God knows he had.

It still puzzled him that she hadn’t looked at him like an engaged woman.

And that her classy clothes showed off a successful, poised woman…yet that wasn’t how she’d looked at him either.

From the first second their eyes met, he’d suddenly remembered rolling in the grass with her. Stealing kisses after football games. Pressing her up against the locker after school, feeling her breasts against his chest, pretending to be talking about homework. She’d blush and flush and fluster, but then she’d look at him from under those thick black eyelashes. Teasing him. Emma had loved turning him on, loved the power of it, the fun of it, the joy of it. They’d tempted wicked every which way from Sunday. She’d made him hotter than fire-and far more frustrated.

She’d been shy back then, but there’d been no guile to her, no ability to hold back. For sure there’d been no distance. There’d just been all that honest, helpless young-woman heat in her eyes. The dare-you-to-melt-my-bones look. She’d turned him into putty.

And he’d loved dying from all those hard-ons with no release.

But hell and damnation, if she was engaged, how come she’d still looked at him that way? Unguarded, winsome…as if she were dying to feel those feelings again. With a man. With him.

You’re imagining all this, he told himself-and knew it was true. He was soul-tired, beyond the ability to think clearly. He needed a good night’s sleep-and then he needed to concentrate on his sister.

Not on a woman who was already claimed by someone else.

Three

A few mornings later, Emma stood outside Color with a contractor. She’d been running nonstop, organizing her traditional art show in July, when she’d run into a major maintenance problem.