Chapter 1
Maggie Frey plonked the caddy with all her meds on her best friend’s coffee table, and curled herself into the corner of the sofa. “There, see? You can stop fussing. I’m following orders.”
Ridiculous orders. She was the one who’d spent forever planning for her hysterectomy—she didn’t need Livia to flap around insisting she get enough rest and drink fluids and set timers for her next dose of pain killers. Maggie set her own timers. Besides, at only eight days post-op, her body was super demanding about resting.
Livia was in the kitchen filling water bottles, but she stopped and joined Maggie on the sofa. “I don’t have to go.”
“You’ve been staring at me nap for a week now. It’s creepy. Go to work.”
“Your phone?”
Maggie tapped her sweatpants pocket. “Charged up.”
“Want me to open the pill bottles so you don’t have to strain?”
“And have Mittens galumph through here and send them all flying? It’s fine.” The Maine Coon cat was a ridiculous beast who never took it well when Maggie came to stay, since the guest bed was his favorite sun trap. He liked Maggie even less now that she’d taken to napping during his prime window hours.
“Oh, and Greg pulled out that hiking cane for you. It’s in our bedroom, hang on.”
Like Maggie was in a big hurry to go for another walk. She’d been predictably achy after the surgery, moving around just enough to satisfy Livia, who’d driven up to be with her at the hospital and during her transition home. But then on day four, Maggie was on the phone to her parents, going over logistics for the weeks she would spend recovering at their house. Livia overheard the conversation. By the time she was off the phone, an outraged Livia had decreed that Maggie had to return with her to Honey Wine for the rest of her recovery.
Problem was, the surgery was by her home in Dallas. Her parents lived barely thirty miles away in Fort Worth. But Livia and Greg’s cabin in Honey Wine was a four hour drive, the last of it on winding Hill Country roads. By the time they’d arrived, even with Maggie practically bubble-wrapped in Livia’s back seat, she needed all the prescription pain relief, and two days of barely moving. But at least in Honey Wine her parents couldn’t tell her to babysit anyone ‘since you’ll be just sitting around anyway.’
Now she was alert enough to cede the bed to Mittens for the day, but Livia didn’t believe she was healthy enough to be left alone in the two bedroom, two bath, log and shingle home they called a cabin. Maggie kept telling her to head across the road to Chata, the bed and breakfast inn Livia owned, to relieve her staff. Livia kept hovering.
Maggie craved a few hours with no one’s company but her own. So when Livia returned from her room brandishing a technical-looking metal cane, Maggie said, “I’m not going to need that. I’m barely getting off the couch. I have all the supplies, and a list of a dozen shows I’ve been told to check out. Plus, you and Greg are both no more than five minutes away.”
Finally, Livia gave in, and headed across to Chata. Maggie let herself collapse into a moody heap of pain. Nestled in the sofa cushions and throw pillows, she stared at the supplies on the coffee table so long she lost focus. Water and pill bottles and three kinds of snacks and a selection of cat toys in case Mittens tried to climb on her torso again and she needed to distract him. It blurred into a zone of overlapping colors she was in no mood to interact with.
She fell into a floaty place, the pain meds blurring the edges but not quite knocking her into sleep. All the funny country sounds she never got in her Dallas condo: chirping birds and wind in trees and some kind of human activity off in the distance, echoing dimly in that way she’d noticed when there weren’t buildings and roads everywhere to direct the sound waves.
It was the distinct steps of someone on the porch steps that roused her to alertness. Livia wasn’t due back until late afternoon, and her husband Greg was spending all day running an event at Cesta, his eco-adventure company. Their cabin was nestled between Chata and Cesta, a private part of the land that had, after some pitfalls, brought Livia and Greg together.
Maggie reached for her phone, regretting it as soon as her abs flexed even that small amount. Ridiculous recovering midriff. She braced her midsection with a pillow and pulled herself more upright as the door opened.
It swung with a bit too much force, hitting the shoe rack behind it, so the first thing Maggie’s befuddled senses picked up on was when the man said, “Shit, sorry.”
Then, as he turned to pull the door closed, she noticed the cardboard box he was hefting, full of paper bags and the enticing aroma of brisket.
And before she’d even gotten a look at the culprit of all these sensations—maybe he’d been on her mind more than she’d thought—she’d said, “Adrian?”
Because groggy as she was, her mind had synthesized everything and let her know that standing there, fully agog now he’d noticed her in return, was her hookup turned … more, Adrian Reyes.
* * *
Adrian nearly dropped the his tray of signature oak-smoked sliced beef. Maggie peeped up over the arm of Greg’s sofa, looking gorgeous and tired and way less delighted to see him than in March, the last time they’d been together.
He closed the door, and shut down the mental replay of his awkward entry, and how it must have seemed from her perspective. Giving himself a second to fix his face, he hefted the barbecue onto the kitchen counter, then turned to approach Maggie.
“So, hey. I didn’t know you were here. Sorry if I disturbed you, barging in.”
She’d sunk back into the nest she’d made of the sofa. He didn’t mention the pharmacy happening on the coffee table, or the uncharacteristic flat hair, or anything about the careful way she held herself. Not cause he didn’t care—if it was anyone but Maggie he’d have probably barraged them with nosiness.
But it was Maggie, and Maggie didn’t open the floor to questions. Whatever she needed, she’d say straight out.
So instead he asked, “When’d you get to town?”
Over two years before, she’d startled the hell out of him, messaging him when they hadn’t seen each other for half a decade. She’d found his profile on a dating app, and her text made him laugh for a sec, with the screenshot and the joking about how she was the one to show up on his turf for once. But she’d followed it with a selfie where she was biting back a grin, and Livia was laughing in the background, and then he’d recognized that the third person in the pic, half-hidden behind a throw pillow, was his sister Amalia.
They’d leaned into the coincidence of her best friend moving to his hometown, and far as he knew, she always let him know when she was visiting, so they could find time to sneak off together.
He’d lacked all kinds of finesse, that first time, emphasizing how he didn’t want his dating life getting back to his family. It was simply so much easier, when the whole boisterous lot of them were so connected to the Honey Wine gossip network. Better to stop the comments before they started. Stop them from making a thousand assumptions about the trajectory of his life, to pile on top of the thousand others they made when they never listened to his actual plans.
To his relief, Maggie had been cool with keeping things under wraps. It was a little juvenile, he got that, for her to stop at his place on her way to visit Livia. On the up side, they were agreed about wanting nothing more than occasional sex, and they happened to vibe extra-well together. So they managed an hour or two in his bed, or devised some other option. Sneaking out to his SUV if they were both at Bob’s Bar. Ducking deeper into the woods while their friends were distracted at the swimming hole. That one time in Greg and Livia’s cabin, while those two were driving off for their honeymoon and had left Maggie behind to tidy up.
And when their libidos burned hot with no visits on the horizon, they’d devised even more. He found excuses to visit the Dallas area. They’d met at Enchanted Rock to hike and camp. He’d thought their dozen encounters—not that he was counting—over the past couple of years encompassed all her trips to town, until now.
They’d maybe gotten off a little on the sneaking, like they were teenagers again and not full-on adults in their thirties. But none of that meant she owed him notices when she was around. And she wasn’t volunteering info, and she was looking … well, not the kind of rumpled he recognized from having sex with her. Truth was, last time he’d seen this particular version of Maggie, flat-out and lank and holding herself like it was a great deal of effort … That’d been rough. He’d shown up at the annual BBQ convention where they’d first met, ready to rekindle the connection they’d made the previous couple of years, and found her so cramped up that he’d encouraged her to pass her work over to a colleague and shepherded her up to rest in his hotel room.
Now he asked, “You need a heating pad?” He didn’t want to go digging around in Greg’s house for supplies, but he also didn’t want to abandon her long enough to head to a drug store like he’d done that time in Dallas. She clearly had whatever medicines might help, but there were other ways to ease her pain until they kicked in. He remembered some from that convention, and ideas he’d picked up later, during the years he’d been with Wanda. “I’ll put the kettle on for tea.”
It wasn’t until he was pacing between the kitchen and the living room, storing the food he’d brought while he waited for the water to boil, that she offered up a couple of sentences. “Adrian, simmer down, it’s not like before. I got rid of my uterus last week. This is what recovery looks like.”
Maggie Frey plonked the caddy with all her meds on her best friend’s coffee table, and curled herself into the corner of the sofa. “There, see? You can stop fussing. I’m following orders.”
Ridiculous orders. She was the one who’d spent forever planning for her hysterectomy—she didn’t need Livia to flap around insisting she get enough rest and drink fluids and set timers for her next dose of pain killers. Maggie set her own timers. Besides, at only eight days post-op, her body was super demanding about resting.
Livia was in the kitchen filling water bottles, but she stopped and joined Maggie on the sofa. “I don’t have to go.”
“You’ve been staring at me nap for a week now. It’s creepy. Go to work.”
“Your phone?”
Maggie tapped her sweatpants pocket. “Charged up.”
“Want me to open the pill bottles so you don’t have to strain?”
“And have Mittens galumph through here and send them all flying? It’s fine.” The Maine Coon cat was a ridiculous beast who never took it well when Maggie came to stay, since the guest bed was his favorite sun trap. He liked Maggie even less now that she’d taken to napping during his prime window hours.
“Oh, and Greg pulled out that hiking cane for you. It’s in our bedroom, hang on.”
Like Maggie was in a big hurry to go for another walk. She’d been predictably achy after the surgery, moving around just enough to satisfy Livia, who’d driven up to be with her at the hospital and during her transition home. But then on day four, Maggie was on the phone to her parents, going over logistics for the weeks she would spend recovering at their house. Livia overheard the conversation. By the time she was off the phone, an outraged Livia had decreed that Maggie had to return with her to Honey Wine for the rest of her recovery.
Problem was, the surgery was by her home in Dallas. Her parents lived barely thirty miles away in Fort Worth. But Livia and Greg’s cabin in Honey Wine was a four hour drive, the last of it on winding Hill Country roads. By the time they’d arrived, even with Maggie practically bubble-wrapped in Livia’s back seat, she needed all the prescription pain relief, and two days of barely moving. But at least in Honey Wine her parents couldn’t tell her to babysit anyone ‘since you’ll be just sitting around anyway.’
Now she was alert enough to cede the bed to Mittens for the day, but Livia didn’t believe she was healthy enough to be left alone in the two bedroom, two bath, log and shingle home they called a cabin. Maggie kept telling her to head across the road to Chata, the bed and breakfast inn Livia owned, to relieve her staff. Livia kept hovering.
Maggie craved a few hours with no one’s company but her own. So when Livia returned from her room brandishing a technical-looking metal cane, Maggie said, “I’m not going to need that. I’m barely getting off the couch. I have all the supplies, and a list of a dozen shows I’ve been told to check out. Plus, you and Greg are both no more than five minutes away.”
Finally, Livia gave in, and headed across to Chata. Maggie let herself collapse into a moody heap of pain. Nestled in the sofa cushions and throw pillows, she stared at the supplies on the coffee table so long she lost focus. Water and pill bottles and three kinds of snacks and a selection of cat toys in case Mittens tried to climb on her torso again and she needed to distract him. It blurred into a zone of overlapping colors she was in no mood to interact with.
She fell into a floaty place, the pain meds blurring the edges but not quite knocking her into sleep. All the funny country sounds she never got in her Dallas condo: chirping birds and wind in trees and some kind of human activity off in the distance, echoing dimly in that way she’d noticed when there weren’t buildings and roads everywhere to direct the sound waves.
It was the distinct steps of someone on the porch steps that roused her to alertness. Livia wasn’t due back until late afternoon, and her husband Greg was spending all day running an event at Cesta, his eco-adventure company. Their cabin was nestled between Chata and Cesta, a private part of the land that had, after some pitfalls, brought Livia and Greg together.
Maggie reached for her phone, regretting it as soon as her abs flexed even that small amount. Ridiculous recovering midriff. She braced her midsection with a pillow and pulled herself more upright as the door opened.
It swung with a bit too much force, hitting the shoe rack behind it, so the first thing Maggie’s befuddled senses picked up on was when the man said, “Shit, sorry.”
Then, as he turned to pull the door closed, she noticed the cardboard box he was hefting, full of paper bags and the enticing aroma of brisket.
And before she’d even gotten a look at the culprit of all these sensations—maybe he’d been on her mind more than she’d thought—she’d said, “Adrian?”
Because groggy as she was, her mind had synthesized everything and let her know that standing there, fully agog now he’d noticed her in return, was her hookup turned … more, Adrian Reyes.
* * *
Adrian nearly dropped the his tray of signature oak-smoked sliced beef. Maggie peeped up over the arm of Greg’s sofa, looking gorgeous and tired and way less delighted to see him than in March, the last time they’d been together.
He closed the door, and shut down the mental replay of his awkward entry, and how it must have seemed from her perspective. Giving himself a second to fix his face, he hefted the barbecue onto the kitchen counter, then turned to approach Maggie.
“So, hey. I didn’t know you were here. Sorry if I disturbed you, barging in.”
She’d sunk back into the nest she’d made of the sofa. He didn’t mention the pharmacy happening on the coffee table, or the uncharacteristic flat hair, or anything about the careful way she held herself. Not cause he didn’t care—if it was anyone but Maggie he’d have probably barraged them with nosiness.
But it was Maggie, and Maggie didn’t open the floor to questions. Whatever she needed, she’d say straight out.
So instead he asked, “When’d you get to town?”
Over two years before, she’d startled the hell out of him, messaging him when they hadn’t seen each other for half a decade. She’d found his profile on a dating app, and her text made him laugh for a sec, with the screenshot and the joking about how she was the one to show up on his turf for once. But she’d followed it with a selfie where she was biting back a grin, and Livia was laughing in the background, and then he’d recognized that the third person in the pic, half-hidden behind a throw pillow, was his sister Amalia.
They’d leaned into the coincidence of her best friend moving to his hometown, and far as he knew, she always let him know when she was visiting, so they could find time to sneak off together.
He’d lacked all kinds of finesse, that first time, emphasizing how he didn’t want his dating life getting back to his family. It was simply so much easier, when the whole boisterous lot of them were so connected to the Honey Wine gossip network. Better to stop the comments before they started. Stop them from making a thousand assumptions about the trajectory of his life, to pile on top of the thousand others they made when they never listened to his actual plans.
To his relief, Maggie had been cool with keeping things under wraps. It was a little juvenile, he got that, for her to stop at his place on her way to visit Livia. On the up side, they were agreed about wanting nothing more than occasional sex, and they happened to vibe extra-well together. So they managed an hour or two in his bed, or devised some other option. Sneaking out to his SUV if they were both at Bob’s Bar. Ducking deeper into the woods while their friends were distracted at the swimming hole. That one time in Greg and Livia’s cabin, while those two were driving off for their honeymoon and had left Maggie behind to tidy up.
And when their libidos burned hot with no visits on the horizon, they’d devised even more. He found excuses to visit the Dallas area. They’d met at Enchanted Rock to hike and camp. He’d thought their dozen encounters—not that he was counting—over the past couple of years encompassed all her trips to town, until now.
They’d maybe gotten off a little on the sneaking, like they were teenagers again and not full-on adults in their thirties. But none of that meant she owed him notices when she was around. And she wasn’t volunteering info, and she was looking … well, not the kind of rumpled he recognized from having sex with her. Truth was, last time he’d seen this particular version of Maggie, flat-out and lank and holding herself like it was a great deal of effort … That’d been rough. He’d shown up at the annual BBQ convention where they’d first met, ready to rekindle the connection they’d made the previous couple of years, and found her so cramped up that he’d encouraged her to pass her work over to a colleague and shepherded her up to rest in his hotel room.
Now he asked, “You need a heating pad?” He didn’t want to go digging around in Greg’s house for supplies, but he also didn’t want to abandon her long enough to head to a drug store like he’d done that time in Dallas. She clearly had whatever medicines might help, but there were other ways to ease her pain until they kicked in. He remembered some from that convention, and ideas he’d picked up later, during the years he’d been with Wanda. “I’ll put the kettle on for tea.”
It wasn’t until he was pacing between the kitchen and the living room, storing the food he’d brought while he waited for the water to boil, that she offered up a couple of sentences. “Adrian, simmer down, it’s not like before. I got rid of my uterus last week. This is what recovery looks like.”