I saw this whole thing going down differently in my head.

I was going to play it cool. Keep my distance. I didn’t plan on seeing her right away. I was going to give her space. Let her get settled. Not because I didn’t want to see her or because I’m trying to play games.

I want to do things differently this time. I want to do them right. I wanted to ask her out on a proper date. Take her someplace nice. Open the door for her. Pull out her chair. Take her home and walk her to her door and leave her there without pushing her up against it and shoving my tongue down her throat.

So, what do I do? I haul ass over here the second Con tells me she’s landed and drag her to Benny’s so Nora can harass her between coffee refills.

Not that she seems to mind.

“I can’t believe she smacked me,” Cari says, fingers dug into her cheek, trying to rub some feeling back into it. “Twice.” Despite the complaint, she’s grinning like a loon.

“Welcome to my nightmare,” I tell her, trying my best not to laugh. Lunch over, we’d squeezed through the throng of waiting people, hoping to sneak out without Nora seeing us. No such luck.

“Not so fast, Veronica,” she shouted, instantly causing Cari’s shoulders to stiffen against my chest as I tried to hustle her through the door.

Cari looks over her shoulder, aiming wide eyes at my face. Her cheek was still bright red from Nora’s last assault. “Is she gonna hit me again?”

“Probably.” I rolled my lips over my teeth to keep from laughing. “Better take your lumps, Faraday.”

She nods her head once and squares her shoulders like she’s marching into battle. “Right.”

She marches back to Nora’s station and stoops a little while the old woman shakes her finger in her face. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but whatever it is, Cari is nodding and genuflecting like she’s been given an audience with the Pope. As soon as Nora offers her blessing in the form of a loud, cheek-pinking smack, Cari straightens, only to have Nora call her down again. Cari goes reluctantly, and then something happens that I wouldn’t believe if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes.

Nora kisses the cheek she’s just abused.

“What was she saying before she smacked you?” I say, curious but also trying to fill the void that’d settled around us now that we’ve left the restaurant.

Cari keeps grinning “That the next time I leave without stopping in to see her first, she’s going to hunt me down and break her foot off in my ass.”

“She’s not kidding.” I laugh, bracing my hand on the small of her back as I guide her around a puddle of melting snow. “You better stop in before you head back home.”

Home. The word stuck in my throat. This was her home. Here. With me. I didn’t want her to leave. Not ever.

“I’m not... leaving,” she says, shooting me a quick, sidelong glance like she’s gauging my reaction. “I’m moving back.”

“Oh,” I say, nodding my head like it wasn’t the single best piece of news I’ve heard in almost a year. “Well, if you need help finding a place, let me know.” I nudge her with my shoulder. “I know a guy who happens to have a few empty apartments laying around.”

She smiles, catching her lower lip between her teeth to chew on it for a second before looking at me. “Thank you,” she says. “For letting me stay at...” she trails off, a pained expression on her face. “Anyway, thanks for letting me stay. I can give you the money I would’ve—”

I laugh, bumping her with my shoulder. “If you give me money, I’ll just set fire to it in the bathtub.”

She gapes at me, cheeks bright red.

“Too soon?” I ask in mock seriousness, and she rewards me with a laugh. “Seriously,” I tell her with a shrug. “It’s your home—or at least it was—and when Tess said you planned on staying in a hotel for an entire month I just—”

“Enlisted your cousin in a kidnapping plot?” she says, arching an eyebrow over some serious side-eye.

“Pretty much.” I grin at her for a second before it fades into something more serious. “You’re family. Family doesn’t stay in hotels, and they don’t pay either so you can forget it.”

“Okay,” she says, relenting before we fall into another short silence while we walk. Finally, she looks at me. “Grace and Molly are moving to Boston.”

I met Grace at Cari’s graduation, while she was still pregnant. “Grace and Molly are moving here?” I say, smiling because she’s smiling. Happy because she’s happy.

“Well,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest, she tucks her hands against her ribcage, trying to warm them. “She hasn’t said yes yet, but I want Grace to go to college. It’s something she feels like she could never do because of Molly and because she’s been stuck at home, helping my parents while they help her—” She drops her hands and laughs. “I’m babbling. Sorry.”

Stopping on the sidewalk, I pull her out of the flow of foot traffic, taking her hands in mine. “I hope she says yes,” I say, lifting her hands to my mouth I breathe on them before rubbing them between my own. It’s something I’ve done for her a thousand times, but it feels different now. Everything between us feels different. Heavier somehow.

I know she feels it too because as soon as I lift her hands to my mouth, she flushes, bright red spreading up her neck from under the collar of her shirt, making me wonder what color her birthmark is. “I have a few vacant properties that would be perfect—” I take her hands and tuck them into her coat pockets and start walking again. “you can even rent the old place if you want. It’s got a room with a window seat and built-in book shelves that would be perfect for a kid.” I don’t mention that I built it with other things in mind.

“So, how’d you do it?” she says, walking along beside me. “Make the apartment—”

“Into Hermione’s bag?”

She laughs. “Yes.”

I shrug, trying to buy myself some time. What can I say?

When you left, I went completely batshit and started tearing down walls because I couldn’t be in a place where I’d touched you without wanting to destroy something.

“I got my hands on some old blueprints of the bar and realized that the space was nearly four times bigger than the apartment my granddad built.” I bump my shoulder into her and grin. “Not that big a deal.”

“Really?” she says, sneaking a look at me. “I guess it wouldn’t be—not for Boston’s Best Catch.”

“Oh, Christ.” I groan, instantly mortified. “Did Con tell you?”

“No,” she says, enjoying my obvious discomfort. “I caught your spread on the plane and then my stewardess told me she met you, and all about your wild night of unbridled passion.”

“What?” I stop walking, her words rooting me in place. “She said we—no...” I’m shaking my head. “I never—” she’s stopped in front of me, laughing, waiting for me to catch up. “Oh.” I let out a long breath. “Fucking Conner.”

“Yes—fucking Conner.” She’s still laughing, pressing her hand to her stomach like it hurts her. “Literally. I mean seriously? What are the odds?”

“That you randomly meet a woman that Conner had sex with?” I look at her like she’s crazy. “Pretty good, actually—but it must’ve been a while ago,” I say. “Con’s off women these days.”

She looks at me like I just told her my cousin is an alien from another planet. “Off women?” she says. “As in... celibate?”

“As in,” I confirm with a laugh.

“The hell you say!” She laughs. “What prompted that?”

“He’s going through some stuff.” I shrug. “It’ll sort itself out eventually.” I hope.

She stops laughing and offers me a soft smile. “For what it’s worth, I think it’s pretty great. The magazine article, I mean.”

“I didn’t even want to do it,” I tell her and it’s true. I didn’t want to do it. When the magazine reached out, I told them no. But then... “But Declan pointed out how much good it could do. For Boston Batters. The reading program at the library. Gilroy’s and our business.” I chewed on my lower lip, trying not to look at her. “For you.” Especially you. It’d been Declan’s ace in the hole. Tell them that you won’t do it unless they mention Cari’s show. Can you imagine the kind of turn out the charity event will get if it gets a mention in a publication as big as Bostonian?

She stops, waiting for the crosswalk to turn. “Me?” she says, looking up at me.

“You.” I give her a lopsided grin, hoping I look more casual than I feel. I shrug again. “I mean, if I’m going to pimp myself out, some good should come out of it other than my manwhore of a cousin getting laid and an upswing in bar business.”

We cross the street, approaching the bar from the front. “I have something to show you,” I tell her, steering her around the corner, along the side of the building while fishing my keys out of my pocket. There, set in the wall is a heavy metal security door, complete with intercom and mail slot. “It leads up into the laundry room, behind the kitchen,” I tell her, fitting my key into the lock. “This way, we don’t have to tromp through the bar with groceries—”

We. I realize what I said a second after it came out of my mouth and I stop, key waiting to be twisted in the lock.

Shit.

I open it for her, risking a quick glance her way. Her cheeks are flushed, and I’d bet her birthmark is as red as a cherry under her thermal.

She caught what I said.

So much for playing it cool.

I pull the door shut behind us, letting the auto-lock catch before leading her down the short hallway leading to a second set of stairs. “I should probably get back to work.” I shove my hands into my pockets because I don’t know what to do with them.

She turns to look at me. “You’re not coming up?”

I let out a long slow breath, the ache in my lungs letting me know that I’ve been holding it for far too long. “I’ve got to check on Jeff, and I have some plans to finish for...” I’m babbling so I shut my mouth while she slowly mounts the first couple of steps. “It was good to see you again, Cari. We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

Jesus Christ, stop making it worse.

“Okay.” She turns to look at me and squares her shoulders, reminding me of how she’s faced down Nora earlier. “How about tonight?”

The step she’s standing on makes us the same height, which makes me think of those red heels of hers. I’ve been in a constant state of arousal since I showed up on her doorstep but thinking about her in those heels, and nothing else, isn’t doing me any favors. I keep my distance, resisting the urge to pull my hands from my pockets. Pull her against me. If I do that, I’m going to take her on the fucking stairs, and I don’t want to do that because I’m trying to do this right, goddamn it.

“It’s Wednesday—dollar shots,” I tell her giving her a grin. “I’ll be here—my shift starts at eight.”

“Oh,” she says her brow, crinkling slightly. “You’re working?”

“The new guy and I split Wednesday. Declan and Conner work Thursday—Ladies’ Night,” I say, trying to keep my tone casual. “You want to do something before I have to be behind the bar?” I look at my watch, calculating how long I have to wait before seeing her again. “I can come back—”

“Was this a date?” she says before catching her lower lip between her teeth. She looks nervous, and I can’t decide what she’s hoping my answer is.

Yes. I want to say it. But I won’t. I can’t because this isn’t about me or how I feel. This is about her, meeting me halfway. Instead, I shrug. “You tell me.”

The corners of her mouth pull upward into a smile. “How quickly can you get back here?”

Every ounce of blood in my body rushes straight to my cock, and it takes every bit of self-control I have to stop myself from throwing her over my shoulder and pounding my way up the stairs. I want her naked. I want inside her. And if she looks down now, she’ll see just how much.

Maintaining eye contact with her, I dig into my pocket and pull out my keys. Snapping off my key to the apartment, I press it into her hand. “You need to take this,” I say, my fingers curling around hers for a second before I let her go. I take a step back. And another. And another. Until I’m a safe distance away from where she’s standing on the stairs. “See you at seven?”

No, none of this is going the way I planned.

I’ve had eleven months to get myself under control. To learn how to manage the half-crazy, out of control feeling I’ve been fighting a losing battle against since the first night I had her. Eleven months and I was sure I had it handled. I was sure I had it all figured. Planned out.

I’ve never been more wrong in my life.