My cheeks flush, and if he notices, he doesn’t comment. He’s too engrossed in my impending lesson—all business. He holds up his knife and nods for me to do the same. Super. I guess I really am getting a lesson in knife work with a gap so wide between our bodies I’d have to stretch just to get our elbows to touch. How sexy.

For the next ten minutes, Ryan drones on and on about how the knife should never leave the cutting board, and the blade should rock back and forth, letting me move through the potato faster. Honestly, I’m bored to tears. I couldn’t care less about this dang blade. This is nothing like when we were making donuts side by side. Instead, Ryan’s brows furrow, and he’s serious—joyless.

I pause my practice and look up at him. “You know, I had no idea that you even liked to cook—back in high school, I mean,” I say, interrupting his monologue on the various techniques of rocking the blade at different angles.

He freezes, and I see something flash across his eyes. “No? Huh.”

“You never mentioned it. Not once.”

His attention is back on his work. “Not exactly surprising. We never talked back then unless we were trying to annoy each other.” He’s right. And now that breaks my heart. So many wasted years.

“Well, tell me now then.” I lean my hip against the counter and look up at him. “When did you get into it?”

“June, we have a lot to get done. Let’s just focus on getting the dinner made before we have to get ready for the rehearsal.”

Oh, I see. He expects me to open up about my life, but he gets to keep all his secrets inside? I don’t think so.

“What are you doing?” he asks, sounding close to amusement.

“I’M…CARRYING…YOU…INTO…THE…SHOWER!” I say with my arms wrapped around Ryan’s gigantic body, using all my strength to try to lift him off the ground. Someone please call Superman. He’s the only one who can get this job done. Ryan is clearly made of lead. “Make yourself lighter!”

He laughs, turns around, and picks me up by my armpits, setting me back onto my perch on the counter (apparently, I wasn’t that much help in the slicing department). I find it ridiculously unfair that he can just move me around like a rag doll, and I can’t even push him an inch.

But I’m not so easily deterred. I reach for the sink sprayer and aim it at Ryan’s chest, but I don’t wait for him to spill his secrets. Nope. I turn on that cold water and blast him like a machine gun of liquid. Otherwise known as a water gun.

His shoulders jump, and he drops the knife onto the counter, but that’s the most startle I get out of him. He rests his hands on the counter and takes the stream of cold water like a war hero. Then, slowly, his gaze shifts to me, and I see retaliation in their depths. His dark eyes flash fire.

They say when you get close to death, you can feel it. I feel it now.

I drop the sink sprayer and bolt up onto the counter, jumping off the island to the other side. Ryan is fast, though. He’s rounding the kitchen island and racing toward me. I don’t know what he’ll do when he catches me, and I don’t want to find out.

I race out the front door, squealing in a way that I’m not proud of as I run toward my backyard. I feel Ryan close on my heels, and when I glance over my shoulder and find miles and miles of his toned, tan abdomen instead of his drenched shirt, my steps falter. When did he take that off, and how did I miss it?

I land hard on the ground.

A better man would check to make sure I’m not hurt. Ryan is not one of those men.

He dives onto the ground and pins me down so he can jab his fingers into my ribs until I’m practically screaming from laughter. How dare he remember that I’m highly ticklish! I want to murder him. Or run my hands up and down his abs. One of those two things.

Finally, the torture stops, and I open my eyes. He’s smiling. A warm, heart-wrenching, let’s-do-this-forever kind of smile, and I feel a piece of the ice around my heart break off. I wish I wasn’t this girl. The one protecting her heart like it’s made of spun glass. He’s still pinning me down, but there’s a new tenderness in his eyes as he shifts his weight to his elbow and uses his other hand to brush my wild hair out of my face.

“I used to cook with my mom,” he says quietly, and both my rapid breathing and smile fade into something softer. “Anytime I had a bad day but didn’t want to talk about it, she’d pull me into the kitchen with her, and we’d cook something together. It was our thing. By the time whatever we were making came out of the oven, I had told her everything that was bothering me. And somehow, just having her listen made me feel better.” He gives a sad smile. “The day she died, I went in the kitchen and cooked her favorite lasagna. It went in the trash when it was finished because I didn’t have an appetite for a while after she died, but that’s how I got into cooking. It’s how I remember her.”

“I didn’t know.”

His thumb traces my jaw. “Because I didn’t tell you.”

“I wish I had known back then.”

“It’s okay. You were nice to me when I was feeling my worst after she died. I think it was the only truce we’ve ever had.”

“Yeah, but still. I wish I knew that about you and your mom—that you liked to cook. That you were hurting more than you let on. I wish I knew you back then.”

“I wish a lot of things about that time. If I could go back, I’d do it differently.”

But we can’t go back. And even if we could, would he really change anything? “If things were different between us back then, you might not have gone to France and become a chef. You would have missed out on doing something you love.”

His eyes leave mine for the first time to stray to where his elbow is holding up his weight. “Right.”

My brows pinch together. “You do love it, don’t you?”

Those deep-brown eyes slide to mine, and I’m not able to read them. He opens his mouth, but before words come out, I hear a car door closing in my driveway. He and I both jerk away from each other and look up into the smirking face of my brother, Jake, and my niece, Sam.

“Hey, June. I see your enemy is here.”

My face is on fire as I look at Ryan propped up beside me, shirtless, with a crap-eating grin on his face. I shove him away from me at the same time that I look at my brother and say, “I hate him.”

Jake’s eyebrows raise and lower as he says, “Yeah. Looks like it.”

Just go ahead and add Jake’s name to my list of people I’m going to murder.

Chapter 15 June

“Sooooo,” says Jake while reclining on my couch and stretching his arms over the back.“Do you want to talk about the elephant in the room?”

“No,” I say, glancing toward the back door, which Ryan, Sam, and Daisy just disappeared through.

Daisy is Sam’s seizure-assist dog and goes with her everywhere. This morning, they had a dentist appointment, and Daisy had to be on her best behavior, so Sam took her into the backyard to toss the ball and give her some fun after a long morning of working. Ryan said he loves dogs and wanted to go, too, but I think he was just trying to give me and Jake a minute to gossip behind his back. Why does he keep getting better and better?

“You two looked pretty cozy when I pulled up.” Jake is wearing a grin the size of the Grand Canyon.

“I said no. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh, come on. How many times did you sing ‘Evie and Jake sitting in a tree’ while Evie and I were dating? I think I get to tease you a little. It’s my brotherly duty.”

“Where are Evie and Jonathan today?”

Jake laughs. “Nice deflection.”

I smile. “I learned it from the best.”

“Fine. I’ll let it go. She’s training a new group of volunteers that will help raise the newest litter of puppies. She took Jonathan with her.”

That’s how Jake and Evie first met. She runs a service dog organization called Southern Service Paws. Sam has epilepsy and needed an assist dog to help during her seizures, and Jake needed a woman to help him and Sam put their lives back together (though he didn’t realize it at the time). Evie helped in both cases. They got married a few years ago and had my little nephew, Jonathan, last year. Basically, they have the kind of life that you want to scroll past quickly on Instagram because they are so cute it makes you nauseous. And jealous. I love them.

“Cool, cool, cool,” I say, twitching with nervous energy as I keep glancing back toward the door. I think if Jake hadn’t interrupted us, Ryan and I would have kissed. We’d probably still be kissing, and I’m not sure what to do with that realization. I need to talk to Jake about all of this, but I’m too scared. It will make whatever is happening between me and Ryan real.

Jake eyes my bouncing knee with amusement and says, “You sure you don’t want to talk about him?”