“I don’t know. Maybe pick a lane! Last night you’re all, ‘here’s the studio space I made for you,’ and today you’re shoving me out the door for Chicago. You make a girl’s head spin and not in the good way. More like in the 360-degree way!”

“Okay. Fine. I’m not sorry. You are. Let’s leave it at that,” he said.

“Why did you come here?” she asked as he picked up the mug.

“To make sure you were all right.”

The man was infuriating. He was lucky she hadn’t swamped him in the lake instead of his snowmobile.

“Thank you for showing up for him.”

“I didn’t do it for him.” His tone was surly, gruff.

He looked like he wanted to say more. Like there were words he was fighting back. She was so damn tired of his silence, his mysteriousness.

“Oh, come on! What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded. When they got like this, it was like two firecrackers that just kept reigniting the other. Someone always got hurt, and dammit, she was sick of losing fingers.

He lifted blazing blue eyes to hers. His hands were fisted at his sides, and his nostrils flared. She could very definitely see the veins in his neck now. But she wasn’t about to back down.

“You wanna say something to me, then open your damn mouth and say the damn words,” Remi said.

There was a long beat during which neither one of them moved. They’d never held eye contact this long. She felt undressed, cornered.

And then he started to move toward her. Slowly. Prowling. “I don’t think that’s what you really want, Remi.”

The way his voice, all gravel and whiskey, caressed her name made her legs tremble. There was meaning there. But she didn’t know what. She didn’t have a Brick Callan Dictionary available for translation.

She took a step back, then another one. But he just kept prowling toward her. He set his mug down with a distinct snap. She stopped when her back met the cabinet. Any second now, he’d look away. He’d leave and walk away without giving her a second thought. Just like he’d always done.

But this time he didn’t. He stopped when his boots touched her toes.

“Are you scared, baby?” his voice was a rasp. There was fire in his eyes.

She shook her head from side to side as her pulse rabbited at the base of her throat.

He placed one big hand on the cabinets behind her head and leaned in even closer.

Yep. She was just going to have a heart attack or infarction or whatever the hell it was called when a heart just gave up trying to work.

His beard was magnificent up close. She wondered if anyone had ever told him that before, then decided now wasn’t the time.

“You should be,” he said.

Beard. Heart attack. Sexy hand and lean-in. Oh, right. He’d asked her if she was scared, she remembered, walking it back in her head.