What Sunny wanted to tell Annie was that the pain and humiliation wasn’t the worst part—it was that her friends and family pitied her for being left. What was wrong with her, that he would do that?

She knew what was wrong, when she thought about it. Her nose was too long, her forehead too high, her chest small and feet big, her h*ps too wide, she hadn’t finished college and she took pictures for a living. That they were good pictures didn’t seem to matter—it wasn’t all that impressive. She sometimes veered into that territory of “if I had been a super model with a great body, he’d never have left me.” Intellectually she knew that was nonsense, but emotionally she felt lacking in too many ways.

Instead she said to Annie, “Did you know? Did you ever have a hint that something was wrong?”

She shook her head. “Only when it was over, when I looked back and realized he never spent a weekend with me, and I was too trusting to wonder why he hadn’t ever asked me to join him on a business trip to one of the other towns where he stayed overnight on business. Oh, after it was all over, I had lots of questions. But at the time?” She shook her head. “I didn’t know anything was wrong.”

“Me either,” Sunny said.

“I probably didn’t want to know anything was wrong,” Annie added. “I don’t like conflict.”

Sunny didn’t say anything. She was pretty well acquainted with her own denial and that hurt just about as much as the hard truth.

“Well, there was one thing,” Annie corrected. “After it was all over I wondered if I shouldn’t have been more desperate to spend every moment with him, if I loved him so much. You know—Nate gets called out in the middle of the night pretty often, and I never make a fuss about it. But we both complain if we haven’t had enough time together. We need each other a lot. That never happened with Ed. I was perfectly fine when he wasn’t around. Should have tipped me off, I guess.”

No help there, Sunny thought. Glen had complained constantly of her Fridays through Sundays always being booked with shoots. There were times she worked a sixteen-hour day on the weekends, covering three weddings and receptions and a baptism. Slip in some engagement slide shows, photos of babies, whatever had to be done for people who worked Monday through Friday and who only had weekends available. Then from Monday through Thursday she’d work like a dog editing and setting up proofs.

Glen was a California Highway Patrolman who worked swing shifts to have weekends off and she was always unavailable then.

She revisited that old argument—wait a minute! Here was a clue she hadn’t figured out at the time. Glen had a few years seniority with CHP, so why would he work swings just to have those weekends off when he knew she would be tied up with her clients the entire time? She’d been rather proud of the fact that it hadn’t taken her long to develop a strong clientele, to make incredibly good money for a woman her age—weddings were especially profitable. But she’d had to sacrifice her weekends to get and keep that success.

So why? It would have been easy for him to get a schedule with a Tuesday through Thursday, her lightest days, off. In fact, if he had been willing to take those days off, and work the day shift regularly, they could have gone to bed together every night. He said at the time that it suited his body clock, that he wasn’t a morning person. And he liked to go out on the weekends. He went out with “the boys.” The boys? Not bloody likely….

After being left at the church a couple of his groomsmen had admitted he’d been having his doubts about the big, legal, forever commitment. Apparently he’d worried aloud to them, but all he ever did was argue with her about it. We don’t need all that! We could fly to Aruba, get married there, take a week of sailing, scuba diving… He hadn’t said the commitment was an issue, just the wedding—something Sunny and her mom were having a real party putting together. So she had said, “Try not to worry so much, Glen—you’ll get your week in Aruba on the honeymoon. Just be at the church on time, say your lines and we’ll be diving and sunning and sailing before you know it.”

Sunny shook her head in frustration. What was the point in figuring it out now? She grabbed her coat, her camera and headed out the door. The snow was still gently falling and she backed away from the town Christmas tree, snapping photos as she went. She zoomed in on some of the military unit patches used as decorations, caught snowflakes glistening against gold balls and white lights, captured angles of the tree until, finally, far enough away, she got the whole tree. If these came out the way she hoped, she might use them for something next Christmas—ads or cards or something.

Then she turned and caught a couple of good shots of the bar porch, the snow drifting on the rails and steps and roof. Then of the street with all the houses lit for holiday cheer. Then the bar porch with a man leaning against the rail, arms crossed over his chest—a very handsome man.

She lowered the camera and walked toward Drew. There was no getting around the fact that he was handsome—tall and built, light brown hair, twinkling brown eyes, and if she remembered right, a very sexy smile. He stood on the porch and she looked up at him.

“Okay, look, I apologize,” she said. “It’s not like me to be so rude, so ‘unapproachable’ as you call it. I got dumped, okay? I’m still licking my wounds, as my uncle Nathaniel puts it. Not a good time for me to respond to a come-on from a guy. I’m scared to death to meet a guy and end up actually liking him, so I avoid all males. That’s it in a nutshell,” she added with a shrug. “I used to be very friendly and outgoing—now I’m on guard a lot.”

“Apology accepted. And I had a bad breakup, too, but it was a while ago. Water under the bridge, as they say.”

“You got dumped?”

He gave a nod. “And I understand how you feel. So let’s start over. What do you say? I’m Drew Foley,” he said.

She took another step toward the porch, looking up at him. “Sunny Archer. But when? I mean, how long ago did you get dumped?”

“About nine months, I guess.”

“About?” she asked. It must not have impacted him in quite the same way if he couldn’t remember the date. “I mean—was it traumatic?”

“Sort of,” he said. “We were engaged, lived together, but we were arguing all the time. She finally told me she wasn’t willing to have a life like that and we had to go our separate ways. It wasn’t my idea to break up.” He shrugged. “I thought we could fix it and wanted to try, but she didn’t.”

“Did you know?” she asked. “Were you expecting it?”

He shook his head. “I should have expected it, but it broadsided me.”

“How can that be? If you should have expected it, how could it possibly have taken you by surprise?”

He took a deep breath, looked skyward into the softly falling flakes, then back at her. “We were pretty miserable, but before we lived together we did great. I’m a medical resident and my hours were…still are hideous. Sometimes I’m on for thirty-six hours and just get enough time off to sleep. She needed more from me than that. She…” He looked down. “I don’t like calling her she or her. Penny had a hard time changing her life in order to move in with me. She had to get a new job, make new friends, and I was never there for her. I should have seen it coming but I didn’t. It was all my fault but I couldn’t have done anything to change it.”

“Where are you from?” she asked him.

“Chico. About four hours south of here.”

“Wow,” she said. “We actually do have some things in common.”

“Do we?” he asked.

“But you’re over it. How’d you get over it?”

He put his hands in his front pants pockets. “She invited me to her engagement party three months ago. To another surgical resident. Last time I looked, he was on the same treadmill I was on. Guess he manages better with no sleep.”

“No way,” she said, backing away from the bar’s porch a little bit.

“Way.”

“You don’t suppose…?”

“That she was doing him when she was supposed to be doing me?” he asked for her. “It crossed my mind. But I’m not going there. I don’t even want to know. All that aside, she obviously wasn’t the one. I know that now. Which means it really was my fault. I was hooking up with someone out of inertia, not because I was insanely in love with her. Bottom line, Sunny, me and Penny? We both dodged a bullet. We were not meant to be.”

She was speechless. Her mouth formed a perfect O. Her eyes were round. She wished she’d been able to take her own situation in such stride. “Holy crap,” she finally said. Then she shook her head. “I guess you have to be confident to be in medicine and all.”

“Aw, come on, don’t give the study all the credit. I might actually have some common sense.” He took a step down from the bar porch to approach her, his heel slid on the step and he went airborne. While he was in the air, there were rapid flashes from her camera. Then he landed, flat on his back, and there were more flashes.

Sunny stood over him, camera in hand. She looked down at him. “Are you all right?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. It took him a moment to catch his breath. “I could be paralyzed, you know. I hope I was hallucinating, but were you actually taking my picture as I fell?”

“Well, I couldn’t catch you,” she said. Then she smiled.

“You are sick and twisted.”

“Maybe you should lie still. I could go in the bar and get the pediatrician and the midwife to have a look at you. I met them earlier, before you got here.”

He looked up at her; she was still smiling. Apparently it didn’t take much to cheer her up—the near death of a man seemed to put her in a better mood. “Maybe you could just show them the pictures….”

She fell onto her knees beside him and laughed, her camera still in hand. It was a bright and happy sound and those beautiful blue eyes glittered. “Seriously, you’re the doctor—do you think you’re all right?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t moved yet. One wrong move and I could be paralyzed from the neck down.”

“Are you playing me?”

“Might be,” he admitted with a shrug of his shoulders.

“Hah! You moved! You’re fine. Get up.”

“Are you going to have a drink with me?” he asked.

“Why should I? Seriously, we’re a couple of wounded birds—we probably shouldn’t drink, and we certainly shouldn’t drink together!”

“Get over it,” he said, rising a bit, holding himself up on his elbows. “We have nothing to lose. It’s a New Year’s Eve party. We’ll have a couple of drinks, toast the New Year, move on. But give it a try not so pissed off. See if you can have some fun.” He smiled. “Just for the heck of it?”

She sat back on her heels and eyed him warily. “Is this just more inertia?”

His grin widened. “No, Sunny. This is part chivalry and part animal attraction.”

“Oh, God…. I just got dumped by an animal. So not looking for another one.”

He gave her a gentle punch in the arm. “Buck up. Be a big girl. I bet you haven’t let an interested guy buy you a drink in a long time. Take a chance. Practice on me. I’m harmless.”

She lifted one light brown brow. “How do I know you’re harmless?”

“I’m going back to sacrifice myself to the gods of residency in two days. They’ll chew me up and spit me out. Those chief residents are ruthless and they want revenge for what was done to them when they were the little guys. There won’t even be a body left. No one will ever know you succumbed to having a beer with me.” And then he smiled with all his teeth.

She tsked and rolled her eyes at him.

He sat up. “See how much you like me? You’re putty in my hands.”

“You’re a dork!”

He got to his feet and held out a hand to her, helping her up. “I’ve heard that, but I’m not buying it yet. I think if you dig deep enough, I might be cool.”

She brushed off the knees of her jeans. “I’m not sure I have that kind of time.”

CHAPTER THREE

ONCE DREW GOT UP AND MOVED, he limped. He claimed a wounded hip and leaned on Sunny. Since she couldn’t be sure if he was faking, she allowed this. But just as they neared the steps, the doors to the bar flew open and people began to spill out, laughing, shouting, waving goodbye.

“Careful there,” he yelled, straightening up. “I just slipped on the steps. They’re iced over. I’ll get Jack to throw some salt on them, but take it slow and easy.”

“Sure,” someone said. “Thanks, Drew.”

“Be careful driving back to Chico,” someone else said.

“Say hello to your sisters,” a woman said. “Tell them to come up before too long, we miss them.”

“Pinch that cute baby!”

“Will do,” Drew said in response, and he pulled Sunny to the side to make way for the grand exodus. The laughing, joking, talking people, some carrying their plates and pots from the buffet table, headed for their cars.

“What the heck,” Sunny said. “It’s not even nine o’clock!”

Drew laughed and put his arm back over her shoulder to lean on her. “This is a little town, Sunny. These folks have farms, ranches, orchards, vineyards, small businesses and stuff like that. The ones who don’t have to get up early for work—even on holidays—might stay later. And some of the folks who are staying are on call—the midwife, the cop, the doctor.” He grinned. “Probably the bartender. If anyone has a flat on the way home, five gets you ten either Jack or Preacher will help out.”