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      For my family.

       Prologue

      Iat all started with a kiss.

      A twenty-dollar kiss, to be precise.

      Courtney Clay inhaled carefully and stared up at the man standing outside her apartment door. She didn’t do this sort of thing … inviting strange men into her home during the wee hours. Or any hour, for that matter.

      But then Mason Hyde wasn’t entirely a stranger. He was a friend of her cousin’s, after all.

      And he could kiss like nobody she’d ever met.

      The statement whispered through her mind, tempting.

      She straightened her fingers, then curled them once more around the doorknob. “Do you want to come in?”

      His eyes were deep shadows despite the porch light burning brightly above her front door. “Yes.” His voice was deep. Blunt. And—as it had struck her from the first moment she’d encountered him—entrancingly melodious. That first time, when she’d heard him speaking to someone else, she’d thought how his voice didn’t seem to quite match his almost dangerous-looking appearance.

      The second time, just that afternoon when he’d stopped in front of her kissing booth at the town’s Valentine’s Day festival, plunked down a twenty for a five-dollar kiss and told her with a crooked smile that she could keep the change, she’d realized just how perfectly his voice did fit him.

      And even though there had been a narrow table between them on which that twenty-dollar bill rested, she’d felt something curl inside her when he’d spoken. And something curl even more tightly when his eyes had stared into hers.

      Her knees had felt a little shaky. Her stomach had danced a little nervously. And her voice had risen about half an octave when she’d thanked him for his generous donation on behalf of the local school that was benefiting from the funds being raised that day.

      But then his lips had tilted a little crookedly, which seemed to make the thin scar that slashed down his face from his right temple to his jaw even more apparent, and he’d leaned across the table toward her and brushed his lips gently … simply … across hers.

      And that’s where her memory stopped dead in its tracks.

      The contact of his lips on hers had simply caused every cell in her brain to short-circuit.

      Which is what had led them here.

      To this moment.

      With him standing at her door in the wee hours of the night, exactly twenty minutes after she’d gotten off her shift at the hospital. Exactly where—and when—she’d uncharacteristically invited him, in a rushed, quiet voice, lest anyone else around the kissing booth hear her, after he’d murmured that he’d really like to see her again. Somewhere. Anywhere that didn’t involve a line of ten guys—young and old—who were happy to hand over a few bucks to kiss a pretty nurse.

      Now, though, despite saying that he did want to come inside, he hadn’t moved so much as an inch. Instead, he was watching her intently with those eyes that she knew from the kissing booth were a startlingly pale green against his olive-toned skin.

      “Are you sure you want me to come in? I’m not going to want to leave anytime soon. We could go out somewhere. Have some coffee.”

      She hadn’t expected that. Her moist hand tightened around the door handle as she continued looking up at him. She was tall. But he was a whole lot taller. A whole lot broader.

      Go somewhere for coffee? Somewhere safe. Somewhere innocuous. Or invite him in?

      She didn’t have indiscriminate encounters with near strangers. She didn’t do anything in her life that wasn’t well thought-out. Well planned.

      But she didn’t want to go to the all-night coffee shop and sit across a table from him pretending that all she wanted was conversation and coffee.

      She wanted his long arms wrapped

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