They’d felt real, and they still did.

That brought her wide awake. She looped her arms around her upraised knees and stared into the shifting moonlight and shadows that cloaked her bedroom, willing herself to shove the absurd feelings away. She wasn’t a teenager who imagined herself to be in love with every guy she crushed on. She was just letting her hormones get the better of her, she reasoned. Even worse, she was allowing her feelings of desperation to find the love of her life to mess with her head. She still had time to find her one and only. She was letting her age and her dissatisfaction with her job plant within her subconscious a need to find someone before it was too late. So she was just fabricating a great love story between her and Wyatt.

She slipped out of bed to pace her house, wearing only a T-shirt and panties. She always turned down the heat at night, and she was soon shivering. Not even that physical discomfort could chase her back to the warmth of her bed, because the dream terrified her. She absolutely could not allow herself to fall wildly in love with Wyatt Fitzgerald. At best, he was a bad bet, because he was determined never to be in an intimate relationship again. And it was entirely possible that he was as screwed up emotionally as she was. If she let herself fall in love with him, she felt pretty sure he would walk away from her, just as he had in her dream, and he’d never look back. If that ever happened, it would destroy her.

* * *

The days were getting longer, Blackie decided as he pushed the ignition switch of his Ford Edge to kill the engine. The driver’s seat immediately moved back into what Blackie thought of as the escape position. Even so, he sat for a moment, staring at Julie’s home, a Victorian reproduction that sat on the edge of the Bearberry Loop golf course. It was a pretty house and appeared to be large enough for an entire family, which gave him an uneasy feeling. Like him, Julie had been running away from a nasty divorce when she’d found a hidey-hole in Mystic Creek, only it looked as if she’d brought at least one of her unattained dreams with her: to one day have children. Why else would a single woman living on a shoestring budget buy a home large enough for the Partridge family?

Blackie almost pressed the ignition button again, his every instinct warning him to get away. He was fifty-three years old, and it would be nuts for him to start a relationship with a woman twenty years his junior. He could plead a last-minute illness, he guessed. A sudden stomach complaint would work. Or the beginnings of a sore throat. Only he wasn’t big on polite lies. In fact, he wasn’t into lying, period, not necessarily because he was morally superior, but because he had never been able to pull it off.