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open!” she scolded.
    “I’ll come when I’m ready, Mother,” Liv said.
    The older woman’s hackles rose, visibly. “I see,” she said. “As always. You have to do things your own way. You must suit yourself.”
    “Yeah, right,” Liv muttered. “As always.”
    It took energy, opposing her mother. The woman had run her childhood like a dictator, picking her clothes, her schools, her friends.
    Except for that one very memorable summer.
    Yeah, right. Mother had cast the Sean debacle up to her for years as an example of what happened when Liv didn’t listen to her. For once, she’d actually had a point. It stuck in Liv’s craw even now.
    She’d finally forced her parents to accept that she was an adult who made her own decisions. Enter T-Rex, with a can of kerosene, and suddenly her parents felt justified in bundling her into a suffocating gift box again. Tying her up with a big silken bow. Olivia Endicott, groomed to be a credit to the family name, if she would only: 1) lose that pesky fifteen pounds, 2) wear the right shoes, 3) dress like a lady, 4) marry Blair Madden, and 5) work for Endicott Construction Enterprises.
    Blair chose this inopportune moment to throw his arm around her shoulder. She jerked away before she could control the reflex.
    Blair folded his arms over his chest, affronted. “I’m just trying to help,” he said stiffly. “You’re being childish, you know. And bitchy.”
    I’m under a wee bit of stress, in case you haven’t noticed. She bit the sarcastic words back. “I’m sorry, Blair,” she said. “I just can’t stand being touched right now.”
    Her mother’s eyes flicked down over Liv’s body, mouth tightening. “I can’t believe you are out in public dressed like that.”
    Liv looked down at her baggy pants, the shrunken tank top. She’d rushed to the fire right after she got the call, not bothering to change out of her jammies. She hadn’t had a belly flat enough for that look when she was twenty, let alone thirty-two. No bra, either. Woo hah, she could throw ’em over her shoulder like a continental soldier. And as for her pants, well…best not to focus on her big butt at all.
    But the scolding made her chin go up. “I’m decent,” she said. “The important bits are covered. Nobody’ll faint from seeing my jammies.”
    Certainly not Blair, she refrained from adding. He’d been badgering her for years in a half-joking-but-not-really way about giving into the inevitable, and marrying him. Sometimes, when she was lonely, she was a tiny bit tempted. Blair was smart, nice, hardworking. Her parents would have frothing fits of joy. And it would be company.
    But there was no heat between them. Absolutely none.
    Of course, her criteria of “heat” was based almost exclusively on her memories of Sean McCloud. Maybe she’d just imagined all that wild intensity, that giddy excitement. She’d been not quite eighteen, after all.
    She swallowed, her throat raspy from smoke and suppressed tears. Maybe a marriage without heat would be more stable. After all, all she had to do was look around to see the damage heat could do.
    “You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” Amelia said. “I’ll see you at home, when you condescend to come.” She flounced back to her car.
    “I’ll take you home,” Blair said. “You’re aware that you have to be accompanied everywhere now, right? You should pack your things.”
    The look on his face abruptly reminded her of why she kept saying no to Blair’s proposals. Pompous bossiness was so unsexy.
    “Pack?” she asked. “Why am I packing? Where am I going?”
    “You can’t stay at your place, Liv,” he lectured. “It’s too remote, up on the hill, and you don’t even have an alarm. You’ll be staying at Endicott House, where we can keep an eye on you. Bart’s contacting a security firm to provide you with full-time bodyguards.”
    “Bodyguards?” Her smoke-roughened voice broke on the word.
    “Of course.” His chest