He lowered himself onto a stool, his back to the bar, and waited for Jen to arrive.

She’d had to finish up her promotion stuff over in Westbury, and then had to do a bunch of other things she was wonderfully cagey in mentioning. He loved how excited she was getting, how she was planning this big to-do right under all their noses, and it was starting to make him feel guilty for not being able to be there, when he hadn’t felt anything of the sort since Da’s death.

Meanwhile, he’d gone back to Mildred’s, showered and changed, and ate an appetizer of a frozen pizza. It was full-size but one of those thin-crust ones, so it didn’t completely fill his appetite.

When Jen walked in, the incongruous digital clock sitting on top of the cash register glowed 8:05. She wore tight jeans with perfect hems, a tank top with straining seams, and flip-flops. The outfit itself was far from flashy, but she drew the eye of everyone in the Stone.

And Leith himself, of course, who was virtually knocked over by the way her hips glided side to side as she skirted around the tables. It was that sway that had smacked him upside the head that one night in this very same room, ten years ago. The movement that had changed everything.

Now, tonight, it struck him dumb and motionless, so when she finally reached him and said something or other in greeting, he said, “Great. And you?”

She wrinkled her nose in a way that reminded him of a particular nine-year-old girl who lived here in town. “I asked how long you’d been here.”

The constricted barroom suddenly shrank even more. “Oh. Uh, ten or so minutes.” As she threw him a sly, knowing look, his hands felt empty. “I need a beer.”

“Me, too,” she said. “Where’s Rafe?”

Leith pointed to the round table in the darkest corner, where Rafe, the Stone’s aging owner, and the farmer Loughlin sat hunched over pints. Leith raised an arm to catch Rafe’s attention. “Two red ales. Two fish and chips,” Leith said when the old guy caught sight of him and gave him a nod of acknowledgement.

“Two fish and chips,” called a hoarse Rafe in the general direction of the kitchen.

“Two fish and chips!” came the shouted, unseen response from beyond the swinging doors.

Then, to Leith, Rafe waved toward the bar. “Get ’em yerself. You know where they’re at.”

Leith slid off the stool under Jen’s amusement. “Wow,” she said. “They just open up the whole town for you, don’t they?”

“I pay for it.” Stopping shoulder to shoulder with her, he added. “And I’ll pay for yours, too.”

In the corner, Rafe was talking with his gnarled hands. Loughlin was listening, but staring at Jen as though he really did think she’d burned down his barn. It didn’t help when Jen’s phone went off and, by the sound of the one-sided conversation, it was the Hemmertex landowners, settling the new location bid.

Leith went behind the bar and pulled down two thick glasses, then filled them with his favorite ale.

“You know,” Jen said to him, pocketing her phone. “The last time the two of us were in here together, we weren’t even old enough to drink.”

He glanced up at her, but her eyes were sweeping through the dim interior.

“We’ve never had drinks together. Isn’t that weird? It’s so . . . adult.” She sighed deeply. “I love it here. It’s like another world.”

Those words, echoing the exact same thought he’d had earlier, caused him to massively overflow one glass. The cold beer poured over his hand and he shook it off.

“Hurry up with those beers,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the dartboard.”

He looked up in surprise, but she was already moving toward the black, white, and red circle mounted between the brick fireplace and a giant Scottish flag. An old white line had been drawn on the floor, but a few tables stood between that and the board, and she began to shove the tables to the side.

“Is it okay if we play, Rafe?” she called over to their old boss.

The owner gave her the same do-whatever-you-like-I’m-busy wave he’d given Leith, and in return she gifted him a brilliant smile.

When Jen was done clearing the area, Leith handed her the beer. “Darts, huh?”

She shrugged. “Are you scared?”

“Should I be? You look very serious.”

“Oh, I am. You can throw around the big stuff. Let me handle the little things.”

She opened the wood flaps on the scoreboard and took out the small piece of chalk resting inside. Some kid had scribbled a pair of dragons on the scoreboard—after he’d had his mac and cheese, by the looks of the orange handprint on the side—and Jen used a towel to wipe the slate clean. She wrote Dougall on the left and Haverhurst on the right.

Removing a handful of darts from a small basket nailed to the wall, she inspected the tips, handed him three, and kept three for herself.

“You know how to score without electronic bells and whistles?” he asked.

She threw him a look somewhere between pissed off and exasperated. “Please.” She pointed to the white line. “Get over there, big boy. You’re about to go down.”

“Do I hear a challenge, Haverhurst?”

She flicked the flights of her darts. “Yep.”

“Stakes?”

She said, “Loser has to do anything the winner wants. Until midnight tonight.”

The grin that spread slowly across her face said that she’d walked into the Stone with the stakes already in mind. Why was he surprised? She never did anything without a plan. Only this time he was her plan, and it unhinged something in him. Solidified something else. He was scared, but that good kind of scared, the kind that made him all excited and tended to get him hard when he least expected it.

Immediately he zeroed in on her mouth. Anything? “You already know what you want me to do, don’t you?”

She nodded. “Absolutely.”

He stepped closer, because if there was one thing he never backed down from, it was a challenge he was sure and desperate to win. As expected, she didn’t back away, didn’t even have the decency to appear off balance. He had to get to her, to move inside her brain, throw her off.

“Good.” Leaning down, he whispered in her ear. “Because I know what I want from you, too.”

Abruptly, he stepped back, turned toward the board and aimed. “Closest to bull’s-eye starts off. Three-oh-one?”

She drew a breath that sounded beautifully ragged. “I prefer cricket.”

He bobbled his head side to side, pretending to consider. “All right.”

With a barely disguised smile, she lined up, aimed, and threw. It dug in at the narrowest part of sixteen. She brushed past him as she made room for him to throw—her ass grazing his thighs, much in the same way they’d touched that first night way back when, when everything had changed.

If she thought that was going to distract him enough to throw badly, she was sorely mistaken. But he’d let her keep trying that if she felt it was doing some good.

He hit twenty, two inches from bull’s-eye.

Jen took his place and hit a triple seventeen and a fifteen. Ouch. But two more turns each, and he had the slight edge. The woman was going down. And “going down” would just be the beginning.

A wide shadow blocked his light, and he turned, ready to give her fake hell for trying to throw him, but it wasn’t Jen’s shadow. Owen had left his table and come over.

Leith watched the plumber, who had always been a confident guy, look a little unsure about going up to the sister of the woman he was sleeping with.

“Hey,” Owen said to Jen. Clutching his baseball cap in both hands, he nodded at Leith.

“Hi, Owen,” she said, then glanced pointedly over his shoulder at the group of men he’d left sitting at the table, rubbing their bellies. “Out with the guys tonight?”

He let out an uneasy laugh. “Yeah. Aimee’s cool with it this time.”

That seemed to relax Jen, for some reason. “Okay.”

“Listen”—he edged closer—“I just wanted to say thanks for helping Aimee out. And for all you’re doing.” Jen’s mouth opened. “There’s a rumor going around you pretty much saved the games today?”

Jen nodded demurely then took a sip of her beer.

Owen gave her a tight-lipped smile. “I don’t know if anyone else will actually say it, but they’re glad you’re here. Especially after what they saw today.”

“Thank you.”

“Everyone knows in their hearts that you didn’t set that fire. You changed people’s minds today, even if they don’t know it yet. I just wanted you to hear that.”

Then he was gone, back to gather his buddies and head out, probably over to the sports bar in Westbury with the TVs and noise and sensory overload.

Jen watched him go, and Leith waited for the gloating. It never came. Instead this strange look passed over her face—sort of dreamy, a tiny kick of a smile. Happiness, if he had to name it. Then it was gone with an invisible wipe as she swiveled to him. “My throw,” she said.

Damn it. She closed out fifteen.

“So.”

The tone in her voice filled him with dread. There was a question coming, dragging down that single word. This was why he’d suggested Duncan coming with them earlier, to act as some sort of a buffer so he wouldn’t have to address the thing with Da’s house. He wasn’t ready. Not yet.

“Yeah?” He set his toe on the line and aimed.

She waited for him to throw and then asked, “How was Connecticut?”

“Great. Really great. Want another beer?” When she nodded, he ambled around the bar, making a show of motioning to Rafe that he was taking two more. He marked off the tally by the cash register.

“It’s scary, you know,” he said, when he saw she was watching him, waiting for him to go on. He held the pint glass with one hand, the brass pull with the other. “To start over somewhere else. I mean, completely start over. I’ve never been so scared in my whole life.”