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ride home.
    Luke had still had two condoms left. He’d told his sister to give him a little bit.
    But Sara hadn’t waited. She’d driven home drunk, blasting through a stop sign and killing an old man crossing the street.
    Though Sara had never blamed him for her two years in jail, Luke still hadn’t forgiven himself, and their relationship had been strained ever since.
    And then his grandma had died two summers later. Again, he hadn’t been the direct cause, but close enough.
    He’d not come back to Lucky Harbor since.
    The stack of boxes against the wall suggested that at some point this room had gone from housing a teenager to housing extra crap. His grandma Fay had never been able to throw anything of his or Sara’s away. She’d been the only sentimental one in the entire family.
    Luke took a long look around and nudged the first box with his toe, eyes locking in on a lump of clay—the stupid snowman he’d once made at summer camp. It was missing an eye and a chunk of its head, but his grandma had cherished the thing, which had sat on her desk as a paperweight for as many years as he could remember.
    Her desk was still upstairs in the den, but it was empty now, available for whichever tenant wanted to use it.
    Luke stared at the snowman, reluctantly acknowledging the damn ache in his chest before shaking his head and heading straight for the bed. Kicking off his clothes and shoes with equal carelessness, he sprawled onto the mattress.
    His last conscious thought was the image of Ali standing in his kitchen in nothing but her sexy bra and panties and that smile, the one that told him he was in a whole shitload of trouble, whether he liked it or not.
    And for the record, he didn’t like it.

Chapter 4
    A li heard the door shut from the depths of the house, and then nothing.
    Just silence in Luke’s wake.
    She cleared up the shards on the floor from the ceramic pot she’d thrown and let out a long breath. Luke Hanover was a force. A big, edgy, enigmatic force.
    And a cop. A detective lieutenant.
    Good Lord.
    Her mom loved men, all of them, but one thing she’d always imparted to her daughters was a general distrust of men of the law. Ali’s growing up years had been like living through a season of COPS , and she still tended to twitch when she heard a siren. Though she’d twitched at the sight of Luke for an entirely different reason.
    In light of the fact that she was just dumped and therefore temporarily uninterested in anyone with a penis, this was deeply disturbing.
    Luke was a good-looking guy, she told herself. Any woman would react. It was the way he carried himself—the sharp gaze that missed nothing and a calm, controlled demeanor even after finding a half-naked woman in his house. Although, there’d definitely been something in his expression suggesting a tension that had nothing to do with her. The earful she’d gotten from the reporter had confirmed this. Luke had clearly had a week far worse than hers, especially since his had involved dead people.
    Clearly Luke dealt with more stress and responsibility on any given day than Ali had ever managed. She felt bad, but at the moment, she had her own problems.
    Big problems.
    Roof-over-her-head problems. She could stay here tonight, but she had every other night to worry about. Letting out a shaky breath, she lifted her chin. It was what the Winters women did, they faked their bravado. Then they told themselves everything was going to be okay. “It is going to be okay,” she said out loud to convince herself, because that would make it so. “It’s really going to be okay.”
    But she had no idea how. She didn’t charge the senior center when she taught there, and Lucky Harbor Flowers was slower than usual this season. Russell kept talking about his dream, which was to follow his ex-boyfriend Paul to Las Vegas. And that meant closing the shop.
    Unless she could suddenly convince him that she could run the shop in his absence, things were going to