He decided she was definitely the loveliest woman he’d ever seen, and totally different from any he’d ever known. Perhaps it was because she seemed so young and vulnerable, and was obviously in a great deal of emotional pain.

She winced when she caught a glimpse of herself in a background mirror. “I need to fix my face,” she sighed. “Would you please excuse me for a few minutes?”

No argument there. Parr had thought it ungallant to point out that her tears had not improved her eye makeup. A few delicate streaks didn’t make her any less beautiful. But she didn’t have a purse with her, something she seemed to have just remembered. Giving him an awkward smile, she rose and made her way through the crowd.

Every male head turned to watch her walk. Parr couldn’t blame them, not with all that strawberry sweetness on display. Coming or going, she was a stunner.

He leaned back a little in the spindly chair, drumming his fingers on the tabletop, alone with his thoughts. He didn’t need drama, hadn’t ever liked it. He wasn’t remotely tempted to turn this accidental encounter into something else. The last thing he wanted in his life right now was someone with a new set of unknown problems.

Since he’d been a kid, other people had needed him, depended on him, and he’d come through every time. He’d been there for Mama, even before Kenneth Parr Weston, his dad, had been found in a motel room with a bullet through his heart. He’d been there for Bobby Joe, and for his cousin Eve and her family. He’d been provider, substitute father, as well as brotherly advisor, to the whole tribe. By the time he was grown and on his own, it was like women sensed Parr would just naturally step up and take care of whatever had to be done.

And he had. Too often.

Every woman he’d been involved with had wanted, needed, demanded—endlessly. Maybe he didn’t know how to ask for what he needed, but it was still a fact that the giving never seemed to work both ways. When he’d needed to know that someone would return the favor, stand by him, have his back . . . it didn’t happen.

The lounge crowd got liquored up and louder. Parr observed the interactions around him, unable to avoid listening to chitchat that sounded depressingly familiar. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Women wanted their freedom, their careers, their hard-won rights, and at the same time, they wanted a man’s love, his money, his body, and his total acceptance of them just as they were.

Parr was thinking that he ought to stop thinking and order a real drink, a stiff one, when the standing guests stepped this way and that to let someone through.

Her.

His cynical mood dissolved in an instant.