“Because if I were with you, I would want you to pick me.” His eyes flashed up to hers and held on. “I would want you to choose me. Not be with me because I paid for it. I would want you…to want me and want to be with me.”

Marie-Terese froze with her body halfway out of the booth.

He continued softly. “And I’d want you to enjoy it as much as I know I would.”

After a long moment, Marie-Terese eased back down into her seat. Picking up her mug again, she swallowed hard and heard herself talking—although it wasn’t until after she’d spoken that she realized what she’d said: “Do you like redheads?”

He frowned a little and shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. Why?”

“No reason,” she murmured from behind her coffee.

CHAPTER
18

A crossroads meant you went left or you went right, Jim thought as he lay stretched out on the garage floor, a wrench in his hand.

When you came to a crossroads, by definition, you had to pick a course, because going straight on the path you were on was no longer an option: You got on the highway or stayed on the surface road. You passed this car on the dotted line or stayed behind him to keep safe. You saw an orange light and either sped through or started to slow.

Some of these decisions didn’t matter. Others, unbeknownst to you, put you in the path of a drunk driver or kept you out of his way.

In Vin’s case, that ring he was sitting on was the equivalent of a right hand turn that took him out of the way of an eighteen-wheeler that was just about to hit a patch of black ice: What the guy did now meant everything to his life and he had to hit that direction signal and get onto the new road fast. The SOB was running out of time with his woman and had to pull the trigger on that all important question before she—

“Fuck!”

Jim dropped the wrench that had slipped and shook out his hand. All things considered, he probably needed to pay a little more attention to what he was doing; assuming he wanted to keep his knuckles where they were. Trouble was, he was consumed with the whole Vin thing.

What the hell did he do with the guy now? How did he motivate him to ask for that woman’s hand in marriage?

In his old life, the answer would have been easy: He’d have just put a gun to Vin’s head and dragged the fucker to the altar. Now? He needed to be a little more civilized.