With his face impassive as granite—those deep dimples totally ironed out—he reached into his back pocket, pulled out the scrap of red-and-black lace, and thrust it toward her.

Della shook her head slowly, tears pricking the backs of her eyes as her heart thudded heavy as a stone in her chest. “Why are you doing this?”

His hand dropped and he stuffed them back into his pocket. “Della…we’d come to the end of us anyway.” His face might be hard, but his tone was gentle.

“Says who?”

“There’s nothing more I can teach you. You’re an A-plus student. Bo coming along was perfect timing. You were hitting it off. You looked so good together. It made sense.”

If her vision hadn’t clouded over with a red mist, she might have paid more heed to the strained timbre of his voice, but she didn’t. “Damn it, Tucker. I get to decide that.”

“I know. And I’m sorry.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “But sometimes we all need a little push to step outside our comfort zones.”

Della would like to be able to deny his words, but they’d been very true where she was concerned. She’d needed to be pushed to therapy, she’d needed a push to go for her job—and without those things, she’d probably still be in a corner somewhere, clutching a flashlight.

“I wasn’t done yet.” She took a step toward him, but he tensed, and she halted abruptly, stung by his reluctance to be close. “We weren’t done yet.”

Damn it… She loved him. She took a deep breath to tell him, to put the truth out there, but he looked so closed off, so stiff and uncomfortable standing there looking at her with his hands in his pockets, like he didn’t even want to touch her, and she couldn’t bear to hear him say he didn’t love her back.

She was stronger now than she’d ever been, but she wasn’t strong enough to hear that.

“Yes. We were.”

And there he was again. The hard-ass. The guy who had held out against her advances for longer than any saint. Della knew how hard that guy was to reach when he’d made up his mind.

“Why? Because you said?”

“No, because we said it was only temporary.”

“And I need to be playing with boys my own age?” She didn’t even bother to keep the disdain from her voice.

“Yes.”

It might have been dark, but she saw the movement at the angle of his jaw as he clenched his teeth. “Or is it because you’ve never really gotten past me being Arlo’s sister?”

“It hasn’t exactly been easy sneaking around behind my best friend’s back.”