LITMIR.BIZ

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a menu back to a diner who was surely going to have to pay for it, silence proved to be too much for Vicky. She swallowed the last bite of her chicken. “What are you, famous or something?”

      “Or something.” Hunter finally grinned for Vicky’s benefit. The curve of his mouth melted everything inside Liv as though the past eight and a half years hadn’t happened.

      “Are you a movie star?” Vicky asked.

      Hunter rested his palms on the polished surface of the table to lean closer to her. Liv felt something shrivel inside her as the man and child went nose to identical nose—then there were those same blue eyes, the same onyx hair, that stubborn thrust of both their jaws.

      Vicky did not look like Liv. And she didn’t look like Johnny Guenther at all. At least, Liv didn’t think so. She had never forgotten a plane or an angle of Hunter’s face, but she had a hard time recalling Johnny’s features.

      “Nope,” he told Vicky. “I drive cars.”

      “That’s not special.”

      “It is when you do it very, very fast.”

      She thought about it. “My mom never does that.”

      His eyes angled off her, to Liv. “Still methodical about getting where you’re going, Liv?”

      “I’m exactly where I want to be, thanks.” Her nerves were beginning to feel like cut crystal, painfully fragile under her skin.

      “Divorced?” His dark-blue eyes fixed on her ringless left hand.

      Liv let go of her wineglass as though a snake had suddenly appeared inside it. She dropped her hand to her lap, under the table.

      “And touchy about it,” he concluded.

      “Now that all the social niceties have been exchanged,” she replied, “you can feel free to go.” Her throat felt too tight for the words.

      He shot a brow up as though considering it, then he shook his head. “I don’t see that happening this time around.”

      It was a promise and a threat. Liv had never known him to hesitate to make good on either one.

      He straightened from their table, and she watched him stroll to one that had apparently been reserved for his party at the back of the restaurant. Those incredible blue eyes raked her one more time before he was seated. Liv took Vicky’s hand quickly.

      “Come on, honey. Let’s go.”

      “But I want dessert! That bread pudding—” Vicky broke off when Liv practically lifted her from the booth.

      “We’ll stop at an ice cream stand on the way back to the motel,” Liv promised.

      Vicky wrinkled her nose. “Oh, yuck, Mom. Please.”

      “For once—just for once—couldn’t you be a normal child?” But it wouldn’t happen, Liv thought helplessly, it could never happen, because her daughter had been born into a lie and, to Liv’s great despair, nothing in her life had ever been very normal at all.

      Chapter 1

      Friday, September 9

       Jerome, Arizona

      “What on earth possessed you?” Kiki Condor, Liv’s partner and cook, actually yelled at her for one of the few times in their long, long friendship. She grabbed Liv’s wrist and pried the remainder of a sourdough roll from her fingers.

      Liv let it go reluctantly. Without the distraction of the roll, she knew she was in trouble.

      Liv was a master at diverting conversations—six years of running a bed-and-breakfast and having various strangers troop through her home asking personal questions did that to a woman. The exceptions to the rule were Kiki and Hunter Hawk-Cole.

      “When you tempt fate,” Kiki continued, “you have to be prepared for it to jump up and bite you in the—”

      “Hush,” Liv warned quickly, automatically, but Vicky was out in the barn. The girl idolized her aunt Kiki, and she was never shy about repeating her words verbatim. Sometimes it was funny. Sometimes it had Liv trooping down to the school for parent-teacher conferences.

      Liv tried again to change the subject. “You know, something about that recipe needs work.”

      “And why are you just telling me now?” Kiki demanded as though she hadn’t spoken. “You’ve been home for five days!”

      Because she’d dreaded just this sort of reaction, Liv thought. She licked crumbs from her fingers. “Nothing has happened since we ran into each other. I haven’t heard from him.”

      Dig a hole over there, child, and dump the problem inside. Cover it up and walk away. It’s yours no more. More wise words, Liv thought, from her grandmother. She’d dug a hole when she had come home from Delaware, had kicked Hunter in there and had heaped dirt on top of him, and true enough, he’d stayed put.

      So far.

      Kiki jammed the rest of the roll down the garbage disposal. “I want every specific detail.”

      Liv gave up. She went to the butcher block table and folded all 5’8” of herself into a chair there. Like their entire inn, the kitchen was done in western tones with an occasional Victorian touch—just as the place had been in its heyday. The floor and one wall were all aged brick. There were pretty rose-colored shutters on the windows instead of curtains. Old copper pots and utensils were strung across the ceiling. But the appliances were modern and state-of-the-art. Kiki had insisted that if she was going to cook for strangers, she was going to do it right. And though it had been Liv’s own inheritance that had funded the inn’s renovation from 1890’s brothel to twentieth-century bed and breakfast, Liv hadn’t tried to argue with her.

      Liv scraped her long hair off her forehead and held it there. “Well, you already know that it happened at the trade show in Wilmington. Not at it exactly, but while I was there.”

      “I told you not to take Vicky to that show. Do you remember? Didn’t I say I’d baby-sit while you were away?”

      “She wanted to go and it seemed like a nice treat for her right before school started again.”

      Kiki planted her oven-mitted hands on her narrow hips. “You knew there was a NASCAR race in Delaware that weekend and you took her anyway. Are you crazy?”

      “The race was in Dover! And the trade show was in Wilmington! These are two separate cities. No, wait, hold on a second.” Liv held up a hand when Kiki opened her mouth one more time to berate her lack of judgment. “I got us a room fifty miles away from Dover in Millsboro. Our motel was way down near the southern border of the state. I took precautions. Vicky and I got up extra early every day of that show to drive all the way to Wilmington. What were the odds of Hunter coming to Millsboro the night before the race—for dinner? What were the odds of him suddenly deciding to mingle with his fans?”

      “I’d say they were pretty damned good.” Kiki shoved another tray of biscuits into the oven, apparently not impressed with Liv’s assessment of them, either. “You took your daughter—his daughter—to a state the size of a postage stamp knowing that he would be there on the NASCAR circuit that same weekend. Did you want to run into him?”

      “Oh, please.” But the pain that flared inside her was every bit as unimaginable as it had been eight and a half years ago when she had sent him away. “It was a calculated risk.”

      “You always did stink at math.”

      It was true enough. Kiki handled all of the inn’s bookkeeping for just that reason. Liv concentrated on what she was good at—charm, hospitality, service, and an uncanny knowledge of her state’s history. Between the two of them, the Copper Rose had prospered.

      “I’ve made it a point to understand this stock car racing,” she said. “Hunter shouldn’t have been fifty miles south of Dover that night. The

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