A quiet joy displaced the pain in Shay’s face and Mitch was relieved. “But we were going to work,” she offered halfheartedly. “I brought the photo albums you wanted. They’re in the car and—”

Mitch spoke with the abruptness typical of nervous people. “I’ll get them while you look around. Maybe you can give me a few decorating ideas. Right now, this place has all the cozy warmth of an abandoned coal mine.”

She looked grateful and just a little suspicious. “Well…”

Mitch pretended that the matter had been settled and left the house. Her car was parked in the driveway, only a few strides from the front door, and the box containing Rosamond Dallas’s memorabilia was sitting in plain sight on the seat. He took his time carrying the stuff inside, setting it on the library floor, sorting through it. Instinctively he knew that Shay needed time to wander from room to room, settling memories.

The room that had been Shay’s was empty, of course. The built-in bookshelves were bare and dusty, the French provincial furniture and frilly bedclothes had been removed, along with the host of stuffed animals and the antique carousel horse, a gift from Riley Thompson, that had once stood just to the left of the cushioned windowseat. The nostalgia Shay had braced herself for did not come, however; this had been the room of a child and she felt no desire to go backward in time.

She wandered across the wide hallway and into the suite that had been Rosamond’s, in a strange, quiet mood. The terrace doors were open to the rising rain-and-sea-misted wind and Shay crossed the barren room to close them. She smiled as she stepped over the tangled sleeping bag that had been spread out on the floor, and a certain scrumptious tension gripped her as she imagined Mitch lying there.

He was downstairs, waiting for her, but Shay could not bring herself to hurry. She reached down and took a pillow from the floor and held it to her face. Its scent was Mitch’s scent, a mingling of sun-dried clothing and something else that was indefinably his own.

Shay knelt on the sleeping bag, still holding the pillow close and, unreasonably, inexplicably, tears filled her eyes. She couldn’t think why, because she didn’t feel sad and she didn’t feel happy, either. She felt only a need to be held.

It was as though she had called out—in the future Shay would wonder many times whether or not she had—because Mitch suddenly appeared in the double doorway of the suite. “Are you all right?” he asked, and Shay knew that he was keeping his distance, honoring his promise that she would be safe with him.

And she didn’t want to be safe. “No,” she answered. “Actually, no.”

Mitch crossed the room then, knelt before her, removed the pillow from her grip and cupped her face in his strong hands, his thumbs moving to dry away her tears.

Shay was reminded of that other time when he’d held her, before the party, when she had dissolved over a bucket of take-out chicken at the backyard picnic table. “I’m not usually such a c-crybaby,” she stammered out. “You must think—”