Zeke grimaced.

“It worked out,” Dani said, not defensively.

Without comment he pulled into the street and started down North Broadway toward the main commercial center of town. He seemed to give his driving his total concentration. Dani noticed the dark hairs on his forearms, the muscles, the tanned skin. His long fingers. For no reason she could fathom, she found herself wondering if he dreamed. Was he ever haunted by the past? Did he ever lie awake nights asking what might have been? She thought of the book Kate had told her about. Easy to guess that his brother probably hadn’t come to a happy end.

Had Mattie known Joe Cutler? Did she know Zeke? Was that why she’d responded the way she had when Dani had told her about the burglary?

He turned down Circular Street, and Dani had the feeling he was letting her make the next move, giving her a little time to pull herself together.

Finally she decided just to get on with it. “I want you to leave the Pembroke.”

He glanced at her. “Why?”

“Because you haven’t told me the truth.”

Following the traffic onto Union Avenue, he didn’t argue or protest, but kept his eyes on the road.

“You have until tomorrow morning,” she said.

“Dani, you can’t throw me out.”

She breathed deeply. “Yes, I can.”

“It’d end up in the papers.” He slowed for a traffic light, then came to a stop. “Enough reporters are on your case without you going toe-to-toe with an internationally recognized security specialist such as myself.”

There was a note of self-deprecation in his tone, of humor, but it was buried underneath the seriousness. Dani felt her mouth go dry. She should have found another way home.

The light changed, and he continued a short way past the racetrack and turned smoothly onto the Pembroke driveway. “A photographer caught you tonight, feather and all. Someone could easily have seen you get into my car. Imagine what a heyday the gossips would have if they found out that you’d given me the boot.”

“Are you threatening to tell them?”

“No.”

They passed the rose garden, the fragrance permeating the cool night air, easing Dani’s confusion and nervousness. Zeke bore left at the fork in the road, onto the dirt road and over the narrow bridge. She could hear the trickle of the stream, smell its coldness.

“Why are you here?” she asked softly.

“I have my reasons.”

Which, his tone said, were none of her affair. “Do they have anything to do with the business you’re in?”

He didn’t answer, sliding his rented car to a stop at the end of the flagstone path that led to the front door of her cottage. “Do Hansel and Gretel show up every now and then?”

“Are you implying I’m a wicked witch?”

His expression was impenetrable in the darkness. Probably he wanted it that way. “Maybe not wicked.”

Dani bit the inside corner of her mouth, feeling unusually awkward, deeply aware-physically aware-of the man sitting next to her.

It would be so easy to back down, so easy to trust him. But she had no basis for trust, and she’d never been very good at backing down. “You have until tomorrow morning. I’ll speak to Ira.”

She could feel Zeke’s eyes on her. He seemed capable of seeing things people wouldn’t want him to see, of penetrating not only thoughts, but souls. In his business, such sensitivity-such probing-could be an asset. He asked quietly, “Do you like living out here all alone?”

“I did until yesterday afternoon.”

“You know, you should lock your doors. It’s often an effective deterrent.”

His tone was professional, neither critical nor patronizing, but Dani hated being told what to do. “How do you know my doors weren’t locked?”

“I tried them.”

“When?”

“This morning. I wandered off on my own during a guided nature walk.”

She placed her hand on the door latch, her heart pounding. She could be gone in a matter of seconds. Was she crazy to be alone with a man she didn’t know-a man who apparently knew more about her than she did him? He was from Mattie’s hometown. He was staying at the Pembroke on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her mother’s disappearance. He was an internationally known security consultant. Dani was torn by curiosity, but she felt she had no choice. She had no reason to trust him. It wasn’t, right now, a risk she was prepared to take.

“I want you off my property.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Are you going to go quietly?”

A flash of sexy smile. “Honey, I don’t go anywhere quietly unless I so choose. And that’s probably the only thing you and I have in common.”

“Oh, no,” she said coolly, deciding on gut instinct to take him on then and there. “That’s not all we have in common, and you know it. You see, Zeke, upstairs, in my bedroom, I have a blanket on my bed. It’s dark green, pure wool, quite old. My grandmother gave it to me. She took it with her when she left home.” In the darkness, through the opened windows, she could hear the crickets and tree toads, the breeze soughing in the woods and meadow. “It was made in a woolen mill in Cedar Springs, Tennessee.”

Zeke didn’t move a muscle or say a word.

“My grandmother’s hometown,” Dani said in a near whisper. “And yours.”

She was off like a shot, racing up the walk and through her front door, slamming it behind her. Her wrist ached. So did her scraped shins and her feet from standing so long in her three-inch heels. But she hunted up her car keys and locked all her doors. Front, back, side. She hadn’t bothered last night. What more was there for her thief to get?

She didn’t lock her windows. She’d suffocate.

And she didn’t call Mattie right away, although she was tempted. She wanted to think first. Get her perspective on tonight, on Zeke Cutler of Cedar Springs, Tennessee.

Groaning, pushing him out of her mind, she ran into her kitchen and got out the half bushel of peaches she’d been meaning to freeze for days. They were going soft. She filled her biggest pot with water and put it on the stove. When it was hot, she’d scald the peach skins to make them easier to peel. Or so the theory went. No matter what she did, the peel always seemed to stick.

As she worked, she considered, and finally admitted, what really had gotten to her tonight.

Zeke’s confidence, his striking looks and his unexpected humor, cloaked as it was in his middle-Tennessee accent, had made her aware of the void in her own life. Riding next to him, she’d felt alone and needy-and that was unacceptable. It wasn’t that he gave two figs about her or she’d ever want him to. He could have arranged the burglary yesterday just to unnerve her and get her to hire him. Given what she’d seen so far of the man, such underhandedness seemed out of character, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was that something about him, or tonight, had made her feel empty. She’d found herself wanting closeness. Wanting love and romance and companionship.

And she remembered something her father had told her years ago, in a static-riddled phone call from some fleabag hotel in some hellish corner of the world. “The love of your life,” he’d said, “is the person who makes you forget what all your standards and preconceived notions about love and romance even were.”

If such a man existed, Dani hadn’t met him yet. And the last thing she needed now was to mess up her life with pointless longing. Loneliness was not a choice she planned to make for herself.

And it was silly to let a dark-eyed security consultant stir up her deepest doubts about herself.

She grabbed fistfuls of peaches and dropped them into the pot, although the water wasn’t yet scalding hot. But she was impatient, anxious to get moving on something, anything.

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

It wasn’t just Zeke Cutler.

She watched the peaches bob to the surface of the water.

Had her mother ever peeled peaches? Had she ever made her own peach jam or known the satisfaction of pulling a peach cobbler from the oven in the dead of winter knowing it was made from fruit she’d frozen herself?