Brambleberry Shores. RaeAnne Thayne

      He had spent his life working hard to keep himself in check. Oh, he knew himself well enough to understand it was a survival mechanism from his childhood—if he couldn’t control his parents’ tumultuous natures, their wild outbursts, their screaming fights, and substance abuse, at least he could contain his own behavior.

      Those habits had carried into adulthood and into his marriage. In the heat of anger, Brooke used to call him a machine, accusing him of having no heart, no feeling. She had to have an affair, she told him, if only to know what it was like to be with a man who had blood instead of antifreeze running through his veins.

      This new, urgent heat for an exotic, wild-haired nature girl sent him way, way out of his comfort zone.

      “My apologies,” he said, his voice stiff. “I’m not quite sure what happened there.”

      “Aren’t you?”

      He sent her a swift look and saw the corner of her mouth lift. He didn’t like the feeling she was laughing at him.

      “You can be certain it won’t happen again.”

      A strange light flickered in the depths of her dark eyes. “Okay. Good to know.”

      She studied him for a moment, then smiled. He wanted to think the expression looked a little strained but he thought that was possibly his imagination.

      “Thank you for taking Conan jogging for me. I admit, I’m not crazy about the whole morning exercise thing. I’m trying to warm up to it but it’s been slow going so far. I thought after a month I would enjoy it more, but what are you going to do? It seems to cheer him up a little, though, so I guess I’ll stick with it.”

      He couldn’t seem to make his brain work but he managed to catch hold of a few of the pieces of what she said.

      “You’re telling me your dog is depressed?” he asked, feeling supremely stupid for even posing the question.

      “You could say that.” She glanced out the window where Conan still watched them and lowered her voice as if the dog could hear them through the glass. “He misses his human companion. She died a month ago.”

      The dog’s human companion had died a month ago and Sage had been jogging with Conan for a month. Even in his current disordered state, he figured the two events had to be connected.

      “She left you her dog?”

      “That and a whole lot of other problems. It’s a long story.” One she obviously had no intention of sharing with him, he realized as she headed for the door.

      “I’d better go. I’ve got thirteen eager young campers who’ll be ready to explore the coastline with me in just an hour. I’m sure you’ve got things to do, people to see, worlds to conquer and all that.”

      His mouth tightened at the faint echo of derision in her voice, but before he could defend himself from her obviously harsh view of his life, she opened the door and walked out into the cool morning air, to be greeted with enthusiasm by the dog, who jumped around as if he hadn’t seen her in months.

      Just now the animal looked far from the bereft, grieving animal she had described. She patted his sides, which had the dog’s eyes rolling back in his head. Eben couldn’t say he blamed him.

      “Thanks again for exercising Conan,” she called back.

      “No problem. I enjoyed it.”

      Stepping outside, he decided he wasn’t going to think about anything else he might have enjoyed about the morning.

      “The run was good for me,” he said instead. “Helps keep my brain sharp while I’m swindling retirees and gullible widows out of their life savings.”

      Her mouth quirked a little at that but she only shook her wild mane of hair and took off down the stairs of his deck and across the beach, the dog close on her heels.

       Chapter 5

      She tried to tell herself that heated kiss was just a one-shot deal, some weird anomaly of fate and circumstance that would never, ever, ever be repeated.

      She and Eben were two vastly different people with different values, different tax brackets. Their lives should never have intersected in the first place—and their mouths certainly shouldn’t have either.

      But as she showered and dressed for work, Sage couldn’t shake the odd, jittery feeling that something momentous had just happened to her, something life-changing and substantial.

      It was silly, she knew, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that her life had just turned a corner down a route she was not at all sure she was prepared to follow.

      Just a kiss, she repeated in a stern mantra as she gave Conan one last morning scratch, pulled her bike out of the garage and cycled through the strands of morning fog that hadn’t yet burned off. Two people reacting to their unlikely attraction to each other in the usual fashion. One never-to-be-repeated kiss certainly was not about to alter the rest of her life, for heaven’s sake.

      She was still working hard to convince herself of that when she arrived at the nature center and let herself into her office. She was answering e-mail from a school group interested in arranging a field trip between her camp sessions when Lindsey poked her head into her office.

      “So the weirdest thing happened this morning,” Lindsey said without preamble.

      Sage raised an eyebrow. “Good morning to you, too.”

      Her assistant director grinned. “Yeah, yeah. Hello, how are you, great to see you and all that. I’ve been up at the bakery since four already helping my dad so it feels more like lunchtime to me by this time. But back to my weird morning.”

      She pushed away the lingering memory of Eben and that stunning kiss and tried to focus on Lindsey’s story. “Don’t tell me you had another creepy dream about old Mr. Delarosa walking down Hemlock Street in a Speedo again.”

      Lindsey screwed up her face. “No! Ew. Thanks for putting that visual in my head again. I just spent the last three months in intensive therapy trying to purge it.”

      Sage fought a smile. “Sorry. What happened this morning?”

      “I was making the usual morning deliveries of muffins to The Sea Urchin and suddenly this huge dog comes running at me out of nowhere. Scared the bejabbers out of me.”

      “Yeah?”

      “It was Conan, of course.”

      “Of course. He is the only dog in Cannon Beach, after all.”

      “Well, maybe not, but you have to admit he’s pretty distinctive-looking. There’s no mistaking him for anyone else. So when I couldn’t see you or Anna anywhere, I thought maybe Conan broke out of your place and was running loose. I was trying to grab hold of his collar so I could take him back to Brambleberry House when suddenly, who should show up but this extremely sexy guy who looked familiar in an odd sort of way?”

      Sage didn’t even want to think about just how extremely sexy she found Eben Spencer.

      “He whistled to Conan and the two of them just kept running down the beach.”

      “That is strange,” Sage murmured.

      “I couldn’t help but wonder what on earth our newest little camper’s father was doing running with your dog at six in the morning. That was Chloe Spencer’s hottie of a dad, wasn’t it?”

      Sage could feel warmth soak her cheeks. She could only be grateful the coloring she inherited from the Italian side of her family hid her blushing.

      “It was. Conan and I bumped into Eben this morning on our daily jog and he, uh, graciously offered to exercise Conan for me.”

      Lindsey raised an eyebrow—the one with the diamond