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But she also couldn’t say, “Hey, since I don’t have a job anymore, maybe I’m willing to give us a shot, even though I let you believe the job was more important.”

She was going to need more gelato.

Lazing around in yoga pants and a flannel shirt, plowing through frozen comfort foods for three days left plenty of time for two things—crying and reflection.

Of course, the common theme of her chocolate-fueled reflections was the shitty state of her life now and how it hadn’t been shitty before she boarded the plane in Boston.

The problem was, how much of the fortnight of non-shittiness was Joe and how much was being on what passed for her first real vacation since she’d started at
Spotlight
. Instead of wearing heels that made her feet throb and making sure everything, right down to her eyebrows, was impeccably groomed. Smartphone. Laptop. Bluetooth device stuck in her ear.

Even if she removed Joe from the equation, it’s no surprise she was happy in New Hampshire. S’mores. Volleyball. Tandem cannonballs of doom. What wasn’t to love?

But her gut didn’t ache at the thought of never playing volleyball again. Or trying to get melted marshmallow out of her hair. The thought of never seeing Joe again…

Another crying jag that left her emotionally wrung out, hiccupping and trying to lick the last drops of chocolate from the gelato bucket.

She couldn’t keep going on like this. The freezer was almost empty for one thing. And she’d dehydrate if she didn’t stop crying so damn much. It was time to decide where she’d be happy.

And there was only one way she could think of to do that.

He wasn’t on hold long enough to identify the music.

“Mr. Kowalski, what a pleasant surprise!”

He didn’t even like her voice. “Your reporter’s dodging my calls, Miss Deschanel.”

There was a rather heavy pause. “Keri Daniels is no longer with
Spotlight Magazine
, Mr. Kowalski, but I’ll be happy to take care of your needs personally.”

“Good. The first thing I need to know is why she’s no longer there.”

“I’m not in the habit of discussing—”

“Hey, Bob, you still have the number for that guy from
People
?” he called to the potted fern on his windowsill.

Joe had never heard anybody grind their teeth over the phone before. It echoed a little. “If you must know, Miss Daniels submitted an interview with you that didn’t contain the sort of in-depth details
Spotlight
readers have come to expect. When I asked her to rework the piece, she resigned.”

“You asked her to betray my trust and that of my family and she walked instead.”

“In a nutshell, yes.”

“When?”

“She came into the office the morning after she flew in and she was gone two hours later.”

Joe sank back in his leather office chair, disbelief robbing him of coherent words. She’d quit the day after she left him but she still wouldn’t return his calls. Did she blame him?

“Mr. Kowalski, if I could just ask you a few follow-up ques—”

He hung up on her. Then he wished he hadn’t. Not only because it was incredibly rude, which he tried not to be as a rule, but because he should have asked her if she knew where Keri had gone.

It had been a week. A whole damn week since she walked out on what she claimed she’d wanted more than anything and he hadn’t even rated a phone call. An email. Hell, even a fax would’ve worked.

That pretty much told him everything he needed to know about where he stood with Keri Daniels.

He picked up a pencil just so he could tap it against the edge of his desk. A couple of phone calls and he could be in California in time for supper. The problem was finding her when he got there.

“Hey.”

Joe almost fell out of his chair, but he recovered well. “Hey, Kevin. I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Probably the drum solo. I knocked but you never answer the door when you’re working. Or pretending to be working.”

“Keri quit her job the day after she flew back to California.”

Kevin walked over to the sofa and perched on the arm of it—something he did no matter how often Joe told him not to. “You found this out how?”

“I called the magazine.”

“Dude,” Kevin said, shaking his head. “I know you don’t have as much experience with the ladies as I do, but when a woman won’t return a week’s worth of phone calls, she’s not that into you.”

“She’s into me.” He didn’t know where she was or what she was doing or why she wouldn’t answer her goddamn phone, but he knew she was into him. “Go away. I need to call the airport.”

“You don’t wanna do that.”

“I’m thinking about moving to Los Angeles.” There. He’d said it.

“To be with a woman who doesn’t want to talk to you? Think about it.”

“I’ve done nothing
but
think about it all week. I’ll rack up some serious frequent flyer miles, so it’s not like you’ll never see me again.”

“The question is if
she
wants to see you again.” Kevin threw his leg over the arm of the couch and slid his butt down onto the cushion. “Have you told anybody else about this?”

“No. Now I need to call the airlines and pack a bag and figure out how to find her when I get there. So you can go now and tell the family you checked on me and I’m still sober.”

“I’m not here to check on you.”

Joe snorted. They’d been finding less-than-inconspicuous ways to check on him all week. It was like they had a rotation schedule of who was going to stop by or call when and what their excuses for needing to talk to him would be. “Whatever. Hey, do you have any contacts that could run a check on Keri through the system? Maybe get her home address for me?”

Kevin sighed and folded his arms across his chest. “Pop sent me over to tell you he got a call from the campground. She’s there.”

“Who’s there?” Joe started tapping the pencil again, anxious for his brother to leave so he could start making arrangements. He’d fly out and talk to her and, if all went well, he’d fly home to pack some stuff and get his house on the market.

“Keri.”

The pencil froze in mid-tap. “Keri’s where? At the campground?”

“Yeah, she’s been there a few days from what he said. Staying in the cabin.”

He heard the words coming out of Kevin’s mouth, but they didn’t make any sense. Why would Keri be back in New Hampshire? Not only back in the state, but back at the one place he would have thought she’d never want to see again. “Why?”

Kevin shrugged. “Nobody knows. He only called Pop because he said she seemed pretty sad. Thought something might be going on we should know about.”

“Why didn’t she call me?” He hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but his brother only shrugged, skipping the manly mocking of a less-than-manly question.

“For the last few days, she hasn’t had cell reception,” Kevin pointed out. “Before that…maybe she needed some space to figure out what she’s going to do. Or…”

“Or what?” When Kevin just shrugged and refused to finish the thought, Joe tossed the pencil onto the desk. “You think she blames me for losing her job, don’t you?”

“You said she quit.”

“She quit because Tina was going to fire her if she didn’t spill all our family secrets. So, quit or fired, my refusing to give her decent material to work with killed not only her promotion, but her whole freakin’ job.”

“She had plenty of material to work with,” Kevin said. “All she had to do was use it and then let Tina worry about your lawyer having a fit
after
the magazine published it.”

He had a point. If she’d had her fun and didn’t have any intention of seeing him or his family again, what did she care if
Spotlight Magazine
and Kowalski Inc. were embroiled in a legal rumble after the article was published and she had her new office?

“Look,” Kevin said, “there’s nothing you can—”

“I’m going up there.” The only way he was going to find out what was going through Keri’s head was to ask her, and it seemed the only way he was going to get to talk to her was to go up to the campground and find her.

“Let me remind you she’s given no sign she even wants to talk to you.”

“She’ll talk to me. She came back to New Hampshire for a reason, and I intend to find out what it is.”

“Most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” her prodigal husband said.

That gave some weight to the theory he’d left her because he was freaking crazy. “I don’t know about beautiful, but they said it would support…just about anything. And the top can be bleached. You know, for disinfecting.”

God, she sounded like an idiot. Her plan to be suggestive and sultry and
subtle
was misfiring badly.

“I meant you.”

Maybe it was the nightgown. She’d gone all the way to the mall for it, paying
way
too much for an above the knee-length drape of black satin held up by two spaghetti straps that precluded a bra. With her breasts in their natural, gravity-weary state and her thighs too exposed for comfort, she didn’t feel quite as sexy as she had in the fitting room with the subtle lighting and lack of an audience.

Her audience didn’t seem to mind the bodily wear and tear, though, judging by the look on his face as he walked across the kitchen.

Take off your shoes
. She started to open her mouth, then snapped it closed. So he had his shoes on. So what? It wasn’t raining and the path from the driveway to the door was paved, but…

Evan put a hand on each of her knees and pushed them apart so he could stand between her thighs.

He smelled different. It was subtle, but he didn’t smell like her Evan—the Evan who used the laundry detergent and the soap and the shampoo she kept in the house.

After hooking his finger under a spaghetti strap and sliding it over her shoulder, he leaned forward and kissed that spot on her collarbone halfway between her throat and shoulder. It was a spot that never failed to make her shiver.

Then he brushed her hair back so he could nuzzle his lips against her ear and whisper, “It’s killing you I didn’t take off my shoes, isn’t it?”

A burst of laughter surprised her and she couldn’t hold it back. At least he smiled with her.

“I heard your laugh before I ever saw your face,” he told her. “I heard you laugh and thought to myself I’d really love to spend some time with you—make you laugh some more.”

“As if I could ever forget all those godawful jokes you told while we were dating.”

“Most women would have dumped me, but you loved to laugh just as much as I loved hearing it.” He reached up and tucked a few stray strands of hair behind her ear. “We used to laugh all the time, Terry. When did we stop?
Why
did we stop?”

Would’ve been nice if the sight of his wife in a slinky nightgown had robbed the man of the ability to form a coherent sentence, never mind the desire to stand around between her legs analyzing what went wrong with their marriage. “I laugh.”

“At sitcoms, but not at life. Not…just to laugh.”

Deflating like a cold balloon, Terry put her hand on her husband’s shoulder and pushed at him. “Now I’m sorry I called you and asked you to come over.”

He captured her wrist and raised her hand to his mouth. When he drew her finger into his mouth and sucked lightly, the little twinge of sexual need at the small of her back flared into a full-blown ache. He locked gazes with her and she felt the heated flush climbing her neck and spreading into her face.

“I’m not,” he told her.

“That’s because we’re not talking about what’s wrong with you.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s been something wrong with
us
.” He let go of her hand and grabbed her hips, sliding her to the edge of the table so his denim-covered erection was pressed against her and her legs wrapped around his waist. “But right now, let’s focus on what’s right with us.”

“I’m having a little trouble focusing at all.”

“I’m going to fix your fixation on my shoes, too,” he said, running his hands up over her ribs until he was cupping her breasts.

“How are you going to do that?” she asked, surprised she had enough breath left in her lungs to make words.

“I’m going to unzip my pants and then I’m going to do you just like this on the table, with my shoes on,” he said, and her entire body started celebrating when his hand left her breast and reached down between them to unbutton his fly. “And from now on, every time I walk into this house with my shoes on, you’re going to remember this day and all the things I’m about to do to you and the last thing on your mind will be footprints on the linoleum.”

It was a struggle not to pant in the face of such delicious anticipation. “I don’t know. Clean floors are pretty important to me.”

“Screw clean,” he told her and she heard the rasp of his zipper. “Right now I want to be dirty.”

Twenty minutes later, Evan could have tracked cow manure across the linoleum, over the living room hardwood and up the carpeted stairs for all Terry cared. The ugly table wasn’t the most comfortable piece of furniture she’d ever been sprawled across, but it was definitely her new favorite.

At some point he’d ended up on the tiled surface with her and now his pants were around his knees. Still had his shoes on. Thank goodness she’d been so paranoid about being in the kitchen in her skimpy nightgown she’d pulled every blind in the house.

He shifted onto his side, flopping his arm across her and planting a kiss on her shoulder. “I like this table.”

“Me too,” she murmured, too wiped out to care that the hard surface wasn’t the best mattress for middle-aged bones.

“Wonder if there’s a matching coffee table version.”

She laughed, a breathy sound due to her still being a little winded. “We could just get a bigger couch.”

“We could get a leather one,” he agreed.

We
.

“Steph won’t be home for another three hours.” Maybe it was the great sex or maybe it was the fact that this was her life—the one she wanted back—but she took a deep breath and stepped off the ledge. “We could get dressed and go pack up some of your stuff. Bring it home.”

The arm across her tightened and she felt his sigh against her heated skin. “That sounds like a plan.”

“I love you,” she told him, because it seemed important that she say it first this time.

“I love you, too. And you better hurry if you’re going to get dressed. Lucky for me, I’ve still got my shoes on.”