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And they lay like that, together, for a very long time.

When he moved, he lifted himself up so he could look down into her face, and Kitty felt herself blushing all over again.

“Well?” Finn asked. “What’s your verdict?”

But he didn’t ask that in a way that made her think that he was really all that worried about her response.

“I don’t really have anything to compare it to,” she said, and lifted her chin a little bit as she said it. A little primly, maybe.

Finn, her husband, grinned. “You will,” he promised.

She lay there as he rolled away, giving her another kiss as he went. He left the bed and padded over to the bathroom, then closed the door behind him.

Kitty couldn’t seem to do a thing but lie there, shattered beyond measure, while great, swollen things that she was terribly afraid were a whole host of the sort of feelings she normally avoided like the plague got their grips in her, hard.

Like they had no intention of ever letting go.

And how she didn’t burst into tears as they ripped through her, she would never know.

Chapter Nine

Finn could not have explained for the life of him how he’d gotten himself into this situation. This marriage, when he’d always been pretty clear that he wasn’t headed for white picket fences, a wife, or any of the trappings of domesticity his father had twisted into something ugly.

He’d vowed to himself when he was still a kid that he would never, ever fall into the trap his mother had.

But somehow, being married to Kitty suited him.

For one thing, it turned out that after all these years living in bunkhouses on the ranch in Colorado, and then the foreman’s separate quarters not far from the bunkhouse, Finn had been missing out.

Because living with the Bennett sisters was delightful.

“You must be losing your mind,” Raleigh said one morning. He and Finn had driven all the way out to Colton Dean’s ranch to look at some horses and talk to the grumpy rancher about his program some more. Raleigh was the one who could manage to tame any wild horse he encountered, but Finn had always liked horses himself. Even if he was no horse whisperer. “Trapped in that house with all those women.”

“Does that sound like a bad thing to you?” Finn asked, eyeing his brother. Raleigh was driving his truck and navigating the dirt roads that wound through the mountains with the safe deftness he did most things. When people weren’t watching him, that was. “Because that’s never going to sound like a bad thing to me. And let me tell you, it’s not.”

Raleigh shot a look at him, then returned his attention to the road. “I like my own company.”

“Someone has to, I guess,” Finn said, with a laugh. “But I like my wife.”

He would have said that anyway, because he was supposed to be bolstering the fake marriage thing no matter what their real relationship was like. But the funny thing was, it was true.

There was no need to bolster anything. He liked Kitty. He’d liked her from afar. He liked her more up close.

And he would describe his feelings about sharing a bed with her as something a little closer to goddess worship—not that he’d describe it that way to her. She would frown and tell him he was exaggerating and one thing Kitty Bennett did not like was an exaggerator.

By now he thought he had all of her likes and dislikes carved into his bones.

He liked her sisters, too. They made three different types of redheads, all different, and he appreciated them all. He hadn’t been sure how it would go at first, given that he doubted very much that Kitty had asked her sisters if they were up for a new roommate.

But he was very good at putting people at ease, so that was what he did.

Finn didn’t act as if he was walking on eggshells around them, but he didn’t barrel around taking charge of the place, either.

“I expected a man in the house to be much more… distracting,” Flannery said one morning when they met at the coffee machine.

Finn thought they both knew that her first choice of word had not been distracting.

He nodded. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”