“Oh, poor Kennedy.” She squeezed her eyes closed. “I’m sure that went over like a lead balloon.”

Wyatt allowed himself to relax slightly. “Actually, we had a pretty good talk once I got over my initial temper spike. And frankly, I can see why he thought that. As far as Kennedy knew, I’d never dated anyone. He just put two and two together and came up with five. I’m really not gay.” He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled to give himself another moment to think. “And I’m not lying about the fact that I find you very attractive. It’s just that I won’t allow myself to act on it. I swore off women six years ago.”

She gave him a long, measuring study. “Why on earth did you do that?”

Wyatt’s original purpose in coming to Erin’s cottage had been to apologize. He’d had no intention of baring his soul. Only how could he explain why he’d embraced a celibate lifestyle without telling her more? Thinking quickly, he decided that he could safely tell her at least a little of his story. “I had what you might call a difficult encounter with a woman. There was a lack of communication, and I had a brush with the law. It all got sorted out eventually, but when I came out on the other side of it, I promised myself that I’d never have anything to do with women again.”

Wide-eyed, Erin listened without interrupting him.

“For reasons I don’t feel I need to get into, that’s a promise to myself that I feel obligated to keep,” he went on. “No dating, no hooking up. That doesn’t mean I have no desire. Take you, for instance. I find you very attractive, and I believe you might be interested in me as well, if I gave you any encouragement. But I just can’t go there.”

She let a long silence stretch between them before she said, “I think you’re just saying that to make me feel better. And I appreciate that. Really, I do. But one of the reasons you hurt my feelings so badly is because every word you said was true. I am competitive with men. I’m going to counseling, and I’ve been working on that, but it’s like trying to reprogram my brain. I know I’m not very feminine. My dad hated it when I got what he called ‘girly notions’ as I was growing up. He wanted me to think like a boy, act like a boy, and essentially be a boy. Changing all of that and developing different habits is a painfully slow process.”

Studying her as she talked, Wyatt knew she spoke straight from the heart. She truly had no inkling just how feminine she actually was. How sad that she struggled so hard to change when she was beautiful and attractive just as she was. She wore overlarge jeans, a ratty, yellow T-shirt, not a trace of cosmetics, and had her long hair knotted in a turkey tail at the nape of her neck. But in his opinion, she was lovely without any embellishments. Her blue eyes dominated her oval face and were so expressive she could almost communicate her feelings to him without words. The bow of her mouth, slightly swollen from crying, was plump and perfectly shaped. She was slender yet well-rounded in all the right places. How could she look in a mirror and not see that? He guessed that nobody saw themselves the same way others did.