It looked a bit like a storybook. The cabin or cottage, she couldn’t decide which was more fitting, had dark-green clapboard siding, a navy-blue front door, and a gingerbread front porch just big enough for two rocking chairs and a pair of ferns overflowing from orange pots.

He’d tucked solar lights along the stone path and deeper in the yard of shrubs and ornamental grasses.

“Wow, Sy,” she said, not for the first time that night. The kiss had been dangerous. It had been an assault on logic. Biology talking her into something she’d prefer to think on for a while. But the house was a new kind of sneaky charm.

“I’d invite you in,” he said, still holding her hand. “But…”

Thank you, sweet baby Jesus, for the “but.”

“Are you saying you don’t trust me to control myself?” she teased.

“Yes. That is exactly what I’m saying.”

“A wise move.”

“Besides, I purposely left it a mess just in case things looked like they were headed in the direction they’re most definitely headed in.”

Maggie couldn’t help but laugh. “I didn’t shave my legs for exactly the same reason.”

He paused at the gate. “Just so you know, that wouldn’t stop me from enjoying you.”

“Neither would your mess,” she promised.

He gave her one of those soul-jarring, stomach-on-a-roller-coaster looks. “Wait right there.”

She watched him jog up the path, onto the porch, and in through the front door.

The second the door closed, Maggie busted a move on the sidewalk.

That kiss with Silas Freaking Wright had finally dethroned her engagement as the most romantic moment of her life. Which, to be completely honest, only held the top honor by default. Not that there was anything wrong with a drunken, late-night proposal in a Burger King parking lot when both parties were too young to know any better. Or to know if they were both straight. She winced at the memory of her drunk twenty-two-year-old self getting down on one knee next to Dean’s VW Rabbit. She should have known then.

“Maybe we should get married,” she’d slurred, leaning hard to the right.

“Maybe we should,” he had agreed, closing one eye to zero in on which Maggie was doing the proposing.

Looking back, that shiny, sickly expression on his face should have been another neon warning sign. But she’d been caught up in the moment. Not the romance of it. Or her feelings for the cute, nice, dependable Dean. She knew now it was more a by-product of the crushing loneliness she had felt after losing the mother she’d depended on and the father she’d learned not to. It had threatened to swamp her, to pull her under and never let her find her way back to the surface.