LITMIR.BIZ

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thing through a teeny-weeny bit, before you agreed to it, huh?”

      His blue eyes narrowed. “I never agreed to it, Sierra! Is that the kind of man you think I am? Interested in that kind of cheap publicity? Hell, interested in getting dates for myself that way? Listen! The Bachelor of the Year headline was the journalist’s idea, not mine.”

      “You could have said no.”

      “I had no clue she was going to present the boat rescue story like that, until it appeared in the magazine. I didn’t realize how much she was going to hook it into my business success, or that it would be on the cover. Let alone that it would bring this kind of response from total strangers. This mess has just erupted. You have no idea!”

      “Gee, all that extra money coming in for extra sailing classes. All the extra business in your restaurants and waterfront stores. Yeah, most tourist enterprises really hate feel-good national publicity, I’m sure!”

      He frowned. “Don’t do that thing with your mouth. It doesn’t suit you.”

      “What thing?”

      “Looks like you’re sucking on a lemon.” Still frowning, he reached across the table and tried to do something to her lips with his fingers, the way he might have brushed a crumb from a child’s cheek. What on earth…?

      Smoothing them out? Yes, soothing those tight little muscles around her mouth.

      With his touch, Sierra could feel the tight muscles herself, and wondered if that was why her face so often felt stiff and tired by the end of the day. Even before this whole mess with the magazine, she’d had so much on her plate.

      There was her teaching job, working with a class of special needs kids, and three younger siblings who still depended on her a lot, and Dad’s health to monitor—he tended to leave the treatment of his diabetes largely to her—as well as his role as Landerville’s mayor to support.

      She knew she needed a vacation, but…sucking on a lemon?

      Ty’s finger-tips moved cool and light against her skin, like a caress, but still she flinched away and drawled, “Gee, thanks!”

      “You’re doing it again.”

      “Maybe because of all the extravagant compliments you’re paying me.”

      “And again.”

      “Ty, do you or do you not want a divorce?” she blurted out desperately.

      “You wouldn’t contest it?”

      Okay, Sierra. Don’t sigh. Don’t suck on a lemon.

      She lifted her chin, managed not to gust out the big whoosh of air that tightened her chest, and said quietly, “No, of course I wouldn’t contest it.”

      “You’ve had eight years to file for one, and you haven’t.”

      “No, I haven’t. Neither have you. But I want to, now. It’s way overdue, don’t you think?”

      Of course she was right, Ty conceded to himself. About seven years and eight months overdue, probably. He should have filed the papers himself, as soon as he’d realized that she had called his colossal, confident, angry bluff and really wasn’t going to follow him to Stoneport.

      But he’d been stubborn about it. That was how he’d dealt with the hurt, by channelling it into sheer pigheaded pride. He wasn’t the one making their marriage impossible. He wasn’t wrong about any of this! Let Sierra take the steps to legally sever their union, if that was what she wanted.

      She never had.

      He’d been so cocky at twenty-four, so sure of himself, his goals, his decisions. “You know where to find me,” he’d told her.

      “And you know where to find me!”

      And the hurt and disappointment had eased with time and hard work, the way such things did. The way they must have eased for her, too.

      “If it’s so overdue,” he answered her at last, “why haven’t you done something about it long before this? Why did it take some frothy magazine article to bring you here?”

      She colored and shrugged, and paused for almost as long as Ty had, before she answered. “Let’s just label it a wake-up call, shall we? Principles have a limited shelf life, I’ve discovered.”

      “Principles?” The word startled him. “Whose principles?”

      “I’m not the one who walked out of our marriage. I’m not the one who wanted it to end. You did, Ty. So the divorce should have been up to you.”

      “I never walked out of our marriage! I walked out of Landerville.”

      “That’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

      “No, it isn’t! I was pretty clear on that at the time, I thought. There was no future for me there. Not one that could possibly have made me happy. I needed this.” He swept his arm around, encompassing his world.

      “What’s ‘this’?” She hooked her fingers around the word to make the quotation marks.

      “The ocean, the boats, a chance to make a future for myself in a place where I wasn’t just that more-or-less-orphaned Garrett boy who might get as far as managing the hardware store some day, if the love-struck mayor’s daughter from the right side of the tracks could keep him honest. But you still don’t get any of that, do you?”

      “No, I don’t. Dad never looked at you that way.”

      “The rest of Landerville did.”

      “You weren’t just asking me to turn my back on a few narrow-minded attitudes. You were asking me to—” She stopped. Her cheeks were pink and angry and her dark eyes flashed. “A family is not something you can just walk away from, Ty. My family was not something I could just walk away from.”

      He sat up straighter. “I don’t consider—I’ve never considered—that I was asking you to do that.”

      “Just listen to us!”

      Sierra did the lemon thing with her mouth again and he couldn’t find an answer. Yeah, listen to them! Back to square one. Back eight years to exactly what had slammed them apart in the first place.

      She was so right. The divorce was overdue.

      She sat there looking at him over the rim of her cappuccino cup and he took a moment to assess the changes in her. She’d been stunningly beautiful, to his eyes, when they’d gotten married twelve years ago. That graceful figure, as lean as a catwalk model’s. That creamy skin. That wide, expressive mouth. That dark, straight, silky hair, flowing like a satin waterfall down her back. Those big, slightly exotic brown eyes—a throw-back to some distant Cherokee heritage on her mother’s side.

      And she was still beautiful. The hair was the same, only kept a little shorter and folded into an efficient pleat high on the back of her head, this morning. The figure was a touch more womanly beneath its conservative olive and beige top and skirt, but if there was a man in this world who didn’t like a few feminine curves in the right places, then that man wasn’t him.

      Her eyes and her mouth and her skin?

      Yeah, beautiful.

      Stunning.

      Except…

      She looked tired, at certain moments. Stressed. Angry? Unhappy?

      And her eyes and mouth and skin were the places where the problems showed, whatever they were. The sucking on a lemon thing. A tightness to her skin which sketched out to the world where her wrinkles would some day appear. A way of narrowing those dark eyes so that the fire deep inside them almost looked as if it had gone out.

      If the limbo of their non-marriage gave an explanation for any of this, all the more reason to get it dealt with so that both of them could get on with their lives.

      Ty gulped

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