There had to be a better way to go about getting to where she wanted to be with Jonathan. Helping out with the renovation project was all well and good, but if people kept barging in on her and Jonathan just when things were heating up….

She sighed and went to work moving cabinet debris away from the wall and into a pile for the dumpster outside. One part of her was revving to go with Jonathan and frustrated that so many things were getting in the way. But another part of her kept trying to tell her things were okay, Jonathan was obviously into her, and there was no rush. If only that voice hadn’t sounded so much like her mom.

“Hey, Jonathan, you got a second?” Linus rounded the corner into the kitchen, then pulled up short. “Oh. No Jonathan?”

Calliope straightened from the pile of debris. “He’s carrying stuff out to the dumpster. Do you need something?”

Linus hesitated for only a second before saying, “Yeah, actually. Wanna come help rip up some floorboards? Jen had to go pick up her son from daycare, so I’m down one crowbar operator.”

More things to smash? Excellent. Just what Calliope needed. “Sure, I’ll come help.”

She followed Linus out of the kitchen and down the hall to the bedroom. The apartment as a whole looked like a bomb hit, which, Calliope supposed, was exactly what an apartment under renovation should look like. She knew a little about the saloon and its history. The original building had been expanded and updated several times in the past hundred and fifty years. The kitchen where she and Jonathan were working was in the newer part of the apartment, but the master bedroom took up what had once been the original living space behind the saloon.

“Jen was working here,” Linus said, nodding to a section of the floor where the original, rotted boards had been pulled up and replaced with temporary flooring. “It shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes to get the rest of the nasty boards up, then you can go back to, uh, whatever you and Jonathan were doing.” He blushed and focused on the wall.

Calliope couldn’t help but grin, even though her soul was unsettled. Linus always had been a cutie. Talk about someone who needed a girlfriend! Not her, though. Linus was like a lost puppy who needed a girl to take him in hand, buy his clothes, and make sure he made it to his appointments on time. She had always had more of a hankering for the alpha male type, the type who would sweep you off your feet and make you feel like you were the center of the world.

Which was what had made her atoms smash for Jonathan in the first place. Well, any time he was ready to do the whole sweeping her off her feet thing….

She grabbed a crowbar from the worktable in the center of the room and knelt beside the next section of old floorboards that had to come up. That uneasy feeling that she was asking too much, expecting too many things, and yet withering because she didn’t have them continued to grip her, like a belt that was cinched too tight. She wedged the crowbar between two boards and pulled. Maybe she should just lay it all on the line and tell Jonathan what she wanted. He might be on the same page as her. Maybe she should just—

“I’m just going to go grab that wheelbarrow so we can move some of this debris out of the way,” Linus said, heading for the door.

“Great. That sounds perfect.” Calliope sent Linus a grateful smile. It was about time someone pulled her out of the endless loop of her thoughts. Because, really, this whole wanting to be six months into a relationship with Jonathan so that she could keep pace with her friends was as ridiculous as it was hard to shake.

She wrenched another floorboard up with a shriek of nails pulling out of wood. Not her favorite sound, but it fit her current mood.

Something caught her eye under the boards.

“Good job,” Jonathan said, walking into the room behind her. “Did you run out of cabinets to smash?”

Calliope laughed and rocked back to her haunches. “Ha. Not quite. Linus needed a hand in here.”

Jonathan looked around. “Did he fall into the floor or something?” He walked over to her side and glanced into the hole she’d been widening.

Okay, maybe Jonathan actually was sweeping her off her feet. Really slowly. His smile and his sense of humor had her feeling dizzy.

“He went to get a wheelbarrow so he can clear all that mess away.” She gestured to the pile of floorboards at the other end of the room.

Jonathan nodded, then knelt by her side. “So what’s the deal?” he asked, humor still flashing in his big, brown eyes. “I thought you and I were the kitchen crew, but here I find you hanging out in Linus’s territory. Did I lose you already?”

A zip of hope and self-consciousness swirled in Calliope’s gut. “It would be awfully careless of you to lose something so soon after finding it,” she teased.

“It would be,” he agreed, inching closer to her.

Calliope’s breath caught in her lungs. He was going to kiss her. They were in a bedroom, after all. Hadn’t she been saying all along that’s where she wanted to get him? Maybe not like this, but he was definitely moving closer. Her gaze dropped to study his mouth. Her heart sped up.

“No one is using this one, so I thought we could—” Linus stopped dead in the bedroom doorway. “Crap. Sorry again,” he said when he saw Calliope and Jonathan millimeters from locking lips. “I’ll just—” He pointed over his shoulder, face red, then fled back down the hall.

Jonathan laughed, his shoulders dropping. He swayed back, shaking his head. Calliope laughed with him, but she wasn’t all that amused.

“Is he going to do that every time we…you know?” she asked.

“I hope not.” Jonathan blew out a breath and sat. “That could get old in a hurry.”

“Tell me about it,” Calliope said. She plopped her butt on the old floorboards too, setting her crowbar aside. “Why is it that we can never seem to get our act together and finish what we’ve started?” Might as well come right out and deal with it.

Jonathan shrugged. “I don’t know.”

She studied him for a long moment. The adrenaline that had flooded her system when he moved in for a kiss was still there, making her reckless. “So where do we stand?” she asked.

“We’re actually sitting,” he answered, a glint in his eye.

She smacked his arm playfully. “You know what I mean. Are we or aren’t we?”

“Renovating a house together?” he asked.

She sent him a flat stare.

“Unlucky when it comes to making plans?” he tried again.

“Getting closer,” she said.

His expression lost some of its teasing and gained heat. “Hot for each other?”

“That’s a given,” she said, feeling herself flush all over to prove it. “Are we, you know, official?”

“Even though we can’t coordinate our schedules to save our lives?”

“Even though,” she said.

He didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he studied her with a growing smile. Even though the radio blared a country tune and the rest of their team worked in other parts of the house, it felt as though the world had gone silent, like it was holding its breath.

At last, Jonathan said, “I’m game if you are.”

Calliope’s heart burst in relief, like a trick jar of peanut brittle releasing springs all over. “Good,” she said.

She shifted, crawling closer to him and kissing him. He responded instantly, twisting so that he could slide an arm around her and pull her closer. It wasn’t their first kiss—there had been a few smaller ones in the last week—but those were like the preliminary fireworks that led up to the real bangers on the Fourth of July. Calliope parted her lips and let her tongue play along the seam of his mouth, swirling with excitement.

He kissed her back with just as much enthusiasm, and just the right amount of pressure and penetration. Heat poured off of him, and as he nibbled on her lip, Calliope was ready to ditch the entire renovation project to drag him home and to her bed. Jonathan seemed to have similar thoughts. He spread his hand across her backside and pulled her into his lap.

Or at least he tried to. In the process of shifting, Calliope’s foot hit her discarded crowbar. The crowbar slipped over the edge of the hole, disappearing into the subfloor. It clattered as it hit something.

“Huh?” Jonathan shifted to look past her shoulder at what made the sound.

Just like that, the moment vanished. Calliope groaned inwardly as Jonathan twisted to peer into the hole. Her own curiosity was piqued a moment later as he reached into the floor and pulled out not the crowbar, but something solid and square, wrapped in fabric. It looked old.

“What is that?” she asked, shifting so that she sat beside him and took whatever it was when he handed it to her.

It was a box of some sort. A box wrapped in a flour sack that looked ancient.

“Should we open it?” she asked.

Jonathan shrugged. “Why not.”

Calliope scooted to sit facing him, then picked at the old string tying the end of the sack closed. The knot might have been tight at one point, but age had worn the string to the point where it fell to shreds as Calliope undid it. She moved carefully to open the sack, then slowly peeled it back to reveal a plain wooden box. Once more, she glanced to Jonathan—who gave her an encouraging nod—then opened the lid.

A smiling woman, tough-looking man, and three adorable children in late nineteenth-century clothing smiled up at her from an old photograph placed on the top of a small stack of letters. The photograph was in surprisingly good condition, considering its age. Although Calliope supposed if it had spent its life sealed in a box under the floor of the saloon, it would have withstood most of what aged and destroyed photographs.

“Let me see,” Jonathan said.

Calliope handed him the photograph as gently as she could, then picked up the letter on the top of the pile. She opened it, revealing neat but simple children’s handwriting. “My name is Charlotte Standish,” the letter read, “and I am eleven years old. It’s April, 1889, and Mama said that me and my little brothers could put stuff in the time capsule she made when she and Papa first got married.”

“What does that say?” Jonathan asked. He craned his neck to look at the letter when she showed it to him. His smile grew, and he said, “Charlotte Standish?”

“It makes sense,” Calliope said. “The Standish family has owned the saloon since it was first built in the 1860s.”

“Neat.”

Calliope handed the letter over to him and searched through the rest of the box. There were letters from Charlotte’s two brothers, Sam, Jr. and Martin, as well as two long letters from Julia Standish. One of those was dated 1889, but the other was dated 1877. At the bottom of the box was a slightly faded picture of a younger version of the parents in the first picture. On the back was written the date, August, 1877, and the names Sam and Julia Standish.

It was a simple picture, probably the only one Sam and Julia would have had, but looking at it ignited something deep and longing in Calliope’s soul. The two young people looked so happy, so in love. Even though it was a posed, nineteenth-century picture. Calliope had grown up on stories of Haskell’s founding and early days. She remembered that Julia was one of the mail-order brides who had come to Haskell from that shelter in Nashville.

“Things were so much easier back then,” she said with a sigh, gazing at the photo.

“Things?” Jonathan asked.

Calliope hadn’t intended to blurt that out, but now that it was there…. “I think Mrs. Julia Standish here was one of the mail-order brides that came to Haskell back in the day.”

“Mail-order brides?” Jonathan took the photo of the young couple from Calliope with a grin. “You think that would have been easier?”

“Sometimes, yeah,” she confessed.

“To leave your home and travel hundreds of miles to marry a man you’d never laid eyes on before?” he continued to press her.

His eyes flashed, but she couldn’t tell if he was teasing her or not. “Okay, maybe not much easier.”

He laughed, handing the photos and letters back to her. “I think we’re doing okay in the modern world.” He winked.

Calliope flushed in spite of her uneasy longing. “The stranger part I could have done without,” she said as she put the things back into the box, then returned the box to its sack. “But they knew what they were doing with the whole getting married right away thing.”

Jonathan blinked, his lips twitching.

“Not that I’m suggesting you and I, or anyone else these days should jump into a quickie marriage,” she said, dreading what he must have thought about her comment. “Only that they were organized. They knew how to make decisions, commit, make sure no one gets left behind.”

He opened his mouth.

“I didn’t say it right that time either,” Calliope cut him off, blowing out a breath and rolling her eyes at her stupidity. She could feel her face and neck heating and knew she must look six shades of embarrassed.

Jonathan paused, took a breath, then said, “Why all the rush? I think things are pretty good between us.”

Calliope tried not to wince. “It was just a thought,” she said. Because she couldn’t very well complain that she wished they’d already been dating for months and had reached that comfortable place on the other side of getting to know each other. “We should probably get back to work,” she went on, standing to take the time capsule to the spot where she’d left her purse in the hall. “I don’t think Linus could handle walking in on another scene.”

“Probably not.” Jonathan got up and followed her to the hall. “So, are you going to give that to the Standish family?” He nodded to the time capsule as Calliope tucked it into her large purse. “Kathy is a Standish, isn’t she?”

A twinge of…well, she didn’t want to call it jealousy, struck her. She’d only just uncovered the capsule and its treasures. It was like making a new friend, and the thought of handing it over to Kathy right away was like having someone else sweep in and steal the friend she’d barely gotten to know.

“Do you think anyone would mind if I took it home and looked at it a little more before handing it over?” she asked.

Jonathan crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “Possibly? But I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“Promise?” The balance of emotion seemed to shift again, putting her on steadier ground where her feelings for Jonathan were concerned. She liked the idea of them being in cahoots about something.

“I promise,” he said, then leaned forward to give her a quick kiss. “Now,” he said, pulling back and checking down the hall, probably for Linus. “Let’s get renovating.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Calliope said.

But even though she had a purpose in front of her and things to do, and even though she’d told Jonathan otherwise, she still thought that maybe those mail-order bride people had the right idea.