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pretty and smart and owns her own business . . .”
    “Enough,” he snapped. “I’m not going to ask Molly out on a date, okay?”
    “Ahem.”
    The interruption had both his and Helena’s heads snapping around.
    Molly was standing half out of the kitchen door, eyebrows near her hairline in surprise. “This is either a very good or very bad time for me to interrupt,” she said dryly, “but dinner is almost ready.”
    Damn it.
    “Now look what you’ve done,” Helena grumbled as Molly went back inside. Then she smacked him on the arm.
    “ Me? This is not my fault.” He rubbed his arm. That had hurt.
    “You’ve probably hurt her feelings.”
    “Only because you were badgering me. And anyway, I don’t think Molly has any romantic feelings for me.”
    “Well, now she certainly doesn’t. But that doesn’t matter. No one likes to hear that someone’s not interested in them.”
    “Then don’t try to fix people up, Helena. It’s extremely annoying and leads to situations like this.”
    Surprisingly, all the snap went out of Helena’s voice. “I’ll apologize to her—”
    “Good.”
    “But you should, too,” she said as she stood. Then she disappeared inside the house.
    Tate leaned his head back and cursed softly. He would apologize, of course, because he certainly hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings. He hadn’t even meant to sound that repulsed by the idea.
    He could only hope Molly would be just asunderstanding this time as she’d been on New Year’s Eve, when she’d simply smirked and rolled her eyes before offering up her cheek for a kiss. They’d never mentioned it again.
    If he was lucky, Helena would confess to her hounding when she apologized, giving at least a partial excuse for what he’d said.
    It wasn’t as if he had something specific against Molly. He’d been dating Tamara when she first arrived in town, and by the time they’d broken up, it was already well known that Molly had turned down every guy who’d asked her out, and she was just “Molly-from-Latte-Dah” to him by then.
    And she’d remained just “Molly-from-Latte-Dah” until she’d become friends with Helena—and, by extension, him, too—so she’d never pinged on his radar in that way.
    But now Hell-on-Wheels had dragged him into yet another fine mess, and he was going to be the one trying to clean it up.
    Again.
    For years, he’d been the one standing up for Helena when other people said she was bad news. A troublemaker.
    Right now, he agreed with them.

Chapter 3
    U nder different circumstances, this would’ve been quite funny. And Molly was pretty sure that at some point in the future she’d look back on this and laugh.
    Right now, though, it was pretty awkward.
    She’d already had words with Helena about Tate once tonight. Inviting him to dinner so things could casually come around to the Children’s Fair was just plain manipulative, and she resented being roped into it. But now . . .
    She hadn’t felt this humiliated in years. At least it was contained to only three people, but that barely mitigated the situation.
    She hadn’t heard much beyond Tate’s avowal not to ask her out, so she had no context for the statement, but, honestly, would context help? There wasn’t much to misunderstand, with or without the rest of the conversation.
    She could guess at it, though. Helena had, once or twice—including orchestrating the most awkward New Year’s Eve kiss ever—made it clumsily clear that she would like to see Tate and Molly together, but the idea wasn’t completely out of left field. She and Tateoccasionally did things with Helena and Ryan, and logistics often split them up like two couples instead of one couple and two singles. And she also understood the urge to fix up single friends once you were in a relationship.
    And considering how important Tate was to Helena, Molly almost felt as if she should be honored that Helena thought she was good enough for him.
    If only Ms. Louise had sent