“Yep.” Jarrod squared his hat on his head and paused at the door. “This is a small town.”

“Too small.” Nervously, Mason clicked the pen.

“But you couldn’t stay away.”

Mason grimaced and glanced at the picture propped on the edge of his desk. In the snapshot a pixie of a girl with dark hair and amber eyes smiled up at him. Freckles dusted her nose, teeth too large for her mouth were a little crooked in a smile as big as the world. Dee Dee. Well, really, Deanna Renée, but he’d always called her by her nickname. “I’ve got my reasons for coming back,” he admitted.

“Don’t we all?”

“I suppose,” Mason allowed. He and Jarrod had been friends for years, ever since high school. Jarrod had been everything from a log-truck driver, to a detective with a police department in Arizona somewhere, but he’d been back in Bittersweet for a couple of years running his own private-investigation business. Mason had hired him to track down his younger sister, Patty. So far, no luck; just a few leads that always seemed to peter out.

Jarrod’s smile was slow as it stretched across his jaw. “So what’re you gonna do about Bliss?”

Bliss Cawthorne. “Not much.” His stomach clenched as he remembered her eyes, as blue as a mountain lake, and lips that could curve into a smile that was innocent and sexy as hell all at once. She’d nearly died. Because of him. Because he’d been weak.

Jarrod pretended interest in his knuckles. “You and she had a thing once.”

If you only knew. “A long time ago.” But it feels like yesterday.

“Old feelings die hard.”

“Do they?”

“She’s not married. Never been.” Jarrod twisted the knob and shouldered open the door. “It’s almost as if she’s been waiting for you.”

Mason nearly laughed as he folded his arms over his chest “My guess is that she’d just as soon spit on me as talk to me.”

“Still blaming yourself for that accident?”

Mason shrugged, as if he didn’t give a damn, but the muscles in his shoulders tightened like cords of a thick rope that had been wet and left to shrink in the sun.

“Hell, Lafferty, it wasn’t your fault.”

Mason didn’t answer.

Jarrod shook his head. “I probably shouldn’t have said anything, but you were bound to find out sooner or later. I was just letting you know that she’ll be back. She’s still a good-lookin’ woman—or so her old man brags—and still gonna inherit a pile of money, so if you’re not interested, I’m sure a lot of other men around these parts would be.”

Jealousy, his old enemy, seeped into Mason’s blood. “Including you?”

“Maybe,” Jarrod admitted with that lazy smile still fastened on his face. “You know it’s nice to keep it in the family, and now she’ll be my what? Stepsister?”

“If the wedding of the century ever comes off.” He knew that Smith was needling him, and yet he couldn’t take anything, when it came to Bliss, lightly. Even after ten years.