He led her to the door under the stairs, pushed it open, and stood back so she could see inside. At first all she could clock was how bright the room was with light coming in from south-facing windows that looked out toward the lake. Then she took stock of everything else in the room and her jaw dropped.

“Oh my God,” she said, squeezing Nash’s hand a little harder as she took it all in, trying to make sense of what he’d done.

What had been a small sitting room filled with several comfy-looking chairs bracketing a fireplace, had been transformed so that half of it was a near-exact replica of her writing space at home, right down to the same desk, a copy of her chair, and even the same brand of pens and notebooks that could only be found in a small, indie paper goods store in the Breakwater neighborhood that’s business hours were basically whenever the woman running the shop felt like opening. There were even matching dog beds next to the desk so Mary and Groucho could nap while she worked. A laptop sat in the middle of the desk right next to a bright red one-cup coffeemaker. A black mug with There Be Dragons printed on it in gold was next to a basket overflowing with different-flavored coffee pods—exactly like it was at home.

Nash came up behind her, still holding her hand, and tucked her in against his hard chest, her head fitting perfectly under his chin. “I know you gave up your writing time to be here, and my family can be a lot, so I thought it would be nice to have this as a room to escape to or write if the urge hit, or you just needed to get away from the family this weekend.”

Everything inside her went all gooey, and she had no clue how to process that. People doing things for her wasn’t the way things worked in her life—at least not before Nash—so she focused on one thing that had nothing to do with emotions. “Is that my laptop?”

“No,” he said, “but it’s the same kind preloaded with the software and apps you use so you can log in and pick up where you left off.”

Emotion clogged her throat, and she had to purse her lips together to keep the happy tears flooding her eyes at bay.

Had she thought laptops couldn’t be emotional triggers? Obviously, that was before her fake husband had taken the time to get her a duplicate laptop to work on at his family’s lake home.

And turned a sitting room into a replica of her office.

And held her against him while she tried to understand the jumble of happy, and excited, and terrified, and awed, and OMG everything fizzing around inside her like Pop Rocks.