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against—
    â€œDid you hear me?”
    â€œYeah.” He shrugged and corralled his wayward thoughts. “Thought I could be helpful. Sorry.”
    His apology had been terse and not very sincere, but she softened a fraction anyway. “You’ve been helpful. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. But I can take it from here, okay?”
    He nodded. “Sure thing.” It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her if it would be against her principles if he came over
without
his tools. To visit. To take her and her son to a movie. Or bring over a bucket of fried chicken.
    But he stopped himself, feeling suddenly like that troublemaking kid from the wrong side of town he’d once been. Maybe Lana wasn’t wealthy anymore. Maybe she’d left her most-popular-girl-cheerleaderdays behind. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that she lived on a different plane than he did.
    That he’d never be good enough.
    Stupid, stupid, stupid. He hadn’t suffered from low self-esteem in a very long time, not since that summer.
    Now Lana, with her haughty little speech, had chipped away at a confidence he’d foolishly assumed was inviolate.
    This time when she reached for the door, he let her go. He watched her swish her green-velvet way to the front door, waited until he was sure she was safe inside. Then he backed out of her driveway with a deliberate screech of tires.
    â€œC’mon, Bennett,” he said aloud. “Get real. Things have changed, but they haven’t changed that much.”
    Lana moped around for the next couple of days, not sure why. Post-best-friend’s-wedding blues, maybe, she told herself. Then why did her thoughts return so often to Sloan Bennett? She re-created in her mind every word of the conversations they’d shared the night of Callie’s wedding. She dissected them to death, theorized, relived her feelings of that night.
    She understood why he’d been so stiff-jawed with her at first. She hadn’t exactly “done him right” in high school. But she had to wonder why later he’d gone out of his way to help her.
    There hadn’t been anything overtly flirtatious in his manner. Maybe he’d simply wanted to prove thathe didn’t hold a grudge, that the past didn’t really matter because they’d been just a couple of kids.
    Oh, but they’d done things kids weren’t supposed to do, she reminded herself. Her stomach tightened at the memory of what his touch could do to her.
    Some of the attraction remained, she acknowledged as she dropped a handful of spaghetti into boiling water. She couldn’t deny that she was still drawn to, fascinated by him. At the same time she was worried, even scared, by the power of that draw. Maybe he’d been thrown off by it too.
    But surely not by much. He seemed so darn … in control. And something in her was oh-so-tempted to simply go limp and let him take control of
her.
    But, as she’d told him, she’d had enough of surrendering her life to someone else. She was the boss now, and she was determined to keep it that way. Let a man like Sloan into her life—even innocently, like allowing him to repair the garage roof—and before she knew it her every decision would be yanked out of her hands.
    In high school that loss of control she’d felt around Sloan had been heady, exciting at first. But then he’d started to frighten her. Not that he was anything but kind and gentle with her. But with the rest of the world … He’d been so angry. And she’d felt on the verge of total surrender, not just her body but her soul. Like maybe her whole identity could be sucked up inside his and she would never be herself again.
    That’s why she’d bolted. But she hadn’t been able to explain it to him. He’d accused her of thinking shewas too good for him. And she’d tearfully agreed, because the truth was so elusive and