The house was large and the rural property sprawling, so there was no reason for Leda to feel claustrophobic. Except she did, more and more as the days stretched out without calls or leads or any of those small, welcome signs that would show that the working world had not forgotten about her.

She was thirty-four years old, too far along in adulthood to be living with her aunt and her aunt’s husband. The older couple thought she was saving money by giving up her expensive downtown condo and living out on their spacious ranch. They didn’t know that selling the condo had been an immediate necessity, not a prudent, preemptive move. After deducting the mortgage and transaction fees, her bank balance was below a thousand dollars—well below.

A woman could eat and sleep for free off her relatives indefinitely, but Leda drew the line at asking for money to take the bus into the city—assuming the bus came out to Heart Lake, Saskatchewan. Everybody in town seemed to get around in a slightly differently tinted version of the same beat-up truck—her uncle’s son from his first marriage included, and he was rich!

Leda glanced up from her laptop in time to see her cousin by marriage—or was it stepcousin? She was never too clear on the terminology—start down the sweeping staircase. His heavy-booted footfalls were as distinctive as they were decisive.

“Are you heading back to the city?”

Zachary had grown up in Heart Lake, but he didn’t live there anymore. He was the owner of a computer software company that specialized in custom programs for the oil and gas conglomerates that clustered in the Canadian prairies, and his home was in a ritzy suburb of Regina. His house was modern, minimalist and extremely expensive—the kind of place Leda’s design colleagues would be salivating over at first sight, much like young women tended to drool over Zach.

In the decade since her aunt’s wedding to his father, Leda had swung between loving and hating Zach, sometimes managing to do both at the same time. Immense success at an early age had made him arrogant. He was six years younger than her and, even at the height of her career, he must have been worth at least six times more. But, he was also generous. His support had allowed the older couple to retire early, and he’d given Leda a very lovely antique ring for her thirtieth birthday which would be the last thing she hocked—and probably gave the ring another couple of months on her finger.

Zach looked at her thoughtfully as she curled up in an armchair by the window. He was tall, so he had to look a long way down.

“You want a lift?”

“Yes, please.” Then she sagged back into the plush cushions as she realized the practical problems of such a simple task. “Only I have no way to get back home.”

Zach waited, jingling his keys in the front pocket of his jeans. He was obviously not about to offer to make the two-hour trip back to Heart Lake merely to drop her off.

“I guess I could spend the night at Jenny’s…” Assuming Jenny didn’t have her newest male friend spending the night already. Three in a bed would be awkward.

Zach turned his head slightly to stare out of the window in a gesture no doubt meant to signal his lack of interest in her train of thought. The sunlight streaming through the glass suggested warmth where there wasn’t any. It took a long time for the seasons to change on the high prairie. So-called Indian summers prolonged the warm weather—and the growing season—for weeks on end, while winter seemed to want to cut both short. Snow tires came off the cars in May and often toward the end of that month.

The light burnished Zach’s hair into a bronze helmet. His profile was clean-cut and just a tiny bit cruel. He was very attractive, perhaps because of that hint of cruelty.

“Or Rae’s,” Leda continued to muse aloud. “Rae’s bound to be in town.”

He switched his attention back to her as suddenly as an elastic band snapping back into place. “Who’s Ray?”

Leda was surprised at the sudden interest. As a rule, Zach showed no curiosity in the details of her personal life. And, as far as she knew, he had no private life of his own, apart from what little he chose to reveal to the business magazines who habitually did profiles on his successful Western Canadian empire.

He was like that Rihanna song—all work, all the time.

“Rae is my friend from design school,” she responded.

Zach’s green eyes were sharp. “Good-looking?”

“Very,” Leda said. “Smart, too.”

Smarter than Leda had been after graduation. While Leda had stuck to high-end clients and been quite successful in selling eclectic luxury concepts to wealthy oil executives, Rae had gone for commercial design work for hotel chains and other businesses. When the economic downturn had hit, Leda’s services had been quickly deemed disposable and her firm had laid her off in the first round of widespread terminations. Rae, meanwhile, was now designing cheerfully efficient interiors for a growing national chain of coffee shops.

The edges of Zach’s hard mouth curved downward. “Smart enough to get you to think spending a night in his home would be free of complications.”

Leda blinked up at him for an entire minute before she fully understood what he was saying. “Rae,” she said, “is spelled R-A-E. As in, short for Rachel.”

She paused again, this time not in concentration but in thought. As incongruous as Zach’s reaction had been, it was also quite unmistakable. “You sound jealous.” She smiled to allow him the luxury of thinking she was teasing. She wasn’t. His response had been too textbook-perfect for ambiguity.

Leda was merely bewildered.

What was wrong with the world that Zachary Benson could be jealous of her?

His jaw was tensed as he answered her, his face now slightly averted. “Maybe because I am jealous.”

“Of imaginary Ray?”

“No. Over very-real you.”

That reply shed no light on her confusion. “Why would you be jealous of me?”

He met her eyes this time and his expression could only be called grim, as if the less-appealing option compared to talking with her was listening to and answering her questions.

“Not of you,” he said with pointed emphasis. “Over you.”

“What’s the difference?”

He curled his hands at his sides. One of those clenched fists held his bunch of keys.

That must hurt.

“You know.”

Leda shook her head. “I really don’t.”

Her insistence appeared to anger him.

“It’s left over,” he said curtly, “from ten years ago.”

She stared up at him, still unable to make sense of his words. They were both speaking English, yet she had the urge to run and get a Zach-to-English dictionary for translation.

“Enlighten me,” she begged. “What happened ten years ago, apart from my aunt getting married to your father?”

“You know,” he said again. Leda was fascinated to see a dull flush rise on his lean cheeks. “I had that painful and embarrassing crush on you.”

She straightened in her chair. “Painful and embarrassing…crush?”

“You knew,” Zach said, as if repeating the statement enough times would make it the truth. “Everyone knew. That’s why it was so fucking embarrassing.”

“I didn’t know,” Leda insisted as the blood rushed to her own face. If she had suspected that might have been his answer, she wouldn’t have pried the truth from him. Still, a crush wasn’t a serious malady. Why is he still so ashamed of it? “You were, what…eighteen? Teenagers have all kinds of weird crushes.”

Yet, digging through her memory, she could find no clues about this so-called crush.

Zach had been a difficult teenager, but most teenagers were notoriously difficult. He’d seemed no more or less moody with her than with anyone else.

“I bought you that ring.”

Leda was floored.

“But…that was four years ago.” She forced a smile that made her lips feel like rubber. Trying to make light of a situation was her first line of defense. “Was that more leftovers?”

He nodded brusquely in response to her teasing question. He was still barely meeting her gaze. His stiffness and sudden awkward behavior was strongly reminiscent of the adolescent he’d been. The Zach she’d known in later years was confident, usually to the point of infuriating arrogance.

He lifted his head and pierced her with a sharp stare. This was the Zach she was more familiar with.

“If I could have you, it would get it all out of my system, once and for all.”

Again, it took a minute for his meaning to sink in. “Have me?” She laughed unsteadily. “You must be out of your mind.”

“I was a few moments ago,” he said, clearly referring to his confession, “but I’m sane now. Sane enough to want to exorcise this.”

That was unfair. She wasn’t a ghost or demon. Just a short while ago, she hadn’t even known Zach had ever felt this way about her.

No, not felt. Feels. He was still presently suffering.

Poor Zach.

“So, no more leftovers?” Leda asked, still striving for lightness and hopefully succeeding. The last thing she wanted to do was twist the knife in a suffering creature. “Do you think it’s so simple?”

“It could be.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “My crush on you never made sense. Maybe the cure is as crazy as the disease.”

There it was, that cruel edge.

And all she was doing was trying to understand…and help, if she could.

“Well, thanks. That’s very flattering.”

“Look at us,” Zach said. In a second, he was kneeling beside her chair, his head pressed against hers, his phone appearing suddenly in his hand. He released her abruptly. Then he turned the phone toward her.

He’d taken their picture—a surprise selfie.

On the small screen, their mashed-together faces were large and grotesque. Leda blinked at the phone a few times before the image resolved into the ordinary sight of two people trying to capture a split second in time.

The flash had made both their faces pallid, hiding the fact that Leda’s skin was tinted a shade somewhere between honey and bronze. Her eyes were the color of olives, a murky brown-green that matched her skin nicely in real life and appeared flat and muddy in the photo. Her hair, wild and dark brown, made a curly halo around her head. Wide-eyed and startled, she looked like a crazy woman.

She shifted her gaze. If she was the wild woman of the Western prairies, Zach obviously represented civilization. His large, bony features were the kind preferred by ancient chiselers of statues and busts. Even his skin was naturally pale and marble-like. The red-blond hair that went with it failed to soften the stony effect. His face was that of a conqueror, stern and pitiless.

“You look like a doll,” Zach said, turning the phone back toward him. He moved his gaze between her and the image, clearly comparing the two. “Pretty and useless, just like your work.”

Wow. He was firing on all cylinders and he was aiming right for her. The anger in him was palpable, despite his outward calm.

Why is he so angry? And why would he be angry with me? She hadn’t made him fall for her.

It was a fact of life that conquerors fell, sometimes for insignificant reasons—a kingdom for a horse, a successful businessman’s self-control for a hard-on.

Leda’s thoughts skittered on this slippery, new ground. A hard-on. That was what a very adult Zach was talking about—not a teenaged crush but a mature want and a very male desire.

“We can’t all be masters of enterprise,” Leda pointed out, still trying to maintain a teasing note in her wavering voice before the face of his full-frontal attack. “Some of us want to be liked.”

His narrowed gaze told her that he’d noticed the buried barb in her words.

He might have been vastly successful, but he had few friends. He trusted no one.

“Everyone likes you,” Zach replied, “because you always say yes.”

Leda flushed. She was a people pleaser. It dated way back to when she had been a child and her father had died. Looking back, it felt like she’d spent her entire childhood afterward singing, dancing and trying to make her mother happy again. It hadn’t worked. Her mother had committed suicide shortly after Leda’s eighteenth birthday. But she’d never really stopped being that singing, dancing child, desperate for a smile.

Still, being a people pleaser wasn’t a crime.

“I suppose you want people to say no to you all the time.”

He was still on his knees but, even in that supplicant-like position, he looked very much in charge.

“I want you to say yes,” he said, “all night long.”

That low statement made it excruciatingly clear to her. ‘Crush’ was the adolescent term, completely harmless, but Zach was in his late twenties. This wasn’t a crush or ‘leftovers’ or anything else of that nature. Something darker lurked in his eyes—lust.

Lust for a cousin by marriage? For a doll?

He was right. It didn’t make sense.

But that was his problem, not hers.

“You must be doing something wrong,” Leda said as she stood and walked a few steps away to put distance between them. “People get over crushes by kissing other people or burning their crush’s photograph or something.”

“You think I haven’t tried that?” Zach asked from behind her.

She swung around. “Burning my photo?”

“No, kissing other people.” His tone put heavy quotation marks around the word ‘kissing.’ Banging other women was what he’d obviously meant.

Leda did not want to think about her ‘cousin’ banging anyone, not because they’d grown up together or anything—they’d both been adults when her aunt had married his dad—but because it was Zach. He was in a different category. He didn’t bring home girlfriends, but neither did he worry about getting dates. From what she recalled, there was always some young woman willing to pair off with him, even if only for a night.

“I’ve tried fucking women who look like you,” he went on. “I’ve tried fucking women who are your exact opposite. It’s been ten years. Nothing works. I know.”

She believed him. Zach Benson would have tried everything, no pain or expense spared. He truly wanted to exorcise her because, to him, she must be haunting his life.

What a burden he must have carried for so long and so uncomplainingly. And it was her own stupid fault it had come out now, embarrassing them both. She’d practically pushed him into a confession.

“I don’t really find you…appealing,” she said apologetically, still mindful of his long years of silent suffering—although, that suffering didn’t seem to have stopped him from having an active sex life. Connected by marriage, it was hard not to know how many women he’d dated.

He laughed shortly. “I know that, too.” He closed the distance between them in one long stride. “The man you end up with is going to be artsy and soft, and he’s going to give in to you, even when he shouldn’t, because you look so cute and sweet.”

Leda couldn’t resist smiling. “I am cute and sweet.”

He loomed over her. “Sweet enough to say yes to me?”

She shook her head furiously, sending curls flying. “Not that sweet.”

He caught a handful of her hair and crushed it between his fingers. “I’m hurt. Now where’s that accommodating woman I’ve come to know?”

Searching his hard face, Leda concluded that his so-called hurt was no more than a bare statement. If she had damaged his feelings—as opposed to his ego—he hid it well.

She wanted to help him. She really did. She couldn’t stand suffering of any variety and she particularly hated being the cause of it. But she still couldn’t quite believe that Zach—Zach!—needed her help.

Zach didn’t need anyone.