She bit her lip to keep from asking if he was ever not smiling.

“But mostly,” he continued, “I remember how much I wanted to make you smile.”

That caught her off guard. Emma paused in her note taking and glanced up.

Clint’s grin had turned just a little bit sad, and suddenly Emma was struck by the realization that maybe Clint wasn’t happy all the time after all. Maybe he was just really good at faking it.

“What do you mean?” Emma asked. She smiled. Didn’t she?

“Don’t get me wrong; you weren’t mopey or anything,” Clint rushed to explain. “There was just…your smiles had to be earned. And it was damn hard work.”

He grinned to soften the blow, but Emma felt strangely off-kilter.

She knew she could be…reserved. But she liked to laugh as much as the next girl. She could be happy and funny and all that. Right? Right?!

“Okay, last question,” she said, suddenly anxious for this first interview to be over. “From your perspective, why did we break up?”

Clint leaned forward, his smile mischievous. “Ah, I wish I knew. See, Emma, darling, you dumped me. And I seem to remember the classic ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ at work.”

Emma tapped her pen on the notebook. She’d been planning for this. In her past relationships, Emma had done a lot of the dumping, so she’d known this was coming.

But the script she’d rehearsed in her head didn’t feel adequate when she was looking at someone she’d once cared about. Who’d once cared about her, even if it had been only for a couple months.

“Don’t worry,” Clint said with a wink. “I’m not holding a grudge about it.”

Emma smiled back. “Like that’d even be possible for you. Have you ever held a grudge?”

He laughed. “Good point. And no. I guess I try pretty hard to let things roll off me. Life is easier that way.”

Emma sat back a little and considered this. Maybe she and Clint weren’t as different as she’d once thought. They both did whatever they could to cope with the not-so-great parts of life. He added a deliberate happy spin to everything.

Emma’s approach was to keep her distance.

“Do you remember anything else about our breakup?” she asked. “Anything juicy for my story?”

He shrugged. “You were sweet about it. I appreciated that. Said you just weren’t in a place for a relationship, and I deserved someone who could give one hundred percent.”

Emma wrote this down, even though she didn’t have to. It was more or less the line she’d given every guy who’d been kicked to the curb.

“Okay, Clint, that’s it for my questions. Like I said, I promised this meeting wouldn’t take up much of your time, right? But if you want to go off book—add something you haven’t yet—this is your chance. Remember, no names, so it won’t trace back to you.”

He laughed. “You realize that you’re either incredibly crazy or incredibly brave for doing this?”

She smiled. “I know. I’m pretty sure it’s the first.”

He reached for his coffee cup, his expression going thoughtful. “You know, I don’t really have anything else to add. Maybe if we’d dated longer than a couple months, but I’m not really toting around any dark scars, you know?”

Emma leaned across the coffee table and touched his hand. “I’m glad to hear that, Clint. Truly. I’ve got a feeling that this story is going to reveal a lot more about me than it will about any of you.”

“Maybe,” he said, studying her. “Or maybe it’s about you…and one of the guys.”

She blinked. “What do you mean?”

His smile was kind. “Just that I figure at some point, some guy must have been able to make you smile. And I always wondered if it was the same guy that made you stop.”

Chapter 11

“You might have mentioned that your ‘casual dinner thing’ was actually a planned dinner party for eight,” Emma said as she made her way around Julie’s dining table, placing salad plates into position.

“I didn’t mention it?” Julie called, glancing up from where she was arranging an antipasto platter at the kitchen counter.

“Nope,” Emma said, setting down the last plate. “Must have slipped your mind.”

“Must have!” Julie said, popping an olive in her mouth and grinning.

Emma just shook her head. “Don’t even. I’m sure that pretty smile works just fine on Mitchell here, but I remain unmoved.”

“Does this smile work on you, honey?” Julie said, turning to face her fiancé, who was doing something fancy with an onion at the cutting board.

He glanced over. “Works better when you’re naked, but this isn’t so bad.”

“Is that so?” Julie said, turning to give Mitchell her full attention.

Emma watched the couple’s exchanged gazes go from playful to heated in mere seconds and rolled her eyes. “Nope. No way. Clothes stay on. Also, why am I the only one on time?”

Emma was pretty sure she knew the answer to her own question. She would not be even a little bit surprised to know that Grace/Jake and Riley/Sam had gotten held up by the very same thing simmering between Julie and Mitchell. Sex.

Grace and Jake were in some sort of newlywed bubble of hormones, and as for Sam and Riley…well, they had about ten years of sexual tension to make up for. Something Riley liked to remind them all of.