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In fact, she had to remind herself, she still didn’t. Somehow, between the yellow dress and the flowers and a happy little lunch with their families, she’d forgotten that none of this was real.

She tried to get her head on straight as they drove down the hill into Cowboy Point, and Finn drove past the clinic, straight to the drive that led up to her house. Their house now, for the next year.

Kitty got out of the truck and he got out of it with her. And when he went around to pull things out of the back, she blinked at him in confusion.

That patience seemed to glow in him, and therefore in her, too. “If I’m moving in, Kitty, I do need to have my things.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right.”

And she could have sworn that he was biting back laughter again as he followed her into the house.

Her sisters had gone straight to the restaurant, so Kitty was all alone in the house with this man. This man she had married. And was now entirely too aware of as she led him up the stairs to the third floor and into what her sisters called the attic apartment.

The stairway came up in the middle. Her bedroom was off to the left and to the right there were a few more rooms. They all flowed in together and Kitty used all of them. She kept her computer and a desk in one of them, and then another one was something of a sitting room with comfortable chairs and bookshelves. There was a den downstairs, but sometimes she liked to be on her own up here with her books.

She definitely had not thought enough about what it would feel like to have a man in this space with her.

“You’re a lot taller than me,” she said, looking at how much closer the ceiling was to his head than to hers.

Finn looked up, then extended his arm overhead. And while he couldn’t fully extend that arm, at least he wasn’t in danger of hitting his head.

“All the more reason to find a little more of those wide-open spaces, I guess,” was all he said.

She was married to him. That seemed to stick in her, and once again she could barely breathe, so she backed away.

And she was entirely too aware of the knowing way he watched her do it, like he’d expected nothing less. Kitty didn’t like that—but she didn’t do anything to change it, either.

“I’ll leave you to get comfortable here,” she told him. “I want to make sure my sisters have everything they need at the restaurant. You should unpack. Take over the space however you want, as we’ll be sharing it. For a year.”

His blue eyes were like fire when they met hers. “Yes,” Finn said. “A year.”

She wasn’t at all sure why that seemed to settle in her the way it did then, like some kind of warning. Or threat.

Or maybe, she thought as she ran down the stairs as if something was pursuing her when she knew nothing was, not even him, it was more of a promise.

And somehow, that was worse.

Chapter Eight

Kitty always kept a change of clothes at the restaurant, which she was particularly pleased about today. She walked right into her kitchen, ignoring her sisters’ expressions when they saw her, changed in the back room, and shoved her hair up into a bun.

Then she got down to work, though it wasn’t as easy to escape into her work as it usually was. She tried. She focused. She told herself only the food mattered.

But every time she came out with a pizza to slide it on the counter or take it to a table, it seemed like more locals were there. They all noticed her ring and commented on it. They all congratulated her on the news that had clearly spread all over Cowboy Point.

She told herself that she hated it. When really, she thought that what she hated was the attention—because it was a lie. Kitty hated liars, but here she was, having gone out of her way to make herself one. Not exactly ideal.

“Shouldn’t you be off somewhere, lolling about in marital bliss?” Flannery asked at one point. “Isn’t that why people get married in the first place?”

“Finn and I are not imprisoned in passing bliss, Flannery,” Kitty replied loftily, but then ruined the whole thing by blushing at the idea of what bliss might even look like, passing or otherwise.

And maybe she was dragging her feet a little at the end of the night, too, when she took three times as long to close up as she normally did.

Her sisters left before her, muttering to each other loudly enough that she could tell they wanted her to hear them say her name. Kitty told herself she might as well let them do that. Let them talk about her as much as they wanted, to get it out of their systems. She told herself she was being nothing short of virtuous as she excessively cleaned every surface she could find. Twice.

And when she walked back from the restaurant, making her way up their drive toward the old house, she was definitely dragging her feet.

But it wasn’t reluctance that was having its way with her. That would be one thing.