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your friends. You’ve set me up with your friends.”
    Lane winced. “That was a misunderstanding.” In college, Allison had been perfectly normal. Dean’s list, dorm resident adviser, total straight arrow. How was Lane supposed to know that Allison had gone on a piercing and tattooing frenzy about three seconds after she got her Ph.D. in economics?
    “Right,” Taylor said, sounding more than a little dubious. “My point is that if and when I decide to jump back into the dating game, my female of choice is going to be someone a little less”—he twirled his hand in the air— “
colorful
.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with a little color.” Heck, in Lane’s opinion, Taylor’s life needed some.
    “My life has so much color I could open a crayon factory.”
    She peered at him over her sunglasses. “Oh, sure.”
    He started counting on his fingers: “I quit my job at the force. I’m barely surviving doing the private-eye gig. My biggest client to date is the scum of the universe. And I’ve got a sister who wants me to set up house with the tattooed lady.”
    “That’s not color. That’s ookey life stuff. And if you’re barely surviving, you should take my money. I’m a big girl. You don’t have to keep protecting me from the world.”
    Taylor gave her one of those looks, then cranked Francis Capra’s engine. “I’m not taking your money,” he said. “I don’t need your money.”
    She pasted on an innocent smile. “Great. Then you can afford to take a girl out on a date.”
    “I’m not interested in dating for the sake of dating. I spent my childhood bouncing from house to house with no roots, nothing tying me down. I hated it, and I don’t want to spend my adult years bouncing from woman to woman.”
    “But how will you ever meet the right woman if you won’t—”
    “Listen to me, Lane.” He hit the clutch and shifted into first. “I’m
not
dating your friends. I’ve had it up to here with wacko women. The next girl I date is going to be the quintessential girl next door, complete with a dog, a pitcher of lemonade, and a white picket fence. Hell, she might even be a librarian.” He glanced pointedly at her hands resting on his door, and she stepped back as he inched the car out of the parking spot.
    “Normal, Lane,” he said, raising his voice as he pulled farther away. “The next girl I date is going to be so normal she could pose for a Norman Rockwell painting.”

    Zoë sat alone on the far side of the cafeteria, away from the overpowering odor of fried fish fillets, plastic-textured pizza, and lime Jell-O. She was also away from the other teachers, who’d never quite managed to find room at their table for Zoë. For almost twenty-five years it had been pretty much the same—everyone else sticking together, knowing without being told that Zoë was somehow different. By now she was used to the seating arrangements.
    What she wasn’t used to was the torrent of Buster lust ricocheting through her brain when she should be thinking chaste lunch-monitor thoughts.
    She’d gone her whole life without mooning over some guy. They weren’t part of her agenda, her plan. So how had this one man so completely and totally infiltrated her thoughts? It wasn’t fair. She was going to be twenty-five in a few days. She needed to be worrying about her council affidavit, about what she was going to tell her mother... about what she was going to do with the rest of her life. But was she worrying, considering, planning, anything-ing?
Nope. Not at all
. Instead she was acting like a mortal teenager with a high-school crush.
    She sighed. This newfound obsession with Buster Taylor was incredibly distracting, to say the least.
    With massive effort, she lassoed her thoughts and shoved them to the far corner of her brain. She had decisions to make, and so long as the cafeteria remained distraction-free, this was the perfect time to make them.
    First... her council application. For over a month, the