“My brother is one seriously happy guy,” he remarked as he walked back into the kitchen and found her standing with her glass in her hand, staring out the window at the city lights.

“They both are,” she said as she turned her beautiful gaze back to him. “It was very sweet to see.”

“I wasn’t sure about the two of them at first,” he admitted, knowing he hadn’t exactly been encouraging in the early days of his brother’s relationship, “but somehow they’ve made the age difference and the demands of both their careers work.”

“Is Marcus also in the entertainment industry?”

“Nope.” Not even close. “He owns Sullivan Winery.”

“Wow, I wish I’d known he was behind some of my favorite cabernets. I would have liked to thank him for all the hours of pleasure he’s given me.”

She was clearly surprised by Marcus’s profession, and yet again Smith loved the fact that she knew next to nothing about his life, when any fan could have recited his siblings’ names and careers by heart. He also loved the way she spoke of pleasure...even if she was giving his brother the credit for it.

“Now I get what you mean about the demands of both their careers,” she said. “They really do live in different worlds, don’t they?”

Smith refilled up their drinks and carried them into the living room. “I don’t think it’s always easy to juggle her tours and his busy seasons in the vineyards, but they clearly love each other enough to make it work.”

When he set their drinks on the coffee table, he could see her surprise at finding a half-finished puzzle on it.

“I love puzzles,” she exclaimed. “Tatiana and I used to do them together all the time before we got so busy.”

She immediately sat down on the plush couch, picked up a puzzle piece and clicked it into place. Smith moved beside her and slid a piece into the corner of one of the dog’s ears while she filled in the nose on another. He was glad to see her forget to keep the distance she seemed to think was so damned necessary.

This easy companionship was precisely why he’d brought her over to the coffee table, where the puzzle of three silly dogs was halfway done...and it was yet another reason why he loved his brother Gabe’s soon-to-be stepdaughter Summer so much. The eight-year-old girl had taken the picture of the three dogs sitting crookedly with their ears blowing in the breeze and had turned it into a puzzle for him. His twin sisters had been great when they were eight, too. Heck, they’d been great at every age, and even if it sometimes seemed like his sister Lori—aka “Naughty” to Sophie’s “Nice”—grew to be more and more of a pain in the butt with every passing year, he wouldn’t have given them up for anything.

“Some picture, isn’t it?”

He loved the sound of Valentina’s laughter. “The absolute best. Where did you find it?”

“Two of the dogs belong to my brother Zach and his fiancée, Heather. The huge one,” he said, pointing at the Great Dane, “and the little one—” He popped a section of the Yorkie’s shoulder into place. “—fell in love first. Zach and Heather weren’t far behind them, though.”

“What about the poodle puppy?”

“The poodle belongs to my soon-to-be niece. Summer is eight-years-old and she brilliantly maneuvered her single mother and my brother Gabe together. They’re getting married on New Year’s Eve in Lake Tahoe. It’s where they fell in love last year.”

“Oh,” she said with a little sigh, “that’s just lovely.” Her eyes, her mouth, were soft as she practically brimmed over with emotion.

Smith had lit a fire earlier, and now, as they sat together working on the puzzle in front of it, it hit him that this was the first time in his life he’d ever experienced something this warm, this sweet, with a woman. Heck, now that he thought about it, this was actually the second time he’d tried to put this puzzle together. The last time it sat unfinished, the woman he’d mistakenly brought home had thought it would be sexy to swipe it off onto the floor so that he could do her on top of the coffee table. A while later, when the woman had gone to the bathroom to straighten her hair and clothes before he sent her home, he’d immediately picked up the pieces.

Doing a woman he’d picked up at a Hollywood event on top of his coffee table was something a movie star did.

Making a puzzle in front of a fire was something a couple did.

“Your family sounds incredible,” Valentina said, her words tinged with wistfulness as she reached for another puzzle piece and popped it into place. “Your parents must have had a perfect marriage for everyone to turn out so well.”

“They did seem to have a pretty great marriage, although to hear my mother tell some of her stories about my father, he had his moments.” Smith winced slightly at the tug in his chest that nailed him whenever he spoke about Jack Sullivan. Smith didn’t miss him every day, but when he did, the sense of loss could be overpowering. “He died when I was thirteen.”

Her eyes widened at the information, giving him even more confirmation that she hadn’t spent one moment of her life reading about him in a magazine or looking him up on the Internet.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t know.”

He was amazed by how much it meant to him, this possibility of building a relationship with someone where they both started from the same place, so that they could both uncover and discover each other’s stories at the same time that they wrote their own story together.

“My father,” she said so softly he had to focus on her lips to hear the words as her eyes closed and she sucked in a breath, “died, too.”

It was pure instinct to cover her hand with his over the loose puzzle pieces. “How old were you?”

Her breath shook slightly as she said, “Twenty-two. I know I should be over it by now, but—”

It wasn’t enough to simply hold her hand, he needed to wrap his arms around her. It didn’t surprise him when her long, lean limbs fit perfectly against his.

“I used to think the same thing, that one day I’d wake up and I’d be over it. That I’d be able to think of him without it hurting.” He took one hand from her back to put it over his heart, as if to soothe the ache. “It hasn’t happened yet.”

When she instinctively moved her hand over his to try to comfort him, his chest squeezed tight at just how good it felt to have her touch him with such innate sweetness.