The worst part? He didn’t do it with a single malicious intention. He just gave and took and moved right along.

I almost couldn’t be mad at him.

Almost.

Except I couldn’t forgive him for the night he’d forgotten. He didn’t remember that kiss, touched with whiskey and fire. It had branded me like a red-hot iron, but it’d meant so little to him, he didn’t seem to have a flicker of a memory of the moment. And the next day, when I saw him at work, he treated me as if it had never happened.

Worse—he’d brushed right past me on his way to manhandle my best friend, Ivy.

“Lucas Bennet!” Mrs. Bennet said in that fond way a mother scolds her child. “Let me get a good look at you.”

He set her down, standing proudly, smiling softly. If he wasn’t a beast, he’d look like a boy.

Mrs. Bennet lifted her hands to his face, her gnarled fingers brushing his cheeks. My heart lurched at the sight.

Rheumatoid arthritis had twisted her hands, limited her mobility, ceased her passion. I’d been her hands for years, my mentor, my surrogate mother. She’d taught me everything I knew, inspired my own passion. I’d found my calling, thanks to her.

I’d found a place to belong, thanks to her.

And now, Luke had returned with his stupid, perfect ass and his pizza bod. You know the kind—broad shoulders, narrow waist that pointed to some spicy pepperoni you’d just love to get in or around your mouth. Even through his T-shirt, I could make out the landscape of his back—hills and valleys, ridges and rolling bulges, like alluvia drawn by water running through sand.

My life as I knew it had officially been flung into a meat grinder, and Luke Bennet’s hand rested firmly on the crank.

Snip, snip, snip, I cut, so mad that I saw everything behind a curtain of fuchsia. I barely even noticed Brutus, the shop’s cat and premier rat hunter, had taken a seat on the table next to me, watching me with detached curiosity, golden eyes knowing and dark fur gleaming.

I had known Luke was coming home—the rest of the Bennets had just arrived, and per the usual, he was late. Really, I should have assumed he’d be working here. What else would he do? The whole point of their return was to help with the shop, and everyone had a job to do. Even Luke. Though the extent of his skillset consisted of making a joke out of everything, seducing unsuspecting women, and being a nuisance. Working the counter seemed to be the only thing he could do.

It was here where we’d first met, here where he’d worked every summer until he graduated high school. And then he gallivanted off, never going to college, never planning for anything. Instead, he traipsed around the city without a care in the world, working a hundred jobs in a handful of years. Then, he met Wendy, and off they went to California by way of a Vegas courthouse. Two months—that was the length of their courtship.