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friend. But she would only stay long enough to eat her appetizer and then she’d bid him good night.
    “Did you enjoy yourself today?” he asked, breaking the spell he held over her.
    She swallowed then found her words. “It was quiet and uneventful.” She touched her shoulder. “I may have been out in the sun too long. I managed to get a sunburn.”
    “Yeah, you’re looking on the toasted side,” he said with a teasing grin.
    Wendy returned with their drinks and took their order. Renee went with loaded baked potato skins and Dan picked out the chili cheese fries.
    When their waitress left, Dan said, “I never knew the story of how you ended up with the Camerons.”
    “When I was five my mother abandoned me.” A shard of pain dug at her belly. “She left me with the Camerons’ Aunt Grace and never came back. I had no idea where she went or if she’d ever return.”
    Dan studied her. “That would have been a hell of a thing to go through.”
    She sighed. “It was. After a while I started to enjoy living with the Cameron boys. My mother had mostly ignored me when I was little so the attention all of the Camerons gave me made me feel special.”
    Dan swallowed a drink of beer. “How long did you live with them? Seems to me the last time I saw you was when you were nine or ten.”
    “You’ve got a good memory.” Renee gave a little smile, forcing back feelings of sadness that always overcame her when thinking about those times. “It wasn’t long after you saved my life.” She continued, “I was just over nine when my mother showed up out of nowhere. She had a new husband in tow and she’d decided, some four years after dumping me on the Camerons, that she wanted me.”
    “Must’ve been hard for you to leave after living with them for so long,” Dan said. “From what I understand, you were like a sister to the boys.”
    “And they were like brothers to me. Aunt Grace, Timothy, Maria, and the boys were the only family I’d known during that time.” A lump rose in Renee’s throat. “I cried for weeks after my mother and stepfather picked me up and I begged to come back. Of course that didn’t happen.”
    “You said something about living in Philadelphia.” Dan took another swig of his beer.
    “That’s where they took me.” Renee shook her head. “Couldn’t have been much farther away.”
    “No doubt it wasn’t easy being a country girl forced to live smack dab in the middle of one hell of a big city,” he said.
    Renee didn’t answer for a moment. Instead she drank from her margarita glass and felt the tequila warming her as the drink rolled down her throat.
    She set her glass down. “It was awful. But I managed to survive city life and here I am today.”
    He held her gaze. “Are you planning on staying long?”
    “Now that I’ve been back, I want to,” she said quietly.
    “What about your boyfriend?” Dan asked.
    She looked away from him. When she met his gaze again, she said, “No, he doesn’t want to stay. As a matter of fact, he wants to leave tomorrow for Phoenix when he gets back from Tucson with the rental car.”
    Dan’s expression didn’t tell her anything about what he might be thinking at that moment. “What are you going to do?”
    She clenched her hands beneath the table as she thought about the way Jerry had talked to her this morning. She wanted to stay in the San Rafael Valley and now she didn’t want to go anywhere with Jerry. “I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do,” she finally said.
    Dan rested his forearm on the table, and he was running his fingers through the condensation on his beer bottle. She had the feeling he wanted to say something but he kept to himself whatever it was that he might want to express.
    “You mentioned you were an office manager,” Dan said. “Did you like working for the advertising agency?”
     “It was all right.” She shrugged. “I didn’t have the money to go to the university so finding something that paid