It was a strange location for an impasse. The house Sophie shared with her sisters was as dainty and feminine as Harrison was rough and masculine. Everywhere the eye landed were massive doilies and vintage finds, with dried flowers next to the sink and artfully arranged silver teaspoons hanging on the wall. Only the kennel through the back door gave any indication that this was as much a place of business as it was a home. Harrison wasn’t so tall that his head brushed the ceiling or anything, but he did have a way of filling the space in a way that felt both unfamiliar and unsettling.

It’s not just his size, Sophie thought. It’s him. Whatever else might be said about this man, he was certainly a presence. Being in the same room with him seemed to kindle an awareness in every part of her—a tingling awareness that started in her toes and worked upward from there. It was almost as though her limbs were awakening from a long, numbing sleep, and she wasn’t sure they were ready to support her weight just yet.

“So you really do know Oscar,” Harrison said by way of breaking their strange stalemate.

“Oh. Um.” Sophie blinked. She’d assumed, when Oscar had asked them to take on this case, that he would have told Harrison all about their personal history. That he hadn’t—and most likely wouldn’t unless Sophie gave him permission to—said a lot about him. “Yes, actually. He and I go a long way back. He asked me to take your case as a kind of favor.”

A look of strange relief swept over Harrison’s face. His shoulders actually sagged a little. “Then that explains why you put up with me for as long as you did. What did he say about me?”

“Um.”

“You don’t have to hold back on my account. He won’t have said anything I haven’t heard a hundred times already, believe me.”

As if the sudden turn of conversation wasn’t strange enough, Harrison paused and pulled out a chair for her. It was her chair, obviously, and he was offering it in her house, but the gallantry of the gesture was still forefront in her mind.

She didn’t sit though. She was already so dwarfed by this man.

“Please,” he said, his voice rough. “One of the things Oscar should have told you first is that my bark is a lot worse than my bite.”

With that, Sophie relented. She didn’t know if it was the reference to canines that did it, or the fact that he sounded so forlorn, but she took the proffered seat and watched as he lowered himself into the opposite chair. Even in a seated position, he still dwarfed her. Those powerful thighs, the broad shoulders hunched as if ready to pounce—there was no other way she could feel in his presence.