Katelyn stood by the coffee maker, willing it to hurry, and stretched her head from side to side, trying to ease the crick that had formed during her restless night. It wasn’t the first uneasy sleep she’d had since coming to River’s Sigh, but this time it wasn’t Steve who’d kept her tossing and turning with nagging unnamed worries. It was Brian.
“Mom, mom,” Lacey said insistently, appearing beside her.
Sawyer tugged on Katelyn’s nightie to add weight to his sister’s plea.
“Can we watch cartoons with our breakfast?”
“Sure. Go ahead.” It would be a nice distraction for them—and might hide how distracted she was.
“Please,” Lacey wheedled, then her mouth dropped open. “Wait. We can?”
Katelyn laughed. “Well, do you want to or not?”
“Yeah!” Sawyer whisper-yelled, and he and Lacey sprinted to the couch.
Lacey turned on the TV and the Pokémon theme song filled the room. Katelyn brought them cheese cubes, fruit and homemade oatmeal bars, thinking that even if they did accidentally spill, everything would vacuum up easily. Then, trying not to sigh with audible relief, she settled herself, coffee in hand, at the little table in the kitchen and resumed staring at the cause of her jumbled emotions and concern: Brian’s painting—if you could call it that. He’d painted each of their names, his, Katelyn’s, and both kids’, then added curlicue hearts and flowers and the big question, “What are we doing, K?” followed by another heart.
She had no idea if he’d left it behind intentionally or not. But the problem wasn’t that he’d left it. Or even what it was. It was that it mimicked exactly what she had been wondering—and had been too scared to face directly.
She’d known from the first minute they met again by chance in the airport that she found Brian physically attractive. But she was off men, at least until her kids were grown, and maybe permanently. She’d been so sure that if they spent time together, she’d see all the ways he was wrong for her and even the physical attraction would wane. At best, they’d be friends. And at worst? There was no worst. If they didn’t work as friends, it would almost be easier.
She hadn’t even considered another possibility: that rather than ripping out stitches of lust, getting to know Brian a bit would only knit a desire to know him even better, would make her like and appreciate the actual man he was, not just his pretty face.
The awareness that she genuinely liked him had been scary enough, but she’d been confident—even while they ran together, even while they kept finding time to steal a conversation whenever and wherever their paths happened to cross, even while she was more and more eager for every hour they spent watching movies and chatting—that she could keep her silly crush under control.
Her first inkling that she was out of her depths had hit her before he’d even left after painting with the kids. When he’d asked if they were “still on” for movies later, all she’d wanted to do was beg him to stay right through, to eat dinner with them, to be part of the kids’ bedtime stories and going to sleep rituals. The idea that she felt all was right in her world when Brian was there beside her, and that Lacey and Sawyer were benefiting from his calm, easy presence made her queasy. Literally. She’d ended up texting him and begging off their movie plans, claiming she wasn’t up to it. Which was true, just not for the reasons she wanted it to be.
And now this. Now she couldn’t pretend that the electricity that zipped between them was all in her head.
She traced one of the red curlicues Brian had decorated his paper with. If her feelings weren’t one-sided, if he felt even remotely the same way she did, there was nothing safe about her infatuation, nothing harmless about her fantasies. She, they, had stumbled into a danger zone.
Now their attraction was something to be dealt with, figured out, put to sleep. And that was too bad. Really too bad. In another world, in a different place and time . . . if Greenridge could be anything except part of her past, a place she had to escape for the health and welfare of her little family, she would’ve loved to explore a possible future with Brian Archer—
She stood abruptly and downed the remains of her coffee in a final gulp. She could obsess to death about Brian later. When they met next, they’d have a quick conversation, sensibly agree that feelings were just feelings, nothing that couldn’t be exorcised by rational facts—the key one being that nothing more could develop between them—and then they could continue on with their easy friendship. For now, he was out of sight and she needed to put him out of mind. It was time to get ready for her day and to get the kids ready for theirs. Specifically, she had to pack their overnight bags for their weekend with Steve. With that thought, bam, all silly notions of possible romance fled. She needed the complications of another man in her life like she needed a frontal lobotomy.