She thought about Grant. Grant, who had never recovered from the loss of his wife. Not until he met McKenna.

If anyone hadn’t treated sex that way, it was Grant.

So maybe... Maybe there were just some people who ended up feeling like this.

Or maybe everybody did, and some of them just put smiles over the top of it a lot easier.

More questions. More questions that she wasn’t going to have the answers to.

She hated it.

She stripped her clothes off angrily and headed back toward the bathroom, toward the shower. She was dirty, and she needed to wash...everything off her.

She hadn’t showered this morning. She’d been too cranky and messed up when she’d woken, and she’d had to get down to the mess hall. Which meant that Gabe was still on her skin.

Maybe this was the solution. Maybe she could wash him off.

But no matter how long she stood underneath the hot spray of water, she still felt him. She still felt changed.

And she was left with the depressing realization that probably only time would make it fade. And maybe, if she gave it enough time, her curiosity would fade, too.

But damn, working with him in the meantime was going to be tough.

Jamie looked at herself in the mirror and wiped away the steam that had collected there.

She looked younger to herself right now.

She frowned, squaring her shoulders.

Yeah, it might be tough. But Jamie was tough. And she could take anything that the world threw at her. A higher power that wrenched your mother away from you only two days after you drew your first breath obviously didn’t care much for your tenderness.

So Jamie wasn’t going to waste any time worrying about it, either.

She was just going to go on.

“Wipe the blood off, put a Band-Aid on it and get the hell over it,” she said to her scrubbed-clean reflection.

It was what she’d always done. And it was what she was going to keep on doing.

There wasn’t another choice.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

GABE HAD TO laugh that when he’d asked his sister to have dinner with him, she had insisted on making it at Bellissima, so that it could be fancy, she’d said.

Especially since he was buying.

When he walked in, McKenna was already seated at the table, a scarred redbrick wall with vines climbing the side behind her, the menu spread out in front of her.

She stood when she saw him, and went in for a cautious hug.

“How have you been?” he asked, grabbing hold of her hand and looking down at her engagement ring. “I still can’t get over this.”

“I know. You didn’t even get a chance to be an overprotective older brother.”

“The Dodges are good people,” he said, clearing his throat and taking a seat across from her.

“They are,” McKenna agreed.

They made small talk until the waiter came to take their order, and when the bread came out, McKenna attacked it fiercely.