day and the girls ran her ragged and Richard was still as annoying as could be.
Who had time for fudge?
“May I remind you,” Lily said, “that I have a year to get out of this house? Not even that, anymore. Just a little over ten and a half months to do everything I can to upgrade it before I have to sell it and hope I get enough out of my half to get me and the girls into another house. Which is going to take every bit of time and energy I have for the next ten and a half months.”
“I know. I know.”
“And where am I supposed to find a man anyway? You know what it’s like in my neighborhood. Everybody’s married, with kids the girls’ages, and if they do happen to get divorced, the wife ends up here in the subdivision with the kids while the cheating husband moves out to some little love nest of an apartment with his new, pretty, young thing. Until the wife has to sell out for lack of money and then some new married couple moves in. These are the suburbs, in all their glory. I could easily go a month without seeing a single, eligible man, and then even if one did show up, I don’t have time to date anybody. I hardly have time to drink my coffee.”
She gave a big huff at the end of her little speech, tired and spent.
Did her sister know nothing of Lily’s current life? Of her world?
It was maddening and annoying and more than a little sad to feel so alone and to be living in such aggravating circumstances, just because Richard met a girl barely out of her teens on a business trip to Baltimore.
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry,” Marcy said, and Lily could hear Marcy’s own kids in the background now. “I wasn’t trying to make things harder for you. I was just trying to warn you that it’s fine to go without…fudge for a while, and then…well, then it’s not. I mean, you’re still human, and you’re only thirty-four years old. We all have needs. We all get lonely.”
“I am not lonely,” Lily insisted, clearing the table of halfeaten bowls of cereal and bread crumbs from the peanut butter sandwiches and half-empty glasses that seemed to multiply like rabbits all over the house when Lily’s back was turned. “At least not for…fudge. Now, a bubble bath, I could handle. Someone to cook dinner every now and then or a good book, plus enough time to read it without interruptions—that I could handle. But fudge is—”
Lily broke off as she straightened up, having put four cups in the dishwasher and found herself looking out the window above the sink, which faced the house next door, which had been empty for weeks.
It looked like it wasn’t going to be empty anymore, because in the driveway was a moving truck backed up to the garage, the big back door of the truck open, a pair of sun-bronzed, muscular arms handing a table out of the back of the truck to someone Lily couldn’t quite see because of an overgrown rhododendron bush.
“What?” Marcy asked. “Where did you go?”
“Right here,” Lily said, watching as the arms kept coming out, soon to be followed by a really nice, perfectly muscled shoulder.
First one.
Then the other.
Lily was afraid her mouth dropped open, and she just couldn’t seem to shut it.
Legs. Long, masculine legs, encased in well-worn jeans that hung just a tad low on a taut waist, above which was what looked to be the most beautifully formed washboard abs she’d ever seen, and above that, nice, broad, extremely capable looking shoulders.
“Oh,” Lily said, all the breath going out of her in a rush.
“What?” Marcy asked. “Are you okay?”
Lily felt like she’d been burned.
A wave of heat came over her, blossoming in the pit of her stomach and spreading like a flood to every cell in her body.
There was an absolutely gorgeous male creature at the house next door, muscles flexing beautifully, a little sweat on his brow, chest gloriously naked, and all of a sudden she got it. Everything her sister had been trying to explain to her about loneliness and needs and how some things were fine for a while and then, they just weren’t anymore.
Suddenly, they were urgent, burning, overwhelming.
“Oh, fudge!” Lily said and dropped the phone.
She was afraid he’d seen her watching him through the kitchen window or that somehow he’d heard her phone clattering on the hard tile floor. Which seemed impossible at this distance and with the walls of her house between them.
But his head shot around and he stared right at her before she gulped and dropped to her knees, feeling guilty and confused and hot all over.
Like she’d suddenly developed a fever in mere seconds.
Maybe she was coming down with something.
Lily touched her hand to her forehead to see if it felt hot.
A mother could tell those things just by the touch of her hand, after dealing with as many feverish kids as she had.
But she couldn’t tell this time. Not for sure.
Rattled, she stood back up and looked cautiously out the window once again, to see nothing but the open back of the moving truck and a few boxes.
No sign of him.
Had to be one of the movers, she told herself as she searched the cabinet above the stove, where she stored medicines to keep out of her girls’ reach.
Men in her neighborhood did not look that good without their shirts on. They didn’t have those kinds of muscles or those kinds of tans.
They were strictly suit-and-tie kind of guys.
Desk jockeys.
Pencil pushers.
A man didn’t get muscles like that in corporate America.
Lily found the thermometer and put it in her mouth, just as her phone rang stridently.
She must have dropped the phone just right to disconnect the call as it landed.
Which meant this had to be her sister calling back.
And Lily didn’t want to talk to Marcy.
Not that Marcy would really give her the option of refusing. She’d just keep calling until Lily answered. Either that or get in her car and drive the twenty minutes between their houses to make sure Lily was okay.
Marcy tended to be a tad overprotective since Richard had moved out.
“Oh, fine,” she muttered, picking up the phone, thermometer still in her mouth. “Hewwo.”
“What happened?” Marcy demanded to know.
“Sowwy. I dwopped d’phone,” Lily said as best she could.
“Huh?”
“Wait…” The thermometer beeped and she took it out. No fever. How
