But before I could use my own eyebrows to telegraph something back—like No, I’m chickening out, get us out of here immediately—Dex followed Mitch’s line of sight and spotted me. Dammit. “Hey, Stace.” He said my name easily, as though he hadn’t broken my heart outside a hotel room in Willow Creek a week ago, and sort-of apologized for it a couple days later.

“Hey.” The word came out as a wheeze, and I wasn’t even wearing a corset. I tried again, aiming for casual. “Hey. Dex. Hey. How’s it . . .”

“Seen Daniel around?” Mitch cut to the chase. God bless him.

“Oh, yeah.” Dex pointed at the stage. “He’s back there; just go around to the right to get to the backstage area. But you should go now. Show’s starting in a couple minutes.” He grinned at me. “About time you showed up. He said he’d never see you again, which is great because now he owes me twenty bucks.”

“There you go.” Mitch physically turned me around and sent me toward the stage with a little shove in the middle of my back. I walked away just as Dex turned toward April, his eyes alight with appreciation.

“Hey.” The word was pure speculation.

“Absolutely not.” I could practically hear April’s eye roll.

The Dueling Kilts were due to take the stage in four minutes, according to both my phone and the schedule on our map, and even though it was just the first show of the day, most of the benches were full of patrons, fanning themselves with their paper maps while they waited for the show to start. I skirted around the house right side of the audience, heading for a black-curtained doorway. I slipped through the curtain to find myself in a backstage area that was roughly the size of a broom closet. The curtain swung down behind me, obscuring me from the audience, and my breath stopped because there he was, half-bent over a cardboard box of Kilts merchandise. After heartbreak and farewell confessional emails and complete absence for days, Daniel was now barely five feet away from me. It was too sudden. It was too much.

He must have heard the choked sound my breath made, because he turned around and froze, looking as stunned as I felt. The stack of T-shirts in his arms fell back into the box. “Stacey,” he said. Or maybe he said. His voice seemed to be as strong as mine, which was to say, not very much at all.

“Hey.” My voice worked this time. Better than it had when I’d been talking to Dex, anyway. I should have known; everything about me was better with Daniel than it had ever been with Dex.

“What are you . . .” He shook his head a little while his eyes roamed over me, drinking me in like . . . well, like I was a cold glass of water on a day as hot as today. “How are you here?” he finally asked, his voice filled with something that sounded like wonder. He looked as though he wanted to smile, but didn’t know if he could just yet.

Now that the shock of seeing him was over, and now that I knew he wasn’t going to throw me out immediately, much of my nervousness fell away. I shrugged, as though I drove across the state to intercept the man I loved before he walked out of my life forever on a daily basis. “Got a ride.”

He didn’t respond, he just kept looking at me as if I were a mirage that might disappear, and I remembered that I had more to say. I took a breath that was more shake than inhale, but it would have to do. “You were wrong about something.”

“I was?” His brow furrowed, and his expression became guarded. I could practically see his shoulders tense up as he braced himself for whatever onslaught I was going to throw his way.

“Yeah.” I tried for a smile, but it wasn’t coming yet. “You said you didn’t have anything to offer me. That I wouldn’t want a life on the road with you. But—”

“Look out, coming through!” Dex pushed through the curtain and bumped me in the back, driving me straight into Daniel. His hands went to my hips instinctively, steadying me, and I barely caught Dex’s smile as he walked past us and onto the stage. “Sorry,” he said over his shoulder at us. “Gotta start the show.”

I watched Dex go and then, as much as I hated to leave Daniel’s embrace, I took a step back and tugged on his arm. “Come on,” I said, nodding toward the black curtain he’d just come through. “Is there somewhere we can go? Someplace a little quieter, so we can . . .”

“No. We can’t.” He pulled me back toward him, and I wasn’t terribly unhappy about that, despite his words. “The show’s about to start. The audience will see us if we try to leave. We have to stay back here so we’re not a distraction.”

I blinked up at him. “So you were just going to hang out here while the show went on?”

“No. I came back here to grab the shirts for the merch stand after the show. I wasn’t planning on being here while the show was going on.” He shrugged. “You kinda ambushed me here.”

“Oh.” I bit my lower lip. “Sorry.”

“I’m not complaining.” His hand flexed on the small of my back, and a smile teased at the corners of his mouth. My heart soared at that almost-smile. That was how far gone I was for this guy: a hint of a smile was all it took. “But I’m afraid you’re stuck in here with me till the show’s over.”

“Oh,” I said again. “Okay.” I looked back at the black curtain. “Any other MacLeans about to barrel through here?”

“Nope.” Daniel’s laugh was a warm chuckle in my ear, and I shivered despite the heat of the day. I’d missed him so much. “The others are out in the house, and they just hop on stage from there.”

Sure enough, as if on cue, the sound of a fiddle cut through the murmur of the chatting audience, quieting them down, and Dex’s voice rang out from the stage, roughly six feet from where we were standing, the same spiel I heard every summer, every time the Dueling Kilts started a show. That little bit of patter was what drove it home for me. This was what they did. Not just at our Faire, but everywhere. This same show, all over the country, all year long. It had to be repetitive as hell. But I still wanted in.

“What were you saying?” He pitched his voice low, since we were only a few feet from the audience, and I leaned in to hear him because there were also loud musical instruments just on the other side of the stage curtain.

Right. I forged ahead. “You said you had nothing to offer me. Nothing I’d want. But you’re wrong. This”—I gestured around us, taking in the stage, this tiny broom closet we were in, the entire Renaissance festival around us—“This is it. What you have is what I want. This life. Right here.” I took a step toward him, which pretty much closed the remaining distance between us. It was cramped back there. “With you.” I rested a hand on his waist; it felt so good to be touching him again.

His breath caught. “Do you mean that?”

“I do.” I nodded vigorously. “So, tell me.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Tell you what?”

“Tell me,” I said again. “You said in your email that . . .” My voice trailed off as the music on stage finally filtered through my consciousness. It had taken a couple verses for me to realize what the guys were playing out there.

Weigh heigh and up she rises

Weigh heigh and up she rises

Weigh heigh and up she rises

Early in the morning

“Oh, listen,” I said. “It’s our song.” That got me another warm chuckle as Daniel’s other hand slid from my hip to the small of my back, and the heat of his skin through the cotton of my dress was almost too much to take.

“They don’t usually open with that. Tell you what?” he asked again, his voice low and directly in my ear, barely loud enough to hear over the music coming from the other side of the stage curtain.

Now my smile felt real, and not like a mask at all. We should have been somewhere private at a moment like this. But there was something very, very right about telling him how I felt here, in the heat and dust of a Renaissance faire, with his cousins performing a few feet away and an audience just out of sight.

I drew back in his arms, studying his face, loving the light that had come into his green eyes. “No more writing,” I said. “No more emails. Tell me to my face. Tell me how you feel. And I’ll tell you how glad I am that you aren’t your cousin.”

His eyebrows rose, and now the smile came full force to his mouth. The joy in his face looked like a sunrise. “You are?”

I nodded. “I’ll tell you that I’ve always had a thing for tall redheads that are on the lean side.”

“Oh, really.” He would have looked dubious if he hadn’t been smiling like that.

“Really,” I insisted. “Much, much more than huge, gross, muscly guys.”

“Thank God for that,” he said, just before he bent to me, and his kiss felt like coming home.

“I mean, eight packs,” I said against his mouth. “Ick. Who needs ’em.”

“Okay, that’s enough.” But I could feel his smile against my lips, which only made me kiss him harder.