“Sure. Do you want me to help you?”

“Nope. Sit tight and hold the wheel steady and then hit the brakes when I tell you to, okay?”

“Okay.”

He dropped the hood but didn’t latch it, took off his coat and tossed it on the lawn, which was finally devoid of snow. He wore a gray work shirt with a red name patch sewn above the chest pocket. His biceps bulged from the effort to move the car, but it started to creep toward the street, picking up speed as it went.

“Okay, stop.”

Hannah pressed down on the brake to slow the momentum.

In a matter of minutes he had her car attached to his truck with jumper cables. She watched him as he worked, noting the way his hair fell over his forehead and how the shirt stretched across his broad chest. Had she ever noticed how muscular he was until she danced with him at the Grange?

Truthfully, she’d never given herself permission to look too closely for fear of seeing something she couldn’t handle. But she looked now, and she had to admit she liked what she saw—and she was sick and tired of her own company. That was something she’d confessed to herself during the long, cold, lonely winter she’d just endured.

With her parents, grandfather, nine siblings and a litany of aunts, uncles and cousins living nearby there was always something going on around her. But at the end of the day, Hannah was alone in the big house where she’d once been happily married. She was thirty-five years old and had been a widow for one-fifth of her life, longer than she’d been married as of this upcoming seventh anniversary of Caleb’s death.

It was probably time to start living again.

“Try it now,” he said.

Hannah turned the key and heard the welcome sound of her engine turning over. “Thank you so much.”

“No problem.” He removed the jumper cables and let her hood drop before bending down to grab his coat off the ground.

Hannah watched his every move, noting the way his navy blue work pants stretched across his taut backside as he bent over. The visual made her skin tingle with awareness—the kind of awareness she hadn’t experienced in a very long time, the kind of awareness that still had the power to frighten her. She opened the window.

He paused outside her door on his way to the truck. “Drive safely and call me if you have any more trouble.”

“I will. Send me the bill.”

“Don’t be silly. There’s no bill, Hannah.”

“Thank you for helping me.”

He paused as if there was something else he wanted to say besides, “No problem.”

He’d started to walk away when Hannah called out to him. “Nolan.”

Turning back, he raised a brow. “Yeah?”