she told herself out loud. The past was over. She’d rehashed it often to kill it from over scrutiny. It had done no good. Now she needed to concentrate on the future—on Adam.
What would Adam expect? She paced the kitchen, made tea, thought about what to wear, how to be charming and make conversation. Dating was like speaking a foreign language she had no practice in. It was something she’d done very little of before—
No! Damn it. There she went again!
Determinedly she carried her mug of tea to the table and laid out files so she could work. If she could get the hardware store accounts finished before Liam got home from school, then she could take a break, maybe go out and build a snowman with him, have a snowball fight. Do something to distract herself.
Liam was going to spend the night at her aunt Celie’s who lived up the street with her husband, Jace, and their kids.
“Why all night?” she’d demanded when Celie had offered. “We’re only going to dinner. I’m not spending the night with him!”
“Well, you might want to invite him in after,” Celie said innocently. “For a cup of coffee,” she added with a smile. It wasn’t what she meant.
Sara knew it as well as she knew that she wasn’t up for anything beyond dinner. Not now. Not yet.
How on earth could she have let six years go by without a single date?
Well, really, she rationalized, when had she had time?
She’d spent the first three years after Liam’s birth finishing a degree in accounting, then setting up in business. Between her son and her schooling and the jobs she’d taken to make ends meet, she’d had no time to meet eligible men.
Not that she’d wanted to.
Once burned, twice shy and all that. And while she supposed there was wisdom in the notion of getting right back on a horse once you’d been thrown, there was also wisdom in being a damn sight more cautious the second time around.
She’d been too reckless the first time. This time she was taking it slow and easy and that meant dinner, perhaps a quick peck on the lips. Yes, she could do that.
But first she had to get to work.
One of the pluses of her job as an independent certified public accountant was that she could set her own hours and work from home. That made it easier to be home when Liam was. The downside, of course, was that it was easy to get distracted—like today. There was no boss to crack the whip, to make demands. It was more tempting to think about checking her closet to see what she wanted to wear or to put in a load of laundry, make a cup of tea and talk to Sid the cat when she really needed to focus on work.
So she started again, made herself settle down at the kitchen table, which was also her desk, and spread out the accounts from the hardware store. Adding columns of figures required that she pay close attention and didn’t allow her mind to wander, to anticipate, to worry.
A sudden loud knock on the front door made her jump. She slopped tea all over her ledger sheet. “Damn!”
She went to the sink and grabbed the dishrag, mopping up the spill, cursing the delivery man, who was the only one who ever came to the front door. He left her office supplies when she ordered them. But she didn’t remember—
Bang, bang, bang!
Not the delivery man, then. He only knocked once, then, having awakened the dead, he always jumped back into his delivery truck and drove away. He never knocked twice.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Let alone a third time.
“Hold your horses,” she shouted. “I’m coming!”
She stalked to the door and jerked it open—to the ghost of Valentine’s past.
Oh, God.
She was hallucinating. Panicking at the notion of dating again, she’d conjured him up out of the recesses of her mind.
And damn her mind for making him larger than life and more appealing than ever. Tall, rangy and narrow-hipped, but with shoulders even broader than she remembered. And just for reality’s sake, her brain had even dusted his midnight hair with snowflakes. They should have softened his appearance, made him seem gentler. They didn’t. He looked as pantherish and deadly as ever.
“Sara.” His beautiful mouth tipped in a devastatingly appealing lopsided grin.
Sara knew that grin. Remembered it all too well. Had kissed the lips that wore it. Had tasted his laughter, his words, his groans, his passion.
Her face burned. Her whole body seemed suddenly consumed by a heat she’d tried to forget. She glanced at her hands knotting together, astonished that they didn’t have steam coming off them, the memory of him was so powerful.
“Speechless, a stór?” His rough baritone with the light Irish inflection made the tiny hairs at the back of her neck prickle. It felt as if a ghost had run a finger down the length of her spine.
“Go away,” she said fiercely, closing her eyes, resisting the hallucination, the memories—the man. It was agreeing to go out with Adam that had done this to her. It had tripped a trigger of memories she’d bottled up, stored away, refused to take out and look at ever again.
She screwed up her eyes and shut them tight. Counted to ten. Opened them.
And felt her stomach plummet to her toes at the sight of him still standing there.
He wore jeans, a black sweater and a dark-green down jacket. He hadn’t shaved in a day or two. His cheeks and jaw were stubbled. His eyes were bloodshot. But his impossibly long lashes blinked away snowflakes as he watched her with amusement. And when he grinned a little more at her befuddlement, she saw that he had chipped a tooth. She didn’t think she would have hallucinated the chipped tooth.
So he was real. He was everything she remembered.
And worse.
Six years ago Sara had dreamed of this moment. Had held on to the hope that he would come back to Elmer, to her. For nine months she had planned and hoped and prayed. And he’d never come. Had never called. Had never written.
And now—out of the blue—he was here.
Sara’s heart turned over, and at the same time, she felt the walls slam down. A fury of pain so fierce engulfed her that she had to swallow and swallow again before she could find her voice.
And when at last she did, she prayed it sounded as flat and disinterested as she wanted to be as she acknowledged him. “Flynn.”
Flynn Murray. The man who had taken her love, given her a child and left her without a backwards glance.
It had been her fault. She knew that. He’d never promised to stay. Had never promised anything—except that he would hurt her.
And by God, he’d done that.
At the time, of course, she hadn’t believed he could. She’d been nineteen, naive, foolish and in love beyond anything she’d ever dreamed possible. She’d met Flynn unexpectedly when he’d come to their small town to cover the human-interest angle of a celebrity cowboy auction. It had been strange, serendipitous, and almost like finding the other half of herself.
She’d always been practical, sensible, driven. She’d had goals since she was old enough to spell the word. Meeting and falling in love with Flynn had turned them upside down. He’d come to her tiny town and changed her world.
Flynn had made her want things she’d never dreamed of wanting—and for a few days or weeks she’d believed she could have them.
She knew better now.
She knew about hurt and pain and getting past them. She knew she wasn’t letting it happen again. Ever.
“You look beautiful,” he told her. “Even more beautiful than I remember.”