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“Krissy, it’s okay. I’ll figure out something else.”

“But now I’m curious.”

He suddenly did not want her to be curious about any part of his life. It felt extremely dangerous. There was an expression: curiosity killed the cat.

Only in this circumstance, the cat could be him!

CHAPTER FOUR

“I’M VERY SORRY about your aunt,” Jonas said with formality, backing away from Krissy slowly, like a man backing away from extreme danger. He felt the door behind him. He put his hand on it. Have a nice life, he wished her silently.

“Wait! They reset the alarm! We will have to go out the back.”

There was no we. Or at least after he escaped out that back door there would be no we.

“Look, I’m going to leave, too,” she said, her composure returning and her tone soothing, as if she was talking to a flighty animal that was about to bolt. “We can go together. If it’s not too much trouble, perhaps you could walk with me? I have to get to Penn Station to get my train home. You could fill me in on the details as to why you need a fiancée.”

“Uh—”

“Fake mate,” she said with way too much enjoyment. “You don’t mind, do you?”

Actually, he did mind. He suddenly didn’t want her knowing any of the details of his quest for a temporary arrangement of the fiancée kind. On the other hand, he did not want her going out the back door by herself, or walking by herself, either. And Penn Station at this time of night?

“Where’s home?” he asked reluctantly.

“Sunshine Cove. It’s a little hamlet in the Hudson Valley—

“I know where it is.” A memory tickled. “Is Moo-Moo’s still there?”

She smiled. Now there was a dangerous thing, far more dangerous than the tears that still wetted the front of his shirt. That smile—along with the fresh memory of her hair, wild and springy under his touch—confirmed his thought that lurking under that deliberately frumpy librarian look was something else entirely.

“Still there,” she said. “The best strawberry milkshake in the world.”

Jonas formed an unfortunate picture of those lush lips closing over a straw.

“A strawberry shake?” he scoffed, partly to erase the visual. “You don’t waste a trip to Moo-Moo’s and have a strawberry shake. You have the Triple Chocolate Volcano Sundae.”

She frowned at him. “You needn’t say that like a strawberry shake is boring.”

“Well…”

“They use real strawberries!”

This, right here, was why he needed to cut his losses. She was prepared to defend a strawberry milkshake, as if he had somehow called her boring, and not the milkshake. And for some reason, instead of cutting his losses, he was prepared to goad her on.

“Caramel Cream Banana Bliss, Gooey Gluey Fudge Cake, Thunder Mountain Raspberry Dazzle or, wait for it, Strawberry Shake.”

“Yes,” she said stubbornly.

“Every time?”

“Sometimes I have a vanilla cone,” she said, as if this was an act of defiance that she was prepared to defend to the death.

“Now you’re just trying to bug me.”

She was silent.

“I suppose they use real vanilla?” Jonas asked.

“They do. You can see the pieces of ground bean in the ice cream.”

“Well, that’s exciting.”

“We all have different ideas of what’s exciting.”

That made him look right at her hair. And then her lips. And then, hastily, away. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels.

He wondered, a renegade thought that he completely failed to head off at the pass, if they weren’t talking about ice cream, what she would find exciting.

“You’re very familiar with the menu,” she said, her tone a little stiff, as if he had managed to hurt her feelings. Which he probably had. He wasn’t good with the sensitive type of woman. She had claimed she usually wasn’t emotional, but he was seeing no sign of that.

“I did try to work my way through the entire menu,” Jonas admitted proudly. “Back in the day, Moo-Moo’s was a big outing for my family.”

It was the kind of memory that he, allergic to sensitivity, avoided. Still, it pushed in, the four of them piling into a station wagon for a rare day away from the failing family resort. The day would be laughter filled, love filled. That thing called family, feeling so steady, so safe, so strong, despite the cloud of financial insecurity they had lived under. How wrong a man—a boy at the time—could be in his sense that things could last forever.

Still, Sunshine Cove was exactly the kind of place he would picture Krissy living: one of those satellite enclaves served by commuter trains, the quintessential Hudson Valley town with mature trees and old manor houses tucked back on big grassy lots, and a sleepy main street that felt like a homecoming.

“I think I had better—” cut his losses came to mind. And yet that was not the direction he was moving in. He knew what he was going to do. Felt weirdly as if he had to do.

Jonas heard a sound. What was it? A heating system with a squealing belt turning on? A cat fighting in the alley? For some reason, it shivered along his spine. “Did you hear that?”

“No, what?”

“It sounded almost like the alarm going off again, only way more quiet.”

Krissy tilted her head at him.

Jonas could not tell her the full truth. It sounded like someone in the distance laughing. He was not sure he had ever heard Madame Cosmos laugh, but he was pretty sure if she did it would have the alarm-like stridency of a cackle of pure delight.

It made him reconsider what he was just about to offer to do. After all, what was the point of Krissy thinking he was the kind of perfect gentleman a strawberry shake woman like her would require him to be? And what was the point of leaving himself open to her curiosity when he had decided Krissy as his fake mate would be way too complicated?

“I don’t hear anything,” she said decidedly after a moment. “You think you had better what?”

What, indeed? he asked