I woke up the next morning reaching for Bill and found myself alone. A terrible emptiness swept over me, then longing, followed by embarrassment – I had slept with a man I barely knew! – and the fear that it had all been a dream. But then I heard noises from downstairs, a clanking of pans that suggested Bill hadn’t fled. Relief flooded through me as I reached for a robe and started downstairs … but then I stopped in my bedroom doorway. From here I saw the open door to Liam’s study … Liam’s empty study. That’s where my last impetuous affair had gotten me, pining for a man who wasn’t even entirely human.

I felt the sharp coils of the wards clutch at my heart. So they weren’t entirely gone yet. They had unraveled when I cut them in the vision with my mother and eased their grip last night with Bill, but they were still there. Although every nerve in my body yearned to run downstairs and throw myself into Bill’s arms, I made myself go back into the bedroom and change into jeans and a t-shirt and comb my hair. In the mirror, I saw the scratches over my eye. They’d healed remarkably well – no doubt due to Bill’s swift ministrations – but they were still clearly visible. If Duncan were the incubus, what did that say about my romantic judgment?

I walked downstairs, schooling myself to take it slow, give it time, not rush in … all the admonitions my friend Annie would give me if she were here, but when I walked into the kitchen and saw Bill bending over the oven, his firm behind filling out faded blue jeans, I went weak in the knees. And when he retrieved a pan of fragrant corn bread from the oven and turned, a speckle of flour dusting his hair and loose flannel shirt, other parts of my body went soft. I heard Annie’s voice in my head conceding, “Okay, with an ass like that and cooking skills, maybe you shouldn’t be taking it so slow.”

“Hey,” I said. “I was afraid you were gone when I woke up.”

He frowned. “I wouldn’t do that. I just thought you might like breakfast. I hope you don’t mind …”

“No!” I cried, a bit too vociferously. I stepped toward him, wondering how we’d managed to get off on the wrong foot. He stepped toward me … but he still had a hot pan in his hands. He turned to put it on the counter … and the front doorbell rang.

The thought that it might be Duncan come to explain what had happened last night instantly flashed through my head. I looked guiltily at Bill.

“Maybe you should get that,” he said.

“I could just wait until whoever it is goes away,” I said. Renewed knocking suggested that wasn’t going to be a possibility.