He held her gaze for a long moment before he looked away. “I’m sorry you feel that way. You’re a real special girl, Kate, and I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t like to be more than just friends with you.”

“I’m sorry. I enjoy your friendship so much. I don’t want to lose that.”

He rallied quickly. “Don’t be silly,” he said with a big smile that didn’t quite make it to his eyes. “That won’t happen. Besides, I’m your attorney now, so you can’t get rid of me that easily.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, touched by the hurt he was trying so hard to cover up.

“Don’t be,” he said, studying her. “Whoever he is, he’s one lucky son of a bitch. I hope he knows that.”

“He does,” Kate said softly, sick at heart over what she—and his father—were keeping from him.

Ashton picked up the menu. “Well, then, how about you let your attorney buy you some dinner? What looks good to you?”

In Knoxville, Reid ventured into the hotel bar to have a drink. It was late, and he was tired from a day of nonstop meetings for five different developments he had going in the city. Lately, he’d been thinking about phasing out some of his activities outside Nashville. The traveling was getting to be a drag, especially now that he had a good reason to stick closer to home. But then he thought, as he always did, about the many people he employed all over the state. His obligations to them kept him going.

Obligations, he thought, as he nursed a scotch on the rocks. He had half a lifetime of them behind him and years more ahead before he could conceive of retiring. Sometimes when he let himself think about what he really wanted, he pictured a tiny house on the beach in the Caribbean—a house he could take care of himself. He’d never had any choice about where he lived, and that had begun to rankle him. Recently, he’d begun to imagine Kate with him in his daydream. They could sail and swim and make love on the sandy beach.

He sighed. With a home that’d been in his family for generations, a business that employed three thousand people, and the economies of several Tennessee cities reliant upon his contributions, the idea of chucking it all for a shack by the sea was at best frivolous, at worst irresponsible.

Reid snapped out of his introspection when the room began to buzz with an undercurrent of excitement. A hulking figure plopped down on the next barstool, and Reid did a double take when he glanced over at him.

“Well, wadda ya know?” said Buddy Longstreet. “Look at what the cat dragged in.”