“Now, Anne.” Jake’s hand brushed the small of her back as he urged her through the door. “You know we’re both dying for a cup of coffee.”

“You are not staying.”

“Of course not.”

Despite the seeming meekness of his tone, Jake’s words echoed in the hall with the reverberation of a detonated grenade. Anne had waged war with Jake before. She wavered momentarily, weighing the dangers of spending fifteen minutes with Jake over a cup of coffee in the same way a general might calculate the risk of sending his troops over a minefield. A good general, of course, would send the troops around the minefield.

Anne let out a breath. “One cup of coffee,” she said flatly. “Only so you can tell me what trouble you’ve gotten yourself into the last few years.”

“Lots,” he assured her. His slashed-on smile was her reward. Jake always rewarded terrible judgment.

Her unwilling heart turned a cartwheel. Her heart had turned cartwheels for those special private smiles three other times in her life-not counting that first time Jake had loved her and left her, when she was eighteen and he twenty-one. “I’ll just bet you have,” she said lightly. “So where have you been raising hell this time?”

“Idaho. Northern Idaho, where the mountains are so steep they can barely build roads. Where the whole area’s deserted. You can walk for hours and have the feeling no one has ever been there before you.”

“Sounds perfectly dreadful.” They fell into old habits in the kitchen. Jake opened cupboards and drawers, finally finding the instant coffee and cups.

“A minute,” she told him when the cups were filled and he was staring at the dials on her microwave oven.

He punched the button. “This is nicer than your last place.”

“I like it,” she agreed, trailing after him with spoons, place mats, napkins, cream in a sterling pitcher and a matching sugar bowl. All the things she considered appropriate for serving coffee, knowing full well Jake would have been content to sit near a campfire with a mug.