Yep. He was still coming.

Ignoring the tug of pain in her left side, she reached into the trunk of her car for a cardboard box filled with food and supplies she’d grabbed out of her apartment. She thought of the other places she could have exiled herself. New Zealand, for example. The south of France. Costa Rica. It didn’t have to be Vermont. Black Falls. Her picturesque hometown in the heart of the Green Mountains.

It was summer in New Zealand, she thought as she lifted the box on her uninjured hip and noted that it was barely four o’clock and yet almost dark. The long, dark winter nights were upon northern New England. She’d left Washington early in order to arrive in Vermont while it was still daylight.

Using her elbow, she shut the trunk. Three brown-spotted bananas on top of the overflowing box hadn’t fared well on the long trip north, but she hadn’t wanted to leave them to rot in her microscopic Georgetown apartment. She didn’t know when she’d be back at her job with the Secret Service. Technically, she was just taking some time off. But everyone knew she’d been all but ordered to clear out of town for a bit.

Jo knew it, too.

Elijah seemed to be carrying a vase of flowers, but that didn’t make sense.

Flowers? Elijah?

Even from fifty yards away, he looked as sexy, rugged and forbidden as ever. She hadn’t realized he was home from the army. Not that her family in Black Falls would have told her, especially this week-because then she really might have chucked it all and bought a one-way ticket to New Zealand.

Elijah had built a house on the wooded hillside adjoining the thirty acres and its dozen, one-room, falling-down cabins he and his brothers and sister had every reason to expect to inherit one day. Instead, Drew Cameron had left the property to Jo. The shock of his death from hypothermia in an April snowstorm had only been compounded by that one detail in his last will and testament.