LITMIR.BIZ

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signify Nate’s commitment never to leave her again.

      To say Derek had disliked Izzy’s now-husband when he’d first met the man...well, that was an understatement. Nate Thayer had hurt Izzy once, before Izzy and Derek had met. After hearing the story and being Izzy’s best friend for all these years, Derek had given Nate as hard a time as he could when the other man had shown up again, suddenly, last year. But Nate had turned out to be a good guy—hard to intimidate, too—and Izzy was nuts about him. Eventually, despite the trust issues born from his own past, Derek had given the pair his blessing, and they seemed to be doing fine. Great, in fact.

      So, yeah, Izzy could afford to smile about it all now.

      “That night in the tavern,” he said slowly, looking at the river, “I sensed from Willa what I’ve been feeling all along. Some of what I’ve been feeling,” he amended, figuring honestly that Willa wasn’t as invested as he. “It was more than physical.”

      Izzy shook her head. “Even after a year of working together, I hardly know anything about her, beyond the fact that she has a strong work ethic and is completely reliable.” She reached for a dill pickle. “You know, if I got a dollar every time someone asked me to set you up with them—or with their daughter or their cousin or their cousin’s daughter’s cousin—over the years, I could retire. So why this woman, this time? I mean, yes, she’s lovely and I know you’ve had the hots for her, but, really, why Willa?”

      The stretch of Long River where they sat flowed quietly, with little fanfare, but it was beautiful, mysterious and multifaceted as any white water Derek had ever seen. It reminded him of Willa. Her silvery eyes were soft, keenly observant, kind, sad—it all depended on the hour and the day. He could study her endlessly and still not see everything he knew there was to see.

      “When we were in the tavern, I told her a joke. A really silly one.”

      “One of Henry’s?”

      “Yeah.” Izzy’s former boss, Henry Bernstein, used to offer his customers “A joke and a pickle for only a nickel.” Derek had heard plenty of them (and had eaten a lot of pickles) over the years. “Willa liked it. She laughed. Really laughed. For the first time, her smile was in her eyes, too, and I could see...” He held up a hand as Izzy gaped at him. “Don’t say anything. No wisecracks.” He waited until Izzy nodded before he continued. “I could see what the future might be with her. And, yeah, there was something kind of desperate about the way she was behaving, but for a moment there, I think she was wondering what a future might be like, too.” Izzy was looking at him seriously, as seriously as she ever had. He took a deep breath. “My gut’s been telling me for a long time that this is different. This is special. So even when I took her home, I knew we weren’t going to do anything more than kiss.”

      Izzy’s brows rose to new heights. Stretching his own legs out toward the water, Derek shrugged. “I might have taken some upper body privileges. But that’s it. When we—” He stopped. Too much information. But as he stared at the river, he let his mind float and thought, I want Willa for more than a night.

      “You don’t know much about her. Nobody does. There isn’t a lot of information to be found apparently. A lot of people have Googled her,” Izzy confided.

      “What?”

      “Yeah. Come on, you haven’t?”

      “No.” Not that he hadn’t been tempted, but... “No. Someday she’ll tell me what I need to know.”

      “Okay, well we mere mortals are curious right now. And you know what we found out?”

      “No. And don’t—”

      “Almost nothing. There isn’t much information to be found. Isn’t that weird in this day and age? No Facebook, no Instagram—”

      “I don’t have that stuff, either—”

      “—and while I support her desire to stay off social media, you have to admit that it’s weird not to be able to find her somewhere online. These days, you can get a history of addresses for people who’ve lived under rocks—”

      “That’s an invasion of privacy. That kind of information should only be available for legal purposes.”

      “—and there are, apparently, over nine hundred Willa Holmeses, but none of them jump out as our Willa Holmes.”

      Derek told himself there was nothing unusual about someone living under the radar of the internet.

      “Some folks are saying she’s running away from a bad relationship,” Izzy continued. “Marcy Anneting thinks Willa is in the Witness Protection Program, but Marcy belongs to a mystery book club. And Jett Schulman says you can tell by her manner that she was born into a life of luxury and is just here temporarily to see how the other half lives.”

      “When did you become the town crier, Izzy?”

      He saw the sting of his words as her eyes flickered, but she didn’t back down. “Since my best friend started to fall for a woman I don’t think will ever love him back.” Unmindful of the sandwich she was squeezing tightly in her hand, Izzy exhaled noisily. “I don’t think she can love you back. I don’t know what the truth is. Maybe she was a mafia wife or her high school sweetheart died tragically and she can’t get over it, or she’s just a very normal, exceptionally private woman who is emotionally closed off. Whatever it is, she’s not the woman I want for you. Derek, everyone thinks of you as having it all together, and you do. Now. But I’ve known you since you since you were the original rebel without a cause. We come from the same place, you and I.”

      “That was a long time ago. When I left my uncle’s house, I didn’t even know what I was running from.”

      “I think you were trying to run to something. Just like me. You’ve been searching for a loving family that was all yours ever since I met you. I don’t want you to be hurt again.”

      “And you think one small, shy woman can do that?” He smiled, hoping to tease Izzy out of her concern, but she refused to be distracted.

      “I think she could, yes. I want to protect you, because I love you. Like you tried to protect me when Nate came back.”

      “Yeah, and I was wrong,” he pointed out. “Everything turned out all right. Better than all right.”

      She stared at him a long time then slowly wrapped the remainder of her now squished sandwich and put it in the insulated lunchbox she’d brought with her. “Okay.”

      “Izz, I love you. But I’ve got to go with my gut on this.”

      She wouldn’t look at him. “Yeah. Well, I hired her, you know? I brought her into our lives, so I guess I feel responsible.”

      He chucked her on the chin. “Okay, you can be the best man at our wedding.” When she swiped at a tear, he realized how serious she was and felt a pinch of surprise. But he’d already considered all the possibilities. He knew where he was headed, and he wasn’t changing direction. “Izz, I know this may turn out to be nothing. I do. I accept that. I’ll deal with it.”

      She sniffled. “You want to get married. You want a family.”

      “Yeah,” he admitted. “I’ve borrowed yours long enough.”

      She pulled back. “Derek! Don’t even say that.”

      He smiled. “Hey, you and Eli are stuck with me.” For the past ten years, he’d spent nearly every holiday, every birthday and plenty of days off with Izzy and her son, who was now fifteen and getting to know his father for the first time. Eli didn’t need “Uncle Derek” constantly in the way. “I’m ready to branch out, that’s all. Widen the circle a bit.”

      “Okay, I get it, but you are family, and my being with Nate doesn’t change that.” Izzy spoke emphatically, even though she’d said it all before.

      She still couldn’t accept that the past Thanksgiving and Christmas had been different. On this

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