“Well, she’s a crush on him, to be sure,” Darcy confirmed. “Not that he’d ever notice.”

“All I did was talk to her.” Uncomfortable with two pairs of female eyes staring at him with both pity and disgust, Shawn turned on the fire to heat the oil. “Next time I’ll just give her a shove out of my way and keep going. Will that do for you?”

Darcy sighed. “You’re such a knucklehead, aren’t you, Shawn?” She gave Brenna’s arm a quick, supportive squeeze, then left them alone.

“I’m sorry I came barreling in and snapped at you.” Apologies came rarely off Brenna’s tongue, and had that much more impact because of it. “Everything’s so new for Mary Kate just now, with university behind her and her just getting her feet wet in her career. She looks at Maureen, all flushed with being newly married, and our Patty so excited about her own wedding coming this spring. And she . . .”

Helpless, she fluttered her hands. She was so bad at words when they mattered most. “She thinks she’s all grown up, you see, and ready for everything in her life to begin. Inside, her heart’s still a girl’s and romantic with it. And it’s tender, Shawn. You could bruise it.”

“I won’t.”

“You’d never mean to.” She smiled now, but it didn’t reach up into her eyes as it usually did. “You don’t have it in you.”

“I’d rather you were mad at me than sad. I don’t like seeing you unhappy. Brenna . . .” But when he reached out to touch her hair, she shook her head and backed away.

“No, now you’ll say something kind and sweet, and I’m too much in the mood for it. We’ve both work to do.”

“I think about you in a way I didn’t,” he said, his voice soft and quiet as she turned to go. “And I think about you often.”

She felt her heart shiver, and took a breath to steady herself. “Well, it’s a fine time you pick to bring up the subject. But then, you’ve never had the gift of timing except for your music.”

“I think about you often,” he repeated. He walked toward her, pleased when her eyes went wary.

“What are you about?” She was flustered, and she was never flustered by a man. Certainly not by Shawn. She could handle him, of course. She always had, always would. But she couldn’t seem to make her legs move.

Now wasn’t this interesting? he mused as he closed in. She looked nervous, and color was rising in her cheeks. “I never used to think about doing this.” He slid a long-fingered hand around to cup the back of her neck, eased her a step closer, all the while watching her eyes. “Now I’m thinking about it all the time.”

He played his mouth over hers. A teasing, whispering, devastating slide of lips.

She should have known he would kiss like this if he set his mind to it. Slow, soft, sexy, so a woman could barely keep a thought in her head. The hand at her neck squeezed and released, squeezed and released, and sent pulses dancing. Warmth washed into her, filling her throat, her breasts, her belly, loosening her knees until she felt herself begin to sway into him, into the seductive rhythm of her own pulse that he set with no more than his mouth.