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back until I get things sorted out. Right now I’m going to sleep, and I hope the mice don’t decide they want their couch back.”
    They arranged their sleeping bags and turned down the lantern. Wade gave her a pillow and ordered Tucker out to the porch.
    “I don’t mind if he stays in the house,” Bronwynn said, pulling off her shoes and crawling into her flannel-lined bed.
    “I mind,” Wade said, toeing off his loafers. “He ate a whole plate of burritos for supper.”
    “Oh. Well, good night.” The pillow had his scent on it, she thought, burrowing her face deeper against it—a pleasant, clean, male scent. He must have taken it right off his own bed. The idea unfurled a velvety ribbon of awareness inside her.
    “Night,” Wade murmured, settling into the soft down bag.
    Silence crept into the room with the stillness of night.
    “Wade?” Bronwynn asked softly.
    “Hmmm?”
    “Thanks for coming back.”

THREE
    B ROWNYNN WAS AWAKE just before dawn. Soft gray light and a cool breeze spilled in through the broken front window. On the floor, not three feet away from the couch, a little mouse looked up at her, as startled as she was. It dropped the cookie crumb it had been breakfasting on and dashed away.
    Wade was sprawled on his stomach, perpendicular to the foot of the sofa. He had left his sleeping bag unzipped, and the top flap was only half covering him. His right knee was drawn up to the side, the toe of his sock only a few inches from their pile of shoes. His white dress shirt had come untucked. At the highest point in the curve of his shirttail, a triangle of bare skin was visible above the waistband of his slacks. He looked cuddly with his hair disheveled and his long, thick eyelashes laying softly against his cheeks. He must have been a heart-stealing little boy, she thought.
    Oh, no you don’t, Bronwynn. You can’t go falling for him. A: You’ve got to deal with what went wrong with Ross. B: You just met Wade Grayson. C: He’s a stuffed shirt—albeit a stuffed shirt who’s a secret sweetheart, but a stuffed shirt just the same.
    The man was there for rest and relaxation, and he was wearing a necktie. That fact alone should have been enough to warn her away from him.
    Her first priority had to be sorting out her life. For twenty-nine years her life had flowed in a strong current that simply had swept her along. The last two years, however, there had been rocks and rapids. Now she felt as though she’d been washed up on shore, battered and bruised. It was time to take a breather. She had to get her feet planted firmly on the ground and her head cleared before she could plunge back in.
    Slowly she sat up and leaned back against the arm of the sofa, drawing her sleeping bag up around her, a look of wonder on her face. When was the last time she had needed to examine options before deciding on a course her life should take? Never, she realized.
    Things simply had happened for her. Her modeling career had taken her straight from high school to high fashion. Just when she had been nearing a point where she would have had to decide to retire or fall from the ranks of the top cover girls to jobs for “older” models, her mother’s illness had made the decision for her. After her mother had passed away—her father having died in a car accident only days before—Bronwynn had followed her mother’s wishes and spent a year raising funds for the Cancer Society. Her wedding to Ross marked the end of that year.
    What now?
    A trip to the bathroom for starters. She had figured out there would be no running water without electricity, because the well had an electric pump. But there were four bathrooms in the house, and if they had been neglected the way the rest of the house had, they would still have water in them, therefore she could flush, she thought.
    Wade cracked an eye open as Bronwynn tiptoed from the room. When she was gone, he rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, yawning and rubbing a