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only to say so.”
    â€œThat’s not what I said, or what I meant. I’m just saying you do come ’round.”
    â€œI thought I could come ’round when you weren’t there as well. Like today. Just to see if she’d come back. I could do a few chores for you while I was there.”
    â€œYou don’t need to find work to come by. You’re always welcome.”
    It softened her, not only that he said it, but that he meant it. “I know, but I like keeping busy. So I’ll slip in from time to time since you don’t mind.”
    â€œAnd you’ll tell me if you see her again?”
    â€œYou’ll be the first.” She rose to carry her bowl and mug to the sink. “Do you think . . .” She trailed off, shook her head.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNo, it’s nothing. Foolish.”
    He came up behind her, gave her neck a quick squeeze with his clever fingers. She wanted to arch and purr like a cat, but knew better. “If you can’t be foolish with a friend, who else is there?”
    â€œWell, I was wondering if love really lasts like that, through death and time.”
    â€œIt’s the only thing that really lasts.”
    â€œHave you ever been in love?”
    â€œNot so it took root, and if it doesn’t, I suppose it’s not love at all.”
    She let out a sigh that surprised them both. “If it takes root in one and not the other, it has to be the worst thing in the world.”
    He felt a quiver in his heart that he took for sympathy. “There, Brenna darling, have you gone and fallen in love on me?”
    She jerked, whirled, gaped at him. He was watching her with such—such bloody affection, such patience and sympathy, she could have beaten him black and blue. Instead, she just shoved clear of him and snatched up her toolbox. “Shawn Gallagher, you are truly a great idiot of a man.”
    With her nose in the air and her tools clanking, she stalked out.
    He only shook his head, then went back to his cleaning up. With that little quiver around his heart again, he wondered who it was that O’Toole had set her sights on.
    Whoever, Shawn thought, slamming a cupboard door just a little too forcefully, the man had better be worthy of her.

    Â 
THREE

B RENNA WASN’T IN the best of moods when she clomped into the Gallagher house. She didn’t knock— didn’t think to. She’d been breezing in and out of the old house, just as Darcy breezed in and out of the O’Tooles’, for as long as either could remember.
    The house had changed here and there over the years. Hadn’t she and her father laid the new floor in the kitchen—as pretty a blue as a summer sky—not five winters back? And she herself had papered Darcy’s room with that lovely pattern of baby rosebuds the June before last.
    But though there’d been a bit of fussing here and fussing there, the heart of the house remained the same. It was a welcoming place, and the walls seemed to ring with music even when no one was playing.
    Now that Aidan and Jude lived there, fresh flowers were always tucked into vases and bowls and bottles, as Jude had a fondness for them. And Brenna knew Jude had plans to do more planting in the spring and had talked of having Brenna build her an arbor.
    Something old-fashioned was needed, to Brenna’s mind, to suit the look of the house with its old stone and sturdy wood and carelessly sprawling lines. She had something in her head she thought would suit, and would get to it by and by.
    Even as she entered the house with a scowl, the sound of Darcy’s laugh tripping down the steps had her lips twitching. Females, she thought as she headed upstairs, were so much more comfortable than men.
    Most men, most of the time.
    She found them in what had been Shawn’s room, though there was little left of him there save the bed and his old dresser. He’d taken the shelves that he’d had crammed