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And if you have a family like mine, well, there’s the added bonus of a line of helpful souls constantly calculating the odds against you, just in case you get the math wrong.

I
always
get the math wrong, much to the amusement of my three brothers who snarfed up all the math genes before I was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye. For example, on this particular night, after being ambushed by success and bamboozled by the champagne, I over-tipped the cab driver and made a friend for life.

Maybe not quite that long. The moment I steadied myself enough to stand without clinging to the roof of the cab, he was gone, leaving the Last Generous Tipper in Massachusetts wobbling on her heels in the middle of the street. Good thing all the neighbors were safely tucked into bed, because I must have looked like a dope trying to reach the curb before I caught it with my chin.

I decided, right there on Mr. McGurvey’s chemically enhanced golf course green boulevard, to avail myself of the one mythic perk of being self-employed. Everyone otherwise employed assumes that working for yourself is an excuse to lay around, sleep in, catch up on the soaps, scoot out of the office early and take many many lunches-of-no-return.

Ha. Truth is, my boss is the worst slave driver ever—and she’s me. I’ve put in more hours, night and weekends working for myself than the any legitimate employer could have demanded. I’ve bedded annuals and double-dug roses and moved trees and laid interlock.

I’ve built decks, for God’s sake, when workers disappeared into that great void where contractors seem to go without warning or return. I’ve tiled porches and walls, caffeinated myself for another night of drafting plans without the decadent luxury of sleep, then marched out the door to do it all again.

I’ve talked a blue streak that I didn’t know I could, I’ve weaseled better terms from skeptics, I’ve supplied impromptu therapy for divorcees removing “all signs of
him
”, I’ve endured the caprices of women who can never make up their minds.

And it was finally paying off.

The pink bubbles tingling through my veins couldn’t touch that giddy feeling of triumph, though they did give it a hefty boost. I did a little soft-shoe on the sidewalk and tripped over my own feet. Fortunately, those champagne bubbles broke my fall—the drunk, as any cop will tell you, have no bones at all.

I felt pretty cocky once I had scaled my neighbor’s drive to the sidewalk and even imagined that I approached the house with a measure of my usual insouciance.

As if. Somewhere someone is snorting their beer at the idea of me even having insouciance.

The thing is, if I
had
had any, it wasn’t destined to last long.

I was about twenty feet from the porch, admiring the little crocuses poking their yellow heads through the soil and congratulating myself on doing a decent job of installing a porch light with a sensor. The light was on, so I hadn’t completely screwed up the wiring, though Number Two Son—my brother Matt—would have issues with my uncompensated, unauthorized improvement of a leasehold facility.

And then I saw him.

There was a man sitting on my porch.

Watching me.

Even stinko, I was pretty sure I lived alone. And I knew I hadn’t invited any guests to join me for an intimate yet casual night-cap. It wasn’t my style.

Those bubbles abandoned me, though that didn’t leave me any better equipped to run or to fight or whatever it is you’re supposed to do when some guy waits for you in the dark and you have to get past him to sanctuary.

He seemed prepared to wait for as long as it took me to make up my mind what to do.

There was an outside chance that he was a champagne-induced illusion, but if so, he was a pretty substantial one. And he showed no signs of fading into oblivion. In fact, he stared steadily back at me as though I shouldn’t be surprised to find him there at all.

The stillness of him reminded me of someone, someone I wanted desperately to see again, someone I knew I should never want to see again. I took a couple of steps closer and, yes, it’s true, my heart really was in my mouth.

Because it couldn’t be
him
. He’d been gone too long and I’d gone cold turkey on waiting for that apology years ago.

But Nick Sullivan was sitting on my porch.

Waiting for
me
. And I suddenly felt all the smooth assurance of sixteen again.

I gaped at him, like the lovesick idiot I once had been, and my heart started to pound hard. A bubble of hope invited the champagne bubbles to cha-cha, and the happy couple took to the dance floor.

Which left my fogged brain trying to wrap itself around the concept of Nick coming to look for me.

Me.

I had been warned for years and years that the Sullivan boys were trouble with a capital T, that they were no good, that they were not the sort of people my sort of people should know. And I had bucked popular opinion all those years ago, believing that I knew better, that I knew Nick, that he wasn’t as bad as everyone believed. I even thought that we were friends.

Then he proved popular opinion dead on the money.

He wasn’t supposed to be here—he was supposed to be in Seattle, running a wildly successful adventure travel company. Okay, so I had been curious enough to find out about that, and maybe I had checked out his web site and maybe I had even looked for him once or twice in airports.

But I was supposed to know better. I was supposed to remember how he let me down.

How he disappeared without a word.

Funny how just finding him here made me forget all of it. I was ready to concede that there could be an explanation, that I had misunderstood him, that he had a really good reason for walking away.

Even if fifteen years is a long, long time.

The artfully installed porch light threw a golden glow onto one side of Nick’s face, leaving the other side in shadow. He looked mysterious, but then, he looked mysterious and unpredictable in full sunlight. He was still long and lean and devastatingly handsome, those Black Irish looks still hadn’t failed him. And he still had the most steady gaze of anyone I’ve ever known.

But there were changes, albeit subtle ones. He was bigger, his features were harder, he had perfected the art of mimicking sculpture. Nick wasn’t a lanky kid anymore, he’d become a man, one even more difficult to read than the teenager had been. He looked older, of course, but then so did I.

That realization put my feet in motion once more. Nick hadn’t wanted me fifteen years ago—he sure as hell wasn’t going to want me now. The only good thing about that was that I was pretty sure I didn’t care.

It would have been nice to be positive, but head and heart were definitely at odds here. The champagne wasn’t helping—nor was the sense that everything was finally coming up roses for me.

Fortunately, I’m a mind-over-matter kind of girl and I knew I could frost Nick right out of my life again. I flipped through my keys and strolled to the steps.

“Hello, Nick.” I kept my voice even, as though I came home to find men on my porch all the time, even men who had been missing in action as long as he had been.

I even managed a cool smile—the one I saved for those women who could never make up their minds—and had exactly two seconds to congratulate myself on my composure before I looked up and saw that he wasn’t fooled.

The trouble with Nick was that he was
never
fooled. I wanted to stick my tongue out at him, but that was the bubbles making me think pink.

“Hey, Phil.” He was probably the only man alive who could make my hideous name sound like a benediction. He still had a voice like rough velvet and it still made parts of me tingle.

Even if I might have preferred otherwise.

I gritted my teeth and marched up the porch steps, grateful that I didn’t stumble. He was the only one who ever called me Phil, and probably the only one who could have done so and lived to tell about it.

But then, there had been a time when I would have forgiven Nick Sullivan just about anything. I snuck another look. There were tiny laugh lines around his eyes and he had too much of a tan for this time of the year. He had probably been off somewhere exotic, I realized, then felt immediately very homebound.

Worse, an unadventurous workaholic who didn’t have time to take vacations and couldn’t have afforded them if she did. There’s a reminder that I didn’t need.

“Hey, yourself.” Oh, nice business crisp voice. Well done. He actually flinched. I fit the key into the lock, though not as neatly as I might have liked. “What are you doing here?”

“I needed to see you.”

Once upon a time, I would have thrown myself at Nick’s feet for a bone-melting claim like that. I tried to resist temptation, but couldn’t help taking another look. I had to see whether he was serious or not.

A smile touched his lips. Just a little crooked smile, the one I remembered, the one that made any woman with a pulse notice how firm his lips were, how sexy his smile was, how it made his eyes gleam. My knees threatened to give out on me, though for the sake of my pride, I blamed the champagne for that.

I gripped the door frame with all the insouciance I could muster. He looked at me, really looked at me, and his smile broadened slightly. I knew my resolve could quickly be in very serious trouble.

“Ever heard of the phone?” The deadbolt punctuated my question with a satisfying, decisive roll of brass.

It was perfectly simple. I was going inside.

He wasn’t.

I was
not
running away, though it sure felt like it.

“That’s how I found you.” Nick eased to his feet, evidently coming to a different conclusion than I had. “Not too many Philippa Coxwells in town, fortunately for me.”

Fortunately? Why fortunately?

My heart skipped a beat—hope is one impulse that refuses to learn from experience. It was in the air that night and I suspect it runs in my blood. I stomped on hope hard and knew damn well it didn’t surrender.

I could feel Nick drawing closer and knew that if he touched me all those barricades against him would come tumbling down. I blocked the door with my body and briefcase, and eyed him the way I imagine a rabbit eyes a hungry fox. “What do you want, Nick?”

He frowned quickly, then pushed one hand through his hair, leaving the dark waves in a tangle. “I need your help, Phil.” Before I could go crazy speculating about that, he looked me square in the eye. Something quivered deep inside me.

“I need some legal advice and I didn’t know who else to ask.”

Well, romance is alive and well, but has left the galaxy in search of greener pastures.

Every champagne bubble simultaneously went flat.

See
? crowed the know-all voice deep inside me, a voice which sounds a whole lot like my mother’s.

And that, even more than his words, made me mad.

“You need
what
?” I flung my briefcase inside the door, too divested of inhibitions to hold back. I flung out my hands and he took a step back. “You think you can just show up, after fifteen years, and ask for free legal advice in the middle of the night?” I poked him in the chest to make my point. “Ever heard of business hours?” Another jab. “Ever heard of Legal Aid? Haven’t I done you enough favors for a lifetime?”

“Phil, take it easy.” He spoke quickly, soothingly, as though I was unpredictable. He caught my jabbing finger and folded it into the warmth of his palm. His expression was so earnest that my mouth went dry. “I know this is a surprise. If you don’t want to help, I’ll walk away and never bother you again. Five minutes of your time, counselor, tops.”

Counselor
. There’s one word I would love to never hear again.

I glared to the best of my abilities, ignoring the SOS signal my captured hand was telegraphing back to mission control. “You need a lawyer so you just show up on my doorstep in the middle of the night and expect a hearing?”

“Phil, this is different.”

I caught a glimpse of the vulnerability that lit his eyes. Maybe it had been there all along, but he looked suddenly so battered and uncertain that my heart went out to him.

My hand was already there.

Now, I am the greatest sucker in the world. Elaine keeps saying she’ll get me a trophy. I fall prey to more cons than my pride will let me admit—most involving pictures of starving children.

And it’s not just strangers who sucker me. Everyone in my family dumps their emotional payload on me. I’ve listened to thousands of Elaine’s tales of romantic woe. I’ve got more secrets in my stash than a sane person would know what to do with.

Even I’m not sure sometimes.

But you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. And Nick had let me down. I watched his thumb slide across the back of my hand and knew I should be remembering that. I should be walking through that door and locking it against him, I should be denying him anything I could deny him.

It was a lot harder than it should have been.

“Just hear me out, Phil.” He shrugged and that smile appeared again, though this time I noticed that it didn’t reach his eyes. “This time I don’t want to just let the law have its own way.”

Unsuspectingly, Nick gave me the ammunition I needed to turn him down. If he had been asking me to listen as a friend, for old times’ sake, or if he had made any kind of reference to emotion at all, I might have buckled.

But Nick had made the mistake of bringing it back to the law again.

It was the theme song of my life and the tune grated on my ears. If the only reason he had come looking for me was because I might be a lawyer, then he could get in line with everyone else who was disappointed in my choices.

I pulled my hand out of his and reached for the door. “You came to the wrong place.”

“How can that be?” well, if he needed a map to the nerve he had hit, I was more than ready to give it to him. “You must have been called to the Bar by now. If nothing else, Phil, you get stuff done. Last time I saw you, you were accepted to all the best schools and choosing where to study.”

“And I was totally miserable over it, if you recall.”

Nick looked surprised and I knew that he
didn’t
recall.