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them.
    Then she spotted the small photo on top of the shelf, and her heart almost stopped beating.
    She snatched up the picture before Liam could get a look at it, but not before he saw what she’d done.
    He looked amused. “What’s that?”
    She hid it behind her back. Very slick.
    “It’s just a…really bad picture of me from a while back.”
    What was it doing on the bookshelf, anyway? She kept those photos in a box at the back of her closet, where no one else would see them. But she had wanted to look at this one a few days ago, and in the chaos of Liam’s arrival and her resulting emotional haze, she’d neglected to pack it away.
    “Let me see it. I bet you’re beautiful.”
    Elisa forced a half-hearted laugh. “No way. Let’s go back downstairs.”
    She stuck the picture into a row of books and pushed Liam toward the staircase before he could argue. She had an idea, a plan that would keep them too busy to talk about the past as well as find Liam a woman—so he could get on with the life he’d obviously moved here to find after losing his mother. She owed him that much before she moved away and left him behind—again. It wasn’t a very appealing thought.
    “If you want to get your name around town, there’s an annual Fourth of July celebration coming up next month,” she told Liam when they returned to the kitchen. “It’s a huge deal and everybody in Windy Flats will be there. You should check it out. You’ll jumpstart your client list, maybe even find yourself a Mrs. Barton.”
    She’d have sworn he blushed at that.
    “I didn’t say I was looking for one of those. Having some fun with a nice lady would do just fine.”
    He looked at her, right through her eyes and into her soul, and she heard what he wasn’t saying.
    A nice lady like you.
    She definitely had to get him a girlfriend. Because he wanted her and she wanted him, and that would never do.
    “Great. I was thinking I could show you around and introduce you to some of the locals. There are plenty of nice ladies, just make sure you check out their left hands before you put the moves on them. Don’t want to get yourself caught up with one of those housewives who can’t say no to a sexy vet.”
    “How about tonight?” he suggested, and though the idea made Elisa nervous, she was happy he’d steered their conversation away from the somber turn it had taken earlier. “It’ll still be light for a couple of hours and I wouldn’t mind looking around downtown. You do have a downtown, right?”
    “Yeah, complete with a gas station and a thirty-year-old ice cream shop.”
    They both laughed. Liam gathered up his toolbox and tossed it in the back of Elisa’s car since he’d left his at home. She didn’t mind driving—it would feel way too much like a date to be riding in the passenger seat of a hot guy’s car.
    She didn’t date, didn’t even like spending time with men who weren’t part of her family, but she needed Liam’s friendship. She needed him to support her decision to leave, and to stay at the clinic so her brother wouldn’t be overwhelmed with work when the new baby arrived.
    Since she could no longer avoid him, she would do everything in her power to keep her affection-starved body and emotions under control. The way she’d done since the day she moved back to this town.
     
    Elisa had definitely changed.
    On one hand, Liam was glad to see it. She was no longer a doormat who got herself attached to the wrong people and into trouble. On the other, she had turned into the most restless, unsettled person he’d ever met. How could she have not hung so much as a single photo during the five years she’d been in that house?
    The sun had begun to set on downtown Windy Flats, which consisted of a couple of blocks’ worth of small businesses housed in old historic buildings, and true to Elisa’s word, a gas station and an ice cream shop. The tour hadn’t taken long, and now they sat at a picnic table on the restaurant’s