he owned was on the lawn outside and he was sputtering protests and explanations even as she slammed the door in his face. It had taught her a lesson about getting involved too quickly.
Or at least she thought it had until she fell for the next man she went out with almost as rapidly. That hadn’t ended quite as badly or as painfully, but it had been doomed from the outset. She would have seen that if she’d given the relationship a hard look at the beginning.
She’d spent the next couple of years taking a good long look at herself and her tendency to fall in love at the drop of a hat. It hadn’t taken a genius to figure out that she was trying to find a replacement for the family she’d turned her back on. As the song said, she’d been looking for love in all the wrong places.
Until yesterday she’d thought she’d broken the pattern, but now here she was, all-too-fascinated with Patrick, and they hadn’t so much as had a first date yet. Well, she wasn’t going to make the same old mistake, no matter how tempting it might be. She was going to be smart this time, even if kissing him gave her a momentary sense of being connected and filled a huge void in her life.
Besides, there were flashing neon warning signs practically posted all around the man. He was a self-professed loner. He had major issues with his family. He was drifting through his life, quite literally at the moment, she thought wryly. He was the last man on earth she had any business falling for. She didn’t even have to take one of those long, hard looks at the situation to figure that much out. Not that her hormones seemed to give two figs about any of that. Her body seemed to care only that he was a top-of-the-line kisser.
“Everything okay?” he asked, his voice husky with sleep.
“Sure,” she said, a little too brightly. “Why?”
“You were frowning.”
“Just wrestling with some old demons,” she said, keeping her voice light.
“Who won?”
“I suppose that remains to be seen,” she said honestly.
“Tell me about yourself,” he encouraged, regarding her with unmistakable interest.
“There’s not much to tell.”
“You’re from Widow’s Cove, though, right?”
She nodded.
“Why don’t I remember you from school? I thought I knew all the beautiful girls.”
She grinned at the puzzlement in his voice. “I’m sure you did,” she said. “I wasn’t beautiful, and I was two years older, but I certainly knew who you were.”
“Is that so?” he said with a hint of all-male arrogance.
She ticked off the obvious reason why the awareness had been so one-sided. “Star football player even as a sophomore. Advance placement in most of your classes. Girls falling at your feet. You were already a legend.”
“And you let that scare you off?” he taunted.
“Absolutely. Besides, senior girls did not give sophomore boys a second look,” she said airily, as if that had had anything at all to do with it. “We didn’t want anyone thinking we were so desperate we had to rob the cradle.”
“Oh, I think I could have held my own with you.”
“No question about it,” Alice said. “But senior girls had a reputation to maintain, even the quiet ones like me.”
“So, who did you date?”
“No one. I just had one goal back then, to get away. I wasn’t about to let romance interfere. I headed for Boston the day after graduation.”
His gaze narrowed. “And never came back?”
“Not until last summer.”
“What happened last summer to finally get you back home?”
“My parents were killed in a car accident,” she said, surprised that she could actually say the words without getting choked up.
His expression immediately sobered. “I’m sorry. That must have been rough.”
“You have no idea. We’d never reconciled. I will regret that till the day I die.” She gave him a sideways look. “Let that be a lesson to you. We never know how long we’re going to have to mend fences with the people we love.”
“Some fences can’t be mended,” Patrick said.
“They must be,” she insisted.
“Alice, I can see where you’re coming from, but trust me, in my case, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. If you understood the whole story—”
“Tell me,” she urged.
He shook his head. “There’s no point. The past is what it is.”
“And your brothers, where do they fit in?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“Will you be seeing them again?”
“I agreed to go to Boston in a few days for Michael’s wedding. After that,