He nodded. “I have zero doubts that you can do whatever you set your mind to.” A woman who’d come out the other side of what she’d been through could accomplish anything. “What do you want to do?”

She turned slightly in her seat to face him, and Tucker really wished she hadn’t. She’d been distracting enough in his peripheral vision, when she hadn’t been staring right at him, but with her eyes firmly trained on his profile, warmth flooded his body.

The good kind. Or not, in this particular case. Because this was Della.

“I want to become a nurse. And I want to travel. I want to go to Disneyland, and I want to see Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon and Washington. I want to go to Australia and London and Transylvania. I want to…invent something. I don’t know what or if that’s even possible, but I want to be known for something, you know? And I want a dog.”

Tucker’s fingers flexed around the steering wheel. Her hair was stuffed in a knitted cap, and she was wearing no makeup, jeans two sizes too big, and the most bulky, unfashionable sweater in the history of crappy sweaters that should be consigned to the trash. But to hear her talk so passionately was like a shot of testosterone direct to his testicles.

“And I want to go there.”

She pointed out his window, and Tucker glanced in the direction of her finger. It was Frieda’s Palace. Of course. Because the universe was deciding now to punish him for those apple boxes. As if the heady distraction of cupcakes wasn’t dire enough.

The shop in question was hard to miss, what with the giant revolving condom gyrating on the roof. At night, it was lit in neon. Many a complaint had been filed about the offending item over the years, but, thus far, none had been successful in getting it removed.

“Frieda’s?”

“Yeah. You ever been there?”

Tucker shook his head. “Nope.”

She laughed sweet and low. “Oh, come on, I heard it was some kind of rite of passage for every teen boy in Credence to go to Frieda’s and buy condoms.”

It was. Or it had been, anyway. But there was no way he was getting into a conversation with Della about condoms or sex shops. “I wouldn’t know. I was too busy reading my Bible like a good Christian boy.”

Her laughter this time was more like a hoot—big and full—and Tucker couldn’t help but smile in response. “Good Christian boy, huh?”

“Yes ma’am.”

She quirked an eyebrow at him, a smile still playing on the corners of her mouth. “So…you’ve never been in a sex shop?”

Tucker sighed, resigning himself to the topic. “I didn’t say that.”