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G inny wasn’t sure how much longer she would be able to keep her limbs moving in a coordinated way as she marched the remaining yards to the top of the driveway, Nico at her heels.

How could there be something she needed to see at an empty lot?

But she welcomed any excuse to put distance between them, because the more she inhaled his scent, the weaker and more vulnerable she became.

She’d forced her voice to behave, but barely. Short sentences only.

At least she’d managed a decent death stare.

He’d even cringed! But that small triumph had backfired, because once again she’d seen the hurt little boy in him—the one who’d asked Santa to protect his mother from his abusive father for Christmas—and her resolve to keep him cowering had nearly collapsed.

She was moving now too, and moving always felt better than not moving.

She’d go up and see the lot like he asked, decide whether Sadie’s promises about him had any basis in fact, and then give Monique the green light to sell the lot.

With any luck, somebody in one of these mansions needed a potato shed with a view.

“Ah!” she yelled as a tiny flying creature suicided straight into her left eye.

Nico was instantly beside her. “What’s wrong?”

Her cornea erupted in burning protest at having six tiny, jagged, flailing legs on its tender surface. “B-bug!” she cried as her eye gushed with tears.

“Okay, okay, give it ten seconds,” he said.

“Don’t rub at it. Just let your tears clear it.

That’s their job.” He clamped a hand on her upper arm, but just enough to steady her on the steep slope while she alternately blinked and held her eye closed.

After about eight seconds, he gave her arm the gentlest squeeze.

“Perfect. You’re doing great.” The sensation of his fingers, strong but supportive, in combination with his soothing voice, reminded her of the morning he’d checked her ankle for breaks. “Is it feeling any better?”

And, as if he had willed it so, suddenly it was. She fluttered her eyelid, feeling for any lingering irritation, but there was none. “I think it’s all gone. Stupid bug.”

“Insects may play an important role in art history, but not so much in ophthalmology, huh?”

She didn’t laugh but was touched he remembered their conversation. “No, not so much.”

“What was it you said about their meaning? The delicate and the grotesque?”

She swiveled her good eye to look at him in some astonishment. He remembered her exact words? She nodded. “I believe I also called them omens of death, so hopefully that’s not what that one was.”

“As long as Mick isn’t here to play people-bowling, there shouldn’t be any mortal woundings today.”

This time they both laughed, hers an airy giggle, and his a deep rumble. It seeped into her soul and instantly settled it, the way a good long walk in the woods did, or a weighted blanket, or a successful day of home repairs.

Home repairs? He was the reason she no longer had a home to repair!

With her eyeball no longer screaming ‘invader!’ at her, she was more aware of her surroundings, which, in this case, was Nico.

His scent, his heat, his Nico-ness encircled her fully.

Too fully. She could probably use the excuse of her ailing eye to sink into his arms one last time, feel that amazing combination of steadiness and softness.

How she longed for it, but no. She continued walking, pulling her arm from his in the process.

After a few more steps, she was high enough to begin to see the plot she now owned. There was the ocean far below. There was the small boulder that had aided in nearly merging her forever with the landscape. There were the two majestic orange wingback chairs that…

Ginny froze mid-step. “Are those…?”

“The very ones. Check them out.”

He didn’t need to invite her. She was already quick stepping toward them like a kid with the key to a candy shop. “They’re just like in the pictures!”

He barked a laugh that echoed to the next ridge over. “They are the ones in the pictures.”

Ginny ran her hand along their backs, feeling the cut velvet upholstery and taking in the richness of the color.

She’d thought they were straight up orange, but they were a glorious, subtle burnt orange.

It wasn’t like her to be so attracted to furniture, but she’d been searching for these for five fruitless years, and they were even more beautiful in person than she had imagined.

She gasped as a terrible thought struck her. “But is your mom…?”

He'd caught up with her and was standing a few feet behind the chairs. “Mom’s fine. The chairs are on loan for the day. Though someday I promise they’ll be yours if you still want them.”

Ginny crouched down, admiring their carved, lion paw feet. “Look at the detail. A master made these.”

“I wish I knew where my mother got them. She doesn’t remember any more, of course. But one thing we do know is—they’ll look great in your house .”

His emphasis on the words “your house” caught Ginny’s attention, and not in a good way. She sent him an arched brow. “What house?”

A grin spread across his chiseled features as he made a palms-up, swiping gesture. “Look around. Are the chairs the only new thing here?”

Feeling disconcerted, Ginny slowly straightened and gazed about.

She’d been laser-focused on the chairs, but she noticed now that a tidy, two-inch deep and six-inch wide trench was dug into the dirt about ten feet in front of her.

Following the line with her eye, she saw that the trench turned left, ran straight for a bit, and then branched off, with the first section continuing straight and the other heading at a ninety-degree angle due north.

The new line was met by additional shallow trenches, while the outer line made a large rectangle.

Like ancient hieroglyphs on hillsides, something about the lines and shapes rang mental bells.

The smile melted from her face as she realized both what this was and its utter cruelty. “This is the outline of my house and its walls! Is this a joke? Did you bring me here just to upset me?”

“No, I?—”

He sounded panicked rather than triumphant, but the door in her heart that had been trying to creak open slammed shut anyway. “I’m leaving.”

“Wait! Please don’t go. Give me that one minute. If you’re still upset after I explain, I promise you can push me right off the cliff.”

Ginny dropped into the right-hand chair but kept her gaze on the sea and hills. “Your terms are acceptable.”

Nico sat gingerly in the other chair. “I brought you here to see if you would not only accept my apology in the form of this lot, but let me make amends, true amends. If you agree, I will rebuild your house, right here on your lot, exactly as it was or with any changes you want. You get final say on everything. It will be one hundred percent your house.”

Though earlier she had wished for a breeze, she was now grateful for the still air. The lightest puff would have knocked her sideways. “Rebuild it?”

“It’s the least we can do.”

“We? Your brother agrees?”

“Absolutely. He feels terrible too about what happened, though the fault was all mine. I hadn’t told him about our cookout, or your injury, or mom’s visit – any of that.

He didn’t know we’d agreed to move the house.

I’m always telling him he needs to take more initiative.

Unfortunately, he followed my advice this time. ”

Sadie spied a single gull flying high overhead. “I’m guessing rebuilding the house was Vince’s idea then, and you reluctantly agreed?”

“It was my idea but believe me when I say that I would have agreed to anything. I’ve been tormented by what happened, by what I did.

At first, I thought it was a mix of guilt and pain about my dad – what you said about me trying to erase him by erasing the house.

I figured I’d give you the lot and we’d be even.

And if we weren’t, well, that’s life, that’s?—"

“The price of progress?”

From the corner of her eye, she saw him drop his head till he was practically talking to his shoes.

“Yeah. What I used think of as that. But I only felt worse and worse. Even after completing the deal that I’ve been centering my whole life around for a decade, I felt nothing.

I took a class on art history, because I’d loved hearing you talk about it, but it was just words and pictures.

Vince made us go on a trip together, just the two of us, to Morocco for a week.

It's been at the top of my travel list for a while, but all I wanted to do was sit in our hotel room till our return flight. It was like all the happiness had drained out of me, all the color.”

He lifted his head and rubbed his hands together, as if steeling himself for what he needed to say next.

“And, finally, I realized—you were the color. I’d been living a grey life, and you turned it periwinkle and lime green and fuzzy pink.

You made tree limbs crack and angry dogs sweet.

You made my long-lost mom use my name again!

There was no place I could travel, no amount of money I could earn, that could bring your magic back into my life.

Only you could do that. And so…” His voice trailed into silence.

She sensed he was hoping she’d look at him, but she didn’t comply. The blue, blue sea was much safer in this moment than his deep brown eyes.

“…and so,” he continued, his ordinarily sure voice collapsing into a quiver, “if you have any feelings for me at all, can we try again? I know it’s a lot to ask, but I’m shooting my shot here because I’m in…

I’m in...I’m hopelessly in love with you and otherwise, well, otherwise, I don't know what I’ll do. ”

Ginny’s mind swirled to the erratic beat of her pounding heart. At the beginning of this, Nico had offered to be pushed off the cliff, but it was she who’d ended up balanced on a knife’s edge – would she retreat or let herself fall into depths she couldn’t begin to imagine?

She’d loved her parents so deeply, and one day they upped and vanished, leaving chasms of pain that would never completely heal.

Accepting Nico’s offer risked opening a brand-new chasm, and she wasn't sure she could handle the fear that brought. But for the past two months, she’d been in that chasm anyway, hadn’t she?

By day she managed to scrabble up and cling to the lip of it, using all her energies to keep her head just above ground level, but every night she fell back in, into his arms, into his kiss.

She stood but kept her back to him.

“I get it, I get it,” he said, sounding utterly defeated. “I hurt you too much. You’re the one person I want most in this world to protect, and I did the complete opposite. The house offer still stands, of course, and…”

He was still talking, but his words became a mumble in Ginny’s ears. She had her decision. Whatever else he said now didn’t matter one whit.

In one fluid movement, she spun toward him. Placing a hand firmly on his broad shoulder, she pushed him back just far enough to be able to slide onto his left knee. With both hands, she grabbed his face, blinking her green eyes into his brown ones. “Shut up and kiss me, ya big stupid cucumber.”

He did, and to her eternal surprise, instead of falling, she soared.

His eyes searched hers as their lips parted. “Do you forgive me?”

“I’m working on it.”

He nodded toward the lot. “And do you want to build the house together?”

She took in the lines that had angered her minutes ago, but that now represented the foundations of a whole new chapter in her life, a very periwinkle and lime green chapter. “We’re going to have to. Those walls aren’t going to fill themselves with love.”

They leaned in for another kiss but were interrupted by a commotion of yelling.

“No, don't go up there!” they heard Sadie say in a high-pitched, desperate tone.

“I will see it right now because I am her real estate attorney !” came Monique’s bellowed reply.

Tearing headlong into the middle of the lot, Monique pulled up short when she spotted Ginny and Nico cozily sharing an oversized and unusually colored antique chair in the middle of the South Malibu hills.

Veins Ginny never knew her older sister possessed bulged from her neck and forehead.

Monique sent them a death stare so powerful that, had time travel existed, it could have single-handedly wiped out the dinosaurs.

“ WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? ”