“Well, it’s a pretty place to die, I’ll give you that,” Ruby said as they pulled up to a sprawling ranch house set against the emerald green of western Washington. In the spring, the fields behind them were covered in a blanket of colorful tulips, but they boasted nothing but leafy greens and shorn heads right now. “What is this place?”

“You’ll see,” he said as he hopped out and began extracting the boys from the back seat. True to her word, Ruby reached for both Max and the bag containing his change of clothes. From the way she took it all in stride, it was clear she hadn’t been making an idle boast. She was as casually unconcerned with bodily fluids as she was with everything else he’d seen thrown her way.

It was the strangest sensation. He’d witnessed this woman, so flawlessly beautiful that heads literally turned when she walked into a room, spend hours trying to train an untrainable animal, single-handedly build a pageant stage in his backyard, and roll around on the grass with three rambunctious children. She refused to let anything he said or did deter her from her goals, and she tackled every challenge that came her way with a smile. She had terrible taste in show dogs, it was true, but even that fit the intoxicating mixture of beauty and tenacity that characterized her.

She was magnificent in every meaning of the word, and for reasons he couldn’t even begin to understand, she seemed to want to share that magnificence with him.

“You’re going to have to get Wheezy out of the back for me,” Ruby called over her shoulder. “I don’t think you included a ‘Get your stubborn behind out of this car’ in the recording.”

“I’ll put it in the next batch,” he promised, but there was no need for Spencer to say anything to the animal. As soon as he lifted the hatchback, Wheezy lumbered to his feet, sighed, and jumped out.

“I know how you feel, buddy,” he said, running his fingers over the silken curls of the dog’s ears. “But there’s not much else you can do, is there? The moment she walked into your life, you didn’t stand a chance.”

And neither did I.

* * *

By the time Spencer encouraged Wheezy up the walkway, Eva’s boys had recognized their surroundings. There were shouts of joy and laughter, followed almost immediately by the slamming of a screen door. His father appeared on the front porch of the sprawling farmhouse with a puppy in one hand and a bottle in another. It was such a familiar sight—that tall, stately man cradling the runt of the litter—that Spencer could feel the last of his tension ebbing away.