There Goes My Heart Read online

  Rory had loved growing up in Bar Harbor, and though he’d traveled extensively after college, he’d always planned to come back to the small town in northern Maine. His family was here, his friends were here, and the woods and ocean that inspired his furniture were here too.

  Zara woke as he lifted her out of the truck. “Why are you carrying me?”

  “It’s what knights in shining armor do.” Even when she was having one hell of a morning, he couldn’t resist teasing her.

  He thought he saw her lips curve up slightly before she buried her face against his chest. “You smell nice.” She inhaled, loud enough that he could hear it. “I wish you didn’t.” And then she fell asleep again.

  She smelled good too. A little like the Prosecco she’d dripped on herself, but mostly like lavender-scented shampoo.

  Again, he told himself his attraction to her must be due to the long, cold year he’d had without female companionship. No sex, and no dates either. Not since the horrible night of Chelsea’s accident.

  His family, he knew, was still worried about him, though none of them had outright said anything in recent months. They didn’t have to speak their concerns out loud when their glances spoke volumes.

  Stepping inside his house, he decided that though Zara would surely be more comfortable sleeping off the booze in a bed, he didn’t want her to wake up later and worry that anything might have happened between them. It was far more likely that lightning would strike through his roof out of the bright blue sky than that they’d ever sleep together. Nonetheless, he got how iffy waking up in his bed would feel for her.

  He laid her on the leather couch, propping two pillows behind her head and covering her with a blanket he’d purchased from the fiber artist in their building. Half the contents of his home had been sourced from Bar Harbor artists. He appreciated the local support he’d received from the start and was happy to give back to the maker community, especially when they were all so talented.

  Zara was one of the most talented among them. Rory didn’t need glasses, but the frames she designed and manufactured sometimes made him wish he did. He had bought a handful of pairs for his cousins on the West Coast, and he’d been glad to hear that they liked them enough to pass the word on to their friends, who had subsequently also bought frames via her online sales portal.

  Rory knew how hard it was to set up shop for yourself—to find the money to pay for materials, shipping, and warehouse space ninety days before your invoices were paid. In the early years, every sale counted more than your customers knew.

  Keeping an eye on Zara to make sure she was doing okay, he walked into his open-plan kitchen and poured ground coffee into the machine. She’d be desperate for a cup when she woke up, and she growled at him enough on a good day for him to guess how loud her growl would be on a bad one.

  Though there were hours of work waiting for him in his workshop, he mentally pushed his to-do list aside and pulled out a sketchbook. Might as well take advantage of the quiet time to get some new ideas for a bench down in black and white.

  Right then, Zara’s snores ramped up. Okay, so it wasn’t exactly quiet in his house. But, even if she wasn’t someone he’d ever envisioned hanging out with, he was surprised to realize it was nice to share his home with another person. For a year, he’d kept everyone at arm’s length, until he’d had no choice but to bring the last woman on earth he’d ever thought would need his arms around her into his house.

  An hour of snores turned into two. And then, abruptly, she sat up.

  Her hair was sticking out on the side of her head, her cheek had an imprint of the pillow on it, and yet Rory was still struck by just how pretty she was. She was even more striking when wearing her glasses, actually. He’d noticed her beautiful features right away, but after their opening swipes at each other on her first day in the warehouse, when she’d parked in his spot and refused to move her car—and then he’d decided her expensive artisan coffee was fair game, much to her incensed chagrin—he’d done his best to ignore her looks.

  “Where am I?” She squinted around the room, then at him. “And why are you here?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Zara’s head spun like a retro turntable as Rory walked across the room and held out her glasses. It was a relief to put them on so that she could see more than fuzzy shapes. But while things might now be visually clear, nothing else seemed to be.

  Yes, she remembered drinking most of a bottle of Prosecco. But even then, she couldn’t imagine agreeing to spend the morning chez Rory, if that was in fact where they were.

  The house was gorgeous, with wood beams and dark floors and natural light spilling in from the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  And wow, was that an attached lighthouse?

  They were perched on the edge of the shore. The seas were calm today, but she could imagine how raw and intense it must feel to be here in the middle of a storm. It was the home of her dreams, especially when filled with his brilliantly conceived and crafted furniture.

  “I couldn’t leave you snoring in the communal kitchen,” he said, finally answering her questions, “so when you wouldn’t share your address, I brought you to my house instead.” His voice sounded so loud she had to cover her ears. “Hopefully, this will help prevent a nasty hangover.” He put two aspirin, a glass of water, and a cup of coffee on the table in front of the couch.

  “Too late,” she ground out, then swallowed the pills and drank every last drop of liquid.

  When she was done, he pointed to his left. “The bathroom is that way if you want to…” He scanned her head to toe. “Freshen up.”

  Normally, she’d come back at him with something witty and barbed, but she needed to wash the grit from her eyes and tongue first. She stood up, then when she belatedly realized her legs weren’t anywhere near close to steady, she plopped down hard on the couch again. Which made her head throb like the dickens times two.

  He offered a hand to help her up, and she was about to bat it away when she realized her standard responses to Rory weren’t quite fair anymore. Not after he’d saved her from making a complete ass of herself in front of their six colleagues at the warehouse.

  Clasping his hand with her own, she let him haul her to her feet and hold her steady.

  “Okay?” he asked, looking genuinely concerned.

  She nodded. It wasn’t lying if she was simply answering his question about how her legs were doing supporting her weight.

  It was everything else that wasn’t okay. Not only that her stepsister and ex were taking the next step toward their forever—but also that she wasn’t absolutely hating Rory’s touch.

  On the contrary, judging by the thrill bumps popping up over her skin, a part of her loved it.

  The shock of that realization should have had her yanking her hand from his. But it was so much easier to lean on him as he led her toward the bathroom than it would have been trying to grit it out on her own. She was stubborn, but she wasn’t stupid.

  Once they reached the threshold, she said, “I’ve got it from here.” Her voice sounded like she’d been swallowing sandpaper all morning.

  After locking the door, she caught sight of herself in the mirror above the sink and nearly groaned aloud. She wasn’t sure which was worse—the drool that had dried on her cheek or that her hair had Medusa-fied while she’d slept.

  Not that Rory would ever mistake her for a beauty queen. And not that she would want him to. But still. She had some standards, and right now she was falling far short of them.

  It was utter bliss to splash cold water over her face. She put her glasses back on, then finger-combed her hair as best she could, and used some toothpaste on the tip of her finger to freshen up. With that taken care of, she took a deep breath and left the bathroom to deal with the complications of her big drunk mouth.

  Rory was standing by the living room window, looking out at the ocean. It wasn’t just the house of her dreams—this view was also one of the best she’d ever seen. She could
so easily imagine wild swimming in the ocean at sunrise, or beneath a full moon.

  “Thanks for looking after me this morning.” It was far easier than she’d expected to express gratitude to Rory. No question, he had done her a solid by whisking her out of the warehouse before the others showed up and got an eyeful of her emotional breakdown.

  “No problem.”

  Amazing. She would have expected him to hold this incident over her for all eternity. Not to shrug off her thanks as though this was all in a day’s work for a highly in-demand furniture maker.

  He must really feel sorry for her.

  Certain there were few things worse than being the object of Rory’s pity, she said, “I’m really sorry to have taken you away from your work for so many hours, but I’m good to head back to the warehouse now.”

  “No worries, and no rush on my part. I’ve been getting plenty done here.” He pointed to the kitchen table, where his sketchbook was open to a black-and-white drawing. Even from across the room, she could see that he was designing yet another gorgeous piece of furniture. “I’ve been wanting to get these ideas down for a while now. Your snoring was the perfect soundtrack.”

  Ah, there it was. A snarky comment. Her rapidly beating heart settled. He must not pity her too much if he was game for teasing her the way he always did.

  “You should have recorded them for instant playback,” she retorted.

  “Who says I didn’t?” She hoped he was joking as he handed her another cup of coffee. “Probably best if you drink this before we head back.”

  Though she felt almost completely sober now, she could use the caffeine infusion. Not to mention a little more time to get her head around things before facing everyone at work with a smile. Plus, one whiff from the mug told her that he stocked fantastic coffee, possibly even the same artisan brand that he’d stolen from her on her first day at the warehouse.

  As she drank, she forced her brain to rewind the morning. First, the text with the news. Then, the selfie of the ring. Then, drowning her sorrows in a bottle of Prosecco. Then, Rory had arrived and—

  Wait. No. He couldn’t have offered to go to the engagement party with her, could he?

  And she couldn’t have reciprocated by accusing him of wanting to get into her pants, had she?

  She couldn’t hold back her groan. This would teach a lightweight to drink. Next time she was upset, she was going to sprint around the block to work off her angst, or go to one of those places where you could throw plates against a wall, instead of getting hammered.

  “Of course you’re off the hook for tomorrow,” she told him. “It was nice of you to offer to go with me to the engagement party, but it will be better if I go alone.”

  “Are you sure about that?” With one eyebrow raised, he looked insufferably sexy. “To my way of thinking, showing up with me would go a long way to convincing both of them that you don’t give a damn what they do.”

  “I love my stepsister,” she protested. It was a tiny bit harder to force out the words, “I’m happy for her.”

  “Then she’s lucky to have you. But being supportive of her doesn’t mean being her doormat.”

  “I’m not Brittany’s doormat!” Although hadn’t she had thoughts along those lines once or twice in the past? “Anyway, you’d be bored stiff at her party.”

  “One thing I can say for you, Zara, is that I’ve never been bored when we’re together.”

  Unable to figure him out, she asked point-blank, “Why are you so hell-bent on going with me?”

  “You’ve met my sisters.”

  Cassie was a regular visitor to the warehouse, making frequent candy deliveries to the makers in the building. Ashley had also been by for a couple of openings, as had a couple of Rory’s brothers. “I’ve met two of them,” she said, “and they’re great. But what do they have to do with anything?”

  “I hate the thought of one of my sisters being in your position.”

  Zara was about to protest that the engagement party was nothing she couldn’t handle, but she decided not to waste her voice when Rory already knew it had been bad enough to lead to Prosecco-guzzling and a two-hour morning nap on his couch.

  “Okay, maybe going with a plus-one would play better,” she conceded. “But I don’t want you to go unless you’re absolutely certain that you won’t hate every second of it. Especially since it’s all the way in Camden.”

  “I like Camden.” He was like a bull in her china shop. “What time does the party start?”

  She just blinked at him. Even had her brain been working at top capacity, she would have had trouble making sense of his behavior. “At six, so I was planning to leave no later than four. But we can just meet there.”

  “No way.” He outright rejected that idea. “We want them to think I’m besotted.”

  “Besotted?” She couldn’t believe that word was in his vocabulary. “Just being seen together will be more than enough.”

  “I disagree. In fact, I think we should dig a little deeper to make it really believable. Learn each other’s favorite colors and whatever else a couple does.”

  Couple? He wanted to pretend they were a couple?

  This day was going from bad to worse.

  Rory Sullivan being this into pretending to be her boyfriend was clearly karmic punishment for something she’d done in the past.

  Long-buried shame for her past misdeeds rose up to hit her hard in the solar plexus, and it took every ounce of self-control she had to shove the shame back down deep. So deep that she could pretend it wasn’t there if she tried hard enough.

  That was when she realized he was smirking at her—a look Rory Sullivan had likely patented at birth—which meant this wasn’t karma. No, far more likely it was payback for stealing his parking space. “You’re loving this, aren’t you? Winding me up with all this pretend-boyfriend stuff?”

  He didn’t bother to hold in his laughter. “You should see your face. The more I say, the greener you get.”

  She breathed a sigh of relief. “So you don’t actually want to pretend to be a—” She could hardly bring herself to say it. “Couple?”

  No was the right response. Of course not would be even better.

  “Actually, we probably should,” was the wrong answer on every single level. But one he gave anyway.

  If only she hadn’t drunk so much earlier. More synapses might have been firing, and she would have done better than saying, “No one would ever believe it.”

  “Sure they would.” He looked far too confident as he moved toward her. “Two single makers sharing a workspace all these months.” He was barely a foot from her when he stopped. “Plenty of people have probably wondered what we’re getting up to all those late nights when we’re the only ones left in the building.”

  “Working!” She was horrified by any other possibility, particularly when the truth was that she’d had more than one secret fantasy after seeing Rory use his saws and drills and sanders without a shirt during a few particularly hot nights. “We’ve both been working. Separately!”

  “You and I know that. But your stepsister and your ex don’t.” She couldn’t miss the naughty glint in his eyes. “All they’re going to see is that we can’t keep our hands off each other.”

  This time, she was the one laughing. “We touched for the first time five minutes ago. I can’t even imagine what it would feel like to put my hands all over you.”

  It wasn’t until the words were out of her mouth that she realized what she’d just done. With a handful of words, she’d thrown down the gauntlet. Firmly and undeniably in front of the man who had driven her crazier during the past year than anyone else ever had. And who would surely never let her walk out of here without taking up the challenge.

  No surprise, then, that he responded by holding his arms wide. “Go ahead. Put your hands on me.”

  Did his voice suddenly sound a little hoarse? Or was it simply that she had completely lost her grip on reality?

  She had to
lick suddenly dry lips before responding. “It won’t be a big deal if I do.” She forced a shrug. “You’re just a guy I work with, doing me a favor. Which,” she made sure to point out, “I will owe you for big-time to make us even.”

  He lifted his arms slightly. “I’m still waiting for you to get over your revulsion to touching me. Better to face it now in private than tomorrow night in front of everyone.”

  That was just the problem. She was anything but revolted.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Zara had vowed to get over her fatal flaw of falling for guys who always ended up wishing they were with Brittany. At first, each of the guys had been so convincing. They told her how much they admired what she was doing with her business and how they liked that she didn’t dress or act like other women they’d known—only to inevitably fall head over heels for her stepsister, who ticked every “perfect girlfriend” box with her swishy blonde hair, her job in PR, and her fashionable clothes.

  Zara’s ex was a paler, smaller, less-built version of Rory. Which only reinforced that she would have to be an utter fool to let herself give in to these strange new feelings for Rory.

  Okay, then. It was time to buck up and touch him and prove that she felt nothing. Yes, that was her new mantra. She was going to feel nothing.

  She gave him no warning before slapping her hands on his chest. The sound was loud enough to reverberate through the room.

  “Sorry.” She winced as she added a white lie. “I don’t think I’ve fully got my balance back.”

  “I’m tough enough to take it.”

  Good thing one of them was. Because now that she could feel his warmth seeping through his shirt to her palms…now that she knew exactly how hard and well-built his pecs were…now that she was getting a lungful of that delicious wood-chip/cedar scent he had going…