The great, gaping pain inside his chest suggested that he had been wrong. That there was a lot more damage left to be done. More emptying to endure.

And he very much feared that Evie Abbott was here to finish the job.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Anger, it turned out, was a strangely enjoyable emotion. Eve let it flow through her as she looked down at Sawyer Collins. She cracked her knuckles. She wanted to punch him. Damn, she should have punched him, back in the day. Actually, she should have scrambled right up onto that stupid Christmas float, shoved aside the mer-elves, broken the vacuum seal between his and Jeannie Wilkerson’s mouths, and pushed him off it.

“Evie?” Sawyer called.

Things Eve Was Pissed Off About

1. That Sawyer was leaning casually against her car three stories down, squinting up at her. The way he almost didn’t even seem to recognize her, his delayed “Evie?” betraying no surprise—no emotion at all, really.

“Don’t call me Evie,” she snapped. The old nickname rankled. He was the only one who had ever called her Evie, and he had lost that privilege.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Are you stuck?”

“What do you think? I’m just hanging out up here for fun?”

“How’d you get up there to begin with?”

“I had a ladder. It’s gone now.”

He looked over his shoulder. “Hang on a sec.”

Like she had a choice? She took advantage of his absence to add an item to the Pissed List.

2. That twenty-eight-year-old Sawyer Collins was eight hundred million times more attractive than eighteen-year-old Sawyer Collins had been.

It wasn’t fair. Eighteen-year-old Sawyer Collins had been cute, with his shaggy, dark-brown hair and his eyes the same color as the bay on its bluest day, but there had been a boyishness about him that was no longer in evidence—shorn away with his hair, perhaps, which today was just this side of a buzz cut. His beard was almost as long as the hair on his head.

His beard.

Eve had never had a thing for beards. She was immune to the whole lumberjack-chic aesthetic that seemed to be a thing these days on the covers of the romance novels she shelved at the library.

3. That she was getting the feels from Sawyer Collins’s beard.

But she hadn’t really gotten a good look at him. She was three stories up. His beard, like all beards, was almost certainly gross up close.

When he reappeared, he was dragging a ladder. Hers, from the looks of it.

“Where did you find that?” she called down.

“It was in the passageway between Lawson’s and the Moonflower Bay Monitor building. I noticed it on my way here, but Law is having some work done out back, so I assumed it was his.”

“All right. Lean it against the building.”