And he loved her carbonara.

Something was wrong.

Brynn took a small sip of wine and ordered herself not to panic. He’d said he was tired. And he was always in a bad mood after a long streak of being on call with little sleep and hurried meals. He was still in his scrubs, for God’s sake. She was worried for nothing.

She casually swung her leg over his, letting out a small sigh of relief when he didn’t shift away or push her off.

“Do you have tomorrow off?” she asked, watching his face closely. “I think I have a slow day. I could pass off a few appointments to Susan.”

“Brynn, we need to talk.”

There it was.

She had the slight urge to throw up. Surely she wasn’t being…dumped.

Brynn had a near-perfect record. Other than the time in tenth grade when Patrick Mulligan had reneged on his homecoming date offer in order to take the better-endowed Carrie Lowry, Brynn had always been a dumper, never a dumpee.

But looking at the resigned, detached expression on James’s face, she had a feeling that was about to change.

“Sure, what do you want to talk about?” she asked, hating the false bright note in her tone. One octave higher and she’d be squeaking.

He set his hand on her knee. Squeezed. “I think we need to take a break.”

Brynn didn’t let her smile slip. Couldn’t even if she wanted to. It was frozen on her face.

“A break, James? I’m not sure anyone beyond junior high really knows what that means.”

He let out a small exasperated sigh. As though she were being the difficult one. “It means I’m not sure I want to do this anymore.”

“You’re not sure,” she repeated in a flat voice.

He rubbed a hand through his hair. Hair that suddenly seemed unbearably boring. “I care about you, Brynn. I really do. And we’re perfect together, it’s just…”

Brynn set her wineglass on the coffee table with a clink. “We are perfect together, James. We want all the same things, we like all the same people…”

“I know,” he said, giving her a sad smile.

“Then why?” Her voice was a whisper now.

His lips tightened and something like guilt flashed across his face, and Brynn felt it like a knife to the gut.

Still, she made herself ask it. “Is there someone else?”

His fingers flexed on her knee again, but she could no longer stand his touch, and pulled her leg back so that she was sitting upright. It was better posture anyway.

“I didn’t cheat, Brynn. I would never do that.”

She relaxed slightly. And she believed him. James was one of those guys with an iron-rod moral code. He wouldn’t run around on her. And yet…

“But you have feelings for someone,” she prompted. She kept her eyes locked on the tulip arrangement on her coffee table, but she felt him shift beside her.

“More like the potential for feelings,” he said awkwardly.

Oh, please. Now she did turn to face him. “Come on. At least give it to me straight. Who is she? Someone you work with?”

Please don’t let it be that cliché.

He cleared his throat. Took another sip of wine. For a second, Brynn almost felt sorry for him. She knew firsthand how hard it was to break up with someone.

But her sympathy began to fade as she realized she’d never dumped someone because she had feelings for someone else.

She intentionally pushed aside her recent attraction to Will. That was a result of too much wine and too few shirts on his part.

James cleared his throat. “Well, you know Maggie?”

Brynn’s mind went blank for a moment before her eyes bugged out. Oh, surely not. “Maggie, as in your neighbor?”

He colored slightly. Bingo.

The world that had been starting to tilt around Brynn now felt completely upside down. She’d only met Maggie a couple times, usually when they’d just returned from vacation and she’d come over to drop off the mail that she’d been collecting.

Maggie was…well, frankly, she was a total mess. Brynn had a dim recollection of a tiny, fake redhead whose clothes were always just a little too big and careless, whose fingernails were always chipped and who laughed too much.

Maggie was James’s opposite. Maggie was Brynn’s opposite.

It was ironic, really. Brynn had been trying so hard to be structured and normal and acceptable so that James would propose.

Apparently he hadn’t wanted perfection at all.

“I didn’t realize you two were close,” she said stiffly.

He started to put a hand on Brynn’s back, but stopped when she tensed and instead took another sip of wine. His sips were calmer now. As though he could relax now that he’d dropped the bomb and would be done with her.

“It’s not like anything’s happened,” he said again. “But she’s come by a couple times recently to drop off UPS packages that she’d signed for, to let me know that maintenance came by to fix the air-conditioner…that kind of thing.”

“And what, you’re drawn to…what? Her split ends? The gap between her teeth? Jeez, James, isn’t she an artist?”

“She paints. Does some freelance graphic design stuff,” he said quietly. Almost guiltily.

“Of course she does,” Brynn muttered.

She felt like a bitch, but she couldn’t help it. She was pissed. And baffled. She ignored the fact that hurt hadn’t yet registered. That would probably come later.

“It’s just…she’s different from me. Different from us,” James said.

“Ya think?” she snapped.

“I like the difference. She’s unpredictable, quirky. She doesn’t care what people think of her, doesn’t care that she’s saying the right thing, doing the right thing, being the right thing. Maggie…she makes me feel…alive.”

But being different sucks. How could this Maggie woman stand it?

How could James stand it?

“And I made you feel…dead?” Brynn asked, keeping her voice calm.

He put his hand firmly on her knee. “No. No. But, Brynn, don’t you ever get sick of us? Sick of our plans and our checklists and the way that we know every little step that’s going to be in front of us?”

She stared at him. “Obviously, I don’t know every little step in front of me. I certainly didn’t see this coming.”

“You didn’t? I thought for sure you’d been feeling me pulling away. I thought you’d been pulling away too.”

She wasn’t in the mood to deal with the truth behind that statement. Sure, things hadn’t been perfect the past couple months, but that didn’t mean she’d been expecting to be discarded so he could dally with a Bohemian.

“I thought you were getting ready to propose,” she blurted out.

He went still. Brynn felt both foolish and relieved for having said it out loud.

“I thought we were headed in that direction too,” he said quietly.

She relaxed slightly. At least she hadn’t been that far off base.

“What changed?”

And why don’t I care more?

He linked his fingers with hers, giving her a squeeze meant to comfort. She found herself squeezing back.

“It’s nothing you did, Brynn. It’s us together that isn’t working. I realized I want more than a lifetime of white furniture.”

Something sharp and nagging snuck beneath her bafflement. She distantly recalled Will’s disdain for her white furniture, and his refusal to get the leather café au lait sectional she’d suggested. The café au lait couch that was nearly identical to the one she’d helped James pick out.

God, had Will known what she hadn’t? That nobody, not even James, wanted a woman with white furniture and piles of notebooks full of plans?

And suddenly Brynn realized that what was really eating at her wasn’t that James was breaking up with her.

It was that James was right.

She was sick of herself. Sick of her life.

Sick of the fact that her life plan was blowing up in her freaking face.

Brynn needed a vacation.

From herself.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Cosmetics should be used to enhance