My Stubborn Heart by Becky Wade Page A

dark, guarded eyes. The strands of brown hair raked by the wind.
    Her fingers twitched eagerly. She knew she shouldn’t do it. But she really, really wanted to. Would it be so terrible? She’d just take a little tiny peek, just browse around a bit. She shouldn’t and yet—
    Fingers flying, she typed in Matt Jarreau and hit Enter.
    Google’s response page immediately sprang up, with matches one to ten of over . . . 1,500,000. Her heart sank. She scrolled slowly down. The first hit was an encyclopedia entry about him. He was . . . ah . . . entered in the encyclopedia? Then a hit identifying Matt as one of the legends of hockey. Biographies. Quotes. An article about a famous goal he’d made in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Stats. NHL stuff. Another article. ESPN.com. Pictures that could be viewed.
    This was only page one. There were still more than a million other matches.
    She tilted her head back, thumping it against the brass headboard. For long moments she simply stared at the pitched ceiling of her attic room.
    The words she’d just read— encyclopedia , legend for goodness’ sake, Stanley Cup —were like a bucketful of icy reality in the face.
    From the moment she’d met him she’d known a romantic relationship with him was never going to happen. So why dredge up more evidence of that fact?
    Why? Because her body insisted on getting all jumbled up with excitement every time he walked into a room. That’s why.
    She felt like a cautionary example in one of those Ten Really Idiotic Things Women Do–type books. There’d be a bad driver’s-license-type picture of her with a caption that said, “Don’t obsess! Don’t drive by your ex’s house. Don’t read letters from your boyfriend’s old girlfriends. Don’t stray into bridal websites if you aren’t engaged. And definitely don’t pine after your gorgeous contractor who’s out of your league. These behaviors are futile! You’re inflicting pain on yourself! Stop!”
    She should close down the Internet immediately. But she still—stupidly—wanted to read more. The biographies, at least. Before her traitorous fingertips could act, she lifted her hands up and out of the danger zone.
    The Matt she knew—their contractor, the man who cooked dinner in their kitchen, the loner—that guy was already intimidating and daunting enough. She didn’t need all these websites to heap amazing upon amazing upon amazing. Better to let him tell her his own version of his biography, if he ever wanted to.
    With tremendous self-control, she shut down her computer and slid it under her bed, out of reach. Once she’d killed the light, she burrowed deep under her quilts. For long quiet minutes she lay there, watching the black trees sway against the night sky beyond her windows. All right. So he’d once been an over-the-top famous hockey player. These days he was a grumpy hermit. Maybe that brought him out of the category of men who only dated supermodels into the category of men who dated regular human women.
    She snorted at herself, at the foolish bent of her thoughts. Angrily, she socked her pillow and then rolled onto her opposite side.
    She might be a hopeless romantic, but she wasn’t a stupid one. Matt Jarreau didn’t even exist in the same stratosphere that she did. He was way more talented, rich, and famous. Plus, he was fatally handsome and she no longer let herself harbor crushes on guys that looked like he did.
    They were just friends!
    She intended to continue working hard every day to keep her feelings for him strictly platonic. But the more she was around him, the better she got to know him, the more difficult it was.

    The next day was the day of The Big Garage Sale, the day when one man’s trash would become another man’s trash.
    They’d been sorting items for days. They’d borrowed card tables on which to