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bet on a lady. They always find out, sooner or later.”
    “Like you’re ever still around for the later.”
    “One of these days, I’m going to surprise everybody and stick with one woman forever.”
    Drew smiled, but Mitch could see the sadness around his eyes. “Just make sure you both want the same thing in life, because it hurts like hell when you find out years into it that you don’t.”
    While he hadn’t been as many years into the relationship as Drew had, Mitch had already learned that lesson the hard, messy way. A man and a woman wanting two different things ended up in two different places, as a rule, which could only lead to misery.
    He was a lot better off when he and a woman wanted the same thing—orgasms not of the do-it-yourself variety. Maybe only one or maybe quite a few, but then they went their separate ways with no hard feelings. With the exception of that one doomed relationship, it was a plan that had served him well and he hadn’t yet found a second woman worth detouring for.

Chapter Three
    By two o’clock the following day, when Ava showed up to take over until closing time, Paige was exhausted. She even thought about going home and taking a nap, which was something she rarely did, but that would only make it harder to sleep at bedtime, and that four-thirty alarm wasn’t very forgiving.
    Instead, she stopped by her trailer and grabbed her library tote bag, since she’d finished the last book three days before and, tired or not, she was getting itchy for more books. The weather was nice—not too hot and no humidity—so she walked to the library, exchanging waves with others as she went.
    She still found it exhilarating, the way the town’s people made her feel as if she was one of their own. They called to her by name and asked her how business was going, and she’d ask after their kids or an aging parent. It was what she’d been looking for her entire life—that sense of belonging—and she’d finally found it in Whitford.
    Dragged around from place to place growing up, Paige had always been the new kid in school. There had always been a new man of the house, some who became stepfathers and more who didn’t. And she’d done it a few times herself. More than once, she’d given up who she wanted to be in order to be what a man wanted her to be.
    Her car breaking down in Whitford had changed that. Changed her . It was an opportunity to start a life in a town that had welcomed a stranded stranger with open arms and, to make sure she kept that life on track, she was abstaining from men. When she was sure she was who she wanted to be and had her life the way she wanted it, she’d think about letting a man share it. For now, she wasn’t going to risk falling back into behavioral patterns she’d learned from her mother. No men.
    The library was quiet when Paige stepped inside, but she knew she didn’t have long before school let out and kids started showing up, looking for a safe place to kill some time, doing homework or reading before their parents got home from work.
    Hailey Genest, of gouged-leather-seats fame, was behind the circulation desk, where she always was, from ten in the morning until five o’clock Monday through Thursday, until eight o’clock on Fridays, and three hours every other Saturday afternoon. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, with her blond hair in a ponytail, looking like anything but a librarian.
    Fran Benoit, with her thick gray hair pulled back in a braid, was checking out a stack of books, and she grinned when she saw Paige. “You’re too late. I grabbed all the ones with the good sex in them.”
    “Guess I’ll have to settle for the ones with the good murders.” Paige wasn’t sure she could handle having Mitch Kowalski and sexy books in her life at the same time.
    “Not having the first could lead to the second, you know,” Hailey said, giving Paige a pointed look. “Gotta release the tension or it builds up and then— wham —somebody’s