Kitty Bennett did not have problems, she solved them.

That had been her primary role in her family since she was small, and because of it, she’d come to think of herself as something of a fixer. Maybe that was dramatic, she sometimes thought. Then again, maybe it was just the simple truth.

After all, she was the reason that her sisters were not still stuck in North Carolina, still dancing to the tune of their parents’ toxic marriage. She was the one who had gotten them out and helped them get away, so that they could see for themselves that there was a whole world outside their family.

And that literally every part of that world was better than what they’d grown up with.

Something she’d been pretty pleased to discover herself.

The three Bennett sisters were close in age, so they were always either going to fight bitterly about every last thing or end up close. That was the way of things. Kitty liked to think that she was the reason that they’d gone the closeness route. Her middle sister, Flannery, had the reddest hair out of the three of them and the temperament to match. The youngest, Indy, had a temper on her, but had the business brain of the family and was much better at keeping her emotions under control.

It fell to Kitty to guide them through the chaos that was their upbringing, because, as the eldest daughter, she’d never had the option of giving in to her own temper. That was a sure way to draw fire—and in the house they’d all grown up in, that was the last thing anyone wanted to do. Kitty was the one who’d learned that the hard way.

That was why Kitty had more or less parented her sisters through high school and then had gotten them all out of there. Once they’d put North Carolina behind them, she had set about educating all three of them about the realities of the world. Because there was never going to be any money for anything unless they made it themselves.

Case in point: Kitty had spent the money she’d saved up working too many jobs in high school to buy a beater of an old VW bus, and her sisters had contributed to the fund when they’d gotten their own jobs. The three of them had painstakingly refurbished it, and the three of them had traveled, which meant living on top of each other. Literally. They’d seen some tempers flare, sure, but they’d also seen both coasts. The red deserts, the Great Lakes. The bayous and the redwoods and the rocky shores of Maine and Oregon alike.

They’d found Cowboy Point entirely by accident.

But then, Kitty liked to think of accidents as opportunities.

They had happened upon Cowboy Point in the middle of a long, slow summer when the little valley had been bright and happy. It had felt almost unbearably charming, particularly because the geriatric old bus had broken down and they’d had to camp out while they tinkered with it.

Far better to do that in a gorgeous alpine valley than by the side of an interstate, they had all agreed.

One night, while eating dinner in the diner attached to the General Store—because they’d all reached their limit with campfire cuisine outside the tents they’d put up in the campground down by the river—Kitty had gotten to talking with a couple at the neighboring table who were bemoaning the fact that they had to drive all the way down into Marietta to get a good pizza.

Ten miles in good weather, but forget about it in winter, the older man had grumbled.

I make a great pizza, Kitty had told them.

She does, Flannery had agreed. It’s so good that we don’t even bother to get pizza anywhere else.

Indy had been nodding along. She makes them on a grill sometimes while we’re camping, and believe me, you really haven’t tasted pizza until you’ve tried it.

The older couple had been so excited by the idea that they’d had the Bennett girls over for a pizza night the next evening. The two of them lived on a plot of land that contained their house, another larger house that sat further back near the steeper slope of the hill, and a big commercial space closer to the road that had been standing empty for some while now.

Their new friends had told them that the abandoned space had once been an Italian restaurant, back when the two of them were young. Back when the two of them could still keep up with the demands of running the only real restaurant in town.

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Somehow, it had all come together as if it had been preordained. Kitty made them the best pizzas they’d ever had. Indy started asking them about the restaurant business. Flannery had stood by the window, looking out at the abandoned restaurant, and her creative wheels already spinning with possibilities.

And that was how the Bennett sisters came to take over that old Italian restaurant and make it into Mountain Mama Pizza, where it had been reliably serving the community for the last seven years.

The catch was that they were in a rent-to-own situation. A very comfortable rent-to-own situation that had always been more when you’re ready than please pay a percentage of the purchase price with an obligation to buy in x years.

Kitty had never paid too much attention to that beyond the monthly rent, because Izzy and Alessandro Milan quickly became friends. More than friends. They all adopted each other, since the Milan children had long since moved away from this tiny corner of rural Montana, and only came back for holidays.

One thing Kitty had always known and never let herself forget was that family could turn toxic at the slightest provocation. She really shouldn’t have been surprised.

But she was.

This morning, she and Izzy had their typical morning coffee from the coffee cart that was parked next to the General Store. They sipped from their to-go cups on the walk home, chatting about things like the freshest ingredients around, the farms that could supply them, and the usual concerns about the snowpack versus the growing season. All very normal for them.

Then she asked where they were on that whole rent-to-own pathway. Also normal. She’d asked many times over the years.

But today, for the first time, Izzy looked… pensive.

“I don’t know,” she said, pushing back a bit of her white hair that the breeze had started to play with and tucking it behind her ear. “I think we need to rethink the situation.”

Kitty felt herself go entirely too still. She felt the telltale prickling sensation on the back of her neck. It was her red flag. Her alarm system. Proof positive that something was wrong.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

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And as someone who had long been accused of intensity when she was just speaking, she worked hard to keep her tone pleasant. Especially when she was, in fact, feeling intense.

She focused on her friend. Izzy walked a lot slower these days. When they’d arrived in town she had been hardy Montana stock, as she’d liked to tell them, usually with her bawdy laugh as punctuation. Her hair was pure white now and she wore it in the same complicated French braid that somehow felt quintessentially western to Kitty. That braid also featured in many photos around her house, dating back to when that same hair had been a rich, dark brown and Izzy had clearly spent most of her time with horses. Her skin was gently creped, she loved turquoise and silver jewelry, and she still dressed like the cowgirl she’d been in her youth.

Today, her faded blue eyes were as canny as ever.

“Alessandro and I have been talking about this,” she was saying, still ambling along the road as if she hadn’t just dropped a bomb on Kitty’s head. “And we really feel that what’s important about that restaurant space, what makes it special, is that it’s a family endeavor.”

“Luckily, my sisters and I are a family,” Kitty reminded her, and had to force a smile to go with it. Because her neck was still prickling at her. “As you said years ago, we tick all the right boxes.”

But Izzy was shaking her head. “The thing is, it works right now because you’re all single. But you won’t stay that way, will you?” She laughed in a way that was clearly supposed to encourage Kitty to join in, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. “You’re all such pretty girls. Sooner or later, you’ll each find yourself the right man and move away. As all of my daughters did in their time. It’s the natural way of things, and we would hate for you to be saddled with a piece of property here in Cowboy Point when your new husband wants to move to Tacoma. You see what I mean.”

Kitty did not see what she meant, and not only because she would not follow a man anywhere—and certainly not to Tacoma. She felt as if she was having an out of body experience. As if she was standing beside herself, suddenly. She didn’t know which part of that astonishing statement she should address first because she was also very much afraid that if she did any addressing of any kind, she would irreparably damage their relationship.

She couldn’t bear the thought of that.

And Kitty might have been used to toxic family moments and the terrible reversals and denials that made them worse—or she had been before she’d removed her sisters and herself from that particular North Carolina swamp—but she couldn’t quite believe it was happening here. With Izzy, who had been more like a mother to her than her own mother had ever been.

Because her own mother had cared only about her husband to the detriment of… literally everything else.

Izzy remembered all their birthdays. She dropped off little gifts for them because she’d seen something and thought of them. She was free with hugs and invitations and always reminded them that her door was open to them as needed.

So she had no choice here but to bite her tongue, and it hurt. “I don’t know what to say to that,” she managed to say.

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“I know you think I’m a silly old woman,” Izzy said with a laugh, but also with enough direct eye contact that Kitty was completely aware that her friend knew that no one who had ever met Izzy had ever thought for even one moment that she was anything like a silly old woman. Quite the opposite. “But Alessandro and I are aligned on this. I’m so sorry if that’s disappointing, my dear.”

She didn’t look particularly sorry. Izzy patted Kitty’s hand, and then continued on down the path that branched off toward her house. Leaving Kitty standing there on the dirt road that wound back from the street and branched off to Izzy and Alessandro’s house on the right and hers farther back and to the left.

With no earthly idea what to do with herself.

“I did not see this coming,” she muttered out loud to the pine trees and the watching mountains all around.

But that felt a little too much like self-pity, and she didn’t do that.

She wheeled around and marched herself back toward the street, thinking that she would do what any reasonable person would do when essentially sucker punched of a morning. She would head across the street, order herself the fluffiest French toast that Tennessee Lisle could whip up, and eat each and every one of her feelings until they were drowned in too much sugar and fried dough.

Then, when she was done, she would see if she could think her way out of this unforeseen pickle, because it was that or find a husband. Kitty almost laughed at that, out loud like a loon, because she wouldn’t have the faintest idea how a person went out looking for husbands. She was more likely to convince one of the local grizzlies to pose as a husband. She could source the most tender and fragrant rosemary to change a pizza from good to sublime, but she didn’t have the slightest idea where to source a whole man.

Kitty charged for the road, her eyes on the diner across the street and her mouth already watering for that French toast feelings removal, when she suddenly seemed almost to slam straight into a brick wall.

It took her a moment to register that it was not a wall.

It was Finn Patrick, who had been in town now about six months or so, and right now she was entirely too aware of the way he studied her.

With that unnervingly big hand of his cupped around her elbow, which had somehow kept her both from plowing into him and from falling down thanks to the impact.

Finn Patrick… bothered Kitty.

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He was a newcomer, which was part of it. A newcomer and part of the Lisle family, which led some folks to view him a little less harshly than they viewed most of the new residents who turned up. Maybe it was because he’d decided to stay in the middle of winter instead of the gorgeous, glorious summers that turned too many heads and led to many a hasty rethink come the darkness. Maybe it was simply because his sister Helena was the one who’d brought that coffee cart to town a couple years back and nobody in Cowboy Point could imagine life without it now.

Either way, something about the easy way folks had accepted him and that brother of his who slunk around like a boneless cat who knew too much about everyone he looked at, rubbed Kitty the wrong way. Men in general, it had to be said, rubbed Kitty the wrong way.

But this man was different.

Sometimes she could swear she caught him looking at her, though Kitty could not think of a single good reason why he would be doing that, and that bothered her. Sometimes, when he wasn’t even in the room, she would find herself conjuring up images of his wide shoulders or that fascinating dark hair of his that he wore close cropped, almost like he wanted to draw more attention to his intense eyes and that mouth of his that was always curving. Always so amiable, so friendly, but all it took was a single glance to see that everything else about him was fashioned from steel.

People thought he was friendly because of that smile. But she knew better.

That bothered her too.

But what really bothered her today was that she could feel the warmth of his hand penetrate through the fabric of the sweater she was wearing, and it felt a whole lot like he had the palm of his hand pressed against her bare skin. And also that his palm was some kind of radiator, it seemed so hot.

It was shocking.

Equally shocking was the fact that she’d never been this close to him before. She had never liked tall men much, because they were always looming around and silly women slung themselves at their feet simply because they apparently mistook such men for trees.

Kitty had never been so afflicted. But there was something about having to tip her head back to look up at this man that… bothered her.

Particularly because, from this angle, she could not help but study that sharp, square jaw of his that bothered her even more.

She felt all the breath leave her body in a kind of rush that she also found she did not like at all.

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“Are you all right?” Finn Patrick asked her, and there was that look in his astonishingly blue eyes that she’d seen before. Always aimed at her. A kind of… patience, maybe. “You nearly crashed right into me.”

But there was something else there too. There was something else, and it lit something inside of her, and made some part of her deep in her belly that she’d never felt before seem to tremble.

That was even more bothersome than all the rest.

It also didn’t help things that his voice was ridiculous. That low rumble, close enough to a drawl and clearly calculated to do exactly what it was doing to her.

What she wanted to do was yank her elbow out of his hands and walk away, so she could go face dive directly into a pile of French toast. Somehow, Kitty did not do that.

Because despite herself, her brain was spinning around and around an absolutely terrible idea.

So she studied this man instead. “I was paying entirely too much attention to where I was heading, and wasn’t aware of my surroundings.”

That wasn’t entirely true. She could have sworn he wasn’t there, and then he was brick-walling her from crossing the road. Almost as if he’d sprinted to intersect with her—

But that was foolish. Not only because she had never seen this man do anything but amble, so she very much doubted that he sprinted unless being pursued by some kind of predator.

“No problem,” he said and then he smiled at her, which made her frown. Which, apparently, only made that smile of his widen. “Though it does pay to be aware of your surroundings.”

“So I can fight off predators?” Kitty asked, perhaps a little bit tartly. She sighed. “Not all predators, of course, but I still choose the bear.”

“I get it.” His smile was entirely too bright for morning, she thought crossly. As if he was trying to compete with the June sunshine. “But I wasn’t thinking about predators, I was thinking more about this place.” He moved his chin, and he only moved it a little, but somehow seemed to take in the whole of the valley. “It gets prettier by the day.”

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Kitty also thought that the valley was remarkably beautiful. She and her sisters had covered a lot of ground in their traveling years. They’d seen a lot of places out there. But very few of them, in her opinion, could stand up to Cowboy Point.

Particularly at this time of year, when the weather was closer to fine by the day and full summer was so close.

“How long are you planning to stay here?” she asked him.

There was laughter in his blue gaze then. “Is there a requirement? Do I have to be here a certain amount of time before I can comment on how it looks?”

She found that thread of laughter in his voice bothered her too. Everything about the man bothered her. But beggars could not be choosers.

“You don’t strike me as a permanent resident,” she said.

“You’re just saying that because you prefer the bear,” Finn Patrick drawled. “And I’m not going to mount any defense of men, but unlike bears, some men actually settle down. Are known for it, in fact. It’s how the West was won and all that.”

Kitty thought western expansion was a little more complicated than men wandering about and settling where they liked, but that wasn’t what they were talking about. She couldn’t afford to get distracted. “Your family’s here now, sure. But who’s to say that any of you will really put down roots here?”

“Are you running me out of town, Kitty?” Finn asked, and his voice was even lower than before.

This was a problem because she could feel the way he said her name. It made that place deep inside of her tremble all over again, and a lot worse this time.

“Not at all,” she said. “I have a proposition for you, that’s all.”

“That sounds salacious,” he said, and that time he really did commit to the drawl. And much as she found amiable, friendly, companionable Finn Patrick bothersome, slow-talking cowboy Finn Patrick was no better.

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In fact, it was worse.

Some people sat with a plan. They refined it over and over again, ironed out all the kinks, and made certain that it was the right thing to do. Kitty, on the other hand, had been blessed in this life with the gift of certainty.

Once she made up her mind, it was done.

And so far, that approach to planning had served her well.

So it was the easiest thing in the world to let all the sudden, possibly questionable ideas in her head swirl around and coalesce and leap into full form. She could see it all spool out before her as if it had already happened.

And there was no denying it. It would solve all of her problems in one fell swoop.

“It’s not salacious at all,” she assured him.

His hand was still so hot on her elbow. His jaw was undeniably perfect, which was a bothersome fact all its own.

But she could see it all so clearly in her head, so she forged straight ahead, despite all the ways this man bothered her. “I’m just wondering if you’d consider marrying me?”

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