“Don’t be. I could have stopped you.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. “Why didn’t you?”

She didn’t answer.

I leaned over her again, bracing myself above her shoulders. “Hey. Look at me.”

She didn’t, so I put two fingers beneath her chin and turned her head. Her lower lip trembled, and I had to kiss it.

“Stop,” she said softly.

A smile hooked up one side of my mouth. “Now you want me to stop?”

“Yes. You’re confusing me.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m confused myself.”

“Why did you come up here, anyway?”

“Because I’ve been fucking miserable all week. Because that night with you was the best I’ve felt in years. Because it doesn’t matter why I should stay away from you—I can’t.”

“Don’t tease me. Do you really mean that?”

I nodded. “I got all the way out to the parking lot tonight. I got in my car. I turned the fucking engine on, and I sat there, getting more and more furious with myself that I couldn’t go.”

“Really?”

“Really. Finally I gave in. But I knew it wasn’t fair after what I’d said, so I promised myself that if you told me to leave, I would.”

She looked amused. “I did tell you to leave.”

“Uh, yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Clearly that was a promise I should not have made.”

“It’s okay.” Her hands swept up and down my back, her touch sending warm shivers across my skin. “I want to be with you.”

“I want to be with you too.” I brushed some hair back from her forehead that had come loose from the knot on top of her head. “But I’m not going to be able to make any promises, Frannie. I meant what I said—I’ve got nothing to offer you.”

“That’s not true,” she said with that irresistibly stubborn tilt of her chin.

“You say that now, but just wait. My life is complete chaos. Most days I feel like I’m hanging on by a thread.”

“You don’t need to worry about me, Mack. I don’t want to be another responsibility in your life. And I don’t need promises or labels.” She took a breath. “I just want to feel like I’m somebody to you.”

I smiled down at her. “You are. But we’ll have to be careful. I don’t want the kids to—” Suddenly I realized something—we hadn’t been careful tonight. I panicked, backing off from her again. “Oh, shit, Frannie. I didn’t even think. I—”

She silenced me with one hand. “No worries. I’m on the pill, and I’m very, very good about taking it.”

I relaxed a little. “Okay. Whew. That’s good.” The last thing I needed was another baby right now. Or ever.

“Give me a few minutes, okay?” she asked, getting to her feet. “If you want a drink or anything, help yourself. I don’t have any beer, but I’ve got wine, whiskey, vodka, tequila …”

I raised my brow. “Should I be worried about you?”

Laughing, she gathered her clothing and headed for her room. “No. I’m not a huge drinker, but I do like a little whiskey by the fire now and then.”

“Whiskey by the fire it is.” I looked around and noticed the fireplace at the far end of the room. Scooping up my clothing, I threw on my underwear, jeans, and shirt and wandered into the kitchen.

By the time Frannie came out of her bedroom, dressed the same way she had been before but with her hair loose around her shoulders, I’d poured two glasses of whiskey and lit the gas fireplace, which lacked the romance of real wood in my opinion, but it warmed the room.

She smiled as she joined me on the couch, tucking her legs beneath her. “This is nice.”

I took her glass from the little coffee table and handed it to her. “It is. Much nicer than what I was heading home to, which was an empty house.”

She took a sip of her whiskey. “So the girls are with your sister?”

“Yeah. Jodie. She’s got a daughter a year older than Millie and a son Felicity’s age. They all get along really well. I wish they lived closer.”

“I wish Sylvia lived closer too. I hardly know my nieces and nephew.” She smiled sadly.

“How is Sylvia? I haven’t spoken to her in a while.”

“Good, I guess. I don’t talk to her much, either.” Frannie tipped up her glass again, then stared into it. “That’s something I’d like to change, though. I should reach out to her. Are you close to your sister?”

I nodded. “Pretty close. I mean, we’re both busy with kids and jobs, but we were tight growing up. She’s only seventeen months older than me. And she’s married to a great guy. They make it look easy.”

She looked up at me, her expression curious. “Can I ask what happened with your marriage, or is it too personal?”

I exhaled and tossed back some more whiskey. “My marriage was tough from the start. Carla got pregnant with Millie right before I was set to deploy, and we got married fast before I left. We’d only known each other for a few months.”

“Marines, right?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“What made you join?”

“I was kinda lost for a while in my early twenties, didn’t really know what I wanted to do yet. I’d dropped out of college because I was too immature to handle the responsibility and my parents told me they weren’t going to pay for me to fuck around anymore.” I took another drink. “I needed to burn off some energy and I wanted to get out of here. One day I decided being a Marine sounded kind of badass. So I signed up.”

“And you were in Afghanistan?”

I nodded. “Twice. And I was in Iraq too. So I was gone a lot during the early years of our marriage, while the older two girls were little. That didn’t help. Then, when I got out, I wanted to move back up here where I’d grown up, and she wanted to move to Georgia, where she was from. She said she’d agree to come here if I agreed to have another baby. So we did both.” I paused to take a drink. “But it didn’t matter where we lived. We never really made each other happy. Eventually resentment set in.”

“Resentment over what?” She took another small sip.

“Oh God, you name it. She resented feeling like I’d married her out of a sense of duty more than anything else. She resented being left alone with kids while I was deployed. Then when I came home and struggled to readjust to civilian life, she resented me for not bouncing back faster. She also felt abandoned again because I worked during the day, managing a hardware store, and went to classes at night so I could finish my degree.”

Frannie nodded slowly and took another sip. “How’d you end up at Cloverleigh? Did Sylvia get you the job here?”

“Yeah. I’d finished my degree and was looking for a better job, and I ran into her one day when she was home. She introduced me to your dad.”

“Did things get better once you had a good job?”

“Not really. We fought all the time, and when we weren’t fighting, there was a lot of angry silence.”

“That must have been awful.”

“It was.” I frowned. “I tried to make it work, I really did—especially for the kids’ sake. But nothing I did or said was right, and I got tired of being the bad guy. Eventually I stopped trying, and she ran off with someone else.”