Her flowers were going to be beautiful when they bloomed, she decided, smiling as they poked their little heads up through the dirt in an assortment of ceramic pots all over the wooden floor.

She had three pots of chrysanthemums and one little bonsai tree named Fred. Gabriel had given it to her when she first moved in with them, a sort of welcome present. It was a tiny fir tree with a beautiful curving trunk and feathery limbs. She babied it, bought it expensive fertilizer, read books on how to keep it healthy and worried herself to death that it might accidentally die if she forgot to water it. That hadn’t happened, of course, but she loved it dearly. Of all the things Gabriel had given her, and there had been a lot, this was her favorite. She left it outside until the weather grew too cold, then she carried it inside protectively.

The Jaguar had been wonderful. But she’d still been driving it when she did the story that almost destroyed Gabriel’s life and after that, she could no longer bear to sit in it. The memories had been killing her.

She missed the Jag. She missed Gabriel more. She wondered why he’d come back. Probably to sell the house, she decided, to cut his last tie with Comanche Wells. If he was working for an international concern, it wasn’t likely that he’d plan to come back here. He’d see the Jag in the driveway, she thought, and understand why she’d given it back. At least, she hoped he would.

That thought, that he might leave Comanche Wells forever, was really depressing. She watered Fred, put down the can, and went back into the house. It didn’t occur to her to wonder what he’d been doing at her church.

When she went into the kitchen to take her dinner out of the microwave, a dark-haired man was sitting at the table sipping coffee. There were two cups, one for him and one for her. The dinner was sitting on a plate with a napkin and silverware beside it.

He glanced up as she came into the room. “It’s getting cold,” he said simply.

She stood behind her chair, just staring at him, frowning.

He raised an eyebrow as he studied her shirt. “You know, most people who wore red shirts on the original Star Trek ended up dead.”

She cocked her head. “And you came all this way to give me fashion advice?”

He managed a faint smile. “Not really.” He sipped coffee. He let out a long breath. “It’s been a long time, Michelle.”

She nodded. Slowly, she pulled out the chair and sat down. The TV dinner had the appeal of mothballs. She pushed it aside and sipped the black coffee he’d put at her place. He still remembered how she took it, after all this time.