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“Don’t do this to yourself,” Zoey pleaded. “I loved Melanie, too, but you’ve got to let her go. It’s over now.”

“Never.” I knew it wasn’t Zoey’s fault, but I couldn’t help it. “It’ll never be over! Melanie was everything to me—everything a guy could want in a girl. And now she’s gone, and you expect me to eat? What’s the point? What’s the point of even being alive?”

I slapped the bowl of mush out of Zoey’s hand, sending it flying. I heard the ceramic smash to bits on the floor a few yards away.

But when I turned my head to look at the broken shards—like the broken shards of my life—I saw there was a woman standing in the doorway. She had a veiled hat over her head, and a suitcase in her hand.

Slowly, she lifted the veil to reveal a pair of sparkling blue eyes and ruby-red lips.

“Well, I must say, Johnny.” She smiled at me. “You sure do know how to make a lady feel welcome.”

“Melanie!”

A moment later, she was in my arms. “Oh, Johnny! Johnny!” she cried, kissing my mouth, my cheeks, my ears, as tears rained down from her eyes. “They told me you were dead. But I knew it wasn’t true. I just knew it. Ittook forever for me to find you, but now that I have, I’ll never leave you again—never!”

“You better not,” I said.

And then I kissed her. And this time when I held her, I knew it would be forever.

Sunday, January 5

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Iopened my eyes and squinted at the morning light filtering into the room. At first I couldn’t figure out where I was. This wasn’t the morning light that filled my Manhattan apartment. For one thing, I had blackout curtains, and I always remembered to close them before I went to sleep.

And for another, the air smelled different—heavy and wet, like the ocean. Plus, there were unfamiliar sounds, a sort of clanking—which wouldn’t have been unusual in Manhattan on garbage day. But farther off, there was a rhythmic whooshing.

What was making the whooshing? And whose satiny-soft gray sheets were these? And whose aggressively masculine digital alarm clock was that on the nightstand that said it was 8:05 in the morning? Who even had a digital alarm clock anymore, when everyone else had cell phones with alarms they could set to tell them to—

I sat straight up in bed, clutching the satiny-soft gray top sheet around me, since I’d realized I was naked. I was naked,sunlight was pouring in through floor-to-ceiling glass windows all around me, and I was in Will Price’s bed.

The whooshing sound was ocean waves, washing up against the shore of Will’s private island, and the clanking sound, I realized, as soon as I’d pulled on my clothes from the night before and stumbled into his kitchen, was Will, wearing only a pair of boxers, cooking breakfast.

“Oh, hullo,” he said cheerfully, when he saw me standing in the doorway. “You didn’t have to get up. I was going to bring you breakfast in bed. Coffee?”

I leaned in the doorway, trying to figure out if what I was seeing was real or still some part of a hallucinogenic dream I was having from the night before. Had Kellyjean put something other than essential oils in the diffuser in my room?

Then I realized how tender the skin along my face—and other places—felt from where Will had raked it with his lips. Beard burn.

Oh, no. This was real, all right.

Besides, Chloe’s dog, Susie, was panting at Will’s feet as he cooked, hoping for a bite of dropped bacon or something. I would never hallucinate a dog. Or sore lips. Or sore other parts. Wonderfully sore. Deliciously sore.

“Do you like your eggs scrambled or fried?” he asked. “I assume you like eggs. You seem to like everything else. There isn’t one thing I haven’t seen you put in your mouth—”

“Okay!” I sprang from the door and made a beeline for the Jura. “I will take you up on that coffee. Want one?”

“I’ve had two already. I’m an early riser. You?”

“No. Not at all. Not a morning person.”

“That’s a shame. And we’re so compatible in every other way.”

I snorted. “Where do you keep the—”

He caught me around the waist as I was reaching for a coffee cup, pulled me to that strong, broad chest against which I’d cried out so many times the night before in pure joy, and planted a hard, confident kiss on my mouth.

And every bone in my body melted, just as it had last night.