ebastian walked into the carriage house feeling as if he’d been blind-sided with a two-by-four. What the hell had just happened? One moment everything had been just fine, and then Clare had started talking about feelings and commitment and love. Where had all that come from? One moment he’d been thinking about how great everything was between them, and in the next, she said she didn’t want to see him anymore.

“What the fuck?”

His father turned from where he stood looking out the window at the Wingate backyard. “What was that about?”

Sebastian set the Brookstone sack on the sofa. “I got you a massager for your back.”

“Thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”

“I wanted to.”

Leo turned from the window. “Why is Clare upset?”

He looked into his father’s eyes and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I might be old, but I’m not senile. I know that you two have been seeing each other.”

“Well, it’s over.” Even though he said it, he still couldn’t wrap his brain around it.

“She’s such a nice sweet girl. I hate to see her upset.”

“That’s bullshit! She’s not a nice sweet girl,” he exploded. “I’m your son, and it doesn’t seem to matter to you at all that I might be ‘upset.’”

Leo’s bushy brows lowered. “Of course it matters. I just thought you were the one to…put an end to things.”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Sebastian sat on the couch and covered his face with his hands when what he really felt like doing was ramming his head through a wall. “Everything was great, perfect, and then just like a woman, she had to fuck it up.”

Leo removed the paper sack and sat beside him. “What happened?”

Sebastian dropped his hand to his lap. “I wish I knew. We were having a good time. Then she sees her old boyfriend, and the next thing I know, she’s telling me she wants more.” He took a deep breath and let it out. He still absolutely could not believe what had just happened. “She told me that she loves me.”

“What did you say?”

“I don’t know. It was a real shock and just hit me right out of nowhere.” He turned and looked at his father and realized that this was only the second time the two of them were talking about something besides fishing and cars and the weather. The first time since he’d dropped the globe at his mother’s house. He frowned. “I think I said that I like her.” Which was true. He liked her more than any woman he could recall being with.

“Ouch.” Leo winced.

“What’s wrong with that? I do like her.” He liked everything about her. He liked to put his hand in the small of her back when they walked into a room. He liked the smell of her neck and the sound of her laugher. He even liked that everyone thought she was a sweet girl and he alone knew her wicked thoughts. And what did he get for liking her? She’d kicked him in the chest.

“I’m afraid your mother and I weren’t very good examples of love and marriage and relationships.”

“That’s true.” But as much as he’d like to blame his life on his parents, he was almost thirty-six, and there was something pathetic about a man his age blaming his commitment problems on his mother and father. Commitment problems? Women in his past had told him he had commitment problems, but he’d never thought it was true. He’d never thought he had a problem committing to anything. It took a lot of dedication and commitment to chase down stories and get them in print. But of course that wasn’t the same thing. Women were a hell of a lot tougher to figure out.

“I thought I made her happy,” he said, and felt a weight settle in his chest. “Why couldn’t she just leave it alone? Why do women have to change things?”

“Because they’re women. That’s what they do.” Leo shrugged his shoulders. “I’m an old man and I’ve never figured them out.”

The doorbell rang, and Leo’s knee cracked as he carefully pushed himself off the couch. “I’ll be right back.” He moved across the living room and opened the front door. Joyce’s voice filled the entry of the carriage house.

“Claresta called a cab, then ran out the front door. Did something happen that I should know about?”

Leo shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

“Did something happen between Clare and Sebastian?”

Sebastian half expected his father to spill the sordid details, and that he’d once again be banished from Joyce Land.

“I wouldn’t know,” Leo said. “But if it did, the two kids are adults and they’ll work it out.”

“I just don’t think I can have Sebastian upsetting her.”

“Did Clare tell you Sebastian upset her?”

“No, but she never tells me what’s going on in her life.”

“I don’t have anything to tell you either.”

Joyce sighed. “Well, if you hear anything, let me know.”

“Will do.”

Sebastian stood as his father reentered the room. He felt restless, like he was going to come apart. He had to get out of there. He had to put distance between himself and Clare. “I’m going home,” he said.

Surprise stopped Leo in his tracks. “Now?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s kind of late to set out for Seattle. Why don’t you wait until morning?”

Sebastian shook his head. “If I get tired, I’ll stop.” But he sincerely doubted he’d get tired. He was too pissed off. He’d only unloaded one duffel from his car, and now he walked into his bedroom and grabbed it. Within twenty minutes he was headed north on I-84.

He drove straight through. Six and a half hours of nothing but asphalt and anger. She said she loved him. Well, that had been news to him. The last time he’d checked, she wanted to be friends. In January she’d specifically told him that if he wanted to see other women, to just let her know. Like she’d be real cool with that. The funny thing was, he hadn’t even considered it. Not once. Now all of a sudden she wanted more.

She loved him. Love. Love came with strings. It was never just given. There were always things attached to love. Commitment. Expectations. Change.

For some six and a half hours he went around and around, over and over and every other which way in his head. Thoughts tumbled and fell, and by the time he walked into his condo, he was exhausted. He fell into bed and slept for twelve hours. When he woke, he was no longer tired, but he was still angry.

He threw on a pair of sweat pants and worked out on the weight machine in his spare bedroom. He burned off some of the angry energy but couldn’t exercise Clare out of his head. After taking a shower, he went into his office and turned on his computer in an attempt to fill his mind with work. Instead he recalled the time she’d come into his office wearing that blue nightgown.

After an hour of futile typing, Sebastian called a few buddies and met them at a bar not far from his condo. They drank beer, shot pool, and talked baseball. Several women in the bar flirted with him, but he wasn’t interested. He was pissed off at all women in general, and smart, attractive women on principle.

He’d been shitty company, had a shitty time, and had behaved like an overall shithead. His life was shit, and it was all the fault of a certain romance writer who believed in love and heroes and happily ever after.

Over the course of the next week, Sebastian went out very little. Just to the grocery store to buy some bread, sandwich meat, and beer. When his father called, they talked about everything but Clare. By tacit agreement, they avoided the subject of his employer’s daughter. But that did not mean he wasn’t thinking of her every waking moment.

Nine days after he’d jumped in his SUV and driven—insane and angry—from Boise to Seattle, he stood in his living room looking out at the ships and ferries in Elliott Bay. He didn’t like personal change. Especially when he didn’t see it coming and couldn’t seem to do anything about it. Change felt helpless. It meant starting over.

He thought of Clare and the night he’d found her on a bar stool in a pink fluffy dress. That night he’d put her to bed, and in the morning his life had been changed. He hadn’t known it at the time, but she’d come into his life and changed it forever.

Regardless of what he liked or disliked, wanted or didn’t want, his life had changed. He was changed. He felt it in the hollow place in his chest and in the hunger in his stomach that had nothing to do with food. He felt it in the way he looked out at the city he loved, yet wanted to be somewhere else.

He loved Seattle. Except for the few first years of his life, he’d always lived in Washington. His mother was buried here. He loved the water and drama and pulse of the city. He loved taking in a Mariners or Seahawks game if he felt like it, and he loved the view of Mount Rainier from the windows of his condo. He’d worked his ass off for that view.

He had friends in Washington. Good friends he’d made over a lifetime. This was where he lived, but it no longer felt like home. He belonged four hundred miles away, with the woman who loved him. The woman he liked to spend all his free time with, who was his favorite person to talk to.

Sebastian lowered his gaze to the street below. He more than liked Clare. There was no use fighting it. It was futile, and he recognized the truth of something when it hit him over the head enough times. He loved the way she laughed and the color she painted her toenails. He didn’t love all that girly girl lace she had around her house, but he loved that she was a girly girl. He loved her, and she loved him. For once in his life a woman’s love didn’t feel like something he needed to run from any longer.

He turned and pressed his back against the window. He loved her. He loved her, and he’d hurt her. He remembered the look on her face as she’d turned away, and he didn’t think he could just pick up the phone and say, “Hey, Clare. I’ve been thinking about it, and I love you.”

Instead he picked up the phone and called his dad. Not that Leo was an expert when it came to women and love, but he might know what to do.

Clare rummaged around in her mother’s attic for a bed canopy. She’d been all over town in search of one she liked, but she hadn’t found it. There had to be something suitable in the stacks of bed linens in the Wingate attic.

The day after she told Sebastian that she couldn’t see him any longer, she’d taken down her Battenberg lace. He’d hated it, and it reminded her too much of him. She just couldn’t look up at it every night when she went to bed.

It had been three weeks since that day in the mall when she’d run into Lonny and realized that she had once again fallen in love with a man who was incapable of loving her back. And this time she couldn’t even say it was because she’d been lied to. Sebastian had never loved her, and she’d known that going in. She just hadn’t known she would fall in love with him.

After the fallout in her mother’s backyard, she’d gone home and crawled into bed for three days, overdosing on John Hughes and Merchant-Ivory flicks until her friends had staged an intervention.

The good news was, she hadn’t reached for a bottle or a warm body to make herself feel better. She hadn’t even wanted to. The bad news was that she didn’t think she was ever going to get over the heartache of loving Sebastian Vaughan. It went too deep in her soul. Was too tangled around her heart.

Clare opened an old wardrobe and searched through her ancestor’s linens. It was all very lacy and girly, and after an hour of looking and finding nothing, she moved out of the attic and down the old curving staircase. A voice from the kitchen stopped her at the bottom of the steps. Stopped her and shattered her all at once.

“Where’s Clare?”

“Sebastian? When did you get here?” Joyce asked.

“Clare’s car’s outside. Where is she?”

“Goodness! She’s in the attic looking at lace.”

Heavy footfalls moved across the tile and the hardwood floors and Clare’s hand shook. She’d been told he wasn’t expected. As she turned, he walked into the entry and her grasp tightened on the banister. Her chest got that imploding feeling again, just as strong as the day she’d stood in Brookstone dying inside.

Sebastian walked across the foyer as if the devil were on his heels, and before she could even think to move, he was in front of her, his green gaze intense as he stared down into her face. He was so close, the open edges of her black cardigan touched the front of his blue dress shirt.

“Clare,” he said. One word that sounded a lot like a caress, then he lowered his mouth and kissed her.

For several stunned seconds she let him. Let her soul remember. Let it pour through her and warm up the lonely places only he could touch. Her heart seemed to weep and rejoice at the same time, but before he could take any more from her, she lifted her hands and pushed him away.

“You look so good to me,” he whispered as he ran his gaze across her face. “I feel alive for the first time in weeks.”

And he was killing her. All over again. She looked away before her love for him swamped her and she started to cry. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“The last time I saw you, I told you that if you walked away, I wouldn’t come after you. But here I am.” With the warm fingers of one hand, he brought her gaze back to his. “I’m going to turn thirty-six in two months, and I’m in love for the first time in my life. Since you’re the woman I love, I thought you should know.”

She felt everything inside her go real still. “What?”

“I’m in love with you.”

She shook her head. He had to be teasing her.

“It’s true. The heart-pounding, steal-your-breath, crazy-for-one-woman kind of love.”

She didn’t trust him. “Maybe you just think you’re in love and you’ll get over it.”

Now it was his turn to shake his head. “I’ve spent my life waiting to feel something bigger and stronger than myself. Something I couldn’t fight or walk away from or control. I’ve waited all my life…” His voice shook, and he paused to take a breath. “I’ve been waiting my whole life for you, Clare. I love you, and don’t tell me I don’t.”

Clare blinked back the sudden sting in her eyes. That was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever said to her. Better than she could make up herself. “You better not be trying to trick me.”

“No tricks. I love you, Clare. I love you and I want to spend my life with you. I even watched Pretty in Pink.”

“Really?”

“Yes, and I hated every minute of it.” He took her hand. “But I love you, and if it makes you happy, I’ll watch teen flicks with you.”

“You don’t have to watch teen flicks with me.”

“Thank God.” He lifted his free hand and brushed her hair behind her ear. “I got you something, but it’s out in the car. I didn’t think Joyce would let it in the house.”

“What?”

“You said you wanted a husband and children and a dog. So, I’m here with one very carsick Yorkshire terrier puppy and a willingness to work on the kids part.”

Once again he’d looked into her lonely heart and given her what she’d wanted. Plus a dog. “I don’t have anything to give you.”

“I just want you. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

The tears she wasn’t even going to try to hide spilled over the bottom of her lashes. She rose on her toes and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I love you.”

“Don’t cry. I hate crying.”

“I know. And shopping. And asking for directions.”

He wrapped his arms around her and squeezed tight. “I sold my condo and I don’t have a place to live. That’s what took me so long to get here once I decided where I needed to be.”

“You’re homeless?” she asked into the side of his neck.

“No. My home is with you.” He pressed a kiss to her temple. “I never understood when my mother used to say that she’d finally found her home. I didn’t understand how one place could feel any different from another. I do now. You are my home and I don’t ever want to leave.”

“Okay.”

“Clare.” He pulled back and held up a ring. A princess-cut, four-carat diamond.

“Oh my God!” she gasped. She looked from the ring to his face.

“Marry me. Please.”

Emotion clogged her throat and she nodded. She was a romance writer, but she couldn’t think of one romantic thing to say besides, “I love you.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes.”

He let out a pent-up breath as if there had ever been any doubt. “There’s one more thing,” he said as he slid the ring onto her finger. “I have an ulterior motive for buying the dog.”

The ring was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She looked up into his face and amended that to the second most beautiful thing. “Of course you do.” She wiped beneath her eyes. “What is it?”

“In exchange for the girly wussy dog,” he said, humor lifting the corners of his mouth, “no girly wussy lace on the bed.”

Since she’d already put away her lace bedding, that was an easy compromise. “Anything for you.” She rose on the balls of her feet and kissed Sebastian Vaughan. He was her lover, friend, and very own romantic hero, proving that sometimes a girl’s worst nightmare turned into her happily ever after.