“Oh, right, yes. I’m Winnie, Winnie Burnett,” she said, slipping her slender fingers into his. She was pretty, he noticed with a little jolt. How long had it been since he had taken the time to notice a pretty woman?
Even if it didn’t go any further than noticing… it felt nice.
And obviously, he amended hastily, itwouldn’tgo any further. It couldn’t. He wasn’t staying in town.
But, man. It had been so long since he’d even thought about finding someone attractive and all the possible things that could spin out from there. Romance. Partnership. Even, maybe, someday a family.
He was thirty-eight. He wasn’t exactly in the first bloom of youth. Most of his friends from high school and college had spouses and kids by now. His sister had a kid incollegefor goodness’ sake, and she wasn’tthatmuch older than he was.
But for so many years, work had been his whole world, so he hadn’t been on so much as a single date in… goodness, it must have been at least a year now.
Winnie fidgeted, and Shane worried that he’d been gaping at her while he went down this little introspective avenue.
But it turned out that she was thinking of something else entirely.
“Does that mean that Eleanor has… said things about me?” she asked, cringing in a way that suggested that whatever stories he had supposedly heard, they weren’t good.
“Um, I don’t… oh, wait! You’re the newest friend, right? The historian?”
Something that looked like hope flickered in her expression before she schooled her expression.
“That’s really nice of her,” Winnie said with a sigh. “I was… not the nicest about town regulations at the beginning. I’m really lucky that she decided to look past all that.”
Now that she mentioned it, this did cause atinyflicker of familiarity deep in the recesses of Shane’s brain, but he was pretty sure that saying so wouldn’t help matters.
“Ellie isn’t a grudge holder,” he reassured Winnie truthfully. “Trust me. I should know. Anything you did to Eleanor, Ipromisethat I have pestered her a thousand times harder over the years, and she still likes me enough to let me stay in her house.”
Winnie gave him a skeptical sidelong glance, crossing her arms. It was a little snarky and a lot adorable.
“You’re her brother,” she pointed out dryly. “I feel like that’s different.”
Hetsked. “Yeah, well, you didn’t see what I did to her Barbie when I decided that my toy dinosaurs needed a damsel to rescue.”
This comment earned him a flicker of a smile. “Do dinosaurs make a habit of rescuing damsels?”
“Hey, you’re the historian, not me,” he said with a chuckle. “I cannot be blamed for any inaccuracies. Anyway, my point is that Eleanor is cool. I don’t think she’s holding onto the past, not if you’re friends now.”
Winnie’s doubt was apparent on her face even before he heard her mutter, “Yeah… maybe.”
Shane didn’t push. He barely knew this woman, and it seemed like she needed some help, not somebody poking at her.
“Anyway,” he said brightly. “Let’s jump the engine?”
For a few minutes, they worked together to attach the cables appropriately, then to try to jump Winnie’s car. The engine gave a brief, promising rumble…
And then it made an extremelyunpromising noise and died.
Shane crossed to Winnie’s driver’s side window. She was looking extraordinarily disheartened.
“I think you probably need a new battery,” he said. “I’m not an expert, but my car has been through something similar before.”
“I think you’re right,” she said, sounding as though she was definitely fighting tears again. “And I know that in the morning, it will all feel fine. But right now it feels super… not fine.”
Shane knew what it looked likeandwhat it felt like when a person was at the end of their rope. He was pretty sure that Winnie was rapidly approaching that point.
“Hey,” he said, making his voice gentle. “Let me give you a ride home, okay? You’re right that it will all seem a little bit brighter after a good night’s sleep.”
“Oh, no,” Winnie protested. “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”
