“Embarrassment burns a lot of calories.”

Sara followed that statement with another spoonful of ice cream. “I’m thinking of writing a diet book.”

“I don’t think your diet will catch on,” Janey said.

“It’s not the most pleasant way to lose weight.”

Janey shook her head. “It’s just that most women can’t stick to a diet for six days. You’ve been embarrassing yourself over Max for what, six years now?”

Sara dropped her spoon into the carton and sat back in her chair. Having the last half decade of her life boiled down to that one basic truth made her feel like throwing up.

“I’m sorry, Sara. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. But it’s only a matter of time before someone’s seriously injured or you’re completely bankrupt or both.”

“Yeah, a short time,” Sara agreed. “I almost wish I could stop loving Max. The only problem is how do I do it?”

Dear Reader,

I’ve always believed that humor is an essential part of love and marriage. After eighteen years, three kids and numerous pets, there’ve been times when my choice was to either laugh or scream. You know what I’m talking about, right? The kids give each other haircuts or the new puppy chews a hole in the living-room carpet and everyone else finds it hilarious, so you just have to laugh along with them.

Sara Lewis is having a lot of those moments lately, except she doesn’t need dogs or kids to be accident-prone. All she needs is Max Devlin. One look at him and she can’t remember she has feet, let alone what to do with them. Before she knows it, she’s involved in some sort of accident, and Max is laughing along with the whole town. Worse yet, everyone in the small, eccentric community of Erskine, Montana, knows she’s in love with him—everyone but Max!

When she confesses the truth, Max discovers just what she’s been going through—because suddenly he’s having accidents of his own. Can he overcome the messy divorce in his past and open his heart again before Sara leaves town for good—not only for his and Sara’s sake, but for the good of his eight-year-old son?

I hope you love Sara, Max and Joey, and their story, as much as I enjoyed bringing it to life. And look for the story of Sara’s best friend, Janey Walters, coming in September 2005.

Penny McCusker

Mad About Max

Penny McCusker

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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For Mom and Dad; it started fifty-five years ago. Nine kids, seventeen grandkids and eight great-grandkids later it’s still going strong. That’s love. And maybe a little insanity.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter One

“Please tell me that wasn’t superglue.”

Sara Lewis tore her gaze away from the gorgeous—and worried—blue eyes of Max Devlin, looking up to where her hands were flattened against the wall over his head. Even when she saw the damning evidence squished between her right palm and her third-grade class’s mangled Open House banner, she refused to admit it, even to herself.

If she admitted she was holding a drained tube of superglue in her hand, she might begin to wonder if there’d been any stray drops. And where they might have landed. That sort of speculation would only lead her to conclusions she’d be better off not drawing, conclusions like there was no way a stray drop could have landed on the floor. Not with her body plastered to Max’s. No, that kind of speculation would lead her right smack-dab into trouble.

As if she could have gotten into any more trouble.

She’d been standing on a chair, putting up the banner her third-grade class had created to welcome their parents to Erskine Elementary’s Open House. But her hands had jerked when she heard Max’s voice out in the hallway, and she’d torn it clear in half. She’d grabbed the tube of glue off her desk to save the irreplaceable strip of laboriously scrawled greetings and brilliant artwork, and jumped back on her chair, only to find Max already there. He’d grabbed one end of the banner, then dived for the other as it fluttered away. Now he was spread-eagled against the wall, clutching both ends of the banner, trapped by Sara and her chair.

She’d pulled the ragged ends of the banner together, but just as she’d started to glue them, Max had turned around and nearly knocked her over. “Hold still,” she’d said sharply, not quite allowing herself to notice that he was facing her now, that perfect male body against hers, that heart-stopping face only inches away. Instead, she’d asked him to hold the banner in place while she applied the glue. The rest was history. Or in her case infamy.

“Uh, Sara…” Max was trying to slide out from between her and the wall, but she met his eyes again and shook her head.

“Just a little longer, Max. I want to make sure the glue is dry.”

What she really needed was a moment to figure out how badly she’d humiliated herself this time. Experimentally, she stuck her backside out. Sure enough, the front of her red pleather skirt tented dead center, stuck fast to the lowermost pearl button on Max’s shirt—the button that was just above his belt buckle, which was right above his—

Sara slammed her hips back against his belly, an automatic reaction intended to halt the dangerous direction of her thoughts and hide the proof of her latest misadventure. It was like throwing fuel on the fire her imagination had started.

Max’s breath whooshed out, hot and moist against the inner slopes of her breasts. She didn’t waste time wondering how she could feel his breath right through her heavy angora sweater. It made perfect sense, considering that his face was buried between her breasts, his mouth right at the bottom of her breastbone.

Too bad the sweater wasn’t a V-neck, Sara caught herself thinking, a low, cleavage-baring V-neck. Her front-clasp bra would have posed no problem to a talented man like Max Devlin, and his mouth was there anyway. Blood rushed into her face, then drained away to throb deep and low, just about where his belt buckle was digging into her—

“Sara!”

She snapped back to reality, noting the exasperation in his voice, even muffled as it was by the regrettably turtle-necked sweater. Reluctantly, she arched away from him. The man had to breathe, after all.

“There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this,” she said in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. In fact, that tone amazed her, considering that she was pressed against a man she’d been secretly in love with for the better part of six years.

“There always is, Sara,” Max said, exasperation giving way to amusement. “There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for how Mrs. Tilford’s cat wound up on top of the church bell tower.”

Sara grimaced.

“There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Jenny Hastings went into the Crimp ’N Cut a blonde and came out a redhead. Barn-red.”

Sara cringed.

“And there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the new stained-glass window in the town hall looking more like an advertisement for a brothel than a reenactment of Erskine’s founding father rescuing the Indian maidens.”

She huffed out a breath, indignant. “I only broke the one pane.”

“Yeah, the pane between the grateful, kneeling maidens and the very happy Jim ‘Mountain Man’ Erskine.”

“The talk would die down if the mayor let me get the pane fixed instead of just shoving the rest of them together so it looked like the Indian maidens were, well, really grateful.”

“People are coming from miles around to see it,” Max reminded her. “He’d lose the vote of every businessman in town if he ruined the best moneymaker they’ve ever had.”

Sara huffed out another breath. It was a little hypocritical for the people of Erskine, Montana, to pick on her for something they were capitalizing on, especially when she did have a perfectly good reason for why it had happened, why bad luck seemed to follow her around like a black cloud. Except she couldn’t tell anyone what that reason was, especially not Max. Because he was the reason.

One look at him and all she could think about was how it would feel to have his mouth on hers, his hands on her body, the long, solid length of him pressing her down into a soft mattress or a haystack or against a wall…Sara glanced away from the white-painted cement block just inches from her face, but she couldn’t hide from the truth.

She loved a man who’d closed off his heart, a man who tossed up a barrier whenever a woman got too close to him. Except for her, Sara thought. He seemed perfectly content with her friendship, and she was too afraid of losing it to ask him for anything more, so she did her best to hide her feelings and, while she was concentrating on that, something embarrassing always happened.

But that wasn’t really the point, Sara reminded herself. The point was that she was superglued to Max Devlin.

“I’m sorry, Max.”

She didn’t have to elaborate. He looked down to where her skirt and his button were getting up close and personal, then at her face again. His expression, raised eyebrows and half smile, said it all.

“At least the superglue isn’t dripping anymore.”

“Sara, Sara, Sara,” he said with a chuckle that resonated through her ribs and did serious damage to her heart. “What am I going to do with you?”

She could have told him, if her breath hadn’t backed up in her lungs, if the thought of what she wanted him to do to her didn’t have all the blood draining out of her brain so she couldn’t even put words to the images that haunted her nights and dazzled her days. She would have told him, if she’d had the courage.

“Unstick me,” she said, then found herself almost wishing she was talking about more than her skirt.

Six years was a long time to love a man who only considered her a friend, a long time to love that man’s son as if he were her own. A long time to dream…Without Max there would be a huge hole in her life, but Sara wanted more than a friend. She wanted a man to sit down to dinner with each night, a man to share her joys and sorrows, a man to give her children of her own. The longer she held out for the impossible, the longer she would be ignoring the possible.

She stared down into Max’s laughing eyes and accepted that she was just too stubborn to believe anything was impossible.

“Is the banner all right?” Max asked.

Sarah took one last rewardingly deep breath and glanced up. Somehow she’d managed to repair the off-center tear so well, even she could barely see the seam from less than a foot away. “Move your hands,” she said.

Max dropped his arms, rolling his shoulders and whistling out a breath.

Sara eased her hands off the banner, first one, then the other, keeping them within easy slapping distance, just in case. The paper sagged a bit in the middle, then settled. She let out her pent-up breath. “It’s holding.”

“I’m sure glad to hear that.”

She let her arms drop, forgetting that she was standing on a child’s classroom chair. Max caught her around the hips just as she lost her footing on the slippery wooden seat.

Sara froze. Not just her body—her heart stopped, she quit breathing and time, as she knew it, ground to a halt. Her eyelids fluttered down, her gaze accidentally colliding with Max’s, eyes as blue as the flame of a Bunsen burner. He flexed his fingers, and every nerve in her body shrieked back to life. Her heart lurched into an unsteady rhythm, the blood pounding where his fingers bracketed her hips. Purely out of self-defense, she braced her hands on his shoulders and tried to climb down from the chair. Away from him.

The wash of cool air on her thighs stopped her. Of course, she thought, closing her eyes and heaving out a shaky breath, she was still joined to Max by the bonds of holy superglue. She longed to get naked with him, but not in her classroom, mere moments before twenty-five third-graders and their parents were due to arrive for Open House. She had to get out of this embarrassing situation before someone saw her. If that meant giving Max a close-up of her shockingly unteacherlike black satin panties, so be it.

Max wasn’t as anxious to put her modesty on the line as she was. “Uh, I think you should stay where you are,” he said, his hands tightening on her hips, his wary eyes on the way her hemline rose when she tried again to step down from the chair.

“Half the town is going to walk in that door in a few minutes.” Or a few seconds, Sara corrected, as the sound of voices and footsteps drifted in from the hallway, reminding her that her clock was at least five minutes slow.

Peep show and Max’s hands be damned, she jumped down from the chair and leaned to the right, grabbing the scissors off her desk. Max’s mouth dropped open, but Sara didn’t give him time to react to seeing a lethal weapon in the hand of someone who couldn’t walk straight half the time. She snipped, and in a show of grace and balance the likes of which no ballet dancer could have duplicated and no one in Erskine would have believed her capable, she raced to the peg across the room, grabbed her art apron off the hook and slipped it over her head, tying it and turning just as sixty pounds of eight-year-old launched himself into her arms.

“Hi, Sara—I mean, Miss Lewis,” Joey said, his arms tight about her waist.

Sara’s heart melted, all her self-consciousness draining away. “Hi yourself, Mr. Devlin.” She hugged Joey back, then let him go, her smile coming more easily and sincerely as she welcomed the students and parents streaming into the classroom. This was where she belonged, where she felt competent and confident, no matter what.

She didn’t look at Max again, didn’t have to assure herself that he’d found a way to cover that damning swatch of red pleather sticking to his shirt button. If anyone saw it and figured out why she was wearing a paint-blotched apron, he’d be just as embarrassed as she would.

“Hey, Sara—” Joey tugged on her sleeve, too, just in case his exuberant words didn’t get her attention.

“Hey, Joey.” She ruffled his sandy-brown hair, so much like his father’s. Max Devlin had it all in the looks department—sun-bleached hair that made her hands itch to brush it from his brow, sparkling blue eyes and a smile that always made her breath catch. His son was going to be just as big a heartbreaker when he grew up.

“Dad let me sleep over at Jason Hartfield’s last night.”

“Good for you.” And for Max, Sara thought as she hunkered down. Joey was the only family Max had; he rarely let the boy out of his sight for anything other than school. She was glad he’d realized that Joey was old enough to go farther afield than the old bunkhouse she rented on their ranch. And that he’d been wise enough to let him go. “Did you have a good time?”

“The best. We went hiking and had a bonfire and stayed up late watching scary movies and eating popcorn. It was almost ten o’clock before Mrs. Hartfield made us turn off the light.”

“Ten o’clock. Wow,” Sara said, suitably impressed. “And I’ll bet you were still up at five in the morning to help Jason with his chores ’cause that’s the kind of friend you are.”

He blushed, his grubby tennis shoe tracing the ribbons of color wound through the dark blue background of the new carpeting. “It was no big deal,” he mumbled. “Hey, did Dad tell you he gave me a colt of my own? He says I’m old enough now.”

He was growing too fast, Sara thought, her heart aching with love and pride, and a slight pang at how quickly time was passing. Not long ago he’d been a toddler she’d sung lullabies to, then a preschooler with such an appetite for knowledge that she’d had to teach him to read so she wouldn’t spend every spare minute reading to him. She’d battled back the same tears of pride and joy on his first day of school, and every milestone since, that she was experiencing now.

If there’d been any justice in the world Joey would have belonged to her instead of a woman who wanted fame and fortune badly enough to trade in a good man and a wonderful son for minor roles in B movies. But life didn’t work that way, and Sara counted herself lucky just for the blessings she’d been given.

Joey tugged on her sleeve, waiting until she focused on him again. “I named my colt Spielberg, Sara. He’s six months old and Dad’s going to help me raise him. I get to feed him and brush him—Dad says that’s so he’ll get used to me and start depending on me. And when Spielberg is two, Dad’s going to help me saddle-break him.”

“What a lucky kid you are.” Sara smiled and nudged him with her elbow, eight-year-old style, so he wouldn’t get embarrassed again. “If you want, I’ll lend you my video camera and you can document the whole thing.”

Joey’s eyes widened. His fondest wish was to become a movie director—which explained the colt’s name. “Would you really do that?”

“Absolutely. The camera just sits around most of the time, and I know you’ll take good care of it.”

“If he doesn’t, I’ll ground him for life,” Max said as he came to stand beside his son. He put one hand on Joey’s shoulder and reached the other out to her.

Sara took it, let him help her to her feet, then hung on to him when she wobbled unsteadily.

“You okay?” Max asked.

“My foot’s asleep,” she lied, letting go of his hand even though she had the perfect excuse to keep holding it. Most of the adults in the room were watching avidly, and she wasn’t about to give them any more entertainment than she had to. “Joey was just telling me about Spielberg—the horse, not the director.”

“Yeah,” Max chuckled. “I guess he caught the movie bug from his mom. You sure you want to hang that name on him, pal?”

“Yep,” Joey said matter-of-factly, then changed the subject between one breath and the next. “Hey, Sara—”

“Miss Lewis,” Max corrected, his deep voice sending shivers down Sara’s spine.

“Sorry, S—Miss Lewis. Dad and me’re going to the church hall for ice cream after the Open House. Are you coming, too?”

“Um…” Sara usually avoided the town dances, ice-cream socials and potluck dinners, afraid she’d do something clumsy and wind up ruining everyone’s time. She glanced at Max and knew that he knew what she was thinking. His sympathy made her want to cry, though it felt more like frustration than gratitude. “I don’t think so, Joey.”

“But everyone in town will be there, Sara. You can drive over with Dad and me in the pickup.”

“Sara has her own car,” Max pointed out.

“That would be dumb when we’re all going to the same place,” Joey said.

Max shrugged and gave Sara a resigned smile. “I think Joey wants you to come have ice cream with us.”

Not as much as she did. The three of them in the cab of Max’s pickup, headed to a town gathering, was like a picture of heaven to her. Like they were a real family… “I’ll think about it,” Sara said, knowing she’d already given it way too much thought for her own good. That dream was so big a part of her life that she was very careful not to indulge herself too much, in case she stepped over the line between fantasy and reality.

“Okay,” Joey said, his face lighting up when he spied the Hartfields coming in the door. “Jason’s here,” he said, all but dancing with excitement, then catapulting across the room to greet his friend before Max had time to do more than nod.

Sara glanced over at Max, whatever she’d been about to say incinerated when she caught him staring at her apron—right about the place where that little diamond-shaped hole in her skirt would be. Which reminded her…She let her gaze drift up, casually, to where the matching bit of red pleather was, or should have been.

“I tucked it down below my waistband,” Max said by way of explanation. “The shirt is so tight on the back of my neck I feel like it’s trying to saw its way through my spine, but what’s a little paralysis compared to a lady’s honor?”

Sara risked a glance at his face. He was smiling, his eyes sparkling like the sun on water.

She looked away before she did something stupid, like tell him just how desperately she loved him. “Thank you,” she managed to choke out.

“No problem,” Max said with the same kind of offhanded shrug his son used so often. “You getting a cold?”

Sara cleared her throat and kept her eyes off him so it wouldn’t tighten up again. “I guess I must be.”

“You should go home early, fix yourself a whiskey, lemon and honey and tuck yourself into bed with a hot-water bottle.”

“That sounds like just the cure.”

“Dad!”

“Gotta go, Sara. You take care of yourself.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Sara mumbled, looking up in time to see Max saunter off toward his son. And he knew just how to saunter, she thought as she watched his long, strong legs carry him and his jeans-clad backside away from her.

“You should tuck yourself into bed with something hot all right, but if I were you, I’d try the doctor rather than his cure.”

“Janey!” Sara glanced around, worried that someone had overheard her best friend—her only friend, aside from Max—and the one person she could confide in about Max. Without Janey Walters’s friendship, unquestioning support and wicked sense of humor, Sara knew she’d have gone off the deep end years ago.

“Relax,” Janey said. “I’m not about to let anyone hear me talking like that. I have a reputation to uphold in this town.”

“So do I,” Sara said glumly.

“Aw, poor Sara.” Janey stuck out her bottom lip in sympathy, and put her arm around Sara’s shoulders. “People just pick on you because you’re an outsider. One of them city gals,” she added in an overdone drawl.

“I’ve been here almost six years,” Sara muttered. “When do I get to be one of you folk?”

“When pigs fly,” Janey said matter-of-factly. “Either you grow up around here or you marry someone from around here—then you get accepted by default. It’s tradition.”

Sara felt even more dejected by that. “I can’t change the past, and it doesn’t look like I have much hope for the future, either.”

“Don’t take it so hard. Everyone knows you’re the best thing to hit this town since government ranching subsidies. Wondering what you’ll do next is more entertaining than anything on TV, and more lucrative, too.”

“Thanks,” Sara said on a heavy exhalation. “I’d managed to forget about the pool.”

Mike Shasta, owner of the Ersk Inn, had run the betting pools in town longer than anyone could remember. There were the normal sports, and things like who was going to have the prize bull at the county fair that year. Of course pretty much everyone voted for themselves in that one, and few of the ranchers had time to sit around watching sports, especially during the summer, so the baseball pool had never been what Mike called successful. Hockey came in the winter, so it typically did the best of all the sports pools.

But never as well as the Sara Lewis pool.

The Sara Lewis pool was a big white sheet of poster board that hung on the wall of the Ersk Inn, with dates across the top and times down the side, forming squares for each sixty-minute interval. People paid five dollars to put their name in a square, hoping they’d be lucky enough to choose the occurrence of her next accident. As technology went, it wasn’t exactly state of the art, but that poster board did the job. As a matter of fact, it got a lot of attention, Sara had heard. As if making a fool of herself every few weeks wasn’t enough, practically the whole town spent a good portion of their leisure time hoping she’d do it again and keeping a sharp eye out to make sure they didn’t miss it when she did. If anyone but Max had known why she was wearing a paint-stained art apron at Open House…

It didn’t bear thinking about. Much as she loved Janey and trusted her silence, Sara wouldn’t even tell her best friend that she’d accidentally superglued herself to Max. Of all the things she’d done, this was the most humiliating yet.

All she had to do, Sara told herself, was get through the rest of the evening with no one the wiser. It couldn’t be all that hard, and as the evening progressed, it seemed as if she might just pull it off. No one asked about her apron, and the scavenger hunt she and the children had set up was a big success, every parent ending up with a prize all the more precious for having been made by their own child’s hands. Sara stayed away from Max, which meant that she kept her composure.

And missed the moment when he let the cat out of the bag.

A school event was no different from any other social occasion in town. The women gathered in one corner to trade recipes and organize the next potluck. The men gathered in another to discuss the price of beef and swap fish stories. Aside from Joey, if there was anything in the world Max liked more than his ranch, it was fishing. And if there was one thing universal to great fishing stories, it was exaggeration.

Max apparently lifted his arms to lend credence to his latest one-that-got-away tale, and the red pleather-decorated button popped right out of the waistband of his pants.

It was the sudden hush from that corner of the room that first caught Sara’s attention. She glanced over in time to hear The Question.

“Hey, Max, what’s that on your button?”

Sara really didn’t blame Max. It was an accident, and if there was anything she understood it was accidents. Just like she understood when he fumbled for an answer, his gaze automatically shooting to her.

That stereotype about big, dumb cowboys was just that—a stereotype. As if it had been choreographed, the circle of men turned and looked at her, back at Max’s traitorous button, then back at her, this time their eyes dropping inevitably to her skirt—or what could be seen of it behind her apron. Her big, concealing apron.

The room erupted in shouts, questions about who had the winning square and laughter. Parents and students from the surrounding classes crowded in, attracted by the pandemonium, until the room was overflowing. Sara found herself at the front of the room, standing right beneath that troublesome banner as the whole embarrassing story came out.

After one glance at Max, his only assistance to shrug apologetically, Sara let everyone laugh and tease her good-naturedly, smiling and going along with the jokes. She caught sight of Jenny Hastings, her hair cropped boyishly short except for the tiniest fringe of barn-red. If Jenny could withstand the fallout of one of Sara’s episodes, Sara could surely take it—within reason.

She let the ribbing go on for a full fifteen minutes, then held up her hands, her sudden willingness to talk bringing an instant hush to the room. “All that matters is that we saved the banner,” she said, looking up at the item in question—just at the moment it decided to come loose.

The superglued center seam parted with a quiet whoosh, the two sides of the banner floating down right over her head. As if that wasn’t enough, the tacks she’d used to hold up the corners suddenly popped out, wreathing Sara in ten feet of white paper that smelled like crayon and felt like the weight of the world settling on her shoulders.

She slumped back against the blackboard, listening as everyone filed out of the room. Even when Max offered to help her, she sent him on his way. As accidents went, having a paper banner over her head wasn’t so bad. At least it hid her tears.

Chapter Two

“Hi, Dad!”

Max shouldered the fifty-pound sack of grain he’d been about to load into the back of his pickup and turned toward the entrance of the feed store to see Joey running in his direction. Sara stood in the open doorway, one hand on the jamb, the other lifted to shade her eyes from the bright sunshine so she could see into the dim interior.

Joey was halfway across the cavernous space when he veered off suddenly, like a heat-seeking missile. Only in Joey’s case, it was kittens that drew him, a whole carton of them with FREE written on the side in big, bold letters.

Just what he needed, Max thought as he bumped the sack up and off his shoulder, letting it fall onto the pile in the back of the pickup. Joey already had a hamster, three goldfish, a parakeet and two dogs, and those were the indoor pets. But even if he’d known about the kittens when he asked Sara to drop Joey off after school, Max still would’ve done it. It would be worth adding to the menagerie if he succeeded in dragging her out of her self-imposed isolation. And dragging, he figured, was exactly what it would take, considering that she was going to leave without even saying hello to him or goodbye to Joey.

“Sara, wait,” he called before she could do more than turn around.

For a minute it seemed she was going to pretend she hadn’t heard him. Then she turned back, stepped through the doorway and stood there, seeming about as relaxed as a sinner at the Pearly Gates.

Max supposed he should feel sorry for her, but he wasn’t really in a sympathetic mood. Impatient was more like it, with enough confusion thrown in to remind him that Sara was a woman and when a woman was involved in any sort of relationship, a man never completely understood what was going on. He knew Sara well enough to have a pretty good idea, though.

After one of her accidents, she usually kept a low profile, staying away from the more public places and the more vocal residents of Erskine. That had never included him before, but then, neither had one of her accidents.

She must still be embarrassed by what had happened two weeks ago, and no wonder. It couldn’t have been pleasant for Sara to have her hips pressed to his—to find herself stuck to a man she considered a brother. And being a woman, she just naturally couldn’t let it go and forget it like he could. At least not until they got the awkward first meeting over with.

“I’ve barely seen you in two weeks,” Max called out. “Come over and talk to me while I finish loading up.”

But instead of reaching for the next sack, he leaned against the side of his pickup, hooked his thumbs in his front pockets and watched Sara walk across the feed store. He couldn’t resist. Even with her normally bubbly personality weighted down by embarrassment, she exuded so much energy that a person’s eyes were naturally drawn to her.

Copper-colored curls bounced around her shoulders with every step. Her dark, lively eyes sparkled, and the corners of her mouth were lifted in the slight smile that rarely left her face. She wasn’t beautiful by the standards set for magazines or movie screens, but she had more charm and personality than any actress or model. And she was a lot more entertaining. Just watching her was a spectator sport, even on a day where the most interesting thing she did was choose what to wear.

Today it was a flame-bright orange sweater, black tights dotted with jack-o’-lanterns—in honor of the big day coming at the end of the week—and a black skirt that flared and floated around her slender thighs and hips with every jaunty step.

Max got a sudden, strong flash of the way those hips had felt between his palms two weeks ago, the resilient feel of her flesh where his fingers had gripped her, the warmth of all that tight, fake red leather. And then there’d been that hole she’d snipped in her skirt. He could have sworn he saw black lace through that hole.

He dropped that memory like a mental hot potato. Thinking about Sara and black lace at the same time was just wrong.

She belonged to the white-cotton set, that asexual group of females in every man’s life who baked cookies, stepped in to baby-sit at a moment’s notice and knew how to heal any injury with a Band-Aid and a kiss. Aside from Joey, Sara was the closest thing to a family Max had, and if there’d been a time, once, when he might have seen her in a different light, a more romantic light, he’d deep-sixed the thought before it could even begin to take hold.

He had a dismal record when it came to love and marriage—all the men in his family did. His grandmother had died young, leaving his grandfather alone to raise a young son and run a ranch. His father and mother had called it quits before they’d been married ten years, and his own marriage had lasted substantially less time. Instead of heeding the lessons he’d learned by example, Max had been young and foolish enough to try the “love conquers all” route. The only thing love conquered, he’d learned, was any man by the name of Devlin.

At least, Joey didn’t have to be shuttled from household to household, like he’d been. Julia, his ex-wife, hadn’t asked for anything from their marriage but her freedom. She’d wanted Hollywood, she had the looks for it, and Lord knows she’d done a damned good job acting like a wife and mother during their few years together.

No, that wasn’t entirely fair. They’d wanted different things, he and Julia, and she’d loved him once, enough to give him a son. For that alone he would never regret his marriage. And regardless of the terms of their divorce, she did her best by Joey, visiting when she could, occasionally calling him on the phone and having him out to stay with her in the summer, no matter what she had to do to swing it. Usually, though, it was just father and son. The same as it had always been in his family.

A man with that kind of sorry history had no right getting involved with any woman, let alone the settling kind like Sara. She deserved someone who could come to her fresh and loving, and give her the home and family she deserved.

It was just a matter of time before some lucky guy whisked her off to the altar and out of his life. When that day came, Max would be the first to congratulate her and wish her well. When that day came…

Frowning, he tore his eyes off her and bent to lift another sack of grain. But he knew when she stopped behind him, even before he caught a faint whiff of her perfume. “Where are you off to—” he paused to launch the sack off his shoulder and into the truck “—in such a hurry that you can’t even say hi to a friend?”

“Groceries,” she said. “It was either the diner or the market, and at least at the market I can stock up so I won’t have to eat out. Or shop again for a while.”

Anything to stay out of town until the hubbub blew over, Max interpreted, and had to hide his grin before he turned to face her. It was good to hear her sounding like her old self again. “You could always go out on the range and catch yourself a steer.”

She shook her head, the corners of her mouth curving up into a reluctant grin. “As long as they stay out of town, they’re safe from me.”

“Now that’s not strictly true, Sara. Remember the time old man Winston’s cows got out and wandered into the road? It’s a good thing I was fixing his fence when you happened by. If you hadn’t seen me waving my red flag of a shirt and shouting like a lunatic, you would’ve driven head-on into the middle of them.”

“Lucky for me you were there, Max, and that you happened to have your shirt off at the time so you could use it to catch my attention.”

“It was lucky, all right. You didn’t get hurt, and the cows started giving milk again after about a week or so.”

“If you’re trying to cheer me up, you can stop now.”

Max laughed, finally understanding her sarcasm. “I’m almost done here,” he said. “If you wait a few minutes, the human stomach and I will go to the market with you. We must be out of something the way Joey eats.”

Sara’s smile dimmed. “Thanks, Max, but I think…it might be better if I go alone. I mean, after the glue and all, you know…” She looked at the floor, her even white teeth worrying at her bottom lip before she met his eyes again. “I wouldn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea. About you and me.”

“I think we can risk being seen together in public without anyone getting the wrong idea.”

“Yeah,” Sara said on a heavy sigh, the thought of braving the teasing of her friends and neighbors obviously pulling her mood down again.

Max could have kicked himself for bringing it up after he’d worked so hard to make her smile, but he didn’t have to rack his brain for a way to cheer her up again. Joey did it for him. He ran up just then, two mixed-breed kittens clinging precariously to his jacket by their needle-sharp claws and mewing pitifully. “Mr. Landry says I can have them both.”

As grateful as he was for the return of Sara’s company, Max wasn’t about to reward his son with a pair of kittens. “They’re not even weaned yet, Joey.”

“They must be, Dad. The mom cat is gone and there’s a dog in there with them.”

“I know. Mr. Landry told me…I’m afraid the kittens’ mother died, son. It just so happened that Mr. Landry’s dog had weaned a litter of pups not long before, so he brought her in to see if she’d adopt the kittens and she did. It happens sometimes.”

Joey thought for a second, then shrugged as if it were an everyday occurrence for a dog to adopt a bunch of newborn kittens. Of course in his world, Max reflected sadly, mothers went away and life carried on.

“Can I have them when they’re weaned?” Joey asked, his one-track mind barely making a detour.

“Who’s going to take care of them all day while you’re at school?”

“Sara will let me bring them to school, won’t you, Sara? They can be…” Joey’s face scrunched up, but in the end he puffed out his breath in defeat. “What’s it called when they belong to the whole class?”

“Mascots?” Sara supplied.

“That’s it! They can be mascots to the third grade. We can all take turns bringing them home on the weekends.”

“I doubt Mrs. Erskine-Lippert will agree to that,” Sara said.

Joey snorted. “Ooh, the principal. I heard Mr. Jamison, the sixth-grade teacher, call her Mrs. Irksome. I was gonna look it up in the dictionary, but I figured it meant, you know, trouble. And I couldn’t spell it,” he added as an afterthought.

“You shouldn’t repeat things like that,” Max admonished. He managed to hide his smile, but his eyes, when he lifted them to meet Sara’s, were shining with amusement.

She couldn’t help smiling back, her sadness lifting as she watched father and son bicker good-naturedly over the kittens. She might not have Max’s love, let alone his ring on her finger, and she might not have a paper labeling her Joey’s mother, but she still got moments like this, precious pearls strung between the humdrum, lonely hours that made up the greater part of her life. And who, she asked herself, could ask for more than that?

“I’ll make you a deal,” Max said to his son, resorting to bribery when reason didn’t work. “If you leave the kittens here, I’ll take you to the diner and you can have anything you want.”

Joey stopped in midobjection. “Anything I want?”

“Yep, and we’ll take Sara with us and feed her some pie—just as soon as I’m finished.” He had to yell the last part because Joey was already running across the feed store to return the kittens to their cardboard home. “And then we’ll take you to the market afterward,” Max said to Sara.

“It’s nice of you to invite me, but—”

“No buts. It’s been two weeks since…you know,” he finished, bending to heft another sack and muscle it into the truck bed. “You can’t hide away forever.”

No, she couldn’t hide away forever, and even if she could, Sara thought, the people of Erskine would still be waiting to rub her nose in what had happened at the Open House. It wasn’t just that, however; she didn’t think she could bear to spend the next few hours with Max. For two weeks she’d been trying to forget those few seconds she’d spent plastered against him. Her memory was just too darned vivid; all she had to do was close her eyes and she was back there again, fighting a real battle with spontaneous combustion.

Watching him work only fanned the flames. He bent, lifted, twisted and dropped each sack, the slide and bunch of muscle beneath worn denim and plaid making her heart pound and her breath shorten until her head began to spin. She couldn’t have taken a steady step if her life depended on it; going to the diner with him would be sheer foolishness. Worse than tempting fate, she would be daring fate to make a fool of her again.

“Really, Max, I’d rather just go home and open a can of soup,” she said, her voice growing stronger when she pulled her gaze off his backside. “I have a lot of papers to grade tonight, anyway.”

“What papers?” Joey asked as he rejoined them. “You let us grade each other’s papers today.”

“And I still have to check them over,” she said to Joey, tweaking the hair that was growing past his collar. “Maybe your dad should take you to get a haircut, instead, and I’ll bake you a whole pie of your own this weekend. Cherry.”

Cherry pie was one of the basic food groups to Joey, but he didn’t even waver. “Nope. Dad promised me the diner and he never goes back on a promise.”

“Well, then, you guys have a good time, and maybe I’ll see you later at the ranch.”

“Nope, Sara, I promised you the diner and I never go back on a promise.” Max bent to lift the last sack of feed and heave it into the truck.

The combination of all those muscles flexing and the sexy little grunt he uttered completely stalled Sara’s thought processes. If Jack the Ripper had popped in and asked her to take a walk, she’d have wandered into the closest alley with him, no questions asked, so it was no wonder she said okay to Max.

She watched, dazed, as he pulled an old, faded bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his face, but it wasn’t until he yelled out to Mrs. Landry that he was leaving his truck in the feed store for a while that she snapped out of her haze and realized what she’d done.

Max gestured for her to precede him, and Sara had no choice. He figured he was helping her get over her latest humiliation, and she didn’t have the courage to tell him otherwise. Maybe if she didn’t look at him she’d be okay.

The street side of the feed store was a huge door that rolled aside to let vehicles in to be loaded. In the middle of the large door was a smaller pedestrian door. Max opened it, warning Sara to step over the lip at the bottom. And just to make sure she didn’t trip, he cupped her left elbow.

She tripped.

How could she stay upright with his fingers wrapped around her arm, shooting heat and need into her bloodstream in such a quick and overwhelming burst that she forgot she even had feet, let alone what she was supposed to do with them?

Max’s fingers tightened around her arm, hard enough to bruise, but Sara stumbled forward anyway, right into the flow of pedestrian traffic on the crowded sidewalk of the town’s main street. Her right arm shot out for balance, knocking a bag of groceries from old Mrs. Barnett’s arms. The sack hit the sidewalk, but Sara barely noticed the brown paper bottom burst open, disgorging an assortment of cans and boxes, along with a spreading puddle of white.

Max and Joey stooped to help the elderly woman salvage what she could of her groceries. Sara went after the half-dozen oranges that had tumbled out of the bag and headed for freedom, oblivious to the potential for disaster. She managed to scoop up five of them and place them in the shallow pocket formed when she lifted the hem of her sweater. The sixth orange insisted on giving her trouble, rolling and bumping down the sidewalk between the feet of unsuspecting pedestrians as though it had a will of its own and no concept of the laws of physics.

Sara ducked and weaved like a quarterback dodging line-men, cradling her sweaterload of oranges more carefully than any football, her goal an even half-dozen rather than seven points. But every time she reached down to grab that last orange, the obnoxious little fruit managed to skip away at the last instant.

Frustrated, she elbowed her way in front of Mr. Fellowes, the undertaker, and planted her foot sideways in front of the orange. It rolled to a nice, obedient stop less than a finger’s width from her arch, as if it were planning to stop there anyway. Sara bent to pick it up, and Mr. Fellowes ran smack dab into her backside.

They both went sprawling, the oranges flew out of Sara’s sweater, bounding off the boardwalk and down the curb. Right into the path of the delivery boy from Yee’s combination Chinese Laundry and Restaurant. He hit the brakes, too late to prevent the front tire of his bicycle from squishing a navel orange into aromatic, slippery pulp. The bike skidded, the delivery boy jumping off just before it slammed into the curb and lurched sideways.

The sack of Chinese food made a graceful arc as it flew out of the bicycle’s basket, the plastic bag flapping cheerfully before it plopped down on the sidewalk, right at Sara’s feet. The bundle of laundry in the rear basket slipped its paper and string constrictions, pelting her with some unfortunate man’s clothing.

And to top it all off, she’d drawn a crowd.

But then how could she not? she asked herself, as she pulled a pair of white boxers from her shoulder and dropped them at her feet. She stood in the midst of chaos, a bag of Chinese food, an undertaker, a delivery boy and his bicycle at her feet. A circle of white shirts and underwear surrounded her, with oranges supplying just the right splash of color here and there. All that was missing was a tent and a couple more rings.

The stunned silence was broken, finally, by Mr. Fellowes’s groan. Max eased his way through the circle of onlookers and helped the old man to his feet.

“I am so sorry, Mr. Fellowes,” Sara said, rushing to take his other arm and hold on to him until he recovered his balance. She didn’t look at Max. She couldn’t.

“Don’t give it another thought, my dear,” the undertaker said. “It was more my fault than yours. After all, I collided with you.”

Because she’d stopped dead in front of him. But Sara kept that to herself. Why give her friends and neighbors yet another reason to ridicule her?

Mr. Fellowes patted her hand, absently peering around him.

“Is something wrong? Aside from the obvious,” Sara added, sending the snickering crowd her best glare, the one that always silenced her third-grade class. It didn’t surprise her that it worked on the people of Erskine.

“I’m fine,” Mr. Fellowes said. “Only…you haven’t seen my eyeglasses, have you? I’m afraid I lost them when I bumped into you.”

“I’m sure they’re around here somewhere.” Sara took a step back and heard a sickening crunch. “Um…I think I found them.”

On the bright side, it was deathly quiet again. Except for the person at the back of the growing crowd who yelled, “I won!”

All Sara could think was that she’d lost. Again.

“SO WHAT DID YOU DO THEN?” Janey Walters asked, picking at the sweet-and-sour pork and cashew chicken still left on her plate.

“I did what I always do,” Sara said glumly. She’d assured Mr. Fellowes and Mrs. Barnett that she’d make reparation, and given Yee’s delivery boy all the cash she had on her. He’d insisted she take the sack of Chinese food, the little white containers mostly intact despite their foray into the world of flight. In the interests of escape, she’d accepted it without argument and hightailed it to Janey’s big Victorian house on the edge of town. “Max tried to talk me into going to the diner with him and Joey, but…” She raised one shoulder and let it fall again, her eyes on her plate of untouched Chinese food.

“The teasing didn’t use to bother you so much,” Janey observed.

“It’s not really the teasing, it’s just…” Sara sighed. “I don’t really know what it is, Janey. I couldn’t face the town, and I definitely couldn’t face Max.”

“Why not? Isn’t this partly his fault?”

“He can’t help how he feels.”

“Yes, he can. If he could see past the end of his nose—”

Sara shoved her plate away and bent forward, banging her head lightly on the tabletop.

Janey bit back the rest of what she’d been about to say. She felt as if she were swallowing a pincushion, but what kind of friend would she be if she vented her own anger and frustration when Sara was in no condition to hear it? “At least we got dinner out of it,” she said, instead.

Sara straightened, managing a half smile. “Cold, slightly bruised Chinese food?”

Janey shrugged. “Nothing a microwave couldn’t fix. And it beats leftovers, which is what was on the menu since I was dining solo tonight.” Jessie, her nine-year-old daughter, was across the street having dinner with Mrs. Halliwell. Jessie didn’t have any grandparents, Mrs. Halliwell didn’t have any grandchildren, and it gave Janey a night off, so everybody got something out of the arrangement.

She pushed back from the table and went to the fridge, returning with a half gallon of ice cream and a bottle of chocolate syrup. “And since you brought the main course, the least I can do is supply dessert.”

Sara took a spoon and the chocolate syrup, scooting her chair closer to Janey’s so she could be in easier reach of the calorie comfort. “What would I do without you?”

“I don’t know.” Janey took a big spoonful of ice cream, closing her eyes and moaning in sheer delight. “I can tell you one thing, though. Without you I’d still be a size eight. I’ve eaten so much ice cream in commiseration that none of my pants fit anymore. But you, you rat, haven’t gained an ounce.”

“Embarrassment burns a lot of calories,” Sara said around a mouthful of ice cream. “I’m thinking of writing a diet book.”

“I don’t think it’ll catch on.”

“It’s not the most pleasant way to lose weight.”

Janey shook her head. “It’s just that most women can’t stick to a diet for six days. You’ve been embarrassing yourself over Max ever since you came to Erskine.”

“Six years.” Sara set her spoon in the carton and sat back in her chair. Hearing it like that made the egg roll and ice cream in her stomach simmer and stir unpleasantly. Not that it wasn’t the truth, but having the past half decade of her life boiled down to that one basic truth made her feel like throwing up.

She’d met Max Devlin when she was nineteen, a bright-eyed, eager sophomore at Boston College. Max had been a senior, there on a track scholarship, and her student advisor; he’d always known somehow when she needed a sympathetic ear or a comforting shoulder, and he’d never failed to provide it—for the short time he could.

Before midterms, Max received news that his grandfather had died suddenly. Sara had ached for him, but even if she could have found a way to help him through his grief, there’d been no opportunity. He’d lost his father to a riding accident before he’d graduated from high school, and his mother had remarried and moved to Europe. With his grandfather gone, there’d been no one to run the ranch, and Max had been faced with a choice—sell or stay home. He never came back to Boston.

Time passed, Max married, and Sara convinced herself that what she’d felt for him was nothing but gratitude for the kindness he’d shown a shy, sheltered young woman out on her own in the world. They’d kept in touch, but the frequency had dropped significantly; Max didn’t have a lot of free time on his hands.

Not that Sara did, either. After graduating from college with a degree in education, her father convinced her to take a job in his company, training men and women with master’s and doctorate degrees how to use software systems they fobbed off on their admins anyway.

When Max’s marriage ended, leaving him with a two-year-old to look after and a ranch to run, Sara hadn’t hesitated. She’d arrived in Montana, a city girl so far out of her element she’d wondered how the ranchers punched cows without hurting their hands. She’d only planned to stay long enough to help Max get things under control, but every time she mentioned leaving, he got such a look of abandonment on his face she hadn’t had the heart to go through with it. In the end, it was her heart that had kept her there.

Looking back now, she could barely remember the decisions she’d made in those first confusing weeks after she realized she was in love with Max. Not that she regretted taking a job teaching third grade; she’d always longed to teach children anyway. Her new job was so much more rewarding than what she’d been doing in Boston. And it had just made sense for her to move into the old, unused bunkhouse on Max’s ranch so she could be closer to Joey. And Max. Someday, she’d hoped, he would fall in love with her and make them a family.

But it seemed that Julia had taken something with her, after all, when she’d walked out of Max’s life. His heart.

“I’m sorry, Sara,” Janey said, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

Sara dismissed that nonsense with a wave of her hand. “My feelings aren’t hurt, Janey. I’m just beginning to wonder what I’ve been doing here all these years.”

“Sounds like you’ve been talking to your mother again.”

Sara looked up, surprised. “I talk to my mother every week.”

“And she always campaigns for you to move back to Boston, so what’s different this time?”

“Maybe she’s right. Maybe Max won’t ever see me as more than a friend.”

Janey’s spoon clattered to the tabletop, her mouth and eyes going wide in overdone shock—which went ignored.

“Besides, Joey’s always been my excuse for staying, and he’s been self-sufficient for a while now,” Sara said, admitting it aloud for the first time, although she’d been thinking it more and more often. “Max really doesn’t need me around anymore, and my contract is up for renewal this year….”

“He’d be devastated if you went away.”

“Would he?”

“You’re a huge part of his life, Sara. He loves you.”

“As a friend.” Sara threw herself out of her chair, pacing the generous confines of the kitchen. “I want more, Janey. I want it all. What if he never wants the same from me?”

“Maybe he won’t, but you’ll never know unless you push him to make a choice.”

Sara snorted softly. “You know Max. If I force him to choose, I’ll lose his friendship.”

“Or gain his love. Look, Sara, in some ways your mom is right. You’ve spent six years—”

“‘Wasted’ is how Mom put it. I’ve wasted six years.”

“So it’s time to take the bull by the horns and tell Max how you feel.”

“Like you’re doing with Jessie’s father?”

“That’s different.” Janey slumped in her chair, scooping up a huge, half-melted glob of ice cream and letting it drip back into the carton. “I called him when I found out I was pregnant. He never called me back.”

“He should still know he has a daughter.”

“We’re talking about you.”

“Not anymore,” Sara said, then gave a little bittersweet laugh. “We’re quite a pair, Janey. Two young, attractive women with nothing to do but sit around and feel sorry for ourselves. There has to be a bright side to this.”

“There is—for Ben & Jerry’s.”

“Seriously, Janey. It’s time we stopped moping around and did something about what’s wrong with our lives. There have to be a couple of men out there who want a home and family—”

“Whoa!” Janey held her hands up, palms out. “I have a home, and Jessie is the only family I need. Despite my recent tendency to wallow, I see no reason to shackle myself to some burping, farting, dirty-laundry machine.”

Sara dropped back into her chair, tracing the pattern on the antique lace tablecloth with one fingernail. “Aren’t you ever lonely?”

“Sure, but that’s no excuse to get married. It’s a known fact that ninety-nine percent of men completely stop talking within five days of their own wedding anyway.”

“I’m not buying it.” Sara had learned early on that Janey’s tough exterior was only a defense mechanism to protect her soft heart. “You want to meet someone and get married as much as any woman. You just aren’t ready to admit it yet.”

“If I ever do, slap me.”

Janey put on a belligerent face, but the look in her eyes nearly brought Sara to tears.

“But, hey,” Janey continued, sitting up suddenly. “You definitely need to change a few things. It’s only a matter of time before someone’s seriously injured or you’re completely bankrupt or both.”

“Yeah, a short time,” Sara agreed. “I almost wish…” She let the thought hang, then shook her head.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Uh-uh,” Janey said. “I just ingested a couple thousand calories for you. Spit it out.”

“Well…there was this moment when I was superglued to Max—Stop smirking, Janey.”

“You have to admit it’s funny.”

Sara couldn’t help grinning a little. “Okay, so it was funny. After. But there was this moment where I almost wished I could—” She swallowed, then said the rest on a rush. “I almost wished I could stop loving Max.”

Janey burst out laughing, holding her stomach and sliding down in her chair.

Sara crossed her arms and glared until her best friend got herself under control. “It sounds stupid, but the way I feel about Max is the root of all my problems. If I could stop loving him so desperately and just accept that he’ll only ever be my friend, I could still be a part of Joey’s life, but I could be happy, too. The only problem is, how do I do it?”

Janey put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands. “Considering my ex-boyfriends, falling out of love was never a problem for me. But Max is such a great guy. And he is drop-dead gorgeous. Just seeing him is enough to make any woman fall in love.” She shot Sara a teasing look out of the corner of her eye. “I’d be tempted to go after him myself, but thankfully I don’t see him all that often.”

Sara leaped out of her chair. “That’s it!”

“What?”

“It just might work.” She began to pace, gnawing on a thumbnail.

“What?”

“All my accidents happen when Max is around, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if I stop seeing him, I won’t have any more accidents.”

“And how does that make you fall out of love with him?”

“I don’t know,” Sara said, her elation dimming a bit at the thought of how empty her life was going to be when Max didn’t fill it anymore. “I only know that seeing him all the time keeps me hoping. Maybe if he’s out of my life physically, my heart will forget about him.” It didn’t make any sense, even to her own ears, but she was desperate.

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” Janey got up and hugged her hard, then handed her a tissue.

“So how are you going to stop seeing him when you live about five feet from his back door? And when the man relies on you for everything but sex, and you’d be giving him that, too, if he’d ever asked.”

“Jeez, Janey, just say what you think.”

“You don’t want to know what I really think. And you haven’t answered my question.”

“I guess I’ll just have to avoid him,” Sara said with a shrug. “And when he asks for something, I’ll just say no.”

“Would you like me to write it on the back of your hand so you don’t forget how to spell it?”

“I think I can manage,” Sara said. “I have to.”

Chapter Three

After the Chinese food and ice cream, they’d moved on to Jack Daniel’s, the only man, according to Janey, who really knew how to comfort a woman. Sara was usually a rum-and-Coke woman, heavy on the Coke, or maybe a Baileys Irish Cream if she was feeling especially adventurous, but she had to admit Janey was right this time. The first shot of whiskey burned her throat and turned her stomach. The second still had her gasping for air, but it hit her bloodstream like a warm massage. By the third she was singing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and doing her tap routine from when she was eleven years old. It wasn’t the song she’d tap-danced to—the two didn’t even go together very well—and she had to imagine the tapping sounds because her loafers didn’t really do the job on Janey’s linoleum. But that song just demanded some life-affirming action and the one she’d chosen wasn’t going into effect until she saw Max.

Her pleasant buzz started to fade after that. By the time Janey, who’d appointed herself deignated driver and switched to coffee early on, pulled into Max’s driveway, Sara was already rethinking her get-it-over-with-now strategy.

“Shhh,” she said to Janey, putting her finger over her pursed lips when the tires crunched and popped on the gravel drive. It didn’t do anything to lessen the noise but it made her feel better.

“Having second thoughts?”

“Second? It’s more like…” She looked at her hands, fingers spread, then lifted her feet, one at a time. “I can’t count that high just now.”

Janey chuckled.

“I know that laugh,” Sara mumbled. “You don’t think I’ll do it, but I will. I’ll just do it tomorrow.”

“I don’t think you’ll remember any of this tomorrow.” Janey turned off the lights and eased past Max’s house.

She pulled up in front of the old bunkhouse Sara had converted into a little cottage, complete with a white picket fence and a generous garden, the frost-browned vines and bare trees decorated like a graveyard for Halloween. Every year when Sara put up the wooden gravestones with funny sayings, she’d secretly dedicated one to her perpetually broken heart. Well, that was going to change. “When New Year’s Day rolls around, I won’t need a resolution,” she said to Janey. “I’ll already be over Max.”

“From the look of things, you won’t have to wait till tomorrow to get started on that resolution.”

Sara twisted around in her seat, this way and that, groaning when she realized what Janey was talking about. Either Bigfoot was coming toward her car or Max was. She would’ve preferred Bigfoot. A three-hundred-pound ape-man with an unpredictable temperament would’ve been much easier to face.

Janey glanced over at Sara, muttering, “I’ll buy you a couple of minutes to get it together, then you’re on your own,” and she popped out of the car, crossing her arms on the top of the door.

Max pulled up short when he saw it was her rather than Sara. He turned toward the passenger side of the windshield, but the way Janey was staring at him was a challenge he couldn’t ignore. “Don’t you have someplace else to be?” he asked her.

“Jessie is spending the night at Mrs. Halliwell’s.”

Max frowned. “That doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

Janey lifted up a shoulder, and gave him a crooked smile. “Moral support,” she said. “And entertainment—at your expense, hopefully.”

Max just shook his head. They had a…unique relationship. No matter what he said or did, Janey would roll her eyes or huff out a breath, as if he had absolutely no clue about anything. Max wrote if off as a kind of younger sister/older brother thing that came from knowing each other their entire lives. If it had been anything else, Janey would’ve told him, he figured. She was nothing if not outspoken.

He went around to the other side of the car. At least with Sara, he knew where he stood. “I figured you were at Janey’s,” he said once she’d rolled the window down. “I wish you’d called, though.”

Sara tried to defend herself, but she had to put her head down first. Jack Daniel’s, loyal and thoughtful guy that he was, suddenly wanted to come to her rescue, and not in a good way. Then again, throwing up at Max’s feet would definitely send him running in the other direction. Or maybe not.

Considering the kind of man he was, Max would almost certainly see her tucked up safely in bed, maybe sit with her for a while to make sure she wasn’t going to get sick and choke on her own vomit. The picture that went along with that thought—minus the vomit—had her sitting up in her seat. Smiling. Max in her bedroom, inches away from her bed. Within easy touching distance. All she’d have to do was take his hand, invite him into her bed and indulge every fantasy she’d ever had. It might mean losing him forever—or it might mean that he’d finally acknowledge her real feelings and consider the possibility that he could grow to love her, too. It was a risk she’d never been willing to take before, but with Jack Daniel’s to help her…

Jack was supposed to help her do something else, Sara thought fuzzily, something entirely different. Wasn’t he? Her head spun like a roulette wheel, risk opposite caution, fear across from courage, all of them separated by big sections of necessity. By the time Max knocked on her window, necessity had shoved all those other pesky options out of the picture.

Sara took a deep breath and looked up at him. Her heart lurched like it always did, but only a little. It was too heavy to give a really good lurch.

He opened the door and offered to help her out. Sara ignored his hand. She waited until he dropped it and stepped back before she levered herself out of the car, awkwardly but on her own.

“You okay?” he asked, all concern, from the deep timbre of his voice to the slight frown between his eyes.

She nodded.

“I was getting worried, Sara. After this afternoon…” He reached for her again.

She held up both hands to ward him off, bending into the car to gather her purse and her courage. And then her balance. She had something to say to Max. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it had to be done or he’d never give her the space she needed to get over him. Just once, she told herself. If she did it right, she’d only have to do it once. She straightened slowly, grabbing on to the open door so she wouldn’t have to wait for her head to stop spinning. “Max—”

“Why don’t you come in the house? We’re eating popcorn and watching The Mummy for the umpteenth time.”

The Mummy was one of her favorite movies, but not for the action or the really amazing special effects, or even the bumbling hero and endangered heroine. She always found herself hoping those two dead Egyptians in love for thousands of years would find a way to be together.

“Come inside,” Max said softly, homing in on her indecision. “Joey is worried about you, too.”

Sara closed her eyes, stifling the intentionally rude thing she’d been about to say. She’d forgotten about Joey. Max would eventually understand why she’d had to stop being his friend until she could be only his friend. But she was going to have to be very careful about how she alienated the father if she was going to avoid hurting the son. She turned to face him, taking a step forward so he couldn’t possibly misunderstand her. “I don’t wanna watch a movie. I’m going t’bed.”

Max took a step back, waving a hand in front of his face. “Are you drunk?”

And she’d enunciated so carefully, too. “Maybe just a li’l.”

He glared over at Janey. “This is your idea of making her feel better?”

“Now I have somewhere else to be,” Janey said. She slid into the car and fired it up.

Max took Sara’s purse and slid his hand under her elbow, steering her out of the way as Janey peeled off in a small shower of gravel. “Leave it to Janey to get you drunk.”

Sara wrenched her arm out of his hand, then had to catch herself before she spun completely around. “It’s not Janey’s fault. I got myself drunk.”

“She should’ve called me. I’d have come to get you.” He tried to take her arm again.

Sara stepped back and, just for good measure, snatched her purse from his hand. It took her two tries, but it still felt good. “Janey’s not responsible for me, Max. Neither are you.”

He stopped in midstride. “I know that, Sara,” he said, his voice very deep and solemn. Hurt. “But I think of you as a—”

“Don’t say it!” She winced as her own screeching voice cut through her head like a railroad spike. Apparently she was getting started on the hangover already. Great. That meant she was sobering up. But drunk or sober or somewhere in between, she had to finish what she’d started before Jack deserted her entirely. “I’m not your sister, Max. I’m thirty, no twenty-nine, years old and more’n capa-capa—I’ve been making my own decisions and my own mistakes for a long time.

“Of course, noooobody forgets the mistakes, but why can’t you remember that at least eighty—seventy—” She stopped and thought really hard, but she seemed to be having an awful lot of trouble with numbers tonight. “Most of the time I manage to live my life without tripping over anything or gluing myself to anyone. But does anybody notice that? No, you all congregate at the Ersk Inn—and by the way that’s the stupidest name I’ve ever heard for anything—and you sit around and drink beer and talk about when Sara Lewis is going to damage the town again.”

Max rubbed at the spot on his chest where she’d been poking him to make her point, his handsome face creased in lines of confusion. “I’ve spent my share of time at the inn, Sara. You got the sitting around and drinking beer part right, but mostly we just watch whatever sporting event is on the big screen. Hardly anyone ever brings up your name, and I’ve never bought one of those squares.”

“No, but you always seem to be around when someone wins.”

“So it’s my fault?”

Sara sank her teeth into her bottom lip, realizing what she’d said. If Max figured out that he played some role in her clumsiness, he’d wonder why. It was a question she didn’t want him asking. Not now that she’d finally found the strength to let go of her dream instead of sitting around waiting for it to come true while life passed her by. The decision made her sick to her stomach, but empowerment was so liberating—it was as if she’d taken her first deep breath after a lifetime of struggling for oxygen. “No, Max, it’s not your fault. I just want it to stop. I can’t live like this anymore.”

“Aw, Sara.”

She almost stepped into Max’s outstretched arms, one last brotherly hug that she could fantasize meant something else entirely. Instead she stepped around him and headed for her front door. “Just go away, Max.”

“But—”

“Please, just leave me alone.”

She slipped inside and closed the door behind her, then leaned back against it as tears started to stream down her face.

Jack Daniel’s was a whiz at courage, but he wasn’t very good at deadening the pain.

MAX SCOOPED UP one last bucket of grain and dumped it into the trough for the milk cows, then opened the fifty-gallon drum of cracked corn to fill the chickens’ feed pan. Joey usually did both chores, but he and Jason Hartfield had been trading off sleepovers just about every Saturday night, and this weekend was Joey’s turn to stay over there.

He missed Joey, but he knew his son would be back in the morning. Sara wouldn’t.

Oh, she was still living at the ranch, but she hadn’t said more than hello and goodbye since that last unfortunate incident Halloween week. It was almost Thanksgiving. Max was beginning to wonder who was going to cook the turkey. Okay, he allowed, that sounded a little self-serving, but that was what friends did, they took care of each other, compensated for one another’s shortcomings. Sara helped him muddle through the domestic side of life and he did stuff like shovel her walk in the winter, change the oil in her car, chop wood…

The sound of an ax thwacking home drifted to him, and Max realized it had been going on for some time while he’d been moping, a kind of somber background music for his self-pity. It puzzled him for a second. None of his neighbors lived close enough for it to be coming from another ranch, and while they all got along pretty well, none of them liked him enough to just drop by and chop a stack of wood—which meant it had to be Sara. She’d finally emerged from her house.

With an ax in her hand.

He dropped the pan of chicken feed. Cracked corn poured into his boots and scattered over the floor. Max ignored the mess and the discomfort, racing out of the barn and across the yard, plowing through knee-deep drifts of snow. He skidded around the corner of her cottage on one foot, arms flung out for balance, his mouth opened on a shout that would have worked a lot better if he’d had any breath left in his body.

He gulped in a huge, painfully cold lungful of air and yelled “Sara!” just as she lifted the ax.

With a shriek she froze on the upstroke and kept going, the heavy ax dragging her over to sprawl flat on her back. The powdery snow puffed up around her, then drifted back down like her own miniblizzard, dusting her in white, face and all. Max pinned his lips between his teeth and slogged over to help her to her feet.

Sara ignored his hand. Her cutting glare might even have made him feel a little bit chastened if she hadn’t spent the next couple of minutes floundering around in her puffy green coat like a turned-over turtle. She finally managed to roll onto her side, then crawl to her feet, leaving behind a snow angel that looked more like a Lizzie Borden silhouette, complete with murder weapon.

Max’s amusement completely evaporated when she bent, picked up the ax and tried to walk around him. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, stepping between her and the woodpile.

“Chopping wood,” she said in her best third-grade teacher’s voice, reasonable and patient. “I use it to heat my house, remember?”

“How could I forget when I always chop it for you?”

“Well, now you won’t have to.” She lifted the ax and took a step forward.

He crossed his arms and held his ground. “You’re not chopping wood, Sara. That’s my job.”

“Not anymore.” But she dropped the ax head to rest on the ground. Safely. “Weren’t you listening three weeks ago?”

“Well, yeah, but…you were drunk.”

Sara’s breath puffed out in a cloud of white. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t know what I was saying. Or that I don’t remember what you said.”

“I really didn’t mean to imply you couldn’t take care of yourself, but…” You’re Sara, he finished to himself, Clumsy, artless, scattered-as-a-handful-of-packing-popcorn-in-a-windstorm Sara. His best friend in the whole world. “I’m sorry if I offended you.”

“You didn’t offend me, Max. I’m used to people thinking of me as hopeless. What bothers me more is that you didn’t really hear what I said.”

That was exactly what his ex-wife had always accused him of, but Max shook off the thought almost as soon as it reared its ugly head. Sara and Julia were nothing alike.

“Of course I remember what you said.” He shut one eye and tried to remember. “You said, ‘I can’t live like this anymore.’ But like I said, Sara, I thought you were—” He got a good look at her face and swallowed the word “drunk,” and, just to be safe, decided against mentioning her unfortunate tendency to leave chaos in her path every once in a while—which was the other reason he’d decided that statement had nothing to do with him. Now he had the sneaking suspicion she’d aimed that dart much closer to home—and he was wearing the bull’s-eye. “What did I do wrong?”

The way she nibbled on her lower lip and looked away confirmed it.

“Just tell me and I’ll take it back or apologize for it or fix it or…” He spread his hands. “I’ll do whatever I can to get things back to normal, Sara. I miss you.” More than he’d ever believed possible, enough to drag that confession from him, which was really saying something for a man who considered “hi” an emotional outburst.

Baring his heart, however, only seemed to have saddened her more. “It’s not you, Max.”

“Then it’s the accidents?”

Sara lifted her shoulders and let them droop in a dejected shrug. “I’m not too pleased with making a fool of myself every few weeks, but the accidents are just the symptom of a bigger problem.”

“So what’s the bigger problem?”

“It’s me.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Don’t yell at me.”

“Don’t—” Max shoved his cold-reddened hands back through his hair, pacing away then back. “You want me to listen to you, but you’re not saying anything. You’ve been sulking for weeks and when I ask you why—”

“I haven’t been sulking!”

“Really? I used to talk to you every day, but I’ve barely seen you since Halloween. You’re hardly ever home before dark, and even when you are here you only come out of your house to get in your car and leave again. If that’s not sulking, then what is it?”

“I’ve been busy,” she muttered.

“Everyone’s busy. If I did something to make you angry, that’s fine, but at least tell me why I’m being punished.”

“I’m not punishing you.”

But she couldn’t look at him, either, Max noticed. “It feels like it.”

“I’m sorry for that, but you just have to understand that I can’t—I don’t—I’m unhappy.”

“You’re unhappy?” She seemed relieved to have that off her chest, but all that revelation did was heat his temper up a few more degrees. Julia had said that a lot. And then she’d left. He paced away, hands in pockets, kicking at the drifts of snow. “If you expect me to say anything remotely helpful, you’re going to have to give me more to work with.” He thought he’d said that in an incredibly even tone of voice, but when he turned back, Sara didn’t seem all that impressed. She appeared…irritated. She sounded it, too.

“I made the decision to come here six years ago, Max. It was my choice and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

“And we’re grateful, Sara. More than grateful. I don’t know what I’d have done without you. If I haven’t said that enough—”

“It’s not that,” she said, shoving his gratitude aside with a wave of her mittened hands. “Much as I lo—” Her eyes lifted to his, then skipped away before he got any clue as to what was going on inside her. “Much as I’d love to spend the rest of my life taking care of you and Joey,” she said so fast the words tumbled over one another, “I want a home and family of my own.”

“Damn it,” Max said on an outrush of breath that emptied his lungs and left him gasping. And damn her for catching him off guard with something he hadn’t thought about in years—six to be exact. A home and family were what he’d wanted when he married Julia, and he’d gotten them—not the way he’d hoped, and he wouldn’t trade Joey for anything in the world—but damn Sara for reminding him that Joey would be an only child. “Nobody’s preventing you from having those things, Sara.”

She looked up at him, her eyes narrowing in a very un-Sara-like way. “So it’s okay if I just move out, get on with my life? You should’ve told me a long time ago that you didn’t care if I was around or not.”

“Who said that?”

“You did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

She snorted. “You’re hardly broken up at the prospect of me leaving, Max. How am I supposed to take that?”

“I was trying to be supportive.”

“You mean you were humoring me.”

“No, I wasn’t….” He rubbed at his temples. It felt as if his head was going to explode. “You’ve been so confused lately. I just…didn’t think you were serious.” He dug at a half-buried log with the toe of his boot and jammed his hands in his coat pockets, looking up at her without lifting his head. “Are you?”

“Would you be upset if I left?”

“Joey—”

“I’m not talking about Joey.” Sara closed the distance between them, waiting until he met her eyes. “How would you feel, Max?”

Max found himself standing behind the woodpile without knowing how he’d gotten there, except that panic had something to do with it. One minute everything was fine, then suddenly Sara was unhappy. Talking about leaving. The next thing he knew, she’d be out the door, exactly like Julia. Except in Sara’s case she’d go back to her family in Boston, probably marry some junior VP handpicked by her father. And when she left, he’d have to pick up the pieces as he’d done before. Unless he made sure he wasn’t breakable this time. “What do my feelings have to do with it?” he demanded.

“They just do, Max.”

“It doesn’t sound to me like you even know how you feel about it.”

She tried to answer, but he walked away while he still could.

“Let me know if you ever figure it out,” he said over his shoulder.

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