It wasn’t that she’d never experienced tugs of interest toward men. She’d experienced tugs of interest in the past and even gone on a few dates in her early twenties. However, it had been clear to her that none of those flickers of chemistry had the potential to convert into an actual relationship, because the flickers had been so extraordinarily temporary in nature.

She’d certainly never felt a fraction as strongly about any man as her friends felt for their boyfriends and husbands. She’d concluded that she was wired differently than other women . . . much less prone to the type of deep and long-lasting attraction and love that led to marriage.

Leah was already unusual in several ways. Her brain was unusual. The fact that she’d begun raising a child at the age of eighteen—unusual. The fact that she’d been working as a teacher and pursuing a master’s degree when her peers had been graduating from high school—unusual. It hadn’t been a stretch to accept that she was unusual when it came to romance, too.

She’d decided to place the idea of a boyfriend on the shelf and simply go without. She was proud of that choice in the same way that she was proud of herself for going without the type of luxuries that had the power to destroy her monthly budget.

She wasn’t fated to fall in love. She’d made peace with that.

And yet, here she was: sitting on this lakeshore during her vacation, envisioning Sebastian Grant rowing a boat toward her.

She’d been very aware of her powerful responses to him the times they’d met at Magnolia Avenue Hospital and at the Colemans’ barbecue. Her reactions to him had been different than anything she’d experienced before. Even so, she’d expected them to prove fleeting.

Instead, a peculiar thing had occurred. An unprecedented thing. It had been more than two weeks since she’d seen him, yet her conscious and unconscious mind returned to him often. If anything, her draw toward him was intensifying.

Had she reached a hasty conclusion when she’d determined that she wasn’t capable of feeling the way other women felt?

No self-respecting mathematician ever trusted a hasty conclusion. So, if that’s what had happened here, she’d made an error.

Admittedly, her data set of romantic interactions was small. In order to test her conclusion about her wiring, she’d need to enlarge that data set. To do that, she’d need to see Sebastian again.

She had no expectation of acquiring Sebastian as a boyfriend. For one thing, he’d given her no reason to think he liked her in that way. For another, Ben was romantically interested in her, and Sebastian was his best friend. So even if Sebastian did like her in that way, nothing could come of it.

Which was actually . . . freeing.