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to me.”
    She nearly dropped the fork at his abrupt conversational switch. But really, how could she blame him for asking the question? They hadn’t had a chance to talk much about it beyond her earlier, “
Yes, the wedding is off. And by the way, your brother has gone god-knows-where.
”
    “I’ll do my best.” She wanted to be as honest as possible with him, despite knowing she had to keep Stu’s secret.
    Ugh. This was going to be a hard conversation. The first of many to come if she wasn’t mistaken.
    She put down the fork on the side of the plate and pushed it away from her. She wasn’t hungry anymore, anyway.
    “You probably know that Stu and I have been friends for a really long time. Since college.”
    “He always said you made him laugh.”
    She smiled at the comment. “He made me laugh, too. Did he tell you the first time we met was a nude-drawing class?”
    Sean’s lips twitched a little bit again and she found herself wishing he would let himself smile. But, again, his mouth flattened out before that could happen.
    “No.”
    Rebecca shook her head. “I probably should have known right then and there that I wasn’t cut out for being an artist.” She wrinkled her nose. “If it had been a naked woman then maybe I could have done it with a straight face, but a naked old man… Well, it was just so gross…”
    He didn’t say anything, simply raised an eyebrow, and she realized she was getting off track.
    “Anyway, fast forward ten years later, and I needed a job.” And an escape. From her mistakes. “Stu offered me one here at the inn.” She looked around the inn’s kitchen, at all the upgrades she’d helped make in the past nine months. “I love working here. I absolutely love it.”
    “Did you and Stu date in college?”
    “No. We were just friends.”
    “When did that change?”
    She dreaded this next part of her explanation. Because this was where it got sticky and didn’t totally add up—even in her own mind. But she felt that she owed Stu’s brother the fullest explanation she could give him. She would have told Stu’s parents the same thing she was about to tell Sean, but they’d never actually come out and asked her. Unfortunately, it had been so awkward between them since Stu left town that she hadn’t felt comfortable just blurting it out.
    She had to take a deep breath before answering. “It didn’t. Not really.” She picked a chocolate crumb off the stainless-steel countertop with the tip of her index finger and absentmindedly licked it off. “That was the problem,in the end. I think we both were far more enamored with the idea of getting married and settling down than we were of each other.”
    Sean was silent for a long moment. “So you didn’t love him?”
    Rebecca didn’t like the way he said it, like she’d set out to purposely hurt his brother.
    “Of course I love Stu. I’ve loved him practically from the moment I met him.” She was sitting straighter on her stool now, her shoulders back, her chin up. “But as a friend.”
    “How could it have taken you so long to realize this? You were engaged for months.”
    “When I saw Andi and Nate together,” she admitted softly, “I knew I could never settle for anything less than that kind of love.”
    She couldn’t believe she was saying these deeply personal things to a man she’d met only hours before. A man she wasn’t sure liked her very much.
    But Rebecca didn’t know how to lie.
    And the truth was, she didn’t want to lie about her emotions anymore, about what her heart did or didn’t feel.
    Next time around the relationship block, she wanted love. Real love.
    Not the false promises she’d let herself believe for so long.
    “So when you realized this, you broke it off with him.”
    “I was going to, but he—”
    She stopped, realizing what she’d been about to say. When Stu had begged her not to tell anyone he hadn’t specifically added his brother’s name to the list, but she’d made a