her post teaching Restoration to 18th-century literature at St. Xavier’s. They’d been friends since the moment they’d met, despite marked personality differences, so Emma should have been used to her dramatic tirades by now. But the fact was, this one hurt her feelings a little. Maybe because the assessment was so dead-on and something she pondered every year when her birthday rolled around. “Mom needs me,” she said lamely.
“I know, hon, but even she’s said she wishes you’d get out more,” Celia said gently. She sat back down in the chair. “It’s been a year, Em. Maybe it’s time to let go a little.”
Emma chewed her bottom lip, trying to ignore the tightening in her stomach. It still hurt so much to think about what might have been, what still could be. “It’s been eleven months, Celia,” she said quietly, staring at the dark screen of her desktop computer monitor. “And you know as well as I do that we’re not in the clear until this year is up.”
She heard Celia swing her legs off the desk and then felt a pair of hands pulling hers out of her lap. “I know. I don’t mean to push, but your mom and I have been talking, and we’re worried. You can’t give everything to your job and then give it all over again to Jane.”
Emma’s eyes flicked to the photo of her and her mother on her bookshelves. Only someone who knew Jane Jensen Reese well could tell that she looked paler than usual, that there were new lines around her mouth and eyes, that her smart new hairstyle was a touch too shiny and perfect, in the photo and every day in real life. “I’m scared,” she whispered. She didn’t have to tell Celia of what.
Celia clutched her hands tightly. “I know. I can see what waiting for this horrible year to finish up is doing to you. I wish I could help.”
“You do, all the time.” Emma stood abruptly and grabbed her large bag, slinging the strap over her shoulder, which sank a little with the weight. “It’ll be fine. That’s what we have to believe, right?”
“Right.” Celia flashed her a smaller, less bright version of her wide grin. “Well, come on. I’ll buy you an early birthday dinner at Ca’Brea, and then you can drive me home in that snazzy new hybrid car of yours.”
AFTER DROPPING OFF Celia at her condo, Emma pulled the snub-nosed Toyota Prius into the garage behind her house. Thirty-five. She was going to be thirty-five years old, and she’d pretty much spent all of those years—with her rigid routines and carefully planned schedules—digging her own personal rut, not just the past one. Rut Girl. Celia might as well have called her Deeply Entrenched Chasm Girl, with or without her mother’s illness.
Thirty-five years old. As she tugged her overstuffed hemp satchel out of the car, the thought stopped Emma in her tracks. Tomorrow, she would officially be in her mid-thirties. Which meant that very soon, she’d be forty. Which meant it was high time she got out and broke the routines she’d been creating since she’d learned to walk and did something extraordinary.
But what?
To date, she’d achieved all of her goals. She’d earned her Ph.D. in literature ten years ago, gotten a teaching job and had risen through the ranks to become full professor of 18th-century literature at St. Xavier University, a small liberal arts college nestled in the palm-lined shadow of the University of Southern Caifornia in Los Angeles.
And now, her time was spent in a weekly routine that, as Celia had so bluntly pointed out, rarely varied, by day, hour or even minute. Could she possibly be any more boring?
Probably not. Even her name sounded like a stuffy old lady’s—Emma Jensen Reese. Hah. “Hello,” she mimicked herself aloud as she walked around her house toward the mailbox in front, “I’m Emma Jensen Reese, professor of stuffy literature at a stuffy university with a large rod stuffed firmly up my—”
Emma halted abruptly, the heels of her shoes sinking into the soft green grass.
The so-called Mystery Man was staring at her front door. And in the daylight, he was what her students would call a hottie.
He stood before the baby palms lining the small patch of grass and flowers she called a front yard, his hands shoved into the pockets of a brown mid-length suede jacket. His face was lean, long, with sharp cheekbones and a straight, prominent nose that gave him a dignified profile. He reached up and swiped a lock of glossy black hair off his forehead, his hard mouth twisting into an expression of confusion. She knew confusion—she didn’t have a reputation for creating St. X’s most diabolical exams for nothing.
But it wasn’t his questioning look that had caused her to pause in front of her home, dropping her chin to look over the tops of her sunglasses.
Emma, you and your stupid annual craving for adventure. This happened to her every time her Intro to Literature students reached the unit on the Romantics. Last year in October, she’d nearly thrown her entire hard-won career out the proverbial window to hike the Inca Trail and build solar showers and other ecotourism infrastructure with the Quechua in Peru. And now, in her Keats-addled mind, she’d turned a man who was probably canvassing for the Sierra Club into Indiana bloody Jones. Shifting the satchel to better balance it on her hip, Emma stepped forward, prepared to dispel this year’s birthday fantasy, courtesy of the mysterious stranger, once and for all. “Hello,” she said to the man. “May I help you?”
Emma’s breath caught as he turned to face her head-on. In profile, he was a hottie. But the full frontal assault of his face was singularly striking. He didn’t respond to her question—just stared at her with a pair of deep, startlingly light brown eyes set under sharply angled black eyebrows. Emma could only stare back.
A heartbeat later, it finally occurred to her that the man could be dangerous, and what she should do is fling her bag at him and run.
But she couldn’t stop looking at him.
“What do you want?” she finally managed, her mouth suddenly dry. Dark hair, prominent cheekbones, tan skin. He looked Latino. Maybe he didn’t speak English. She tried again, in Spanish this time. “Necesita ayuda?”
His eyebrows drew together, and he shook his head, stepping close enough to her that she should have stepped backward instinctively. But she didn’t. “I don’t know what I need,” he finally said.
Oh, great. Like turning thirty-five-which-is-almost-forty, wasn’t traumatic enough without having two close encounters with the mentally unstable in one twenty-four-hour period. Ignoring the fact that having a mysterious and rather Byronic stranger talking about his needs in the middle of your front yard ranked pretty high on the romantic meter, Emma shifted the satchel in her arms, readying herself for one good fling. She had no doubt that the number of research papers she carried with her would pack a wallop.
But she couldn’t. Heaven help her, his lost expression moved her.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Joe,” he said.
Then he blinked and shook his head, scrubbing a hand across his face. As she watched, the dream-like cast to his golden-brown eyes faded. His jaw tightened, his brow furrowed, until the man with the tough, uncompromising expression before her bore almost no resemblance to the one she’d been talking to mere seconds before.
“I’m sorry,” he said gruffly, turning his head away from her. “I don’t remember—I don’t know why I’m here.” With a sudden, quick movement, he moved across the lawn to the sidewalk. “I’m sorry,” she heard him mutter again. And then he was gone.
WHAT THE HELL was he doing here?
Joe stalked down the sidewalk, away from the giant Victorian house and the tall, pretty woman who lived there and now presumably thought he was completely deficient. “I don’t know what I need.” What the heck? His pickup lines were usually better than that.
The fact is, she’d scared him to death. Or, rather, that frilly Hansel and Gretel house of hers did, with the turret and brightly painted shutters and meticulously placed flowers and palms. Because both it and her entire goddamned neighborhood resonated somewhere deep