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on.” He pulled her back into his arms.
    â€œI’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She sniffled.
    â€œFor what? Being human? Anybody would be upset.”
    â€œOh, I’m making a big mess of your shirt and you just changed it for a clean one,” she wailed.
    He tightened his arms. “No worries. I’ve got a good washing machine.”
    His words only seemed to set her off again and Matt held her, hating this helpless feeling. With no sisters and a mother who rarely lost her cool in front of her boys, his experience with crying women was extremely limited. This was a novel experience, trying to offer comfort instead of instinctively seeking any handy escape route.
    She clutched his waist as if he was the only thing keeping her from floating away on her wild emotions, her cheek pressed against his chest. Her hair smelled like fresh raspberries just plucked from his mama’s garden behind their house and he inhaled, doing his best to ignore how soft and curvy she felt in his arms and feeling powerless to do anything but hold her.
    He moved into his half-finished family room where he could sit down on the sofa, pulling her with him.
    After a few moments, her intense sobs quieted. She took a few slow, hitching breaths and he could feel the shudders against him subside.
    With vast relief, he felt her regain control until sometime later when she eased slightly away from him, though she didn’t seem any more eager to leave the shelter of his arms than he was to let her go.
    â€œThis is the single most embarrassing night of my life,” she finally said, her cheeks flaring with color. “Apparently, I’m a maudlin drunk. Who knew?”
    He laughed a little roughly, still unnerved by the intensity of his attraction to her, which somehow far outweighed all those protective impulses.
    Elise always had the ability to make him laugh, he remembered. She had a funny, quirky sense of humor and he remembered back in school feeling privileged to be among the few she revealed it to.
    â€œI haven’t cried once since…well, since Erin told us all what she suspected.”
    â€œThen you are probably long overdue, aren’t you?”
    She said nothing for a long moment and then she smiled at him and he felt like he was seeing his first taste of springtime after weeks of fog and gloom.
    Even with her reddened eyes and tear-stained cheeks, she was beautiful. He gazed at her upturned face a long moment, then with a strange sense of destiny or fate or inevitability—he wasn’t sure—he leaned down and pressed his mouth to that smile.

Chapter Four
    E lise froze at the first warm touch of his mouth. He tasted delicious, like fresh-baked cinnamon cookies, and his arms around her seemed the safest place in the universe.
    She couldn’t quite believe this was happening and wondered for a moment if she was hallucinating. No, she hadn’t had quite that much to drink. She wasn’t sure about a lot of things but she knew that, at least.
    Matt Cates, who had never looked twice at her all these years, really was kissing her, holding her, like he couldn’t get enough.
    Elise would have laughed at the sheer, unexpected wonder of it if she wasn’t so preoccupied with the sexy things his mouth was doing to hers.
    This all seemed so surreal. She wasn’t exactly afemme fatale. Most guys tended to think of her like the girl next door, somebody sweet and fairly innocent. Blame it on her blond hair or the blue eyes or her small stature. She didn’t know exactly what, she only knew that she wasn’t the kind of girl men considered for a quick fling.
    Now, twice in one night in the space of only an hour or so, she found herself in a man’s arms. Not that the two things were in any way comparable. Kissing Matt Cates was a whole different experience than trying to fight off Jake Halloran in the hallway outside the ladies’ room at The Hitching Post.
    Then, she had been