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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