Had he really planned on moving in with Sophia when he hadn’t broken off his relationship with Megan? What had he been thinking? What the hell kind of idiot was he?

“Women trouble?” Bobby asked, ramming the Ford into gear.

He put his empty cup in one of the holders between the seats. “Always, I think.”

“Ye-up. Best to settle down with one.” He eased on the gas, and the big flatbed started rolling across the pocked parking lot. “Or at the very least settle down with one at a time. That’s what I did with Cyn, and it’s worked out.”

James didn’t argue. He winced from a sharp pain in his shoulder when Knowlton turned onto the long, rutted lane that led into the foothills, where his shop and office were located. What was it Rebecca Travers had said her sister accused him of being? A man-whore?

He thought about Rebecca—tall, dark, with red-tinged hair and, he remembered, whip-smart and someone who wasn’t that close to her sister. They were half-sisters as it was, but that wasn’t the reason. Rebecca and Megan just hadn’t gotten along—oil and water. She the calmer, Megan the hothead. He was even surprised that Rebecca was so determined to find her sister. As he recalled, she found her sister irritating.

Guiltily, he remembered other things about the older Travers sister as well, most of which involved laughing and talking and fierce lovemaking. There had been that last night in Seattle, in a hotel room overlooking Elliott Bay. They’d had too much to drink and had been ravenous for each other, as if they’d subconsciously known their time together was doomed.

While the lights of the city reflected on the dark water and they’d kissed wildly, her dark auburn hair spilling around them, they’d become tangled in the bed sheets and slid to the floor still wound in a lovers’ embrace.

That had been their last time together, and the thought was disturbing. For the first time in his life, he felt regret over the ending of a relationship and had a sense that he’d missed out.

The one that got away.

Because he couldn’t be faithful.

And he wasn’t faithful with the worst person possible, the person who could wound Rebecca the most deeply: her self-centered younger sister.

A man-whore, he thought again, deciding that the accusation wasn’t too far off the mark.

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 19

Charity was getting nowhere fast.

Literally and figuratively.