Dan looked flummoxed. “I just wanted us all to be together,” he said, addressing Melba directly. Brynne wasn’t sure he was aware, just then, that anyone else was in the room. “You know. Start the New Year out right.”

Something softened in Melba, a visible relaxation of small muscles and wary thoughts. “Dan Summers,” she said, “you know I don’t like it when you involve the girls in your business. Hummer or no Hummer, I don’t trust any of those people you hire from God knows where to look after our daughters.”

Dan puffed out his cheeks, collapsed them again by expelling a loud breath. “If we’re going to argue,” he said, “could we do it later? In private?”

Melba looked mildly chagrined. “Yes,” she replied quietly. “If the sheriff and I don’t get called out in the meantime, we can talk in private.”

“Take that and run with it, old buddy,” Eli advised his friend, laying one hand on Dan’s broad shoulder.

Summers was, Brynne thought, the biggest man she’d ever seen. He had to duck his head just to pass through doorways. He was also a man very much in love with his former wife; that was painfully obvious.

Was Melba still in love with him?

If Brynne had to hazard a guess, she’d say yes. The very atmosphere seemed to pulse around those two.

“Let’s get dinner on the table,” Sara said.

She turned to head back into the kitchen, and both Brynne and Melba followed quickly.

The moment Dan and Melba were in separate rooms, the house seemed to exhale.

THE FOOD WAS probably delicious, but Eli, seated directly across Sara’s dining room table from Brynne, was barely aware that he was eating. It was as though all his senses had melded into a single, laser-sharp focus, trained on her to the exclusion of their surroundings.

The insight was vivid and very strange, unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, a glimpse into the past, the present and the future, all at once. If it hadn’t been so real, and so beautiful, Eli would have been terrified by the sheer emotional power crackling between them.

He wasn’t a psychic, didn’t even believe in such things. He was a just-the-facts-ma’am kind of man, a cop with sharp professional instincts, honed by time and practice, and he believed in what he could see, touch, hear, smell and taste.

This was something new, something beyond the way he’d seen her as a girl back in high school.