“Not a fan of…?” Lincoln broke off, realizing he didn’t remember Daisy’s ex’s name.

“Gary,” Whitney all but spat.

“You don’t like him.”

“Do any best friends like the man who breaks their best friend’s heart?”

“He didn’t break her though,” Lincoln said mildly.

“No, he didn’t, and that’s good of you to notice,” Whitney mused. “But sometimes I think he got closer than she lets anyone realize.”

Lincoln’s fingers tightened around the bottle. “Because he told her he didn’t want a family, and then started one with someone else?”

Whitney’s gaze sharpened. “Told you that, did she?”

He lifted a shoulder. “I shared something with her—something personal. I suspect she was trying to set me at ease.”

“Yes, she does that. Likes to make other people comfortable. And yeah, Gary did knock up his secretary in the tackiest of all clichés, but I’ve always gotten the sense that was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. She was so different even before she found out about that.”

“Different how?” he asked, torn between guilt over blatantly snooping into Daisy’s ill-fated marriage and an unshakable need to know more about her.

“Subdued. Quiet. Hell, she’s still not back to the Daisy she was before he put his stupid fat rock on her finger. She used to be the life of the party. Not as loud as me, but close. She’s slowly coming back to her old self, but she’s guarded in ways she never was before.”

The back door slammed, and Whitney and Lincoln exchanged a quick look of understanding that their conversation would stay between them. Luckily for them, Daisy was too busy carrying a full tray to notice. “Okay, I’ve got a new pitcher of margs, a beer for Lincoln, some water, because none of us are twenty-three anymore and hydration’s important, and Lincoln if you wouldn’t mind adding these potatoes to the grill—”

He was already maneuvering the tray out of her hands. “Easy there, hostess. You know you don’t have to do everything on your own, right?”

She looked up, met his gaze with those soft, whiskey-brown eyes of hers that reminded him of a mint julep on a porch on a summer’s night.

He wanted that, he realized.

Not the porch, not the drink. Her.

Then he shook his head.

That wasn’t for him. Not the vision, not the woman.

Whitney’s cell phone rang—the ringtone some sort of country jingle Lincoln wasn’t familiar with. “Oooh baby,” she hooted. “Big-money client coming through. You guys care if I take this?”

She answered the call before Daisy or Lincoln could respond, holding out her margarita glass for a refill and then stepping off the porch to roam around Daisy’s yard, her conversation punctuated with gusty laughter as Kiwi followed along adoringly at her ankles.

“I like her,” Lincoln said, topping off Daisy’s glass with more of the margarita pitcher before taking a sip of the fresh beer she’d brought him.

“Yeah, she’s good people,” Daisy said fondly, before gesturing at the tray she’d brought out. “So, okay, the potatoes have garlic butter inside, they just need to cook, and I already seasoned the asparagus, shouldn’t take long to grill, they’re pretty thin, and—”

Lincoln grabbed her hand as it gestured over the food. “Wallflower. I’ve got this.”

She lifted her eyebrows in challenge. “Do you, city boy? Because I’ve seen your apartment. The stove had a sort of ‘never been used’ look about it, the microwave had a very used look about it, and your cell phone has three different food delivery apps on it.”

“Just because I don’t cook doesn’t mean I can’t.”

Daisy fixed him with a look.

“All right,” he admitted. “So I can’t cook. At all. But grilling is different.”

“How?”

He flexed. “Am man.”

She laughed, then wiggled her wrist a little. “Think I can have this back now?”

Shit. He was still holding her hand. He released it immediately, feeling the strangest urge to apologize. And an even stranger urge to take her hand once more, tug her forward and see if she tasted as sweet and spicy as she looked…

What was with him? Lincoln Mathis didn’t do awkward schoolboy. Hell, he’d spent the past couple years being that guy who was perfectly comfortable around women—who’d perfected the art of making them comfortable around him.

He’d never thought of Katie as a safety net, but he realized how that’s exactly what she had been. Not just that, obviously, but as long as his heart was carefully tucked away, his loyalty fixated on one woman, being around other women had been easy.

Lincoln no longer had that buffer, and the absence of it was unsettling. For the first time in the five years since he’d first met Katie, he was allowed to be aware of another woman. His mind knew that it was too soon, his heart was screaming no fucking way, never again…

But his body?

His body was all too aware that it had been a long-ass time since he’d touched a woman. Really touched her.

Daisy leaned a lean hip against the railing. She was wearing dark jeans, brown ankle boots, and a cream-colored sweater that looked soft and expensive.

“You okay?” she asked, studying him over the rim of her drink.

He opened his mouth to make some sort of lighthearted quip, but then, as it did so often around her, the truth slipped out. “Sometimes I wish I liked you less, Wallflower.”