“It’s hot!” he protested, fighting back a smile at Andra’s haughty scowl. Unable to resist, he slid a chair across the kitchen to her. “Sit down if you’re gonna swoon.”

She snorted, picking up a spoon to stir the peaches in the boiling water. “Yankee girls don’t swoon, Casanova. And you’ve got a pretty high opinion of your abs.”

“I better. You have any idea how many sit-ups it takes to get abs like these?” He crowded her out of the way and stole the spoon, his shirt still hanging open as he fished peaches out of the pot and dropped them into the waiting bowl of ice water. “Not too long, now. You want them to blanch, not cook.”

“I’m going to blanch you if you keep hip-checking me out of the way all the time.” Andra planted her hands on her hips. “Whatever happened to a simple ‘excuse me’?”

“Well, excuse me if you were boiling my damned peaches to death.” He didn’t even try to keep the laughter out of his voice. Pretty well his favorite thing in the world was getting Andra to threaten him with violence. Freud would likely have a heyday with that, Jung even more so. He just couldn’t help it. Watching her get all puffed up and indignant and not a whit afraid of him did his soul some kind of good.

They’d never discussed what she’d told him about her kidnapping the other day after their grocery store run. And he’d never asked about all the parts she hadn’t told him.

He’d thought about it, all right. All through that sleepless night of staring at his darkened phone on the nightstand. Answers were only a quick Google search away, but he kept thinking about the news helicopters circling overhead while he and his neighbors were still stuck on his roof, waiting for rescue. People were entitled to privacy in their pain.

And Andra was entitled to people looking at her without seeing the story behind that court trial. Now that he’d seen the shadow of horror in that woman’s face in the grocery store, he saw the echo of it in everyone who looked at Andra, even on her own ranch. Stacia didn’t look away as quickly as Andra’s brother did, but her gaze was even heavier with regret. And Bill . . . now that LJ knew her attack wasn’t a simple mugging, the weight in her dad’s shoulders made a lot more sense. As did the fact that he hadn’t been keen to hire a young, intimidatingly tall man to work close by his beautiful daughter.

“Now pull them out of the water,” LJ said. “Easy does it. If you prepared them right, the skins should just fall right off.”

“If I burn myself, you better believe you’re doing the rest.”