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It was supposed to be an easy elopement. A quick trip to Marietta to stand before the judge, no muss and no fuss. That had been Kitty’s plan from the start.

Until Kitty’s sisters got wind of what was going on, that was exactly what was going to happen. And the days of them listening to Kitty on any topic were over, apparently. Because they cornered her after her dinner out with Finn and no matter how she tried to turn the conversation to the owners of the new restaurant or the exquisitely prepared food, they wouldn’t have it.

“Crowded Table sounds great,” Flannery said impatiently, from where she was sitting on the stairs—literally blocking Kitty from racing up to the safety of her attic. Indy stood at the bottom of the stairs, which wasn’t actually better. “But I think I speak for everyone who’s ever lived when I say that what we’re actually interested in is the Finn Patrick of it all.”

“You know Finn Patrick,” Indy chimed in. “The guy you went on a date with and were seen cuddling up with on the street?”

It took every ounce of will Kitty had in her body not to get deeply cross with the both of them. Not to snap back, claim that she didn’t know what they were talking about.

Or be happy they didn’t know about that second kiss.

She had to remind herself, more than once, that this was exactly what she’d wanted.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she told them both flatly. “It’s a whirlwind. Who knows where it will end up.”

Which had not satisfied her sisters at all.

Maybe that was why, a week later, when she told them that she needed them to get lunch up and running because she might be late, they were suspicious.

“Why would you be late?” Flannery demanded at the Sunday scheduling meeting where Kitty had brought this up.

She frowned across the table at Kitty, the summer sun making her red braids seem like fire as light poured in the kitchen windows.

“I have an errand in Marietta,” Kitty replied, and she was quite pleased with how matter-of-fact she sounded. How collected and sure.

But Indy snorted. “Last time you couldn’t go to work was because you were going on a date. Is this another date? A morning date?”

“It’s a none of your business date,” Kitty retorted, automatically. Then she remembered that she was supposed to be playing a part of a besotted woman.

The trouble was, Kitty had no idea what a besotted woman would behave like. She’d seen many a besotted woman on a movie screen and in television programs, but this was her life. And every time she talked about anything even remotely connected to the Finn Patrick of it all, she felt that same shaky, trembling sensation sweep through her. It was disconcerting.

She hated it, if she was honest. Sometimes she thought it was her body’s way of warning her that she should absolutely not be doing this thing she was doing with Finn.

But then she would remember the way he’d kissed her on the porch. Or on the main road outside Crowded Table.

It wasn’t as if all those feelings went away, exactly. It was as if they settled in harder, but with a weight that somehow felt right. Or not bad, anyway.

Maybe what she meant was that it didn’t feel like a warning. It felt like whatever the opposite of warning might be.

“I don’t know how to talk about this,” she said abruptly, as her sisters continued to make a meal out of staring at each other and then staring at her, because they clearly wanted her to understand that they were having a whole host of conversations about her, right there in front of her. And Kitty had never been one to let other people speak for her, had she? “Finn and I are eloping.”

She thought maybe her sisters would get excitable at this announcement. That they would screech, carry on. Maybe break things—who knew?

But instead, they both sat there on the bench across from her and tilted their heads—in the same direction, at the same angle—and regarded her with the same direct hazel eyes she had in her own head.

“Come again?” Indy asked, after a moment.

“Because it sounded as if you said you were eloping,” Flannery chimed in. “And you can’t possibly have said that, can you?”

“That’s what I said,” Kitty bit out. She held her hands in front of her and clenched her fingers together, a little too tightly.

“Kitty.” Indy laughed a little bit. “What are you talking about?”

“Haven’t you only been on one date?” Flannery demanded.

“You don’t understand,” Kitty said. She thought about what Finn had said before. When he told her that people needed to wonder about what had happened between them. She couldn’t decide if she should pick some fantasy story about the two of them that she could tell her sisters. How they’d been sneaking around for months. How passion had overwhelmed them. How she didn’t know how to go on another day without him, or whatever it was people said at moments like this.

Not the truth, which was that she’d propositioned him because she wanted to own the restaurant and the land, and now she thought about neither the restaurant nor the land. She mostly thought only about Finn.