Mitch was kneeling on the roof of the playhouse, half a dozen nails jutting from his mouth, his tanned chest and shoulders bared to the crisp bite of the weather. Shay stood watching him for a moment, her heart caught in her throat.

He stopped swinging the hammer to look at her, and there was no welcome, no tenderness, in his eyes. “Well,” he said.

Shay was careful not to reveal how much his coolness hurt her. “If you have a minute, I’d like to talk.”

He began to drive another nail into another tiny shingle. “I’m busy.”

Shay was shaken to her core, but she stood her ground. “I came to return the manuscript, Mitch,” she lied. In truth, the book had been an afterthought, an excuse.

He went on working. “Leave it with Mrs. Carraway,” he said brusquely.

“You aren’t going to let me apologize, are you?” Shay reddened, embarrassed and hurt and yet unable to turn and walk away.

“Apologize all you want. I’m through playing the game, Shay.”

“The game? What game?”

Now, Mitch set the hammer aside, but he remained on the roof of the playhouse and his manner was no friendlier. “You know what I’m talking about, Shay. You come to me when you need comfort or a roll in the hay, and then you run away again.”

“A roll in the—my God, that’s crude!”

The broad, sun-browned shoulders moved in a shrug cold enough to chill Shay. “Maybe so, but it’s the truth. You want the fun, but you’re too cowardly to make a real commitment, aren’t you? Well, get yourself another flunky.”

“You said you loved me!”

A small shingle splintered under the force of a blow from Mitch’s hammer. “I do,” he said, without looking at Shay. “But I don’t want to play house anymore. I need the real thing.”

Baffled and as broken as that shingle Mitch had just destroyed, Shay turned and hurried away.

Chapter Twelve

If there was one thing Shay learned in the coming weeks, it was how little she knew about the catering business. She made all the standard mistakes and a few new ones to boot. By the end of October her confidence was sorely shaken.

Alice lifted the furry Halloween costume she was making for Hank to her mouth and bit off a thread with her teeth. While her grandmother sewed at the kitchen table, Shay was frantically mixing the ingredients for enough lasagne to feed fifty people.

“You expected starting your own company to be easy, Shay?”

Shay sighed as she wrapped another panful of lasagne and put it into the freezer. “Of course I didn’t. But I have to admit that I expected a lack of business to be the problem, not a surplus. I have four wedding receptions and people are already calling about Thanksgiving. Who ever heard of having Thanksgiving dinner catered, for heaven’s sake?”

Alice chuckled. “The solution seems obvious. Hire some help.”

Shay leaned back against the counter in a rare moment of indolence. “I hate to do that, Alice. If things slow down, I’d have to let people go.”