Nate stood there.

“Help me?” He smiled and closed the door. “How long have you got? I can think of a million ways so this might take a while.”

All morning she’d waited for him to call her, or show up, and he hadn’t. She’d resigned herself to the fact that he was staying away. Forced herself to be okay with that.

And now here he was.

And he was smiling at her.

“Nate—”

“I woke up and found you gone. Why did you leave?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not to me. You had to get to work? You had to go home and change first? Why not wake me?” He searched her face. “What am I missing?”

“You...don’t know?”

“Don’t know what?”

“The photographs. All over the internet. You haven’t seen them?”

“What photographs? I had a meeting with a supplier this morning. I haven’t even looked at my phone. I almost called you on my way home, but I’m more of a face-to-face guy than a phone guy. Half the time I forget to switch the thing on. Mel says it’s one of my most irritating features.”

He hadn’t looked at his phone.

He hadn’t seen the photos. All morning she’d been stressing out and he didn’t even know. Was that good or bad?

“They took photographs. On the beach last night.”

“Photographs of us?” He held out his hand. “Show me.”

She opened up her phone, found the page and handed it over. She felt like taking a long walk, but that would mean leaving the bookstore unattended and she wasn’t doing that.

Nate studied her phone. “You look good. I look good, too. A bit like a romantic hero, but that’s probably because it was evening light and I look good in the dark.” He glanced at her and shrugged. “Are you telling me that they’re going to point cameras into my bedroom? Because if so, I am definitely going to have to tidy up.”

She wanted to be able to laugh. She wanted to joke about it and roll her eyes and say, This doesn’t matter at all, but she hadn’t yet reached the point where she could do that.

He glanced back at the photos, and this time he was presumably reading what they’d written because his mouth tightened. “I see Denise hasn’t mellowed with age.”

“Doesn’t seem like it.”

He handed the phone back. “This is why you left without waking me up?”

“I was up early and I saw them on the beach outside the Surf Café. Photographers. I saw what they’d already posted. I didn’t want you to have to deal with that. It’s part of my life and it’s possible it’s always going to be part of my life, but it doesn’t have to be part of yours.”