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With need.

Who could possibly have known that she had curves that his palms itched to measure, that narrow waist, and hips that flared out just enough to give a man all kinds of ideas about how to grip them.

It wasn’t even a particularly warm evening, not at this elevation, and here he was sweating.

Still, unless he’d read her completely wrong—and he didn’t think he had—he’d be very surprised if Kitty had kissed a man before. Or if she had, it certainly hadn’t been a long, slow kind of kiss like tonight.

He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to care about food when he’d had the taste of her already. No matter how good it was.

As they walked down the main road toward the newly renovated barn, he could see that furrow between her eyebrows. And because they were trying this whole thing on for size tonight, he followed his instinct and slung an arm over her shoulders. When he pulled her closer, he could smell rosemary and something sweeter, not quite vanilla.

It made him feel like he might, at any moment, actually wheel around, throw her over his shoulder, and carry her directly to his bed.

Though that would not be following the plan she’d made. And he knew enough about Kitty to know she liked to keep to her plans.

So he settled for tipping her face up to his, and then smoothing out that frown between her eyes.

“Um.” She looked stunned. Maybe confused. “What are you doing?”

“Passion requires touching,” he told her. “Or it does if the purpose of it is to convince other people it exists.” She only blinked, and didn’t look like she fully understood him. “Don’t worry. I got this.”

And he did. He kept that arm around her as they walked up to a building that still looked like the barn it had been, but was now dressed up in finery and ready to be Cowboy Point’s newest restaurant.

Finn wasn’t surprised, when they walked in the front doors, to find that the place was nearly full. He smiled at the hostess, who he was pretty sure was one of the owners, as Kitty gave her name.

And then he hung back as Kitty, with that unselfconsciousness that was one of the things that he found thrilling about her, not only talked that hostess into introducing them to her other co-owners, but into giving them a peek into the state-of-the-art kitchen, too. By the time they finally were led to the table that Kitty had reserved—because of course she had, the woman left nothing to chance—Kitty knew the names of all four owners, had toured their kitchen, and had given everyone in Cowboy Point who was in this restaurant tonight an extended period of time to observe Finn and Kitty together.

“Cricket Lanier. Trinity Capshaw. Lauren Madigan and Gatlin Douglas,” Kitty said as they sat down at a cozy table for two. When Finn only gazed at her, she frowned at him. God, man can get addicted to a frown like that. “Those are the owners.”

“I met them when you did, Kitty,” he reminded her.

“Tomorrow I’m going to invite them all into our book club.” He must have looked interested, because she shook her head. “It’s the Cowboy Point Bluestocking Society & Book Club and it’s only for single women, obviously. They’re four best friends, so I figure they might mesh nicely with me and my three best friends.”

He didn’t have to ask who her best friends were. He’d seen the three of them at the counter in Mountain Mama’s last night, laughing hard and leaning in close to tell each other stories.

“What makes you think these girls are single?” Finn asked her, since he hadn’t heard her comment on anyone’s personal life. “They’re business owners who aren’t from here and might not know that they’re supposed to put their life on parade for the rest of the people in this town. They might have all kinds of lives you don’t know about.”

“Then they’ll decline the invitation,” Kitty shot back.

Finn grinned. He liked her spicy. And he liked being out with her, too. The space around them worked too, because the possibly single owners had made it seem both cozy and expansive at once. They’d left the beams in place, but it painted everything else so that the wooden beams gleamed rich and warm. The walls were an off-white and there were chandeliers hanging, all of them intricate in ways that would have been ostentatious in a different space, but somehow, here, made it all feel more quietly magical.

The menus at their table listed local produce and meat and the kind of combinations of foods that Jimmy Grant would have called acrobatic. Jimmy would have meant that as an insult.

But Finn had seen, while walking around the place with Kitty, that the friends in charge of Crowded Table actually knew where they were opening this restaurant. This was rural Montana, not fancy Bozeman, and folks didn’t want stunt food. He’d been pleasantly surprised to see that the servings looked reasonably sized. Better yet, they also looked delicious.

“Do you invite every woman who moves into town into your book club?” he asked.

“More or less,” Kitty said. “Sometimes it’s a woman who doesn’t like to read, so we wouldn’t be friends anyway. But otherwise? Of course. One reason it’s for single women is the married ones tend to have less time on their hands to do social things. Or they do around here, anyway.”

“Don’t worry, Kitty,” he said, because he couldn’t resist. “I won’t get in the way of your literary pursuits if we get married.”

Kitty frowned at him. It really shouldn’t have been so hot. “One thing you should know about me is that I don’t have any need to virtue signal with my reading material. I like romances. And mysteries that are about characters, not clever tricks. I’ll even do a horror novel now and again, if it’s the right kind of scary.”

Finn wanted to kiss her again. Preferably somewhere even more private, and possibly with them both lying down, because it seemed like too much to ask that he risk gravity taking charge while he was losing himself in the taste of her. He wanted his hands all over her, and he was aware she had some ideas about this marriage she was hell bent on.

But he didn’t really think in name only was going to work.

All that and he still wanted to know how her mind worked. He wanted to understand what made her tick. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been this fascinated by a woman before in his life.