It all came out in a rush that was flavored with hiccuping sobs and a torrent of tears. I knew she was shaken up when I sat next to her on the bed and she actually allowed me to put my arm around her shoulders and comfort her. I wanted to cry, too, but instead I made soothing noises and told her everything would be all right. I offered comfort to my clients in a professional capacity all the time. This was the first time in my life I wanted to open myself up and offer comfort and reassurance on a personal level. I wanted her to know I was there for her beyond a roof over her head and a safe place to stay. I wanted her to know I cared, and that stunned me so much that we were both shaking as we huddled together and let our emotions run their course.

I wasn’t sure how long we stayed like that, but when it was all out of her she pushed her caramel-colored hair out of her face, took a deep breath, and told me she needed to get cleaned up so she could go and tell Rowdy and Salem she really was happy for them. I nodded and took a minute to get myself back under control.

Poppy seemed weak and fragile on the outside, but she never stopped fighting, never gave up when all the bad things from the past tried to drag her down. She felt everything so fully, so intensely, that it paralyzed her with the force of it and I had to admire that. Instead of dealing with the entanglements and thorns that pricked at me from before, I denied feeling anything. I shut myself down and closed myself off so that there wasn’t the kind of pain Poppy was dealing with. She was a thousand times stronger than I would ever be.

Rowdy and I decided to leave Poppy and Salem alone to have a heart-to-heart, which meant we ended up in the bar with a couple of frosty craft beers and some tortilla chips and green chili in front of us. It took exactly five minutes of small talk before Rowdy laid into me about what was really going on with Zeb.

“So you want to tell me what’s really up with you and Paul Bunyan? I mean I know you’re helping him out with his kid but there’s more going on there, isn’t there?”

I snapped a chip in half with my teeth and narrowed my eyes at him, and only partly because he called Zeb by such a ridiculous nickname. Sure the guy was big and looked like he could fell an entire forest with one swing of his ax, but he was far too handsome and far too well-spoken to get saddled with the silly moniker. “What makes you say that?”

“Besides the fact that you were checking your phone every five minutes in the car, how about when I called him last night to see if he wanted to go get a beer at the Bar and he told me he couldn’t because you were coming over to help him work on his latest flip. You aren’t exactly handy, Sayer. You had to call me to come hang all the pictures and curtains up in your house when he was finished with the remodel, so that tells me ‘work’ probably means something else.”

I groaned a little and picked up my beer. “I don’t know what I’m doing or what any of it means. I’m deeply invested in helping Zeb get full custody of his son and that’s all it should be. Anything else involving me and him is a terrible idea. Honestly, I have no clue what to do with him outside of the courtroom, so I’m pretending nothing is going on in between bouts of throwing myself at him and running away.”

He snorted at me and picked up his own beer. “How’s that working out for you?”

I scowled because there was humor laced liberally through his tone. “Not very well.”

“Because it’s been brewing from the very beginning. Zeb has been interested in you since day one; it just took you a while to recognize it. Once you did there was no way in hell that he was going to let you ignore it.”

Oh, Zeb had no idea how good I was at ignoring things. I was a master at denying I felt anything. It was my second greatest skill next to practicing law. He wasn’t going to get a choice in the matter if I really put my mind to pretending nothing was going on between the two of us.

I tucked some of my hair behind my ears and looked at Rowdy unwaveringly. “I’m not good with passionate people, Rowdy. I don’t know how to deal with someone who acts on what they feel, or how to handle someone who takes what they want with no regard for the risks. The fact that he jumped both feet in with Hyde even before knowing if the kid was his petrifies me. That kind of investment in another person, that level of unconditional love . . .” I shook my head sadly. “I don’t think I’m wired to return those kinds of feelings, and that will ultimately lead to a disaster. Someone will end up getting hurt and I lived with enough hurt when I was younger to last a million lifetimes. I don’t have room inside for anything else, which means I’m immune to all the things he stirs up, and that isn’t fair to him. He should have someone who is just as passionate and invested as he is.”

His eyes that were an identical match to my own widened and he set his beer down on the table with a thunk. He leaned closer to me and bit out, “That’s bullshit, Sayer. It’s utter bullshit and you know it.”

I blinked in surprise at the vehemence in his tone. It went completely against his laid-back personality to get so heated, especially at me. “Why do you say that?”

“Because as soon as you found out about me you dropped everything and moved your life here. You had no idea how I would react, if I was a nice guy or a complete asshole, and yet you took that leap blindly. You didn’t know a thing about me or my life and yet you were determined to be my family even when I acted like a dipshit when we first met.”

I sucked in a sharp breath and sat back in my chair a little bit as his words sank in. He wasn’t finished leveling the hard and uncomfortable truth as he saw it at me, though.

“Then you helped Asa out for me without blinking an eye. That fancy-ass lawyer friend of yours wouldn’t have even looked at his case if it wasn’t for you, and then not even a month later you took in a stranger. You moved a scared, broken girl into your home simply because I love her. You have done more for Poppy than either Salem or I have been able to do, so don’t try and tell me you don’t invest in people as passionately or as wholeheartedly as Zeb does because it’s bullshit.”

I couldn’t think of a valid rebuttal, which annoyed me to no end, so I sat back in my chair and glared at him. “Are you sure you didn’t take any law classes while you were in college?”

He wiggled his eyebrows up and down at me in his usual cavalier way, and I fought the urge to throw a chip at him. Going after Rowdy was the first completely out-of-character thing I had ever done. It was a compulsion, a craving for family and a place to belong and be loved, which was something I never had before. I couldn’t resist the pull any more than I could resist the draw and tug of endless attraction between me and Zeb. When I took Poppy in it wasn’t just because she was important to Rowdy, and he had become so very important to me . . . no, it was because I saw so much of myself inside the broken shell of the young woman. I knew exactly what it felt like to have someone try to strip you of your value and humanity. I knew all too well what it felt like to never measure up to someone who was supposed to love you unconditionally and yet all they did was tear you down. My father had never been uncouth or out of control enough to raise his hand to me or to my mother . . . but his words and his pitiless, dismissive actions . . . those nasty suckers had fallen just as heavily as the mightiest of blows. Poppy had her whole life ahead of her. I didn’t want her stuck in place and stuck unmoving from the past’s embrace like I was. I didn’t want her to shut off her heart. It was too beautiful and needed to be shared with someone who would cherish it. She deserved that.