She wanted to agree, but she couldn’t. “No, not with anyone. You can be attractive when you put your mind to it.”

“So can a lot of men. You know there’s something between us, but you don’t have the guts to see what it is.”

“I don’t need to. I know exactly why I’m attracted to you. It’s an old habit.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She twisted her rings. “I mean that I’ve been there and done that. The alpha male. The stallion who rules the herd. The take-charge prince who makes all Cinderella’s troubles go away. Men like you are my fatal weakness. But I’m not a penniless teenager anymore who needs someone to take care of her.”

“Thank God. I don’t like teenagers. And I’m too self-centered to take care of anyone.”

“You’re deliberately minimizing what I’m trying to tell you.”

“That’s because you’re boring me.”

She wouldn’t let his rudeness distract her, especially since she knew it was calculated to do just that. “Liam, I’m too old and too smart to make the same mistake again. Yes, I’m attracted to you. I’m instinctively drawn to aggressive men, even though it’s their nature to run roughshod over the women who care about them.”

“And here I thought this conversation couldn’t become any more infantile.”

“You’re doing it right now. You don’t want to talk about this, so you’re belittling me to try to get me to shut up.”

“Too bad it’s not working.”

“I thought I’d finally gotten smart, but obviously I haven’t, or I wouldn’t be letting you do this.” She rose from the chaise. “Listen to me, Liam. I made the mistake of falling in love with a controlling man once in my life, and I’ll never do it again. I loved my husband. But, God—sometimes I hated him more.”

She hugged herself, astonished that she’d revealed something to him she could barely admit to herself.

“He probably deserved it. He sounds like a son of a bitch.”

“He was just like you!”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“You don’t think so?” She jabbed her hand toward the redbud tree. “He wouldn’t let me have wind chimes! I love wind chimes, but he hated them, so I wasn’t permitted to hang them in my own garden.”

“Good judgment on his part. The things are a nuisance.”

Her stomach clenched. “Letting myself fall in love with you would be like falling in love with Craig all over again.”

“I really resent that.”

“A month after he died, I hung a set of wind chimes outside my bedroom window.”

“Well, you’re not going to hang them outside our bedroom window!”

“We don’t have a bedroom window! And if we did, I’d hang as many sets there as I wanted!”