As Julie slipped the ring box into her purse, she met his gaze. “Thank you so much for holding on to her ring for me. My ex-husband hated it and bought me a showy diamond, so I never got to wear this one during my marriage. You’ll never know how much it means to get it back.”

“Ah, but I do know. From personal experience.”

“I won’t offend you by trying to repay the favor,” she said, “but I would love to have you over for dinner at my house some evening by way of a thank-you.”

Blackie looked deeply into her eyes again. “Please don’t think I’m a presumptuous old man by asking this, Julie, but exactly where do you think the two of us are going with this?”

Startled by the question as much as she was by his directness, she couldn’t think what to say and stammered without managing a coherent reply.

His expression softened. “I’m too old to play games. We can continue to dance around the issue, but that seems kind of silly to me. We’re both adults and know there’s an attraction building between us. That happens. Only I’m a good deal older than you are. Twenty years, I think. Not to say I’m pushing for anything serious, but in case that happens, how is the age difference going to work?”

Julie had barely wrapped her mind around the fact that she liked him. Well, okay, she thought he was really hot, and as Erin had so succinctly pointed out, Julie was crushing on him. But she hadn’t considered the nuts and bolts of a relationship.

“I’d like to have a mature male friend,” she blurted out. “But I’m not ready for a romantic relationship yet. I have some trust issues since my divorce.”

He chuckled. She loved the sound of his laughter, so deep that it seemed to curl around her like warm smoke. “The first step toward healing after a divorce is admitting you have trust issues.”

“Yes, well, my admission doesn’t make the trust issues go away. Don’t I wish?”

“I’d like to hear about that. What went wrong in your marriage, I mean.”

She laughed. “It would be much easier to tell you what didn’t go wrong.”

He nodded as if that was everyone’s standard answer, which made her feel a sense of camaraderie with him. He’d mentioned once that he was divorced, but he’d never hinted at how bad the marriage was. “I can close up a few minutes early. We can go upstairs and crack open a couple of beers while we share war stories.”

Julie wanted to say yes, but her trust issues were real.

As if he read her mind, he winked at her. “Come on, Julie. When I stop by your shop, we’re usually alone. If I wanted to make an inappropriate move on you, I would have already done it. That’s not my style.”

“Okay, but just so you know, I hold a black belt in karate.”