created an inner circle around his pupil.
His lashes weren’t long, but they were thick. If it weren’t for his dark-blond hair, which he’d miraculously inherited from his mother instead of his dad’s dark curls, those eyes and his natural tanned skin would have made him the spitting image of his father. But it wasn’t just the hair that made the two men different. Michael had the warmest eyes I’d ever seen.
They were beautiful.
He was beautiful.
Feeling another flush heat my skin, I put down the burnisher and reached for the tweezers. “They are what they look like. Tweezers. For handling stones and manipulating the silver. I use mostly silver.” I moved through the other tools. “Hammers for hammering the silver.” I touched a shallow slab of square metal and the weirdly shaped piece of metal beside it. “Stakes. I use them to shape the metal.” I gestured to the shelving unit above my cabinet of tools where I kept my stakes. “I have them in all shapes and sizes.”
“And these?” Michael pointed to several long cylindrical pieces of metal. A few were round, and a few were oval, all different widths.
“Those are ring and bracelet mandrels. You choose the width you want depending on what size of ring or bracelet you’re making, and you can work it into shape around the mandrel.” I put down the mandrel I’d picked up and glared into Michael’s face. “Now we’re done with the tutorial … you want to tell me what the hell you’re doing here?”
He pushed off the bench and wandered around in a way he knew would piss me off. “Why does the whole place smell like coconut?”
I swear I growled.
“Well?”
“Because I sometimes oxidize metal and it smells like sulfur, so I use coconut diffusers,” I replied through clenched teeth.
He nodded, trailing his fingers over my cabinets. “This is amazing, Dahlia.”
Stop trying to soften me!
“Michael.” I stepped toward him, hoping he’d hear the genuine alarm in my voice.
He did. Michael turned to me, his expression carefully neutral. “Dahlia.”
“Please tell me you did not quit a job with Boston PD and come to ‘nothing-ever-happens-here-Hartwell’ because of me.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Oh my God.” I ran my hands through my hair, turning away in vexation. What was he thinking? With all the crap already between us, now he would end up resenting me even more. “This place may technically be a city, but it’s tiny.” I whipped around, wide-eyed, feeling frantic, desperate, panicked for him. “It has a small-town mentality, and nothing happens here. You cannot give up a career as a detective in Boston to be here for me. And not because that’s crazy doing that for anyone but because we are a mess!”
Michael’s face hardened, and he took a step toward me. “One: I’m working for the sheriff’s department, so it covers the entire county, not just Hartwell. Two: three months. For three months, I’ve laid awake in bed at night missing every fuckin’ inch of you.”
I sucked in a breath, feeling a complicated mix of exultation and desolation.
“Our night together three months ago was the first time in nine years I have been truly happy. Until you walked away again.”
“But you agreed. You didn’t say anything, so I assumed you agreed there’s too much hurt, too much history, between us.”
“No. I realized there was nothing I could say to make you believe I wouldn’t make the same mistakes I made all those years ago. I had to do something that would make you believe.”
Shaking my head, I backed away from him. “You don’t give up everything. That’s insane.”
“What was I giving up? Boston was wearing on me long before you came back, Dahlia. Working nights, coming home to that empty apartment, hardly ever seeing my mom now that my dad’s retired. I’d lost most of the friends I had because most of them found themselves on the wrong side of the law and thought I was a sellout. My closest friends are your family. And I only got close to them because they were your family.
“When you left, I got in contact with the sheriff’s office here, and I spoke with Jeff King. I considered it fate that he needed a detective with experience.” He thankfully halted when there was still enough space between us to allow me to breathe. “I don’t consider moving here giving up on something. For the first time, I am not giving up on what matters.”
No, no, no! Him being here was … no!
Every day Michael