Jennifer Greene

Ain’t Misbehaving

Dear Reader,

Over the years, so many wonderful readers found me through my Harlequin/Silhouette books…and asked me if the books I wrote under “Jeanne Grant” for Berkley would ever be available. Thanks to Carina Press, they are! Over the next few months, starting in November 2010, two titles will be available every month through next spring.

Ain’t Misbehaving has a special place in my heart-and it’s a story that readers have never stopped writing me about. At the time, it broke all the rules-breaking rules is something I’ve always loved to do-and undoubtedly, that’s part of why I’ve loved it so much.

Mitch has a problem no romantic hero is supposed to have. Let’s just say that he’s an alpha guy who was deprived of his “alpha” until recently. And Kay, the heroine, thinks of herself as a sophisticated woman with a ton of common sense…none of which is going to help her a bit to deal with a man like Mitch.

I hope I’ve tantalized you! Carina Press worked with me to take out a few outdated phrases and references, but otherwise, this is the same story that won a Silver Medallion from RWA and placed on a variety of bestseller lists when it first came out.

Please feel free to let me know how you like the story-you can find me through my website at www.jennifergreene.com or through my Jennifer Greene author page on Facebook.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Jennifer Greene

Chapter One

With a violent shiver, Mitch shook the rain from his dark hair and strode briskly up the stairs. Outside, there was a “lalapalooza” of a wind, as they called it in Idaho, and his bulky fisherman’s sweater afforded only minimal protection against the damp, cold morning. The first of November was announcing itself with a vengeance.

At the top of the stairs, he pushed open the heavy steel door and wandered through, automatically turning left into the familiar corridor of Branson’s, the new medical facility halfway between the college towns of Pullman and Moscow. The bright walls of the children’s wing were decorated with cartoon art, while painted rainbows graced the ceilings.

Unfortunately, the cheerful decor in no way muted the unmistakable smells of alcohol and antiseptic. Mitch jammed his hands in the front pockets of his worn, loose cords and felt his teeth instinctively clench, just a little.

Old dreads. He’d spent too many years in hospitals to shake his revulsion for those smells; yet that very revulsion was the reason why he spent so many Saturday mornings here. Antiseptics and fear went together if you were a kid. He knew. The hospital he’d been in had been much older and drearier than Branson’s, and he’d been a few years older than most of the children on this floor, but he understood exactly what they were going through.

Way back when-when he was fifteen, to be exact-his only goals in life had been to play football and to get laid.

One’s goals changed slightly when one had spent thirteen years fighting for survival. A narrow streak of white in Mitch’s dark hair and a deep furrow between his brows bore witness to the change. Still, his face must have retained some traces of that hell-bent-for-trouble teenager, because when the brunette at the nurse’s station glanced up, her eyes sparkled in welcome.

“You’re early, handsome.”

“A little.” He returned her wide grin. Rhoda had soft brown eyes, curly hair and a figure that almost made her nurse’s uniform look seductive. He let his eyes sweep over her a little longer, primarily because she would have been disappointed if he hadn’t.

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

She fussed hurriedly with the papers in front of her. “You give me that kind of look every time you come in here,” she accused mildly.

“You have terrific legs.”

“Thank you.” She stopped fussing. “Now, are you going to see Peter for me?”

Mitch’s easy smile didn’t falter, but his dark eyes ceased to dance and turned broody and gentle. “He was better last week,” he said shortly.

“Medically, he’s doing fine. Oh, chafing at the traction, but it’s his mother he’s frantic about. She’s his whole family…”

“Last week you said she’d been taken off the critical list.”

Rhoda nodded. “She has been, and in time she’ll be fine. But we can’t let him see her, Mitch. The bandages alone would scare him to bits…especially since he’s convinced something terrible has happened to her. Kay’s already in there, by the way, but never mind-that little boy can use all the company he can get.”

Mitch had already taken a determined stride toward the child’s room when he hesitated, one eyebrow raised curiously. “Who’s Kay?”

“Who’s Kay?” Rhoda echoed in surprise. “How could you not know Kay? You two have been coming here on alternate Saturdays for months. Actually, we figured you two had worked the schedule out between you.”

“Never heard of her.” He took another impatient step down the corridor.

“Hey. Where’s my kiss?” Rhoda hissed in an outraged whisper.

Mitch’s head swiveled back. “There you go again, completely spoiling your image as a tyrant. How do you expect to keep discipline around here when you’re such a sucker for a little kid and a good-looking man?”

“You? Good-looking?” Rhoda lifted her face for a peck on the cheek.

“You’ve still got that key to the back room?”

“You want it?”

“Believe me, I’d give you exactly what you deserve,” Mitch whispered, “except that then you’d have to go back to your husband knowing exactly what you’d missed in life.”

Rhoda chuckled. “Get out of here. And if you cause trouble on the ward today, I’ll hang you by the thumbs, Mitch Cochran.”

“Now you’ve got me shaking.” Mitch rapped his knuckles once on the high Formica counter and stuck his hands in his pockets again as he strode toward room 209.

Flirting, he was discovering, was like riding a bike. One never forgot how to do it. Between adults, the innuendos were a little more sophisticated than between teenagers, but it was basically the same. A hint at forbidden pleasures, a little verbal rush, a slight retreat, the smallest hint of physical contact… Actually, flirting was really a vastly underrated cure for low blood pressure.

Low blood pressure had never been his problem. It was the condition of his heart valves that had prevented him from having a normal life for the past thirteen years. But that was all behind him now.

His life was at a crossroads. He suddenly had to make decisions-about his lifestyle, his career-he’d never thought he’d have the chance. The choices were awesome. Already, he’d had six months of life. It had taken him almost that long to get used to just having the commodity.

These Saturday mornings at Branson’s were a reminder of the riches, and in some ways a relief from those decisions most twenty-eight-year-old men had already made. In a dozen ways, Mitch felt older than his years. He knew a great deal about pain and about courage and about the gut strength it took to fight for survival. But he seemed to know very little about how to form relationships that went beyond the superficial-and the ability to reach out to others wasn’t coming easily.

Except with the children, on Saturday mornings. Mitch paused in the open doorway of room 209. The room was a private one; Mitch had already tried to persuade Rhoda to move the boy into a two-bed room. Little ones needed company, not solitude, and this boy even more than most.

Peter was seven, a redhead with more freckles than face. His left leg was in a heavy cast. At a glance, Mitch could see the blotchy red around the youngster’s eyes, as if he had only recently finished crying. However, at the moment Peter’s cheeks were puckered, and he was clearly fighting laughter.

Mitch’s eyes shifted promptly to the source of that miracle. Both amusement and curiosity caused his lips to curve in a smile. Gazing at the woman’s back, he realized this must be the Kay that Rhoda had mentioned. She was evidently acting out a story for the little boy.

“Crrreeeak, went the door,” she whispered dramatically. “Little Archibald’s heart was beating so hard he couldn’t think. Slowly, slowly, he peeked around the corner, and right there, right there in the center of the room, was a monster. A big, fat yellow monster with three eyes, and all of those eyes were crying…”

Silently, Mitch eased his way to a corner from which he could see the woman’s reflection in the mirror over the bureau. Peter was captivated, his eyes huge with curiosity and expectation.

“He wanted a cookie,” Kay said sadly. “That’s all he’d ever wanted in his whole monster’s life-one little cookie.”

“Did Archie give him one?” Peter demanded impatiently. “If it had been me, I’d have given him one.”

“Archibald was terrified out of his wits. This was a terrible-looking monster, yellow and hairy and fat. And he looked mean.”

Mitch’s smile grew broader. Kay was trying to describe her monster graphically, by bloating her cheeks and hunching her shoulders and crossing her eyes. Peter giggled.

With a total lack of self-consciousness, Kay mussed up her hair until it was going every which way-evidently trying to reproduce her monster’s hairstyle. She lurched toward the bed, squinting out of one eye and trying to talk out of the side of her mouth. Peter giggled again. “You’re silly, Kay,” he told her.

“Hey. Would you kindly try to get into this?” Kay told him severely. “This is a very scary story.”

“I’m scared, I’m scared,” Peter assured her. “It’s just that I’m so much braver than Archie. What happened about the cookie?”

“Weeelll…”

Mitch couldn’t seem to stop watching her. Somewhere amid all those grossly contorted features was an unusual pair of sherry-brown eyes-big, deep-set and heavily lashed. Neither the bulky red sweater nor her ridiculously hunched shoulders could hide a distinctly feminine set of curves. His eyes lazily drifted from the small rainbow patch on the fanny of her jeans to her soft white throat to the arch of her delicate brows. Her hair was sort of brown, half honey and half coffee-colored, and he speculated that she must normally wear it simply curling to her shoulders. It was hard to tell, when at the moment, it was sticking out in a witch’s tangle.

But it was easy to see the luster of it, as it caught the dull day’s light from the windows. It was also easy to see that she must be a few years younger than he was, and that she was working her little tail off to entertain Peter. Warmth and compassion radiated from her like sun rays. So did a certain spice of humor, and a natural vibrancy that tugged at his curiosity. And if her face would just stand still long enough for him to be sure, he had a sneaky feeling that she had a very special brand of beauty.

Peter was clearly in love with her. “And they lived happily ever after,” he finished for her. “But I still don’t understand how the monster never got to eat a cookie before. His mom would have given him lots of them.” The little boy chewed on his lower lip. “My mom…” His smile abruptly faltered. “I want,” he said, very quietly, very firmly, “my mom.”

“I know you do, sweetheart.” Aching for him, Kay reached out her fingers to brush the wiry carrot-colored hair off his forehead.

“I want her now.” The blue eyes filled up. “They keep telling me she’s okay. She’s not okay. You don’t know my mom. She’d have been here if she knew something had happened to me. I want-”

“Oh, honey.” Kay leaned over and hugged him, her lips pressed to his temples. She wanted to pick up that little frail bundle and rock him so close he couldn’t cry. Damn. A seven-year-old could only understand so much… “She’s fine,” Kay soothed. “You’ve been so very brave-you think I didn’t notice?-and you’re going to see your mother in a few more days. I promise, Petie.”

“No,” he choked. “I’m sick of everybody saying that. Something’s happened to her…”

“Petie-”

“Sport?” The deep male voice startled Kay, and she jerked around. “If you really want to see her, we’ll manage it.”

“Mitch!” Peter cried. His two fists hurriedly rubbed the moisture from his eyes.

“You in the mood to take a ride this morning?”

“A ride?”

“Down to your mother’s room. We can’t go in, of course. But I can’t think of a reason in he-on earth why you couldn’t talk to her. If you want to.”

“I want to,” Peter breathed.

The stranger cocked his head in Kay’s direction as he moved forward. “So who’s your friend?” he asked Peter.

“Just Kay. Don’t you know Kay?”

“Now I do. Hello, just-Kay.”

Peter giggled. Kay found herself moving forward to accept a mock-formal handshake. “How do you do…?”

“Just Mitch.”

“How do you do, just-Mitch,” she said gravely.

“I’m pleased to meet you, just-Kay.”

“No, no,” Peter chortled. “You don’t say just-Kay-it’s just Kay.”

“Isn’t that what I said?” Mitch insisted.

“No!”

Like windmills, Kay’s hands were hurriedly trying to straighten her hair and tug down her sweater. Unobtrusively. While Peter continued to explain the vagaries of the English language to Mitch, Kay stole a studying glance at the stranger. He was about a zillion feet tall and lanky, all limbs and big hands. His broad shoulders were encased in a fisherman’s sweater, but beyond that he was rather lean. His old cords looked comfortable; his suede boots even more so. His movements were slow and sure, easy.

And he was very lazily, very nonchalantly, raising Peter’s bed to stretcher height. Kay’s eyes widened. “Hey, wait a minute. Are you sure-”

“That I need your help? Very. Hold this for a minute, would you?”

Behind her back, she dropped the brush into her purse. So much for her hair. “Listen,” she started politely, but he was gone, out the doorway. Weakly, Kay offered her most reassuring smile to Peter.

“You don’t have to worry,” the boy told her. “Mitch can do anything.”

“I’m sure he can.” She wasn’t sure of any such thing.

“He can. Honest. And he gets real mad if you tell him you can’t do something. Never say can’t, he says. Just thought I’d warn you.”

“I get the picture.”

Mitch returned moments later with a gurney. Even in the ensuing confusion, Kay noted that he wheeled it around with the assurance of one who has had long experience in stealing hospital equipment. She tried to sneak in a polite “Are you out of your mind?” but she couldn’t seem to get the chance. He was talking nonstop to the child in that deliciously vibrating baritone.

Suddenly, Peter’s leg was elevated on pillows; the child was strapped onto the gurney and giggling to beat the band. For a man with such a lazy economy of movement, this Mitch accomplished a remarkable amount in a very short time, Kay mused. He didn’t give anyone a chance to think.

More puzzling yet was watching herself help him every step of the way. Still, she balked at the door, her hands determinedly perched on her hips. Kay was no stranger to a moment’s impulse, but the child’s welfare had to be their paramount consideration right now. Her lips parted to fire out at least seven of her ninety-seven concerns, but then Mitch’s eyes met hers, really met hers, for the first time.

She found herself swallowing, and pushing the gurney out into the corridor. Mitch was pulling the other end.

The stretcher wheels made a steady dull rumble on the tile floor. Feeling a little like a gangster’s moll, Kay let her eyes flicker in Mitch’s direction. His face…well, he didn’t look much like a gangster, but beyond that she wasn’t exactly reassured.

His hair was Irish black, silky blue-black, brushed back. One of his eyebrows seemed slightly higher than the other, adding character to his features…but his face already had plenty of character. The man had known pain. His skin was wind-weathered and ruddy with vitality, but the network of lines around his eyes was deeply embedded, and something had etched a jagged V between his brows.

Still, he had the most beautiful eyes. Old eyes, haunted with experience, dark and emotional. His face was angular, with a very straight nose, a clearly defined chin and cheekbones, a broad forehead.

And his smile was utterly disarming. A slow, lazy twist of his lips totally captured her attention, until she realized the smile was directed at her. He had caught her studying him; he was amused. And those wicked eyes just kept on looking.

Kay averted her own gaze. One would almost think she was nervous, the way her pulse was suddenly thumping in her throat. Well, maybe she was, but not because some stranger had the sexiest eyes this side of the Rockies. It was simply fear of getting caught with the gurney.

No one paid them any attention until they reached the nurses’ station. Kay held her breath as they wheeled close to the Formica counter. Rhoda’s eyes lifted up. Then her body did the same.

“Mitch? What the devil are you up to now? You just take that stretcher-”

“Sssh.” Mitch raised one finger to his lips and wheeled on past her.

“That leg was swollen this morning-”

“It’s up on four pillows.”

“You have that child back in his room in ten minutes!” the nurse hissed furiously after him, but Kay could hear the laughter in her voice. Obviously, it was at least unofficially all right for Peter to be out of bed for a short time. And Mitch was not unknown to Rhoda.

Offhand, Kay expected Mitch was not unknown to a lot of women. One look from those dark eyes and most women would turn to putty in his hands. Kay, of course, was not susceptible. Sex without commitment was one of her taboos.

His eyes seared hers again as they rounded another corner, and she wondered vaguely if that wasn’t rather a prudish philosophy for a twenty-seven-year-old woman.

What was a night? Who’d know? Her mother was three thousand miles away.

That’s not funny, the puritanical part of her brain announced repressively.

They maneuvered the stretcher into the elevator. A few minutes later, they were on the ground floor. Orderlies and nurses passed, then a doctor. To heck with it; Kay offered a brazenly cheerful “hello” to the last. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

In front of room 104, Mitch gently pushed the gurney against the wall, adjusted the pillows under Peter’s leg and disappeared inside the hospital room, leaving Kay in the corridor with Peter.

He seemed to be gone years before a feminine voice softly called out, “Petie?”

Peter promptly burst into tears, crushing Kay’s hand so tightly he hurt her. “Mom?”

“Honey, I’m fine. I miss you, darling. And in just three more days…”

They talked, mother and son. They weren’t able to see each other, but it was enough. Mitch came back out and leaned against the doorway, staring at Kay. She knew darn well there were tears in her eyes. Not the kind of tears that fell, just the kind that welled there, causing a soft blur. She lifted her chin, not really caring a whit if he saw them.

Any one of them could have done it, Kay reflected. The nurses, Peter’s doctor, his mother’s. She should have thought of it herself. All the child had wanted was to know his mother was all right.

Mitch had simply walked in and done it. No fanfare, no applause.

He was an extraordinary-looking man, though she couldn’t define why. He looked too old for his years, far too grave. Almost as if he didn’t know how to laugh, yet he obviously had a sense of humor. And a sense of mischief. Those deep, worn lines didn’t go with a man who stole stretchers and broke rules. Kay had a definite feeling that Mitch didn’t live by the rules. Anyone’s. Except his own.

One might be inclined to pursue the man, if one were a brazenly forward type of woman. Kay, of course, had more decorum.

Chapter Two

“You certainly know your way around the clinic,” Kay remarked conversationally. “I don’t know where you found the gurney, and I wouldn’t have had the least idea how to elevate his bed-”

“Most hospitals are pretty much the same,” Mitch replied.

Kay waited, but nothing else was forthcoming. “You come here often?”

“Every other Saturday.”

“Same here.” At the sudden silence, Kay said softly, “Peter will be leaving soon.”

“And so will his mother.”

They’d already been dumped out of the elevator and had now covered the distance to the hospital entrance. Through the glass doors, Kay stared out at the steadily pouring rain. Conversation was not exactly going like a house afire. Mitch answered in more than monosyllables, but he certainly volunteered very little.

The less he volunteered, the more curious Kay became. Mitch was proving to be a very mysterious man. Kay had never had a high tolerance for mysteries, particularly when they were packaged with magic eyes and endless shoulders. Actually, the sex appeal was only part of it.

Mitch came across as indomitable and self-contained.

She liked his quiet assurance and she loved the way he’d handled Petie and she was increasingly captivated by his lazy, disarming smile. But those shadowed pain lines on his forehead and around his eyes bothered her; and for a man who’d threatened to make her personal earth move with his eye-to-eye contact, he was suddenly turning shy. No man with looks like that could conceivably be shy-not around women. Something about him proclaimed a loner-and yet he didn’t seem the type.

“You come to the hospital just for the children?” she asked.

Mitch flashed her a quick smile, an acknowledgment of her nosiness; the wry look was almost enough to make her flush with embarrassment.

Except that his eyes trailed down to her lips, as if he were evaluating their kissability, their touchability. The heat in her cheeks took a dive, settling in far more private regions. Not a reaction she was used to from the simple glance from a stranger.

“I have the feeling you know your share about kids stuck in hospital beds,” he said quietly.

Diverted from her wayward fantasies, she nodded, turning serious. “My little sister has Crohn’s disease. A digestive ailment, not common, almost impossible to diagnose…” Kay took a deep breath, trying to control the sadness in her voice and sound perfectly matter-of-fact. “There was nothing the hospitals could do for her here, so about five years ago my family moved to Connecticut to be near a specialist. Jana and I were always so close…”

“She spent a great deal of time in hospitals?” he probed gently.

“Far too much.” Kay’s eyes darkened perceptibly. “And no, my coming here on Saturday mornings doesn’t help her at all when she’s that distance away, but somehow I just feel better doing it. I can remember all too well what it was like for her.”

“But you didn’t go with your family when they moved?”

“No,” She tugged the shoulder strap of her purse higher. “I visit often-so do they. If they’d needed me, I would have gone, too, but I couldn’t really help and I was settled here with a job. Plus, at the time, I was engaged.” The “not-anymore” was implicit. Regardless, she seemed to have said something wrong, because Mitch abruptly pushed open the door. The half-lazy smile was gone from his mouth. An impenetrable neutral expression had replaced it.

Bewildered, she stepped outside, since he was clearly waiting for her to go through the door first. He followed. She fumbled in her purse for her car keys and then groped for the push button of her umbrella. It was still raining-not in buckets, but the drizzle was insistent and cold.

Behind her, Mitch dug his hands in his pockets and jerked his head back at the onslaught of rain. His hair abruptly dampened, molding itself to his scalp, the ends falling in waves over his forehead and cheeks. Kay glanced back. “Share my umbrella?”

He shook his head. “Our cars are undoubtedly in opposite directions.”

She nodded, mortified. Their cars could very well be in the same direction. He simply and clearly didn’t want to pursue the conversation. “Well…goodbye then.” She added quietly, “I thought you were terrific with Peter.”

Mitch said nothing. He watched her hesitate and then finally turn, adjust her umbrella and start walking toward the parking lot. His eyes followed the sway of her hips, mesmerized. Water was starting to run down his neck, and raindrops were collecting in his lashes, splashing on his cheeks.

He still couldn’t take his eyes off her. She wore a short jacket that didn’t cover the rainbow patch on her fanny. She barely had a rear end worth speaking of, but that little patch moved from side to side with a bounce that was distinctly feminine, entirely unconscious and irresistibly sexy.

He shivered violently.

She’d been engaged, which meant she’d slept with her fiancé. That assumption went with the times, but it went with the lady as well. She radiated feeling; she was the kind of woman who naturally expressed her emotions. She’d shown no embarrassment at the show of tears in the hospital corridor, no holding back in her hug for Peter.

Mitch hazarded a guess that her ex-fiancé was demented. True, Kay was no sex symbol, in spite of her extraordinary beauty when she smiled. But Kay was something infinitely more desirable-a lover. Any man who didn’t see that… But Mitch suspected most men did see that. How could they miss it, in the free way she moved, the vibrancy she brought to a smile, the emotions that shimmered in her eyes?

Lots of men had seen, if not touched. Mitch had only needed to learn of one. He’d tensed up like barbed wire the instant she mentioned having been engaged.

Ducking his head, he tried to fend off the assaulting rain. He’d been sharing ribald jokes with nurses for thirteen years. Before that, he’d been a fifteen-year-old with an active libido.

The libido was still active-hollering to make up for lost time. His physical reaction to Kay had been instant, uncontrollable and darned near impossible to hide.

Unfortunately, he’d missed the entire decade of sexual experience that men his age were supposed to have. How would he dare approach Kay? She was damned…real.

With his head bowed low, he was barely aware he was following her until she whirled around suddenly. Her umbrella tilted back, and those sherry-brown eyes leveled furiously on his from a dozen feet away.

“If there’s anything worse than a stubborn man, it’s certainly a stupid one,” she announced with foot-tapping impatience.

His jaw dropped.

“Look. You’re soaking wet. Now, just get under my umbrella.”

He hesitated, feeling the corners of his mouth twitch as he strode forward. When he ducked under the umbrella, Kay jammed the handle into his hand as if it were a lethal weapon and hunched her shoulders as if to announce that he didn’t have to touch her for God’s sake.

“Where’s your car?” she demanded stiffly.

“One row over. The gray BMW,” he replied meekly.

She said nothing, licking up the silence like an offended kitten. She was clutching her purse and walking so stiffly she might have had iron bones.

He could smell the rain in her hair and the faint hint of some springy perfume; his hip brushed hers and he felt an instant, potent desire rise up in him like flames. Kay was trying so damned hard to establish that her earlier friendliness wasn’t a come-on; she was saying she’d caught the message that he wasn’t interested.

She was so dead wrong. He would have been happy to seduce her right there in the parking lot, rain and all. There was just the issue of how she felt about raw recruits. Regardless, he’d never meant to hurt her feelings with his coldness.

Clearing his throat, he began a peacemaking speech. “Listen…”

She cocked her head but said nothing.

He groped for something to say. “You said you had a job. What kind of work do you do?”

“I teach,” she said curtly.

A huge puddle welled up in front of them. Instinctively, his hand went to the small of her back to steer her around it. Like steel, that spine. She’d stopped puffing steam, but it was obvious that she wasn’t risking any more friendly overtures.

“What subject?” he prodded her.

“Don’t ask.”

“Kay?”

She stopped dead, glaring up at him, her sherry-colored eyes so defensive that he was startled. “I teach sex education,” she said defiantly. “You want to make something of it?”

Obviously, over the years a few men had, but, Lord, no. Mitch had no inclination to make anything of it. He didn’t need more bad news. Why couldn’t he have fallen victim to a runaway attraction for a nice, quiet, retiring woman who wouldn’t be able to guess that the closest he’d come to an erotic experience was reading the Kamasutra?

Still, she looked so defensive, so furious, so ready to make a chilly comeback, that he had to reach out and push back the strand of hair that was bouncing down in front of her nose. Gently, he tucked it behind her ear. “You take a lot of ribbing, do you?” he asked.

Those lovely eyes gradually softened, inches from his. Suddenly, she was chuckling. “You bet I do. I start out the year taking rabbits to the kindergarten classes so they can see how a mother takes care of her young. I teach life, not pornography, but whenever I tell anyone-”

“You work with all grades?”

She nodded. “I started the program with the health department, and it evolved into a full-time job with the school system. There were just too few teachers who felt comfortable with the subject. Generally, I give a month-long course, starting with the younger grades and proceeding through high school. I go from school to school.” She stopped abruptly, as if suddenly aware she was chattering in a friendly manner again. “Where’s your car?”

“We passed it.”

She glanced up at him, startled, and then that special smile of hers lit up her face. Her soft, throaty laughter echoed through the rain, delighting him. And when, almost unconsciously, he tucked a hand across her shoulder to turn her around and pilot her toward his car, her limbs no longer felt like iron; her body was warm and giving beneath her jacket.

Her eyes lifted again to his, soft but still serious. “You know, I wasn’t trying to…pry before. I didn’t mean for you to think-”

“That you were looking for a fast pickup?” Mitch’s dry chuckle reflected just how easily he had read her mind, and chided her for having come to such a foolish conclusion. “Somehow I don’t think you usually go to the hospital on Saturday mornings to pick up men.”

“Don’t give me that much of the benefit of the doubt,” she said gravely. “Take Peter, for instance. Don’t think for a minute that I wouldn’t pick him up and spirit him right out of there if I thought I had the ghost of a chance of getting away with it.”

They’d stopped at his car. “So you’re that kind, after all,” he said with mock disgust. “I think I guessed the moment I saw you acting out your monster story that you were the cold-blooded, heartless type.”

She laughed, and then sobered. Her lips were parted. She had a sweet, soft mouth, small, the top lip exquisitely shaped.

“Anyway,” she said lightly, “in spite of my dubious character, I just wanted to make one thing clear. Maybe my questions offended you, I don’t know, but I was just making conversation, not-”

“I’m going to kiss you, Kay.” She looked as alarmed as if he’d suggested robbing Fort Knox. He took advantage of her parted lips. It was her fault, he told himself. He certainly wasn’t to blame for the fact that she’d been born with an alluring mouth and an irresistible scent. And he wasn’t responsible for all those years of frustration that just then clamored for release.

He bent down, adjusting the umbrella, using his other hand to tilt up her chin. The mechanics of a kiss were always so annoying to maneuver. He’d learned that at thirteen. For an instant, he was afraid he’d forgotten how, that he’d be as awkward as a kid.

Some things, he reminded himself, a man never forgot. Relearning to ride a bike should be so easy.

Her lips were cool and still. At first. She didn’t fight the gentle pressure, but then she was obviously still suffering from shock. He almost smiled, but didn’t. He had forgotten some details. A woman’s lips had a certain crushable, sensitive texture; there was nothing as soft, nothing as pliant, nothing quite as delicious.

He savored the taste of her, his tongue teasing the corner of her mouth. A tiny sound escaped her lips, like the purr of a kitten. She really shouldn’t have done that, he thought fleetingly, because that faint murmur of pleasure was all it took to set off a trip-hammer in his blood. His lips homed in, with a rough pressure he couldn’t seem to help, not a bruising pressure but the soft crush of possession.

Her head tilted back responsively, offering another dangerous threat to the self-control he’d always taken for granted. Her hand reached tentatively for his shoulder. He felt the softness of her breasts beneath her jacket, the lift of her as she rose up on her toes to meet him…

He doubted that she knew she was setting off dynamite inside him. All he knew was that his whole body suddenly ached. His tongue slipped between her teeth; she suddenly stiffened a little, her fingers tightening on his shoulder. She murmured a protest, but her body language gave it the lie. She wasn’t moving away. She was so very warm…

And he felt so damned drugged. Her lips were so sweet, so giving… He wasn’t going to hurt her. He’d murder anyone who tried to hurt her. He wasn’t even going to see her again. This was just…a moment in time. He’d learned to value such fleeting moments of happiness. For years, he’d thought that was all the joy he would ever know.

His palm gently traced the line of her back, ending up in the curtain of her hair, captured there. The damp silk curled around his fingers, scented with the softness of rain, more sensuous than a thousand fantasies of women he’d conjured up over the years. This wasn’t a schoolboy’s libido talking, but a man’s. Her lips were infinitely responsive, returning his pressure, wildly returning his pressure for one fleeting instant…

Kay broke off, staring up at him. Her eyes weren’t sherry-brown at all, but suddenly very dark. And her lips were red and trembling.

He still held the umbrella in one hand, but it had tilted. Rain was pelting down on both of them; neither seemed to have noticed.

“Now, you listen here…” Her voice was shaky. Her lashes lowered; she ran her hand through her hair. “Is this your car?”

“Yes. Kay…”

No one had ever kissed her like that. As if she were the first Christmas present opened, during one of those too-few years when one honestly believed in Santa Claus. As if she were brand-new and ever so special, and so desperately wanted it hurt.

The skies suddenly exploded, the rain hurtling down in a torrent. Kay glanced up, then took a step backward. Enough of that. Kay, we are twenty-seven-we no longer fall in love at first sight. In fact, we usually have the sense to back off at the first pass.

“Kay-”

She backed off another pace, refusing to meet his eyes. She’d never given herself to a man like that in her life. What on earth was there to say?

Nothing.

She turned and darted through the rain toward her own car.

Ten minutes later, Kay reached the outskirts of Moscow. Welcome, said the sign on Main Street, a soothing reminder that she was within minutes of home.

No one seemed to know why the town had been named Moscow; its residents certainly had no affinity for Russian politics. Paradise Valley had been its original name, and that, to Kay, captured the flavor of the place. Steep hills, ancient maples and oaks and ash, a delightful blend of rustic and cosmopolitan. Wheat farmers had been buying supplies at Ward’s for generations, and homemade ice cream was still sold on Main Street, yet the University of Idaho sponsored a wide range of cultural events. Muscovites enjoyed the symphony and ballet and even the Moscow sci-fi convention.

As Kay shoved her car into first gear for the steep climb to her home, she passed regal old houses half hidden in bushes and trees. All of the houses were familiar, and so were their inhabitants. The world had not abruptly changed, contrary to what the beat of her heart was telling her.

As she parked and stepped out of her car, the lingering smells of late fall wafted toward her like a soothing balm. The rain had stopped, but the wind had brought down the last of the leaves, and walking along the sidewalk was like wading through oceans of crimson and gold.

Pushing open her front door, Kay tossed her purse on the white couch. An indefinably enticing aroma was drifting out of the kitchen; her eyebrows cocked curiously. As she slipped off her damp shoes, her stocking feet immediately curled into the fluff of cherry-red carpet.

Kay’s best friend was into interior decorating. Susan had definite ideas about color schemes and furnishings for an old Spanish-style house with stucco walls and arched doorways. Susan had suggested heavy scrolled furniture and rich, dark colors.

Unfortunately, Kay was a big fan of red and white and wanted a hodgepodge of things she loved around her. A restored trunk was her coffee table; a collection of alabaster elephants stood on top of it. More collectibles cluttered the bookshelves; music boxes and porcelain owls jostled for space with dozens of books, most of them with dog-eared pages. The old Morris chair had been her father’s; it didn’t go with anything else, but it was familiar and comfortable. And besides, the antique love seat with its white velvet cushion didn’t go with anything else either.

Susan regularly despaired of her taste, but Kay felt delightfully relaxed whenever she came home. At least most days. But then, most days she didn’t go around kissing strangers in the pouring rain.

For the fourth time in ten minutes, she shoved the incident determinedly from her mind. Following her nose, she wandered toward the kitchen and paused in the doorway with a grin.

Two dozen fresh doughnuts lay in an open box on the kitchen table. Next to them was an astonishingly large pair of cowboy boots; above that was a pair of long, jeaned legs. The rest of the body was hidden behind an open newspaper, except for one long arm that extended around, groped for a doughnut and disappeared behind the newspaper again.

Five doughnuts had already disappeared from the two dozen.

“Good morning,” she said severely.

The paper folded down. “I was going to leave them on the kitchen table, but then-”

“You got greedy.”

“I didn’t eat breakfast.” Stix grinned at her beguilingly.

Stix had grinned at her just that beguilingly when she was sixteen. He’d been her first date. The traditional boy next door-give or take a few houses. He’d taught her a lot about kisses, most of which was hard earned. Since he was six foot six and she was five foot four, any physical contact had been hard earned, and not, they’d discovered, worth all the trouble. Stix had moved on to taller women, about nine thousand of them, by Kay’s last count, but he popped over regularly and made himself at home.

Lots of people did that to her, actually. She’d never figured out if it was just that kind of neighborhood or if there was an invisible sign on her door that said Endless Open House. She would have missed her family a great deal more if it hadn’t been for her friends, and Stix, unquestionably, was a special friend.

Choosing a cherry-filled doughnut, she plopped down on the kitchen chair across from him and glanced disapprovingly at his feet on the table.

The cowboy boots obediently dropped to the floor.

“You’ve got to stop using this house as a second home,” she remarked idly.

“Can’t understand you.”

With a grin, she swallowed her mouthful of doughnut and repeated the comment, adding, “People are going to think you live here. This is your third visit this week. You do still have a home of your own?”

“Certainly. That’s the place I keep my dirty laundry.”

Kay sighed. “So who’re you going out with tonight?”

“Samantha.”

“Heavens, that’s lasted two months now. Don’t tell me you’ve finally convinced someone you’re worth keeping?”

They bantered over two more doughnuts, after which Stix hinted tactfully that he was honestly hungry. Shaking her head resignedly, she fed him four peanut-butter sandwiches. She felt obliged to feed him. If Samantha ever discovered how much food he consumed, Kay would never have him off her hands.

It was a lazy kind of Saturday afternoon. Stix roused himself long enough to take a wrench to her leaky faucet, then settled in front of the TV set to watch a football game while she got out a dust cloth. The next time she looked, he’d been joined by Sandra, a teenager from across the street who claimed she would have been forced to clean the garage with her family if she hadn’t escaped.

Kay threw them both out before dinner, to allow herself time to get ready for her date. Just a movie and drink afterward, with Tim, a teacher at the high school. They had a reasonably good time, and she was home, kissed at the door and in bed by midnight.

The entire day she’d had Mitch on her mind. He wasn’t an obsession, but he was there, like a dream one couldn’t forget when one woke up, like the lingering taste of champagne after the glass was long empty.

She kept remembering his gentleness with Peter, so much in contrast to the hard lines of his face. She kept remembering his aloofness when she’d tried to talk to him, so much in contrast with the blazing warmth of his eyes when he looked at her. His simple announcement out of the blue that he was going to kiss her-but his kiss hadn’t been at all simple…

Impatiently, she switched the light back on, fluffed the pillow under her head and reached for a book. The old torch song “Stormy Weather” kept crooning in the back of her mind, nostalgic and moody and…disgustingly romantic. She flipped impatiently through her newest book on trivia.

The weather had been stormy, all right. So why had she had this warm glow inside her ever since Mitch had kissed her in the parking lot?

Chapter Three

“Don’t give me that. Every guy knows that half the time when a girl says no, she means yes,” Jeff said disgustedly. “If a guy didn’t push it a little once in a while, he’d never get anywhere.”

A chorus of foot-stomping approval-entirely male-erupted from the back of the classroom. “I’m glad you said that,” Kay said cheerfully. “That myth has been kicked around for generations. It’s another way of saying that a girl just wants to be coaxed. Is that what you mean, guys?”

A half dozen “right ons” were pelted in her direction. Kay nodded as if pleased. The girls were staring at her as if she’d suddenly turned into Benedict Arnold. Hands were waving like flags of protest. Kay motioned them down; her attention, for the moment, was directed solely toward the males in the class.

“There’s just one problem with that,” she said regretfully. “When you coax people into doing something sexual that they’re not sure about, you’re in a position to hurt them very badly. Maybe in a way that will affect the rest of their lives.” She slid off the desk, aware that a few of the smiles in the back of the room were suddenly fading. In the silence that followed, she said softly, “Do you really want to be responsible for that? Jeff, can’t you understand what it’s like to be just plain scared?”

“Hey, wait a minute. You think a guy isn’t scared?”

“Very.” Kay agreed quietly. “Maybe more than most of you want to admit. Men often have a hard time acknowledging vulnerability, but that’s exactly why, when either partner says even a tentative no, the other partner must honor it. Now, let’s talk about some more of the sexual myths that get passed around. One of them is the notion that a girl means yes when she says no. Another is that a man can’t stop after he reaches a certain point. Now, what are some other myths?”

Mitch shifted in the open doorway, unseen, unnoticed. Kay played her class as if it were a symphony orchestra-a noisy clamor of basses, short silences, then the softer timbre of her voice making points that forced them to think.

Sex education had definitely changed since he was in school. At fifteen, he could well have been one of the boys in the back of the class-belligerent, wise-cracking, his jeans too tight, and just the first word on the subject of sex enough to raise his hormone level to the combustion point.

But in those days, sex education had consisted of the football coach belting out a few gruff words on the subject. And Coach had looked nothing like Kay.

She wore an open-weaved violet sweater, with sort of puffed sleeves and a rounded neckline. The clingy fabric skimmed gently over her slim figure, softly revealing the pert swell of her breasts. Her straight skirt, a plaid in muted jewel tones-violet and sapphire and topaz-not only hugged her hips but showed off her legs. And he’d been right about her hair. She did wear it simply brushed back, swirling around her shoulders whenever she moved.

Her skirt hiked up as she pinned two magazine photographs above the blackboard. “Sexual stereotypes in ads,” she announced. “One for makeup and the other for a motorcycle. You see dozens of ads every day, and each one tries to tell you what the Ideal Man or Ideal Woman in our culture is supposed to look like. Steven, do you think the girl in this ad is good-looking?”

“You better believe it,” hooted the boy from the back of the room. Two girls turned around to scowl at him.

“Is she sexy?” Kay asked.

There was a chorus of male agreement.

“She doesn’t have a single flaw,” Kay agreed. “Heck, she doesn’t even have a pore. The camera makes us believe she’s absolutely perfect. And the ad makes us believe that perfection is the goal for a woman. But it’s pretty easy to feel self-conscious, intimidated, even inadequate comparing oneself to that kind of role model. So…are these ads valid? Mark, answer a question for me. Is that your standard? When you feel attracted to a girl, is that what first appeals to you-how close to a perfect beauty she is?”

Finally, to Kay’s relief, they began to talk about their sexual feelings. For a while, she thought the boys in the back of the room were going to do nothing but smirk and wisecrack. For eleventh graders, some of them were remarkably immature.

It was her last class of the day, and she was glad when the bell rang. “Hold it one more second,” she ordered. “On Monday, I want you each to bring me pictures from magazines or newspapers that tell us more about sexual roles in our-” she spotted Mitch in the doorway, and gulped in shock “-society. Be prepared to talk about what you think is sensible in those roles, and what you think is unimportant, illogical or unfair.”

The class, dismissed, headed toward the open door with the collective grace of a charging bull. For a minute, Mitch’s face was lost in the shuffle. Maybe she had only imagined he was there? She hadn’t heard from him since the previous Saturday and hadn’t expected to; they hadn’t even exchanged last names.

But when the kids cleared out, he was definitely there, leaning against the doorway, an old brown leather jacket slung over one shoulder and a brown-corded leg shoved forward as he waited for her. She felt a flush climbing her cheeks as she hurriedly retrieved her books and papers.

“I’ve gone through more trouble than you know to find you, Kay Lucretia Sanders.” His voice boomed out in the empty room.

She grabbed her coat with a sudden smile. “I can understand how you might have learned my last name, and even how you tracked me to this school. But not how you uncovered Lucretia. That middle name’s been buried for years.” Her eyes flashed impish glints. “You must be a very determined man,” she said solemnly. “Either that, or unbelievably nosy. Did you enjoy the lesson?”

“I wanted to come in and sit on the kid in the back row, but I controlled myself.”

She chuckled, switching out the light as they left the room. “Jeff will come around one of these days. Compassion and patience work a great deal better than stem reprimands, at least for my subject.”

“Maybe, but sitting on him would have been a great deal more satisfying.”

She chuckled, sliding him a sideways glance as they headed for the back door of the school. The kids in the hall-particularly the girls-were giving him plenty of eye attention. He didn’t seem aware of it. As he held open the glass door, his expression was inscrutable.

“I had in mind spiriting you away,” he said casually.

“Did you?”

“You undoubtedly have something planned for later, since it’s a Friday night. But I was thinking that maybe for an hour or two…”

“Sounds fine,” she said gently. A gentle voice seemed to be called for. She could see Mitch was uncomfortable. The word shy flitted through her head, as it had once before, yet it seemed so impossible. Neither his looks nor his manner nor anything else about him gave him any reason to suffer from shyness. “I haven’t been kidnapped in a long time,” she remarked.

“Then there’s something wrong with the men in this town.”

And with the women, she thought, if this delectable man was actually at loose ends on a Friday night. Outside, they were instantly assaulted by a burst of wind. Clouds were bunching together in low, swirling masses, blocking a sun that had already started its downward descent.

“Your car?” he asked suddenly.

She shook her head. “I almost always walk.” Since Moscow was built on hills, walking made for excellent exercise, at least until the snows hit. “Where are we going, anyway?”

He cleared his throat. “Tell you in a minute.” As soon as he figured it out himself. He’d spent the entire week just finding her, this lady who seemed to have entered his soul like sunlight. He’d simply wanted to see her one more time, see if she was as real as he’d remembered, only somehow he’d never gotten around to worrying about what to do with her then. And maybe he’d expected to find her talking to a class about reproductive functions in some academic way, not happily chattering about sexual intimacy in front of a roomful of teenagers.

Damn it, he’d faced death-more than once. He’d shaken hands with courage, and he had no doubts about himself whatsoever in terms of strength of character or fortitude…but he hadn’t figured on a lovesick attraction for a woman who spoke about sex as if it were toothpaste. Normal, average stuff. For her.

Sliding into the seat beside him, Kay tossed her books in the back of the car as Mitch started the engine. She resisted an urge to brush back that single shock of white hair that had fallen over his forehead. He was so quiet! She had the feeling Mitch took life far too seriously-maybe he had had to.

At the first stop sign, he tossed a sudden, lazy smile her way. “How do you feel about climbing fire towers?” he asked gravely.

Normally, just the word climb was enough to set off a phobic reaction in Kay. But she took another look at Mitch. His eyes, settled on hers, were like polished stones still warm from the sun, and she found herself catching her breath. “That sounds like an occasion for a bottle of wine,” she responded, just as gravely.

***

“You can put me down anytime, you know. Really. What’s a pair of shoes? And the ground isn’t that damp.”

Kay glanced back; she wasn’t sure why. It had something to do with her skirt hiking up around her waist as Mitch carried her piggyback. Still, there was no one around to sneak a peek at her blue-and-white polka-dot underpants.

It was one of those Robert Frost woods. Lovely, dark and deep. Also nearly impenetrable. Regardless, it smelled marvelous, like clean winter wind and pungent bark and rich, dark earth. A few leaves still clung to the trees, just enough so the wind could whistle through them in exotic, ghostlike murmurs.

She was having a wonderful time. When they’d first stepped out of the car, Mitch had looked first at the thick brush tangling the forest floor, and then at her attractive leather shoes. “Would you believe this has changed more than a little since I was a kid?” he’d said wryly. “Could we start over? Pretend I never came up with the idea of walking to the tower. I’ll take you out for a drink, and if you have time we’ll go out to dinner.”

That struck Kay as a terrible idea. Every instinct told her that being surrounded by people would do nothing to loosen up Mitch. So she’d convinced him that they just had to climb that fire tower of his today. In the process, he’d tried to maintain that quiet reserve of his, but how long could a man stay formal while carrying a woman on his back? And as she’d suspected from the beginning, he had an irrepressible sense of humor.

“You’re getting heavy,” Mitch complained.

“You’re not even breathing hard,” she pointed out.

“Give me a chance. We’re not even near a mattress.”

She blinked, staring in delighted surprise at his dark, wavy hair. That remark was definitely risqué. He was really warming up. And she was determined to get some full-blooded laughter out of him if it killed her.

Her arms were curled loosely around his neck. A bottle of wine and some plastic cups in a brown bag were snuggled between his back and her chest, inside Mitch’s jacket. His forearms had a firm grip on her thighs, and she had the delightful sensation of being carried off like pirate’s booty into the middle of absolutely nowhere. Piggyback wasn’t a romantic position, but it was certainly suggestive, though her fanny was taking most of the cold wind. If she’d worn a full skirt today, she could have pulled off a somewhat more modest posture, but heck, a little end justified the means.

“Where’d the white streak in your hair come from?” she asked conversationally. Her finger stroked that half-inch-wide streak of crisp hair; she’d been wanting to touch it from the first minute she’d seen it. “Genetic thing in your family?”

“No, I earned it carrying two-ton women around in my youth.”

He was the stingiest man with a secret she’d ever met. “Do I have to tell you one more time that I could have walked?”

“And had your feet soaked and your shoes wrecked from the brush. Down.”

She slid, rather unglamorously, down his back to the ground and was given a second and a half to restore her skirt to propriety before he turned around.

“I should have peeked at what my hands were holding all this time,” he remarked.

“After all your grousing, you should be so lucky. Why-” But she could see why they’d stopped. It only looked like the middle of nowhere. Half hidden in dead vines was a metal ladder leading up to the planked floor of the fire tower. In the dusky woods, it hadn’t been immediately visible. She studied the lower steps first, and then her eyes slowly trailed up, and up again.

“It’s rather a long distance to the top,” she commented.

“About three stories’ worth.”

“That platform up there doesn’t look solid.”

“It’s very solid.”

“People can get shortness of breath if they go too high.”

“You’re scared of heights.” Mitch sounded resigned.

“Certainly not,” she assured him, and gulped. “You first.”

“No way.”

A latent burst of propriety made her remind him politely that she was wearing a skirt.

“I already noticed. And I’ve already had my hands on your fanny, so it’s too late to worry about modesty. If you fall, you’ve got a cushion. Me. So it’s ladies first. I won’t look.”

Which was fine, only she hadn’t taken ten steps up before he remarked on her terrific legs, the stinker. Actually, from his position Kay knew he couldn’t really see her legs. From the instant she’d lied about her acrophobia, he’d flanked her every move. His long arms stretched above hers and he made mischievously sure his body was surrounding her with every step. No wonder she was dizzy. It had nothing to do with soaring above the trees…but those steps did keep coming.

She glanced back to look at him. His grin was wicked, his eyes were dancing and his cheeks were ruddy. She had a feeling he hadn’t done anything quite so crazy in years, which was enough of an incentive to drive her up the rest of the way. So her heart was beating in her throat and the vertigo was making her head spin. So?

“So this is your fire tower,” she breathed at the last step.

“Honey, stop clutching the ladder like a lifeline,” he said mildly. “Just step up onto the platform. Honestly, you’ll be safe.”

“It doesn’t have sides,” she observed.

“There are at least eight square feet of solid floor up there, and I’ll be your sides.” His palm, most possessively, patted her rear end encouragingly.

She crawled up onto the platform, pride never having been her strong point. The view, truthfully, was spectacular. Misted mountains climbed to the north and west, with a sterling-silver ball of a moon just rising over them. Beyond the woods, rolling wheat fields sprawled to the south and east, like a blanket stretched out in soft velvet folds. The stars were out, even though it wasn’t pitch-dark yet, and they were so close she felt she could touch them. As it happened, all she wanted to do was grab Mitch’s jacket.

Her fingers clutched, and she heard his soft chuckle. “We can go right back down, you little liar. If I’d had any idea you were this scared of heights-”

“I’m not,” she insisted, and added demurely, “Where exactly is that wine we were carrying? I could use some Dutch courage.”

“Coming. I zipped the bottle up inside my jacket.” Without releasing his firm grip on her wrist, Mitch sat in the center of the wooden floor, tugging Kay into the space between his thighs. She didn’t argue. With both arms around her, he managed to wrestle the wine from the bag and to get the cork out with a pocketknife corkscrew.

“You’re a regular Boy Scout,” she remarked.

“You can stop shaking anytime. There is no possible way I would let you fall.”

Ignorant man. She was terrified of falling, but for the moment she was tingling simply from the feel of his thighs tucked around hers. His body was big, powerfully constructed and unbelievably warm. That heat was in direct contrast to the coolness of his wind-chilled cheek as he leaned forward to pour the Beaujolais into two plastic cups.

Kay relaxed, feeling tucked up and enfolded like a gift-wrapped present. His touch was casual, meant to warm and reassure, not to turn her on. It was delightful to meet a man who didn’t spend all his time negotiating his way into bed. He actually showed old-fashioned symptoms of feeling pleasure just at being with her, no strings attached.

Relaxed or not, Kay felt as though all the blood had drained from her head and settled lower…somewhere near where his thighs touched hers. Wanton fantasies were singing in her bloodstream, and the lyrics were “You’d be so nice to come home to…” She accepted a cup of wine with laudable calm. “You’ve been here before?” she questioned.

“As a kid. It obviously hasn’t been used in ages, but fifteen years ago the tower was always manned during dry summers. In fall and winter, it was deserted, making a terrific place to go just to…think.”

“Nonsense.” She took a sip of wine, loving the feel of the warm liquid soothing her throat.

“Pardon?”

“Don’t give me that ‘think’ stuff. You were a teenager when you came here. So you had a girl with you. And that’s why you came here. For the privacy.”

There was silence behind her, and then his palm brushed her hair to one side. Very straight, very white teeth took an unexpected but gentle nip out of the nape of her neck. “Nancy White,” he murmured.

“Ah-ha!” Kay said triumphantly.

“Her father was a minister. Nancy was so darned willing…and her father was so darned mean,” Mitch said morosely. “Darned near got me kicked out of school.”

“How old did you say you were?”

“Fifteen.”

“And you never got past first base?”

“Second,” he corrected immediately.

Kay chuckled.

“I didn’t always come here with a girl,” he insisted. His voice turned quiet, pensive. “It was one of the few private places I knew.”

“And beautiful,” she said softly. With her head resting in the curve of his shoulder, she was perfectly content. “I love it, Mitch. This is a thousand times better than going out for a drink and dinner.”

“Pardon?”

“Come on, Mitch. We’re both of an age. Just being with someone is the best way to get acquainted. The traditional date is a terrible way to get to know someone. It’s always the same old thing. You dress up and act stiff and talk about what school you went to and whether you like shellfish.”

Mitch choked on a swallow of wine.

Kay grinned. “Don’t you agree with me? The man’s always had it the hardest. Getting up the courage to ask for a date, then laying out the cash for a meal and wine, and finally having to worry about timing the first kiss. Unless you’ve been happily attached for a long time, you have to be sick of that routine. Admit it.”

She tilted her head back and caught a peculiar expression on Mitch’s face. “It can get boring,” he agreed.

“And how can a fire tower ever be boring?” she added contentedly.

“Particularly when the lady plans to stay up here for the next four years rather than risk the climb down.”

“Let’s not get sarcastic.”

He chuckled, and Kay loved the sound. Mitch sent her protective messages, whether he knew it or not. Never mind that at times he could suddenly turn reserved, and never mind that his lightest touch sent exciting ideas tumbling through her head. He sent out definite vibrations that told her just being with her was precious to him, and not that his sole interest was in bedding her.

“Do you have to be back at a certain time?” he asked.

“Not till nine-thirty. Poker,” she murmured irritably.

“Poker,” he echoed.

“The guys come over to play poker most Friday nights. Usually, they like five at the table, particularly when one of the group remembers to buy napkins and potato chips. As in the sole feminine participant. Me.”

“You like the game.”

“Generally, I beat the pants off them,” she admitted.

“And just who are…the guys?”

He folded his arms around her ribs and she snuggled back, setting down her wine, aware of his slight stiffening but assuming it was due to his change of position.

“Stix is one. He’s sort of a big brother-my first date way back when, but that never went far. He’s called Stix because he’s tall and skinny.”

“I guessed that.”

“John works for the health department.”

“You also dated him.”

She shrugged. “For a few months. Actually, Barker…”

Mitch didn’t want to know. She was comfortable with men; he already knew that. She was comfortable talking about sex; he already knew that, too. And undoubtedly she ended her affairs amicably, because she would have started them with honesty and terminated them that way as well. That was fine. Commendable.

But he had a sudden image of her, flushed with laughter, her hair disheveled and her lips parted, surrounded by a houseful of men who’d known her far too well…

“Hey,” she murmured.

He had tucked his long arm under her knees and swung her around into his lap. “You know, I like to play poker,” he said quietly. “In fact, as a kid, I could bluff as well as a Las Vegas hustler.”

She stiffened at the first pressure of his lips on hers, not in rejection but in surprise. She hadn’t minded hearing about his Nancy White; it was years before. And she hadn’t hesitated to mention her poker game; the men were friends, not ex-lovers. Actually, she’d tried to tell him subtly that it wasn’t a date that took up her Friday nights.

All the same, jealousy was in that first pressure of his mouth on hers. It wasn’t merely a kiss; it was also a claim.

When she closed her eyes, colors seemed to splash on her closed eyelids. The vibrant red of a summer sunset, the pale yellow of the early morning sun, the silky blue of a mountain lake. Between her coat and his were folds of material preventing intimacy. All she could really feel was the pressure of his lips, so warm, so precious.

The afternoon hadn’t been what she’d expected. His showing up, the woods, his fire tower… Maybe it was all a little crazy, but from the first time she’d met him she’d felt odd vibrations. Mitch wasn’t an average man.

Oddly, she felt a little afraid of him. Of the powerful feelings he induced in her, so fast, so unexpectedly. She also had a great faith in her judgment as a woman. Every instinct told her this was a man she could trust when all the chips were down. And there weren’t many such men running around.

Her mouth gave back tit for tat. With fingers spread, she slowly touched his jacket and climbed up to the collar, finally to the warm skin of his neck. With that touch of her fingertip to his skin, the kiss changed; his mouth turned soft and sensitive.

His tongue swirled, probing her parted teeth, then stole inside, suddenly tentative. Her tongue touched his, welcoming gently.

The wind nipped at both of them; darkness surrounded them like a hush. When his arms tightened around her, she slipped her hands inside his jacket, wanting to touch this man as she’d never really wanted to touch another. He was so…different. Kisses…darn it, at twenty-seven, she’d had dozens of kisses. The men she dated used kisses as preludes to the next step, but Mitch didn’t use a kiss at all. He savored it.

Her lips felt loved, stroked by his own. He tasted and tested and kept coming back for more. There was a smile between the two of them, when they both ran out of breath like teenagers. There was a smile, and then it vanished, because Mitch’s lips clearly hadn’t yet had enough.

Her legs curled up, and her fingers splayed in his thick hair as she exulted in his quick intake of air. As he supported her head with one hand, his other hand reached for the buttons of her coat. His breath fanned her throat as he managed the first button, then the second.

His lips nuzzled at the flesh he’d uncovered, above her sweater. He rubbed his cheek against her soft skin, and when his lips crushed hers again his hands were suddenly in a terrible, almost awkward rush to loosen the last buttons. She almost smiled, but couldn’t.

Her breasts ached inside her sweater. She’d waited years to feel the caress of those big hands. No one had ever touched her the way she knew Mitch was going to. Loving had always come as naturally to her as breathing, from expressions of simple affection when she was a child to demonstrations of sexual feeling for the two men who had been special in her adult life. In between, there had always been levels of physical contact that had felt right at the time to her judgment.

With Mitch, there wasn’t a judgment but an emotion. Everything and anything was right. It had to be. He tasted so sweet, her suddenly not-so-shy man. So hungry! His whole body was tense with urgency, his heart beating with it, his hand trembling with it. Yet it wasn’t the rough kisses that swayed her, but the gentle ones. The ones where he slowed down and made sure she knew the exquisite taste and texture of his mouth and his skin, the scent of him, the pleasure in her that shone in his eyes.

His loving promised a giving so intense, a potential for sharing so infinite that she really no longer cared if they were better than a hundred feet above the ground on a cold night on a hard platform without a cushion in sight. Her body surged toward his when she felt his hand slide beneath her coat.

His fingers rested just below her breasts, just below soft white flesh that swelled, waiting. All he had to do was move his hand an inch. His fingers roamed over her ribs, making her murmur with wanting.

The side of his thumb edged half an inch. Her nipples stiffened and heated up like hot pebbles, shamelessly pouting for him. He lifted his hand…

Mitch took one last nibble at her bottom lip and then drew back, clutching the lapel of her coat as he closed it. His breath was rasping in his lungs as though he’d just sucked in fire. “Your men,” he said raggedly.

“Pardon?”

“You have a poker game.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.” And if she thought he was going to leave her at the door to a group of other men, she was sadly mistaken.

Maybe he had a latent streak of masochism, but he needed to at least see his competition.

Chapter Four

Kay crunched down noisily on a potato chip and saw five pairs of eyes turn irritably in her direction. She swallowed hastily.

“Do you by any miracle have just a little more of that dip in the refrigerator?” Stix asked.

“What’s it worth to you?”

“At least all my love for the rest of your life.”

“I know that. I meant in money.”

Stix aimed a slap at her backside but missed. Chuckling, Kay fetched a fresh bowl of dip from the refrigerator and perched back up on her stool. Stix instantly scooped up a tablespoon of the stuff on a quarter-sized chip and popped it into his voracious mouth, mumbling, “Raise two.”

Mitch smiled, as if the raise had pleased him. “See your two and raise another.” His eyes flicked first to Stix and then to Kay before his attention returned to the cards.

Sucking on a salted cashew nut, Kay watched with fascination as Mitch raked in yet another stack of chips.

Having lost her stake of five dollars-her max-to him earlier in the game, she was delighted to sit back and let the others suffer. Glancing at the clock, she saw it was nearing midnight. She still hadn’t figured out how Mitch had ended up at the poker game with her. He’d seen the four men waiting for her at the door when he brought her home, and the next thing she knew he’d blended into the group as if born there.

The table was set up in the living room. Soda and beer cans littered the side tables; chips and dip and napkins and bowls of cashews were clustered among the cards. John was the only smoker in the group, and his thin haze of smoke wandered around the room.

John chain-smoked when he had a good hand. Stix munched when he had a good hand. Barker fidgeted, and their resident CPA, Hailey, from three blocks down, pulled his mustache. Kay had always found him remarkably easy to beat.

Mitch did nothing to give himself away. He just won. No big deal, but he definitely kept drawing in the lion’s share of the chips.

And he listened. The man might have a zipper for a mouth as far as his own secrets, but he was remarkably adept at prying information from others. What they did for a living, how long they’d been married, how long they hadn’t been married…and how Mitch got them going, she had no idea, but the guys had been relating a disgusting selection of escapades from their-and her-younger days. One senior prom night that ended with skinny-dipping in Coeur D’Alene Lake. One perfectly innocent afternoon of fishing in the Sawtooth Mountains that turned into four days, thanks to a flash flood that washed out the roads…

“Kay always had the best ideas,” Barker told Mitch, still laughing. “Whenever the guys wanted any excitement…”

He left the sentence hanging. Thanks so much, Barker, Kay thought darkly. She stuck another cashew nut in her mouth. You’d think she’d spent her entire life in high-spirited antics, but that just wasn’t true. Working herself through college hadn’t been a lark, nor was making a life for herself alone. And earlier, there’d been some very dark years, when the family had been afraid Jana wasn’t going to make it, when her mother had come close to falling apart and it had been up to Kay to keep up the family’s morale.

Given a choice between a funny story and a tragic one she’d choose the funny one any day, but the picture of Capering Kay was hardly accurate. Her poker cohorts knew that; she was used to their ceaseless teasing, and she wouldn’t have cared at all if it hadn’t been for Mitch.

On the one hand, he kept feeding the guys their cue lines, obviously encouraging their most risqué tales. On the other hand, Mitch gave away nothing about himself. He played his emotions as close to the chest as he played his cards.

Finally, Stix stretched and yawned. “I give up,” he said lazily.

Simultaneously, the other players tossed their cards on the table. “I didn’t realize how late it was,” Hailey said with a frown. “Mitch, you’ve got to join us on another Friday. Really enjoyed it.”

There was a rush for coats. Hailey left first, once he’d found his glasses. John, after a kiss on Kay’s cheek, was the next to go. Barker went so far as to take his beer cans to the kitchen, then delivered his good-night kiss. Stix lingered a little longer, giving Mitch a sidelong glance as he tugged on his ancient cord jacket. “You want help cleaning up?” he asked Kay.

To her credit, she didn’t faint from shock. “You’ve discovered dishes don’t miraculously wash themselves?”

“Samantha’s taught me a thing or two. Don’t get sassy. I could help take down the table.”

“We can take care of it,” Mitch drawled from the hall doorway.

Still, Stix lingered a bit longer, taking endless care with every one of his coat buttons, eyeing Kay with a protective gleam that made no sense.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing.” He glanced at Mitch. “Coming?”

Mitch moved forward with a half smile, his hand firmly extended for Stix to shake, exactly as he had done with the other men. “Appreciated the chance to get in a night of poker. I hadn’t done it in a long time.”

“Anytime…” The two talked for a minute before Mitch dropped back, and Kay stepped forward with a perplexed expression.

Stix’s genial grin was gone. Suddenly, all six feet six inches of him exuded irritability. Stix was normally so laid back that Kay was baffled by the change in him. She stretched up on tiptoe for her good-night kiss. Her lips met a very stiff cheek; Stix glared at her and then departed, as the others had, into a very dark, very late night outside.

Kay turned back to find that Mitch had disappeared…and the card table was half cleared of debris. She snatched up the bowl of potato chips and two soda cans, carting both into the kitchen. There she spotted Mitch, who flashed her one quick, enigmatic smile on his way back to the living room.

It was like playing tag. When she headed back to the living room, Mitch was striding toward the kitchen again. The entire house was restored to equilibrium in minutes.

When she finally caught up with him, he was in the hall, pulling on his coat at the door. Kay stared at him from the kitchen doorway, astonished that he’d bothered to stay all this time…and was now leaving.

“They’re good men,” he said flatly.

“Old friends,” she agreed, bewildered.

He crooked his finger in a beckoning gesture.

Now there was the man she thought she’d spent the afternoon with. Chuckling, she went toward him. The wicked gleam was back in his eyes. It seemed he could turn it on and off at will, like a light. When there were no other people around, that light definitely glowed warmly. “Do you want a cup of coffee?” she asked him.

“All I want is to tell you something.”

“So tell me.”

“You’re too far away.”

Leaning back against the open doorway, he drew her arms around his waist until they were snuggled length to length. The web instantly woven around her was invisible, private and utterly male. The intimacy increased deliciously when his lips pressed into her hair. “You’re an affectionate lady,” he whispered.

“That’s what you wanted to tell me?” She tried to convince herself that she didn’t want him to stay. How could she possibly want him to stay? It was far too soon.

His lips nuzzled farther, his chin brushing back her hair so his mouth could center on the soft skin just below her ear. “No,” he murmured. “I just wanted to tell you that I wish I’d known you a long time ago. From the beginning. From before you were a woman, from the very moment you became a woman…”

She tilted her head back, touched by the earnest note in his voice. Mitch dipped down, placing a light kiss on her forehead, then on her nose, then on her chin. Her lips felt forsaken. “You don’t really wish that,” she told him with a sleepy half smile. “The young Kay was chubby, Mitch. And she had miles to go before she learned what she really valued in life.”

“Her…experiences had to be that extensive, did they?” His smile was lazy.

Kay slid her arms out from under his jacket and wrapped them around his neck. “You bet they did,” she whispered wryly. “I had more to learn than most.”

He chuckled, yet his dark eyes settled intently on hers before he leaned down to rub his cheek against hers, his arms suddenly restless over her sweatered back. “How long has Stix had a thing for you?”

“Hmm?” She’d been a teenager the last time she’d necked in a hallway. The sense of doing something that was forbidden had enhanced the moment then. One mustn’t, one shouldn’t, one would get caught. There was no danger of getting caught now, but there was still a lush sense of danger. Or was it anticipation? “Stix? You’re crazy, Mitch.” She pressed a kiss to the hollow of his throat and felt his pulse jump. “Stix is just a self-adopted big brother,” she said absently.

“He mentioned your ill-fated engagement.”

What were they talking about? She pressed her cheek against his jacket and closed her eyes, loving the sensation of being held. “I won’t tell you my war stories unless you confess yours,” she warned him.

“You don’t have to tell me anything, ever. Do you mind that I’m curious about you?” His fingertips brushed back her hair so soothingly that she leaned her cheek into his palm.

She shook her head. “Of course not. Secrets are sad things. My war stories aren’t anything extraordinary, Mitch-I was engaged, twice. The first time I was seventeen, and the engagement lasted all of three days.”

“What happened?”

“We both used the ring as an excuse to do what we wanted to do. We soon decided sex wasn’t all it was cracked up to be-at least not for us-and we had the sense to call it off before anyone could be disastrously hurt,” she said wryly.

“Except,” Mitch said softly, “that you were disastrously hurt.”

Her eyes flickered up, brilliant and luminous. “No one,” she admitted, “could possibly hurt as much or as hard as a seventeen-year-old. Surely you’ve been there?” She had a sudden image of Mitch at seventeen, boyish and brazen and sexual…and then a second image, of the girl in his arms who must have been there. A little green glob settled in the pit of her stomach. “You’re not sharing war stories,” she reminded him, but her heart told her promptly that she didn’t want to know.

“We’re not through with yours yet. You said you were engaged twice.”

“The second one was named Mason.” When she looked up, his eyes had darkened, and looked oddly warm. Tell-me-your-secrets warm.

“So what was he like?” Mitch said softly.

She shrugged, tucking her cheek into his chest. “Mason I loved,” she said simply. “No excuses, no apologies…and no lingering feelings. Love, unfortunately, isn’t all it takes to make a relationship.”

“No?” he murmured.

She half smiled. His arm enclosed her and she felt sealed up, protected, enveloped. His lips were pressing into her hair again. “I’d known Mason for such a long time. His laughter could light up a room. You would have liked him-everyone liked him. But to Mason, people were like wine. Wonderful to get high on, but once the bottle was empty he moved on. It took me a while to catch on. People who really celebrate life don’t have to use other people to do it. Anyway…that was three years ago. And you know something?”

Mitch’s thumbs slowly traced the line of her cheekbones. “Tell me.”

“You have to make a choice,” she said simply. “You can choose to be defensive, to protect yourself against all the people-users, to guard yourself against feeling too much. That’s the safe way. I’ve been there, Mitch, but life’s too darn rich, too darn short, too special. I feel sorry for the people like that.

They’re missing it all…and you’d think I’d had four glasses of wine, the way I’ve been rambling on.” She cocked her head back at him with an impish grin. “Your turn. Are you sure you wouldn’t like some coffee? And in the meantime you can start telling me about when you were engaged, married, or otherwise entangled. Don’t let me be the only one hanging out the dirty linen. Which was it?”

He hesitated. “Actually, none of the above,” he said curtly.

“Not even the coffee?” She arched a teasing eyebrow.

He placed a swift, firm kiss on her mouth. His forefinger followed, tracing the shape of her lower lip, then the upper one. Abruptly, she forgot the thread of their conversation.

“Don’t you change,” he said roughly. “You’re real. Real, Kay. Honest, giving, soft. You don’t seem to realize how easy it would be for a man to love you. Really love you.”

And with that, he was gone.

***

Mitch got out of the car at his house, glanced at the dark, unwelcoming windows and decided to take a walk. A bitter wind nipped at his face and throat.

The streets were deserted. Cars were parked and windows were lamp-less at the late hour. Shadows shifted in the wind.

With his head bent low, Mitch jammed his hands in his pockets and just kept going. Kay had loved two men. Two was not an unmanageable number. He was surprised there hadn’t been more. Maybe there had been. In this day and age, she could well have had a dozen lovers.

Every damn man at the table could have been one of them. They all loved her. And she didn’t even seem to see.

Mitch felt like a fool. It wasn’t a sensation he’d felt often, and he definitely didn’t enjoy it. She’d had, and still had, her choice of lovers. For that matter, he knew exactly what she needed in a lover. A giver. A man who ever so carefully nurtured that sensual sweetness of hers. A man who would protect and treasure her vulnerable heart. A man experienced in pleasure, who’d take her fast past anything she’d felt with those fiancés of hers. A man who knew just what flesh to touch, what words to say, what timing would send her so high…

He walked. And kept on walking. Frustration lay like a dead weight inside him. He resented those lost thirteen years as he’d never resented anything before.

***

Kay stood in the open doorway a long time, even after Mitch’s car had disappeared from sight. Finally, shivering, she closed the door.

Talk about bewitched, bothered and bewildered… She could have written the song.

Trying to convince herself she was exhausted, she changed into a lavender-and-white striped nightgown, washed her face, brushed her teeth and turned off the light a few minutes later.

Sleep was the last thing on her mind.

He’d gone to a lot of trouble to find her-only to leave without even mentioning that he wanted to see her again.

He stole kisses in very odd places. Like hospital parking lots in the rain. Like fire towers. She had no question in her mind that he’d been as turned on as she’d been each time they touched. Only he’d left without the least attempt to press for more.

She’d told him practically her entire life story, and he hadn’t even told her his last name. Or what he did for a living. Or where he lived. Or why those wonderful smiles of his were so few and far between…

There was so darned much experience in his eyes-life experience, and not the easy kind. Every time she was around him, she had an urge to cuddle him. Hold him tight, coax out more of those smiles of his, make him laugh, razzle-dazzle him with…what? Brown hair and brown eyes and an average figure?

She thumped the pillow with her fist. Just what is going on here, Kay Sanders? she scolded herself roundly. Mitch had the look of a man who’d known plenty of women. Undoubtedly more attractive, sexier, smarter, more creative types, she added glumly. Maybe he was between women just now. Maybe he’d simply happened to have a free afternoon and evening today.

She told herself firmly that she had more sense than to make too much of it. Yet her dreams were haunted by a pair of dark eyes and a lazy, disarming smile.

***

“Mitch?”

“Back here, Dad,” Mitch called out. Removing the magnifying loupe from his eye, he strode briskly across the small octagonal room to greet his father-but Aaron Cochran was already in the doorway.

Aaron clapped a hand on his son’s shoulder affectionately. “I thought you must be back from Spokane by now. You know, I could have picked you up, if I’d known what time your plane was coming in.”

“I left my car at the airport. No problem.”

“So how’d it go?”

Mitch gave his father an amused glance. Amazing, how he’d misjudged his dad once upon a time. The Cochrans came from a long line of rough-and-ready lumberjacks. If these days Aaron spent most of his time overseeing his timber empire from an office, Mitch still suspected that his father valued physical rather than mental prowess in a man. Way back, when Mitch had been forced into a sedentary lifestyle, the transition had been that much tougher because he couldn’t help feeling that he was failing his father along with everything else.

But it was Aaron who’d nudged Mitch into minerals, gruffly challenging his son out of his depression, filling the library with books, bringing in tutors so Mitch would have the education he certainly never thought he wanted at fifteen.

And at the moment, his father was impatiently surveying the octagonal room, with its sheets draped as curtains and its bare floors and spectroscopes and balancing scales, with Mitch’s own feeling of possessiveness. “Are you going to keep me in suspense for the next year?” his father demanded. “Was the meeting worth it or not?”

“Well worth it. He jumped for the tourmalines, but more important-” Mitch handed his father the loupe. Silently, Aaron fitted it to his eye and bent over the table. The single stone, on white velvet, had the dazzling brilliance of an emerald. Its fire caught every ray of light as Aaron slowly shifted it in his fingertips.

“Tsavorite,” Aaron identified it. “Dammit, I’ve never seen one this large before.”

“Flawless,” Mitch affirmed. He leaned a shoulder against the wall, enjoying his father’s pleasure. Neither said anything for a minute.

“How much did you have to pay?” Aaron demanded finally, but his eyes were still on the stone. Perching on the stool, he adjusted the lamp and then bent over the tsavorite again.

Mitch answered his question.

“You know, with a little more training, you could have been a thief,” Aaron complimented him wryly.

“Hell, he tried to pawn a tray of smoked opals off on me first.” Mitch took the stone and wrapped it carefully before locking it in the trunk chest against the far wall. “You want a cup of coffee?”

“No time. Was that the only stone you bought?”

Mitch shook his head. “A few others,” he said as they wandered back toward the front of the house. “He didn’t really have the quality I wanted. Frankly, I don’t know how he got his hands on that one.”

A barren hall with a swinging lightbulb led to the living room, where Aaron paused, giving his son a wry smile. It wasn’t exactly a living room yet. Ladders and drop cloths and paint cans caught the early afternoon light. “You know,” Aaron drawled, “you’re socking away plenty of money these days. Going to get around to buying a few sticks of furniture for this old barn eventually?”

“In time. It’s taking me a long time to fix the place up.”

“All of which you could afford to hire others to do.”

Mitch shook his head, and his father chuckled. “When do you sleep?”

“I haven’t time.”

Aaron sobered abruptly. They were alike physically, both tall and broad-shouldered and lean. Mitch had his father’s dark hair, the same quietness in the way he moved, the same enigmatic expression in his dark eyes. They were both stubborn. Both fiercely independent. And they understood each other, at times, far too well. “You’re pushing it, you know,” Aaron said quietly. “Trying to do everything all at once. It’s not like that anymore. You’ve got time. And you know I’ll help you-”

“Good. You can let me know what my last round of medical adventures cost you.”

Aaron sighed. It was an old argument. Even before that final operation, Mitch had been pulling his financial weight in the family, with a drive that his father respected and a stubbornness no one could control. Lately, yes, Mitch had pursued a most determined course in fortune-building…and he’d fiercely resented his father’s paying the last hospital bill.

Aaron understood. Mitch had never been able to tolerate feeling dependent on others, and had a man’s need to pay his own way. But for Aaron there was no forgetting the long hours in the waiting room, with the knowledge that this last operation could swing either way. It wasn’t the gift of money but the gift of life he’d been so desperate to give his son. The decision to go under the knife one final time had been Mitch’s. It was Aaron who’d barely survived it.

“If you want to help me out, you can accept your mother’s invitation to dinner tonight,” Aaron said abruptly.

Mitch dug his hands in his pockets as his father pulled on his coat. “Dad-”

“She told me to tell you there’d be prime rib, a good Burgundy, glazed carrots, blueberry pie…”

“And who’s she lined up as a surprise across the table this time?” Mitch smiled dryly.

“Laura Kingsley.”

Mitch chuckled. “Let no one suggest that Mom leaves any stone unturned.”

“Your mother-” Aaron cleared his throat “-occasionally lacks subtlety. On the other hand, she says we haven’t had the Kingsleys over in some time.”

“And their daughter, by some miracle, just happened to be in town.”

“A miracle, yes.” Aaron looked at his son and burst out laughing. “Do you want a word of fatherly advice?”

“No offense, Dad, but not particularly.”

“Thank God.” Aaron glanced at his watch, then negotiated a path around a pile of cardboard boxes near the door. “You know, if you should want to sell that garnet-”

Mitch shook his head. “If I can find a match, I’ll work up a set of earrings for Mom for Christmas.”

“Dinner?” Aaron asked abruptly, giving his son a wry look. He knew damn well Mitch was going to find some way to pay back the debt.

Mitch hesitated. “Not tonight, Dad. I’ve got an afternoon of painting here, plus I want to get a run in, maybe a game of racquetball. Beyond that, I honestly have work to do. Tell Mom thanks-and I’ll stop by to see her tomorrow.”

“That’ll mollify her.” There was a moment more, as both men stood in the doorway, a quick flash of eye contact that simply conveyed the very real affection they had for each other. “Not that I appreciate being left alone to entertain those two vacant-headed Kingsley women over dinner this evening. You just keep in mind that you owe me one.”

Mitch closed the door a moment later. With his father gone, the house seemed pregnant with a peculiar, lonely silence. He tugged off his tie, taking the steps upstairs two at a time. His bedroom was the only room in the entire house that was more or less furnished. There’d been ample space in the huge room for a couch and armchair on one side, for his double bed on the other. The rest of the furniture included some handsome teak bookcases and an old chest lacquered in navy blue, Chinese style, that had belonged to his grandparents. He’d collected Chinese prints from the time he was a kid, so the walls didn’t look too bare. Chinese had been the first language he’d started to learn during those years when he’d been forced to pursue sedentary activities.

Sheets hung in the windows. He’d gone to a store to buy curtains once, but couldn’t make head or tail of the measurements, nor did he have the least idea what a valance was. Of course, he could have asked for help-but he wasn’t much inclined to take help from anyone these days. All his life, he’d had to ask for far too much from other people.

Within ten minutes, he was out of the business suit he’d worn to lunch and into painting jeans and an ancient crewneck sweater.

He switched on the overhead light and opened a paint can, smiling to himself as he thought about his mother’s less than subtle machinations.

She wanted him married. She also wanted an even dozen grandchildren. Preferably yesterday.

The paint roller scudded over the wails, turning an odd shade of rose to an antique cream. The house was around fifty years old. When he’d finally recovered from the last operation, he’d looked at newer houses. And to speed the recovery process, he’d generally tried to fill most evenings with a woman across a restaurant table from him. That’s what he thought he should want: to buy a brand-new bachelor’s pad, and to hurry back into circulation and make up for lost time. Neither houses nor women had been hard to find.

Neither gave him what he wanted.

He couldn’t go back. He couldn’t play it like a kid just starting out. He was a man, not a kid. He had a man’s need for a home and privacy, but the home had to express him, and none of the newer places he looked at fit the bill. He also had a man’s need for a woman at his side, the kind of woman he’d like to wake up to in the morning. He wanted more than just the quick encounters that were readily available.

Oh, he’d considered going to bed with them. An easy lay would have solved any number of problems-not the least of which was sheer overwhelming physical frustration. And with a stranger-well, if she guessed about his inexperience, it would hardly matter.

Mitch stepped back, viewing the half-finished wall with a critical eye. The plaster sucked in the paint, and minutes later the original color showed through. The cathedral ceiling had taken him an entire week to paint, and then another week to repaint.

Strangers hadn’t been an answer. Twice, he’d been close. But the scenes had reeked of two people taking advantage of each other so cold-bloodedly that he’d backed off, feeling like a bastard. The women might not care that they were being used, but he did. He’d had to fight for life too damn hard not to separate the gold from the dross. Nobody had time to waste on experiences with no value.

An image of Kay flickered in his mind. He blocked it, irritated. In the past two weeks, ever since he’d left her that Friday night after the poker game, he’d been carrying a mental picture of her around with him everywhere. Gold framed. Twenty-four-karat gold, because she was far softer than fourteen-karat.

He told himself he was completely over that first rush of overwhelming attraction for her. She had droves of men in her life already, lovers he couldn’t begin to compete with. And he wasn’t going to try. But he just couldn’t dismiss that resistant mental picture of the woman.

Chapter Five

“So when are you going to tell me who the man is?” Susan asked. Plopping down three bulky parcels, she slid into the booth across from Kay. Hurriedly, she finger-combed a disordered set of bouncing blond curls in a characteristic gesture.

“What are you talking about?” Kay returned, as she nodded a thank-you to the waitress for delivering two steaming mugs of coffee. Unbuttoning her jacket, she wrapped her freezing hands around the warm mug.

“For openers, we’ve been shopping for two hours and you haven’t bought a single thing. On top of that, you’ve been crabby for two weeks. On top of that, you made a date for lunch with me last week, called an hour later to make the same date again and then forgot to show at all. I haven’t seen you in such bad shape since high school. So what’s his name?” Susan’s eyes danced over the rim of her mug.

“My car’s name is Bertha. And if I’ve been distracted, it’s only because she needs a new transmission,” Kay said wryly.

“That would explain the crabbiness,” Susan agreed, and added demurely, “Stix says that the man could be a lethal weapon in the wrong hands. He seems to have the terrible feeling you could get burned. Why do you have all the luck?”

“Is there nothing sacred in this town?” Kay wondered aloud, and took a small sip of the steaming brew. The coffee felt scalding on her tongue, but she welcomed it. After two hours of shopping on a frigid Saturday afternoon, she wasn’t absolutely certain her toes still existed. They were certainly numb.

“We’re waiting to hear a name,” Susan probed.

“So was Rumpelstiltskin,” Kay returned cheerfully. “How’s the new job going, anyway?”

“Kay.”

“If I really decide to redecorate my living room, do you think I should have the couch reupholstered?”

Susan, bless her, was diverted. Kay leaned back against the booth, savoring her hot drink. After a moment, she let her coat slide behind her. Her white angora sweater was tucked into maroon cords; both were new. Her hair had a center part, a style equally simple but otherwise different from the one she usually wore.

The white hat and white mittens were also new, and she’d sprayed a mist of expensive perfume between her breasts and in other places where no one would notice it on a Saturday spent shopping in a heavy coat.

Occasionally, a woman had to work herself out of a little depression. Change helped. Usually. But then, Kay wasn’t usually depressed.

“Well…” Susan set down her mug and reached for her coat. “I’m broke-I guess I’ll have to go home. Unless you want to do some more shopping?”

Kay shook her head. “I’ll probably hit the bookstore, but that’s it.”

Susan grimaced. “You’re going to buy more books for the kids at the hospital, aren’t you?”

“It’s almost Christmas,” Kay said defensively as she counted out change for the waitress.

“It’s only a week after Thanksgiving, and you spend half your salary on stuff for those kids. If you’d save a little, I could really do that living room up right for you.”

“Next year,” Kay promised.

“Bull.”

They both chuckled, and at the entrance to the little café parted ways. Kay started walking toward the bookstore, tugging the collar of her coat around her chin, jamming her mittened hands into her pockets. Shoppers milled around her, laden with packages. Moscow had put up its Christmas lights, and everyone seemed infected with the holiday spirit. As the small town’s main street had been closed to cars, people were free to wander to and fro, crisscrossing streets, hats bobbing, coats pulled tight against the whip of cold wind. Laughter and red cheeks seemed to surround her. She loved it. As much as she’d loved anything these past few weeks.

Ducking her head against a sudden burst of wind, Kay surged forward. There was no real reason for her to be depressed. She was never depressed. So he hadn’t called. So he’d grabbed a few kisses and split. She’d handed out a few kisses of her own and split more than once.

She’d thought they had something, that was all. Something she’d never had before, something she couldn’t quite define. Something that left her feeling ridiculously breathless when he was around, like a schoolgirl with a crush. Silly.

She pushed open the door to Bookpeople and felt an instant rush of warm air caress her freezing cheeks. She pulled off her mittens and sat cross-legged in the children’s section. The Little Engine That Could was a must. So was The Giving Tree. And she’d need a book for Robert, the new boy she’d met at the hospital that morning; she could tell at a glance he wasn’t the best of readers. Tugging The Rainbow Goblins off the shelf, she checked it for easy words. The pile of books next to her kept growing.

There were plenty of other fish in the sea. She didn’t need a mystery man with sad eyes who was stingy with his last name, who had to be coaxed into laughter, who played poker like a Las Vegas dealer and climbed fire towers.

Her book pile kept growing.

If he called tonight, she’d turn him down. She didn’t like games and never had. There were enough men who did call that she didn’t have to sit around waiting for Mitch whatever-his-name-is to be in touch.

“Kay, you have to be joking. Even for you,” said the cashier.

Kay raised her eyes above the pile of books, smiling faintly. “Um. You won’t cash my check before Monday, will you?”

“Monday night,” the cashier answered wryly.

“That’ll do.” Enough time to transfer some savings into checking, although the Lord knew what she was going to buy groceries with. She swung her purse strap to her shoulder and picked up the overstuffed plastic bag and held it in both arms. It was too heavy to carry in one hand.

“Hey. Want some help?” the cashier asked.

“Believe me, I’ve managed worse,” she called after him, tucking her chin on top of the pile to balance it. Her arms ached instantly from the weight of the books. Somehow a few choice children’s stories had multiplied into a couple dozen. Well, not somehow. Rampant enthusiasm was definitely the weak point in her character, and in the meantime there was a full mile to walk home.

A stranger held open the door for her; she tried to nod a thank-you and failed, offering him a smile instead. Snowflakes pelted her cheeks as she maneuvered carefully outside; the air had turned colder, the sky darker. People were hurrying suddenly, bustling all around her, as if shopping no longer took precedence over getting home to hot cocoa and a crackling fire.

She bumped into someone, apologized. The top book shifted; she righted it with her chin. She’d forgotten to button her coat, and the wind stole around and in like a bandit, sneaking a chill under her sweater.

Someone else brushed her arm and she nearly stumbled. She had to stop and readjust the entire bundle. A mile? She was going to make it a mile this way? Kay, this is really it. as of this instant you are going to turn into a rational, sensible person, she informed herself.

***

Mitch saw her from across the street and three stores down. First a glimpse of swinging soft hair, almost lost in the bustle of people. Then he saw that her arms were full. Her lips, so red, were parted in embarrassed apology to someone she’d collided with, and then she was lost in the crowd again.

He frowned. Swinging his bulky package under his arm, he gave in to a full-blown scowl and kept on walking.

For another very long minute.

Waiting at a crosswalk, flanked by a group of kids and harried mothers, Kay closed her eyes as she waited for traffic to pass, mentally counting to ten. You will hold up, arms. If you go another quarter-mile, I’ll give you a rest. That really doesn’t sound so far, now does it?

The cars passed; the kids surged forward and around her, bumping her left elbow, then her right thigh. Her aching arms had been just looking for an excuse. Almost in slow motion, the books shifted in a long, undulating wave; she knew in one glum moment that it was all over. The flimsy plastic bag had already split; now a book surged out through the hole, flying for the street.

She grabbed for it, which freed the rest of the books to tumble in a skittering mess all across the street. If she hadn’t been so exasperated, she would have cried.

Frantically, she glanced back for approaching cars, and found a lazy, disarming grin bearing down on her instead. “You never do anything halfway, do you?” Mitch shoved his odd-shaped package at her and bent to retrieve the scattered books. “Button your coat,” he ordered.

She buttoned, silently eyeing him with all the bristling awareness of a porcupine. If he thought he was going to just show up in her life again…

“Where’s your car?” he asked.

There were a lot of problems with answering that question. The first of which was admitting that she hadn’t driven. The second of which was implying that she needed his help.

“Was that too hard a question?” he asked mildly. “We could start out with easier ones. Have you ever considered buying stock in a bookstore? And in the meantime, I take it we’re walking this library home? Or do you just want to stand there and glower at me?”

She did want to stand there and glower at him. He was carrying the books as if they were cotton balls. There was nothing more annoying than a male male.

And that was the disgusting problem about Mitch. The way his collar stood up against his cheeks, for instance; the way his skin was windburned, his dark hair careless… Primitive instincts announced themselves in her bloodstream. She felt swamped by his virility. It wasn’t fair. He hadn’t even touched her.

“I can carry them myself,” she informed him.

“I have no doubt you can do anything you want to. And if you’re in an independent sort of mood, I’ll give you back your books and just trail behind you, separate but equal.”

Now when did he sneak in that boyish grin? Separate but equal, indeed! She had no desire whatsoever to smile at him, and to hide the twist of her lips she glanced down, finding herself suddenly staring at the odd-shaped package he’d shoved into her arms. “What is this, anyway?”

“A football. For Robert.”

When she peered up, only for a second, Mitch’s dark eyes were sliding over her features as if claiming private property. Most irritating. “For Robert? You weren’t even at the hospital this morning.”

“Yes, I was. Before seven. I left early, so that later in the morning I could pay a visit to Peter at his house.” He started walking while she was trying to figure out why she wasn’t still furious with him for not calling.

Furthermore, he was walking fast. When you were going uphill against the crowd, you either walked slow or died from hyperventilation. Apparently, no one had ever mentioned that to him. “Was Peter okay?”

“Terrific. He said to give you a hug. He doesn’t really miss us, though. With his mom getting around again and all his friends calling, he’s doing fine.”

“Mitch.”

“Hmm?”

“Are you some kind of physical fitness maniac?”

He stopped instantly, his thick eyebrows shooting up in alarm. “I was going too fast?”

“I don’t know. Are you training for the Olympics?”

Actually, he was only trying to make sure she didn’t take back her books and disappear. He didn’t blame her for being a bit touchy, after the vanishing act he’d pulled two weeks ago.

Every instinct told him he was risking acting like a fool. Every instinct but one, and that one told his heart not to let her out of his sight, that to let her go again would be like losing part of himself.

Nothing could go wrong if he simply pursued a friendship. A platonic relationship.

“Are you?” she repeated.

“Am I what?”

“Obsessive about physical fitness.”

He hesitated, looking down at her. A wisp of hair had escaped her hat and curled sensually around her throat, inviting the touch of his hand. Platonic, his head echoed morosely. “No,” he replied absently, trying to remember her question. “I run a little, play a little racquetball. Not for any fitness medal, but for the sheer pleasure of it. You see, there was a time when I-” He clammed up abruptly.

Kay slid him an exasperated glance when he stopped talking. She halted in the middle of the sidewalk. “Don’t do that,” she ordered him.

“Do what?”

“Start to say something about yourself and then back off. Heck, I’ve seen you in action prying out other people’s secrets. Now talk to me,” she demanded.

Startled, he felt a slow grin forming on his lips. “Of course I’ll talk to you,” he said dryly. “What do you want to know?”

“Your last name.”

“Cochran.”

“What do you do for a living?”

He hesitated. “Collect stones. Kay?” He shook his head ruefully. “You have the most beautiful eyes.”

She dropped his football.

***

Since the man had come into her sphere again, Kay had every intention of teaching him a few things about relationships. Lesson one: A man didn’t kiss a woman with the impact of Vesuvius, disappear from her life and expect to show up again without retribution.

Retribution began when she opened her front door and watched Mitch’s jaw sag slightly. If he expected privacy, he certainly wasn’t going to get it.

Stix was sprawled on the sofa, the two teenagers from across the street were flat on the floor and Mrs. O’Brien from next door, in her favorite polka-dot apron, was curled up in the Morris chair. The African Queen was playing on the DVD player, and the group was munching on doughnuts. Hepburn was removing the leeches from Bogart’s back, and no one gave Kay more than a cursory look.

“You’re late,” Stix mentioned, unnecessarily.

“I knew you’d start without me.” Most efficiently, she introduced Mitch, stole his coat, piled the books in the dining room and headed for the kitchen.

A few moments later, Mitch leaned in the doorway, a look of wry amusement on his face. “You often have people just…occupy your house like that?”

“Yup. About four weekends each winter, everyone pitches in to rent a DVD. A neighborhood thing. I don’t know who decided my house was central, but somehow they always end up here. It’s my mother’s fault, really.” Flicking back her hair, she peered into the refrigerator.

“Your mother’s fault,” Mitch echoed.

“Not for renting the movies, but she always had an open-door policy around here. All ages, anytime.” Her head twisted around the refrigerator door with a quick, studying glance at him. “You look like the lasagna type. Are you staying for dinner?”

“I…yes.”

She beamed approval at him. That yes was a straightforward answer. That was lesson number two. Straightforwardness and honesty were critical to a relationship. Mitch was about to get a good solid dose of her lifestyle, and she was about to take the mystery out of the man.

“The lasagna just needs to be heated up, but it’ll still take a while. In the meantime…” She tossed a head of lettuce to him and started humming, whipping around the kitchen with practiced ease. “Shred,” she ordered him.

He shredded. She grilled…him.

He was twenty-eight, a passionate football fan; he’d lived most of his life around Coeur d’Alene but had recently bought a house in Moscow; his politics were dead wrong; he knew wonderfully crazy stories about outlaws in Idaho…and that lazy half smile was becoming a fixture.

She thought he’d be thrown by the continual hustle and bustle around the place, but she was obviously wrong. He listened soberly to Mrs. O’Brien’s arthritis woes, gave a tactful opinion on Sandra’s and Bern’s newly purchased jeans, answered the phone three times and managed to slaughter Kay in an impromptu trivia quiz while they were eating. No one else ever remembered that Babe Ruth had been a coach for the Dodgers after he retired from play.

By the time they were doing the dishes, Kay had totally forgiven Mitch for not calling; she had the feeling she would forgive him just about anything when she heard his uninhibited laughter for the first time. Stix was the only one still hanging around by then. Standing in the doorway, he was absently tossing his car keys up and down, watching her and Mitch bicker over the number of presidents who’d had Franklin in their names.

“Benjamin wasn’t,” Stix whispered to her dryly.

“Well, he should have been.” The two men exchanged glances as Kay looked at the clock. “Stix, are you crazy? You’re going to be late. You said you had a date at eight and it’s already past.”

“So give us a kiss.”

She stretched up and got a stranglehold around her neck for her trouble as she walked him to the door. “Be good,” he ordered her. “Don’t do anything I would do. Try to remember to lock your door tonight…”

“The trouble with you is that you don’t have any sisters.”

“Is that my problem?”

Mitch collapsed on the couch a few minutes later. Keeping up with Kay occasionally required a rest period. Her house had everything he’d missed for years-noise and energy and bubbling laughter. Only it wasn’t the house; it was Kay.

She served him popcorn, with white wine to wash it down, then curled into the huge overstuffed chair across from the couch, her knees drawn up and her arms around them. The chair swallowed her up. She looked as feminine and helpless as a tiny kitten, but like a relentless prosecuting attorney she kept the questions coming.

He felt rusty, as though he was just learning to talk again. Of course, he’d talked to people for years-about politics, geology, sports, local affairs. On any number of topics, he could talk knowledgeably-it was talking about himself that he’d shied away from. Kay kept coaxing up things he barely even remembered.

“I don’t believe it, Cochran. You were actually kicked out of kindergarten?” She giggled.

“I skipped out during rest hour. Who wanted to nap? And one day I put a napkin full of butter on the teacher’s chair…” He shrugged, then cleared his throat. “I just didn’t seem to be cut out to sit in a classroom.”

“But you’ve got degrees, you said. In geology and mineralogy. You speak German and Italian and Chinese. You must have turned into a student sometime.”

“Well, I did. The other was before-” He checked himself.

They’d been doing so well! Kay could have cheerfully dumped the bowl of popcorn over his head for clamming up again. At least they seemed to be safe talking about their childhoods. She was willing to settle for that. For a while.

“The only time I ever got in trouble was in fifth grade,” she told him. “Judy Whitaker called me skinny. I glued her desk shut.”

“Were you?”

“Skinny?” Kay nodded morosely. “I started out a plump kid, but then it all disappeared. Every other girl was getting these nice little bumps on her chest and I was still concave. I probably would have gotten into a lot less trouble if I’d said I was sorry for sealing the desk, but I told the principal I was glad, glad, glad.”

“What happened?”

“The PingPong paddle.” She lifted her wineglass in salute. “They don’t allow that in the schools anymore. Child abuse and all that, but to tell the truth, it was only my pride that hurt for a week. The principal was shaking with laughter the whole time.”

“Ours was a ruler. I cashed in for decking Stoney Laker. He hit my girl.”

“How old?”

“Second grade. My first and only engagement,” he added. “God, I loved her.” He popped a handful of popcorn into his mouth. “She could play the best damn game of marbles…” He kept his voice deliberately serious, because that seemed to make her laugh and he loved the sound, loved the way the corners of her eyes crinkled and her hair cascaded back. Only by accident did his eye suddenly wander to the windowed wall, where a clay pot filled with dirt stood, a scrawny stick emerging from it. “What is that?” he asked.

“My fig tree.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t. I absolutely adore plants. They refuse to grow for me, but that one-that one-is coming back. I feed it, water it, talk to it, turn it…” She uncurled from the chair long enough to refill his glass. “Cochran,” she remarked as she set down the bottle, “I wouldn’t say what you’re thinking if I were you. That plant is coming back.”

“Are we-” he cleared his throat politely “-talking reincarnation or…?”

“Not to threaten you or anything, but I’ve strangled little old ladies who cast aspersions on my fig tree,” she informed him.

She was close, oh so close, when she bent over to set down the wine bottle. Her lips were damp from her last sip of wine.

And she was laughing. He wanted to capture that laughter, bottle it, never let go of it. A warning bell in his head told him not to touch her; he didn’t want to start something. He wanted her…too much. And he couldn’t bear the thought that he might be awkward with her.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” Kay said lightly, “but I’ll warn you one more time. I’m more than a little sensitive on the subject of my brown thumb. Retaliation for insults will be both prompt and devastating.”

“You’ve got me terrified,” Mitch said, smiling.

She knew it was coming. She could tell from the look that had been in his eyes all evening. And suddenly he wasn’t smiling anymore.

He was reaching for her.

Chapter Six

Mitch was not shy. How on earth had she ever come to the conclusion that he was shy?

When it came to pursuing something he wanted, Mitch had a downright uncivilized streak. His lips swooped down and claimed, and the next time she opened her eyes the couch was a long distance up, the carpet was cushioning her back and the only scenery around was Mitch, stretched out next to her.

So fierce, the desire in his eyes. Such an incredible blend of tenderness and stark wanting. She murmured something, feeling the luxury of Mitch’s fingers sweeping roughly through her hair as he bent over her yet again to take her mouth. The sensation was like sinking a very long distance into a fathomless darkness.

The feeling was delicious. Mitch was delicious. And the rush of desire kept coming, her inhibitions jettisoned like the unwelcome cargo they were. Before, his embraces had been so preciously careful. She was not fragile and didn’t need to be treated as if she were, and his swift, drugging kisses, the strain of his lean muscles against her, the wildly possessive caress of his hands-well, she reveled in them. No man had ever made her feel so infinitely needed, as if the touch of her actually inflamed him, as if her closeness was something he could not get enough of.

His features were in shadow. Still, she could see the etched grooves in his forehead. She reached up to touch, wanting to erase whatever had caused those mysterious pain lines. With even that simple caress, she heard his ragged intake of breath. When he lifted his head for air, her lips felt abandoned, still trembling from the wanton pressure of his mouth on hers.

“Mitch,” she murmured, raising her eyes to his, “has anyone ever told you that you’re a lethal kisser?”

His brows lifted just slightly. “No,” he said shortly, but there was a curious sound of unexpected laughter in his voice. It was gone when his mouth hovered over hers again. “Did anyone ever tell you exactly what you do to a man when your eyes look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like a witch’s promises. Like spells. Like this.” He hovered only a moment before tenderly claiming her lips again. And if she’d just lain perfectly still, he might have been able to control it at that. But she didn’t lie still; her fingers curled in his hair and gently tightened, inviting the sweet ravishing of her mouth. He could feel the groan rumbling from deep in his throat even before he heard the sound.

She was so…responsive. He’d never intended to make the pass; something had just happened when he touched her. And he’d never intended to drag her down to the carpet like some uncouth caveman… He had to regain control. Otherwise he’d risk losing her when she suddenly discovered herself grappling with a hurricane rush. No. There was no way he wanted to push making love.

He just wanted to revel in the sheer luxury of wanting her.

Her spine curved toward him when his hand smoothed down the back of her soft angora sweater. Her body lay pliant, infinitely moldable, her breasts fitting to his chest, her thighs suddenly grazing his. Like a banked fire that suddenly burst into flame, he felt every muscle clench in response to her closeness. Control slipped.

“Mitch?” she murmured. Eyes closed, she savored the nuzzling of his mouth on her throat, the lush sensations of his hand rubbing up and down her back. She kneaded his rough wool sweater at his shoulders, guessing at the smooth, warm skin that would be beneath it, feeling the powerful muscles tense beneath her hands. It wasn’t enough.

Her hands slipped down to his waist and slowly skimmed up again inside the sweater, her fingers delighting in the first contact with his skin. It was like hot satin under her fingers as they splayed on his flat stomach. Her palms crept up just a little farther, but before they reached his chest Mitch swiftly stole her hands and swung them around his neck.

Her lashes lifted. She found herself staring up into an incredibly dark pairs of eyes, brilliant-dark with desire…but there was something else. Something beyond those rapid-fire kisses he suddenly pressed on her mouth, one after the other.

“Kay?”

“Hmm?”

“What other plants do you grow?”

Her hands stilled. “Pardon?”

“What other plants?”

He was crazy. “Ivy. Philodendron. But it’s only the fig tree I get violent about.” She felt his forefinger very gently trace her profile, from forehead to nose, down to the exact shape of her lips. Yet when his mouth once more hovered over hers, she said gently, “What’s wrong? A minute ago, you-”

“Nothing.” But the kiss didn’t happen. He just looked at her, and then away, his hand smoothing her hair over and over, his touch as whimsically elusive as the kiss of a butterfly. “There’s a scar on my chest,” he said quietly. “A large one.”

So that was the reason he’d so brusquely pulled back. “It hurts you?”

“No. But you might not have wanted to…”

Touch it? “Fool, Mitch,” she whispered fiercely, almost angrily. Questions about what had happened to him burst in her head; she ignored them. Not now. Now it didn’t matter.

She raised herself up, kneeling over him, ignoring his sudden harsh breath. As her fingers pushed up his sweater, her lips teased kisses on a straight line up from his navel. She felt the odd smooth skin of the scar that started between his ribs. She couldn’t see it in the semidarkness; she didn’t need to see it. Her lips pressed the length of that soft blade of a scar, right over his heartbeat…and that heart of his turned wild for her lips, a fierce pulse that leaped at the stroke of her tongue.

His hands slid under her arms, lifting her, pushing her back down on the carpet. More control was slipping. His loins were on fire, aching with the need to make love to her, and the rush of heat in his bloodstream kept surging faster. The flood rose higher until the dam was ready to burst. The touch of her lips on his bare skin was too explosive; he couldn’t handle it. A stark feeling of inadequacy jammed him in the stomach, a fear he wouldn’t be lover enough, a fear he’d never be able to satisfy this richly giving woman. He had to stop.

Yet she murmured a fierce yes when his mouth found hers again. He couldn’t deny himself one last kiss. He couldn’t stop his hands from slipping down her back to mold her bottom, cradling her to the aching heat of his arousal.

“Mitch?” She was suddenly feverish, her whole body aching. The smell of him surrounded her, warm and male. A rampant drug seemed to have taken hold of her body and left it trembling. Mitch was the name of that drug. She’d known the first minute she’d laid eyes on him that touch would be different with him…but not that she would feel borne away to some place where she didn’t give a damn if it was too soon, or if it was right, or if it made sense to crave his loving with such abandon.

His palm curled over her breast, cradling the orb through her sweater, rubbing and kneading it until she thought she’d go mad. He was a sorcerer, a magic man. He touched her as if she were precious. He touched her as if he wanted to ingrain desire in her flesh. He touched her as if every response she gave were a delight he wanted to give back tenfold.

And to her shock, she was deprived of that touch abruptly. Her eyes flickered open, startled to see his face hovering above her. His brow was dotted with moisture. His breath was coming unevenly and he looked like a man suffering torment.

In contrast, she’d never heard a more gentle voice. “When,” he murmured firmly, “was the last time you played football?”

***

“Touchdown!” Kay shouted gleefully. “I did it again!”

Her voice echoed in the empty stadium. Bleachers stood hollow, sucking in the moonlight, while the long grassy playing field lay shrouded in darkness.

Mitch’s eyes gleamed at her, dancing with amusement. “So let’s see if you can throw it this time.”

“I threw it last time.”

“A foot and a half.”

They had flung their coats in the grass somewhere. It had to be past midnight, and although it had stopped snowing, the temperature was at least freezing, yet Kay was hot as a firecracker from running so hard. Exuberantly, she whipped back her hair, planted her feet just so, grabbed the football firmly and wiggled her rear end.

“You’re not supposed to be pitching, you crazy fool. You’re trying to throw a football.”

She hurled the football. It landed behind her. “Just wait a minute,” she shouted, and got ready to throw again. This time she threw the ball at least ten feet; Mitch naturally caught it, damn him, but then he had to get past her.

He was fast, but he was also a big lug. Something in the way she moved inevitably seemed to make him laugh, and that slowed him down considerably. In seconds, she’d touched him. In seconds, he was flinging the ball toward her again.

She caught it and feinted left. So did he. She darted right. So did he. She stopped dead, staring with open mouth up into the empty bleachers. “Good heavens, what is that?” she hissed.

He glanced back. She whirled past him, bounced the ball on their makeshift goal and shouted, “Touchdown!” She added demurely, “My thirteenth. I thought you said you could play this game.”

“Come over here!” he roared.

She cocked her head, grinning at him. “Give me one good reason why I should risk getting within a mile of you.”

“You’re terrified of me,” he said smugly.

“You bet your sweet booties I am.” She darted backward, holding out a hand defensively when she saw two determined eyes closing in on her. “Now, just take it easy-take it easy, Mitch.”

They were playing touch, not tackle. He tackled, at the ten-yard line. He not only tackled but tickled, and when she was gasping for breath he kissed her, gathering her up like so much putty, twisting her so that his was the body against the cold, damp grass. Her mattress was the long, strong length of him. Her lips matched his in tenderness, in sharing, in a precious promise of intimacy that locked the breath in her lungs, silenced her laughter.

She stared at him, wanting him in a way she had never understood wanting before. His liquid eyes were haunted with desire.

A moment later, he was tugging her up, dusting off the seat of her pants, scolding her. “Of all the stupid ideas, and in the middle of the night. If you catch cold, I swear I’ll-” He went off for her coat while she stood there. When he came back, she was still silent. He put the coat on her, buttoning it up meticulously, turning up the collar, pulling her hat on her head. “Don’t you catch cold,” he growled.

He was so beautiful. His dark hair and dark eyes and the way he moved, his breadth of shoulder and lean, taut thighs and the soul of him, so rich when he opened up. Humor, gentleness, the tender, special touch of his hands… She didn’t know all of his mysteries yet, but she trusted him all the same. It wasn’t sane, but it was instinctive. This man she could love.

“Mitch?”

His fingertip traced the tremble of his name on her lips. He traced it once, then a second time, then roughly started shoving her hair under her hat. “This time,” he murmured, “you’re going home. You don’t even know me, dark eyes.”

“Whose fault is that?” Kay said softly.

Mitch hesitated, and then offered a very slow smile. “Mine?”

Kay planted her hands on her hips. “You’re getting smarter, handsome. I’ll give you that.”

Chapter Seven

Kay tapped her foot in front of her open closet door. “Appear, ravishing outfit,” she commanded.

At least a dozen skirts and dresses mutely confronted her. Nothing was strictly wrong with any of them. At least nothing had seemed wrong with them yesterday.

Mitch had said it was to be a business dinner. With a man they would pick up at the Spokane airport. Stanley Hemerling. They would meet his flight, wine him and dine him, and put him back on the 10:45 plane to Los Angeles.

Very odd.

But she’d jumped at the chance to learn more about Mitch, to be included in his life. The only problem was what to wear. Formal? Casual? Was she supposed to impress or understate? Exactly what do you wear for two men who collect rocks for a living?

Rocks, she muttered dourly. Something was rotten in Denmark. But what can you expect from a man who interrupts an incredibly successful seduction to play football?

She tugged a violet-striped shirtdress from the closet, studied it and shoved it abruptly back in place. Boring. The red frock was dressy enough, but didn’t seem appropriate. Black made her skin look like a washed-out dust cloth; she hated the thing. The pink was just a little on the bright side.

At 6:25, she rapidly tugged on an Oriental number her mother had given her the Christmas before. Her mother had the same love for wild colors that Kay did. The dress was a blend of violets and pinks and orchids, with black piping at the mandarin collar and long sleeves. Viewing her image in the mirror, she grimaced. Conservative it wasn’t. Actually, expensive it wasn’t either; she just loved the crazy dress.

In the four minutes she had left to put on makeup, she played up her eyes with shadow and mascara. She was about to swing her hair up in a coil when the doorbell rang.

In the next life, of course, she was going to be punctual. She slipped on black heels as she pumped the perfume atomizer at her throat and wrists, and with a hairbrush in her hand raced for the door.

She took one look at Mitch and muttered a despairing “oh, God” before racing back to the bedroom.

“I know. We’re meeting a plane,” she called back. “Just give me five minutes, Mitch, no more, I promise-”

Thoroughly rattled, she fumbled with the frogs at the front of her dress while simultaneously glancing through her closet again. Oriental would not do. The dress slipped to the floor, ignored, as she fumbled with hangers.

“What on earth are you doing?”

Kay ducked instantly behind the closet door, still fumbling with hangers. When she had tugged on a black knit skirt, she ventured a quick glance around the door. Mitch was still standing there, looking totally intimidating in a stark navy Savile Row suit-he’d never bought that in Moscow-and a crisply starched white linen Oxford shirt.

The dark suit and his dark coloring brought out the dramatic intensity of his looks, but it wasn’t that. She could suddenly picture him in a boardroom, quelling people with a look, commanding respect with total authority. Nice, she thought wryly. Why did she keep telling herself he needed someone to pull him out of his shell? The man dripped assurance.

The only thing familiar about him at all was his eyes. They looked exceedingly wicked, and very familiar.

“Could you at least give me a small hint why you’re changing a perfectly good dress at this particular time?”

She could hear the distinct note of Patient Male in his voice. Ducking her head back inside the closet, she burrowed into the black knit top. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“I can’t hear you.”

She finished tugging the top over her head and peered over at him with a sudden grin. Men could occasionally be ridiculously stupid. There was no point explaining that if he was dressed in a five-hundred-dollar suit, she could hardly pair up with him looking as if she’d just stepped out of a bargain basement. “Since you’re here you can make yourself useful.” She backed up.

He zipped. And then he watched her rapidly fuss with her hair, piling it all up into some kind of topknot. Her cheeks were flushed; he understood that she was embarrassed because he was in her bedroom while she was dressing, but he couldn’t move.

He stared at her, mesmerized. The black outfit was classically styled, and the knit clung faithfully to her figure, and he recognized the rope of pearls she slipped around her neck as very old and very good, probably an heirloom. She’d achieved the sophistication she had apparently been aiming for. And Mitch was fascinated with watching the transformation, the way she fussed with bottles and brushes and riffled through the tiny jewelry box on her bureau.

She was beautiful…but black was not her color, and he knew instinctively that she wasn’t going to be his Kay for the entire evening. Her eyes were overbright, and when she confronted him in the doorway with the finished product, her posture was a little stiff-not at all Kay. And her hands didn’t quite know what to do with themselves.

That hint of vulnerability was supposed to be hidden under the sophisticated veneer. Kay wanted him to see her as a woman he would be proud to have on his arm, a woman he could easily take to a business dinner. Popcorn and football games and fire towers were fine, but she was a long way from childhood and so was he.

“You look beautiful,” he told her.

She relaxed, a little. “This is better, isn’t it?” she asked, but the question was rhetorical.

“There was absolutely nothing wrong with the dress you had on,” he told her.

She flicked imaginary lint from his shoulder and inhaled the faint scent of his aftershave. “It wasn’t right. I could tell the minute you walked in the door.”

“Kay, there’s no need to worry about this dinner. If I’d thought you’d be nervous, I would have told you-”

“I’m not in the least nervous,” she assured him instantly.

“You’re in an argumentative mood,” he murmured dryly.

“I am not.”

Mitch chuckled, steering her out of the bedroom. “Have I really caused all this trouble simply by showing up at your door in a suit? Most men do own suits, you know.”

Most men owned suits, but they didn’t look as sexy as he did in them. On the way to the airport she was aware that Mitch was making an effort to relax her, and thought wryly that the shoe was definitely on the other foot tonight. Up till now, she was the one who had made massive efforts to help him feel comfortable.

Not being the nervous type, she wasn’t exactly sure why she was all but trembling with nerves. The well was deeper than she’d thought; that was part of it. Mitch was not a simple man. And his wealth and assurance suddenly stood out like neon lights in darkness; she wasn’t at all sure what was expected of her at this dinner.

It didn’t help when he suddenly reached behind him to the backseat and brought up a small white box. Dropping it in her lap, he took his eyes off the road only long enough to wink at her. “Present,” he said lightly.

Her fingers opened the white tissue paper, while Mitch reached up to switch on the car’s overhead light. Giving him a startled glance, she gently fingered the exquisite carving. It was a fig tree, five inches high, its leaves delicately sculpted in green glass. Even in that odd light, the tiny ornament had so much brilliance that the plant almost seemed alive.

“You can overwater that one to your heart’s content and it still won’t die on you,” he remarked. He glanced over at her. “Good Lord, Kay, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s absolutely beautiful.”

Tears trembled in her eyes. She reached over to give him a swift hug, but when she tried to move back, his arm tightened around her shoulder. She felt the brush of his lips in her hair. “Aren’t you silly?” he whispered.

“I don’t cry in a real crisis, you know. When the chips are down, I remain cool and levelheaded. I just have this problem, with weddings, and old movies-”

“And presents.”

“It’s ridiculous, and embarrassing.”

“It is not,” he denied.

She glanced up at him, her lips curving in a smile. “You’re in an argumentative mood, aren’t you?”

“I am not.”

They both chuckled, and ended up laughing the rest of the drive and afterward, even during the tedious hour they waited for the late plane, carrying paper cups of cold coffee as they wandered around the Spokane airport. “When are you going to tell me what kind of business dinner this is?” Kay asked wryly. “I mean, do you do this often? Pick up people at an airport, take them to dinner and then just send them back on a plane again?”

“Not often, exactly.” Mitch cleared his throat suddenly. “Hemerling,” he admitted, “is a character. Actually, he’s sort of a fly-by-night crook.”

“What?”

“A legal crook,” Mitch corrected himself promptly, and shot her a sidelong glance. “And if you don’t enjoy this dinner, I’m going to be disappointed. The first hour will be boring for you, Kay, but the rest…”

The loudspeaker announced the arrival of the flight they were waiting for. Kay watched the passengers deplane, expecting…what? Someone who looked like Mitch?

When the palm at her back urged her forward to greet Stan Hemerling, she nearly gaped at the man whose hand was stretched out to hers. Stan was short, with stiff gray hair and slits for eyes. His suit was rumpled, and he clutched a worn briefcase under his arm as if it held gold. His eyes shifted everywhere, lighting once with masculine appraisal on Kay-she stiffened furiously-before blinking at everyone else in sight. He resembled a gangster in a B movie.

This was the kind of man Mitch did business with?

***

Kay rearranged her coffee cup for the seventh time. When the handle on the cup was perfectly aligned with the spoon, she glanced up on the off chance that she would catch Mitch looking her way.

Their eyes didn’t meet, which was definitely good news for Mitch. Sooner or later he’d have to give in, and when he did, she was going to murder him. Nothing fancy, no thrown knives or judo chops. Lethal eye darts were all she had in mind.

“So, like I was telling you, Kay,” Stan said earnestly, “half the people live underground in sandy-clay houses. It’s the only way they can bear the heat. There isn’t a tree for hundreds of miles, and men have made fortunes selling drinking water-it’s that hard to come by.”

“Fascinating,” Kay murmured. “Southwestern Australia, you said?”

“Coober Pedy,” Stan clarified.

The waitress stopped to refill their coffee cups, which would have been the ideal time for Kay to catch Mitch’s attention. If Stan hadn’t been beaming at her.

“A dust storm’ll howl for days in that part of the world, it will,” he told her. “Dust’ll rise up to fifteen thousand feet. You can’t see sky nor anything in front of you. When it’s all over, the whole town looks like it’s covered in ash.” Stan leaned back, rubbing his slightly protuberant belly as he picked up his coffee cup again. Kay had long since erased the gangster image. Stan’s rather sleazy appearance was only the result of living on a plane for three days. That he liked to clutch his briefcase-well, to each his own. And as for the slitted eyes-it wasn’t his fault he was born looking shifty. “And the temperatures-Lord, the temperatures at the height of the season’ll reach a hundred and thirty, day after day, and a man’ll work for months in that sun for nothing more than a promise of potch.”

“Potch?” Kay questioned.

Stan glanced at her with surprise. “The common stuff. No fire.”

“Ah.” She nodded. It would be nice if she had the least idea what he was talking about.

Stan hadn’t said so much as two words until Kay had asked him where he was from. He hadn’t shut up since.

Mitch had greeted the man with a firm handshake and introduced him to Kay. From then on, aside from ordering dinner from wine through dessert, Mitch had said very little. Twice she’d caught an amused half smile on his face, but there was no smile in his eyes for his colleague-or whatever Stan Hemerling was.

And while Stan had more moves than a nervous cat, Mitch remained totally laid back and relaxed.

Kay was as strung up as barbed wire. What was his business? What was going on here?

“We’ve been working together going on five years now, I’d say, right, Mitch?”

“Around that.”

“Really-” Stan turned again to Kay with another of his off-center smiles “-we’ve been more friends than business partners. His father brought me home one time to…uh…liven up Mitch’s life, and I sure enough did that. Took him for a ride on one flawed stone, but after that I taught him everything I knew and then some. Mitch took a while to forget that feathered culet, though, didn’t you, Mitch?”

Mitch smiled. “There’s nothing you taught me that I’ve forgotten,” he said dryly.

After the third cup of coffee, Stan rose with polite excuses and headed for the men’s room. Kay whirled in her chair with lips parted, prepared to cannon out four thousand questions, when Mitch said a quietly appreciative thank-you.

So much for the wind in her sails. As if she hadn’t just listened to an hour of incessant prattling on a subject she couldn’t fathom, she felt a soft quiet steal over her. Mitch’s eyes were warm. And as provocatively intimate as naked skin. Mitch gave her the feeling he could see through to bare flesh, at will. Like now.

“I thought you’d like the stories about Australia,” Mitch said quietly, “but I’d forgotten the way he takes for granted that everyone’s in the business. I’ll fill you in on the lingo later, Kay-but right now I just want to tell you I appreciate your patience with him. Not that I don’t like the old devil myself. But I find it almost impossible to concentrate, with his incessant talking, and a few minutes from now I’ll need every ounce of concentration I can beg, borrow or steal.” Mitch signed the check, handed it to the waitress and rose. “I’ll be a bit disappointed if he didn’t at least whet your curiosity,” he murmured as he steered her through the crowded restaurant lobby to the motel entrance.

She simply tossed Mitch a glance, as Stan ambled back into view. Why on earth should she be curious? Simply because a man flew in from a few thousand miles away just to have dinner? Simply because that same man rambled on about Cooper Pedy and potch and feathered culets as if such things should be familiar to her? Simply because the man didn’t seem to have two figs in common with Mitch? Simply because the men were now getting a key to a motel room?

“In for a dime, in for a dollar,” Kay muttered darkly as she felt Mitch’s palm at the small of her back, leading her inexorably toward room 114. Even the number had a sinister sound.

“Same room as last time,” Stan mentioned, as if that thoroughly satisfied him.

Kay smiled happily.

She continued to smile happily as Mitch opened the door to a bedroom, done tastefully in blues and greens. When the three of them were inside, Stan closed the drapes while Mitch locked the dead bolt. Kay couldn’t think of anything equally clever to do. She set down her purse. That took less than half a second. Not that she felt uncomfortable because the double bed took up eighty percent of the available space, but she just wasn’t used to business meetings in these particular surroundings. Now, with just Mitch alone, she might not have minded.

By the time she turned around, the standard motel desk was covered with a white velvet cloth. Mitch was unplugging a lamp and carting it over to double the lighting. Fumbling with the key to his case, Stan produced a small, collapsible ultraviolet light. A microscope appeared from nowhere.

Kay sat on the edge of the bed, not wanting to get in anyone’s way. Lascivious ideas obviously had no future here. The two men were rattling off terms like “cabochons” and “crystallized fossils” and “floaters,” and suddenly nobody was smiling. Stan’s face closed up tighter than a vain woman’s girdle. “I’ve got the best stuff you’ve ever seen,” he told Mitch gruffly. “But I never told you it’d be cheap.”

“I knew you didn’t come all this way to sell tiddlywinks.” Mitch took the desk chair and removed a small cylindrical magnifying glass from his jacket pocket, fitting it to his eye. “Kay?”

She sidled up behind him, still worried about being in the way. The bag came out of the zippered inside pocket of Stan’s case, and when he carefully emptied its contents onto the white velvet cloth, she no longer had time to worry about being in the way because she was too busy having heart failure.

Mitch started talking in low quiet tones, his words obviously meant just for her. “None of that jargon you heard during dinner could have made any sense to you, but now you’ll see what we were talking about, sweet. Opals are valued in terms of their fire-that is, the brilliance of the stone. A ‘potch’ is an opal too bland in color to be worth anything. A feather is a crack in the stone, a flaw. Cabochon is the facetless cut you use on stones when you want a smooth convex surface. Diamonds are never cut that way. Opals almost always…”

Kay certainly hoped Mitch wasn’t expecting her to hear a word he was saying.

There was only a handful of “stones” spread out on the table. Seven in all. Two of the opals were as big as a baby’s fist and had a milky, translucent background. The others were black opals, and prisms of color burst from their base of dark smoke.

The whole table seemed aglow. Rainbow crystals danced under the special light; the stone Mitch picked up to show her radiated a mesmerizing vibrancy from its center, as if light and brilliance were darting around within it.

Stan said something. Mitch didn’t answer him; he was staring at Kay, studying her response to the jewels with the most enigmatic expression. His features were statue-still, watchful. Worried?

Completely bemused, Kay opened her mouth to say something, but instantly forgot it. Shock was setting in, and for the next hour total silence reigned in the room. A fortune was clearly displayed on the white velvet cloth. Mitch appeared used to evaluating fortunes. And he turned to Stan only once, to hand him a stone.

Stan abruptly flushed. “I saw the flaw,” he said gruffly. “The stone will be good, though, if it’s cut right. You know that as well as I do.”

Mitch said absolutely nothing, but Kay could have made Popsicles in the coolness of his stare. Was this her big, gentle man, with his so-well-hidden shy side? The one who defined tenderness every time he touched her? She had expected to get to know him better tonight; instead, he was now more a mystery to her than ever.

Chapter Eight

By ten thirty, Stan was aboard his plane, his bag five stones lighter. Walking a half step ahead of Mitch, her arms wrapped around her chest against the freezing cold, Kay stared straight ahead as they made their way through the silent parking lot to Mitch’s car.

She hadn’t said a word since Stan had left, and didn’t intend to.

“Hemerling shows up about twice a year,” Mitch said from behind her, breaking the silence. “I don’t want you to think he’s typical of my business associates, Kay. Australian opals are the best, and if he’s half crook, he’s also one of the best stone peddlers around.”

Still she said nothing, waiting while he opened the car door so she could slide inside. Moments later, he stuck the key in the ignition, started the engine and sent her a sidelong glance. “You’re emitting a few frigid vibrations, honey,” he remarked.

“You’re one smart man,” Kay acknowledged.

Mitch paused, giving her an inscrutable look. “You’re not impressed with my line of work?”

“I wouldn’t care if you were a ditch digger,” she said, flatly.

“Then…?” His car was already swallowing up the miles. When she made no response, Mitch started talking again, his voice quiet and low, almost coaxing. “They’re fascinating, you know, some of the legends and superstitions about gems. In the old times, a man would wear a sapphire for wisdom, but he’d never give one to his lady for fear she’d turn into a jealous witch. And he’d wear a ruby himself, as a sign of nobility and authority, but for his woman he’d always choose a garnet. On her, the ruby symbolized stubbornness, whereas the garnet would guarantee her loyalty.”

He glanced at Kay, and when she still said nothing, he kept on talking. “The opal’s acquired a bad name in the last few centuries, but for thousands of years people believed it increased the powers of the mind. No other ‘lucky stone’ has more powers than the black opal-or so the stories say. Probably more men have been killed for that luck than for any of the more famous diamonds. Kay.”

She jammed her hands in her pockets, staring straight ahead.

“Talk to me,” he said quietly.

“Did you think I would care? About what you did?” she asked in a low voice. “Is that why you didn’t tell me ahead of time about your work?”

A perplexed frown creased his forehead. “It wasn’t anything like that. Hemerling’s such a character that I thought you would enjoy him…”

“I did. And you can get off it, Mitch. You and I just aren’t going to play games with each other. Collecting stones, was it? Why didn’t you simply tell me what you did for a living?”

His right eyebrow arched. “Kay, that’s not what…” He hesitated, and then continued in flat tones, “Honey, if you want to know what I do, I deal-in garnets and opals, and occasionally other stones. I don’t work with jewelry-my interest is in investment, and since the recession, investing in precious and semiprecious stones has become an increasingly viable enterprise. It started as a…quiet hobby, but it became a way to earn a decent living. Also, six months ago, I took an additional job with the university.”

“Doing…?”

“Working to protect the mineral resources we have in this state. Opals, for instance, are often found in the same area as gold and silver, yet the mining process destroys the more fragile opal…”

Very gradually, the words stopped rushing out in a flood and started to flow in an endless stream. Kay’s lips curved in a secret smile. He cared, very much, about his work. He was clearly an expert in his field; he clearly loved what he did; and she loved watching him when that wall of reserve was down.

“I’m talking too much,” he said abruptly, as if stunned at the thought.

She chuckled. “No, you’re not, you foolish man. I could listen to you all night-though I have yet to understand why you didn’t tell me all this before.”

“It was hardly a secret,” he said wryly. “The subject just never came up before.”

Kay shook her head, and Mitch shot her a glance laced with both exasperation and humor before his jaw clamped shut for a minute. How could he explain that he was carefully trying to feel his way into a kind of relationship he’d never had before, that her respect mattered to him, that exposing each new layer of his life to her left him with a raw feeling of vulnerability that he had a hard time coping with?

Finally, he admitted roughly, “Maybe I deliberately didn’t talk about it. The people in your life do normal things, Kay. They work at normal jobs, live normal lives. Maybe I just wasn’t sure how you’d react if I suddenly proved…”

“Weird?” she supplied smoothly.

He cast her a quick look before turning his eyes to the road. After a time, he mumbled, “Why is it that I find you so comforting to have around?”

She laughed, and then so did he. In less than an hour, he pulled up to her house, but she shook her head when he reached for the key. “We’re heading for your house, not mine,” she informed him. “And don’t get any happy ideas that you’re about to be vamped. I just want to see your place-before you spring any more surprises on me.”

***

Mitch’s house was itself another surprise. The outside was intriguing by lamplight, all gray stone and mullioned windows, with a castlelike octagonal turret on the west side. Inside, the foyer was flanked by narrow stained-glass windows.

As Mitch took her coat, he asked, “Do you want some coffee?”

“No, thanks.” Kay kicked off her shoes at the door, and on stockinged feet started exploring. To the left of the foyer was a living room with a beamed cathedral ceiling that took her breath away. Hardwood floors led to French doors at the far end; a stone fireplace climbed one entire wall. There was wood piled on the hearth, and a huge pillow on the bare floor told her that Mitch enjoyed a fire…even if he didn’t have a stick of furniture in the place yet.

“You must want some coffee. Or brandy,” Mitch suggested, trailing behind her.

“No, honestly, Mitch,” she told him absently. The living room, which smelled of fresh paint, was absolutely magnificent and really didn’t need a stick of furniture. Reluctantly, she left it to start roaming again. The dining room must have been an afterthought; its three glass walls protruded into the backyard. On the other side of the house was a sort of family room, with wild cherry wainscoting. Then there was the smell of fresh paint again. Cream-colored paint.

“I should have warned you,” Mitch rumbled wryly from behind her. “I only bought the house a few months ago, and it needed renovating from the bottom up. I’m afraid plumbing took precedence over lamps and chairs.”

She glanced back. He removed his suit jacket, tossed his tie aside and unbuttoned his shirt. In spite of the change to informality, he still exuded an aura of self-possessed control…and her most protective instincts still surged up at the sight of him, which was ridiculous. There wasn’t any reason to think he was either uncomfortable or unsure-beyond the very tiny hint of winsome appeal in his eyes.

“Admit it,” she said gravely. “You’re just petrified at the thought of shopping for furniture.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it abruptly. “I’d rather go to the dentist,” he admitted.

“The bigger the man, the harder he shakes in a department store,” she murmured teasingly. “I think it’s a deficiency in the genes.”

“I’ll deficiency you, woman!”

But Kay darted out of reach, opening the door to a library-or an empty room with the potential of becoming a library. The gleaming teak shelves were all empty. Bay windows were begging for curtains. It took a moment before she noticed another door set into the paneling.

When she opened it, she found an octagonal turret room, its surrounding windows covered with sheets instead of curtains, making her smile again.

“If you don’t wipe that grin off your face, Sanders…”

But for a moment she was too busy looking at the room to tease him back. One long table was covered in white leather. Another held scales and a microscope, an assortment of special lamps and the kind of magnifying glasses she’d seen him use earlier in the evening. “Your workroom?”

He nodded.

She fingered the smooth white leather. “You’ve worked with stones for a long time, haven’t you?”

“When I was five, my grandfather figured I’d want a two-wheeler, but I didn’t. Instead, I wanted the deed to his abandoned gold mine. The family all thought it was pretty funny, but I got my deed. Luckily, the mine had no gold-if it had, I would never have found the opals. As I said before, they’re usually destroyed in the process of mining. Gold dust might be worth a ton, but opal dust is worth zilch. I don’t know why my grandfather even bought the mine-timber’s the family business. No one ever really cared about anything else.”

“How old were you when you got seriously interested?” She wandered out of his special room, down a hall toward the kitchen. That room was complete, delightfully so. A skylight hung over the eating area; oak cabinets blended with an old-fashioned pegged oak floor; a small corner fireplace stood near the eating nook.

“About…sixteen.”

“You started buying and selling opals at sixteen? Or mining them?”

He shook his head. “I started reading about the subject then. My father was the one who explored the old mine for me and revved up my interest. One day he plopped a four-carat star garnet in my lap and told me there was a slim chance I could make a fortune-if I had the guts. He brought people to the house. Miners, prospectors, collectors. To talk to me. And then he dropped it.”

“You mean he tried to discourage you all of a sudden?” Kay wandered back into the hall. Mitch gave her a wry glance as he hit the light switch, illuminating the stairs.

“I take it you’re not going to be content just checking out the ground floor, nosy.”

“Oh, hush. So then what happened?” she demanded, as she mounted the stairs, her palm on the hand-carved banister.

“Then, nothing. I had to learn. A lot. My father gave me an initial stake in garnets…and then watched me make a fool of myself.” He didn’t add that the challenge of making a fortune had affirmed his will to survive just when he’d decided he’d rather be dead than exist as a semi-invalid. His father had simply dropped the challenge in his lap-here was something he could do, something that took more mental than physical prowess, something he could master with endless study and a telephone and the right kind of teachers. And time.

“What are you leaving out, Mitch?” Kay asked softly. She’d turned in the upstairs hallway, mystified by the intensely brooding look on Mitch’s face.

As an answer, he moved toward her, tilted her chin up with his hand and lowered his soft, cool lips to hers. His eyes met hers only for a moment, long enough for Kay to remember that this was a man who could only be pushed so far.

And then he was walking past her, flicking on light switches so she could view the two bedrooms and adjoining baths, none of which interested her any longer. The house told her only so much about him; none of it explained the long, smooth scar on his chest or that streak of white in his dark hair.

“Mitch…”

“As you must have figured out, I had to have someplace to crash beyond the bare floors downstairs. This has served well enough.” Mitch turned with a wry smile as they entered his bedroom. “Though I have to admit, one’s bedroom isn’t the standard place to entertain visitors.”

The room looked like an excellent place to entertain visitors, Kay thought with a rare jealous streak. A couch and easy chair sat in their own private alcove; a luxuriously huge bed in another. The motif was Chinese, austere prints with a perfection of line, a richly lacquered chest, a pair of oriental carpets that felt like sponge beneath her feet. Mitch flipped on two lamps, and their muted glow shone softly on the richness of comfort and privacy he so clearly valued. A frantic thought occurred to her, and she raised startled eyes to his.

“Mitch-”

“You like the house?”

“I love the house. Listen. About that fig tree you gave me…?”

“I knew you’d love it, you know.” His forefinger swept back a strand of hair that had curled around her cheek. In contrast to that most tender gesture, every muscle in his body was totally rigid. He knew he shouldn’t have brought her here. She’d used some kind of perfume that had continually drifted toward him all evening. He’d watched her laughing with Hemerling; he’d watched the way she cupped a fist under her chin when she was listening intently; he’d watched her eyes come alive with humor and the way she tossed her head when she was irritated. And he’d so carefully not touched her.

“I thought it was glass,” she said hesitantly. “Mitch, it never occurred to me…”

The scent of her was such a drug. The more he tried to shake it, the stronger his addiction grew. He bent down, nuzzling his cheek into her hair, pressing his lips just behind the small shell of her ear.

“Are you listening to me?” Kay asked wryly. “Mitch…”

“I haven’t been this hungry for neck since I can remember,” he murmured.

Her stiffness dissolved in instant laughter. She swung her arms around his neck but leaned deliberately back from his marauding lips, trying to fix him with a quelling glance. “I want to talk about fig trees. Five-inch-high fig trees.”

“Okay,” he agreed. He sank down on the couch, taking her with him, swinging her legs over his thighs, leaning her back against the couch cushions. She had a terrible frown on her forehead; he leaned over her to kiss it away. Then he had a terrible frown. With that crazy knot she’d put in her hair, there had to be a dozen hairpins sticking into her.

“You’re not listening. Mitch, what do you think you’re doing?” She shoved away his busy hand, the one so full of hairpins. “It isn’t…valuable?”

“The fig tree?” He found the last pin, dropped them all next to the couch and combed his fingers through her hair until the strands lay smooth and silky around her face. Finally, after far too many hours, she was Kay again. Like a soft, insistent whisper, his mouth brushed hers.

And a long, low drum roll sounded at the back of his head, like a warning. He tried to banish it. When you sign up for the big leagues, you’re expected to play ball. There was nothing strictly wrong with that; he definitely wanted to play ball. And he knew damn well he was overly worried about high standards of performance, but if he got enough practice in, there was just a slim chance she wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a seasoned player and the greenest rookie.

Halfheartedly she tried to escape from his kisses. “Mitch. I can’t possibly accept something with that kind of valu-”

His lips stilled her protest. His palm slipped inside her black top, finding the satin flesh over her ribs; he savored her quick intake of breath. She actually wanted him to touch her. She actually loved his gentle kneading on her breast; he could feel the soft orb tremble and then swell in his hand, its tip hardening.

He moved slowly, searching for the least sign that she wanted him to stop. He didn’t receive any signs. She murmured approvingly when his hand slipped behind her to find the catch of her bra.

A year later, he figured out it was the front-hooked kind. Damn it. At fifteen, the girls he’d known had all worn back hooks.

He managed, and without once interrupting the exchange of tongues going on in a completely different world. She gave pleasure so naturally, so sweetly. Her fingers had already unbuttoned his shirt, were splaying in the curling hair on his chest, climbing near his heart. His heartbeat was deliriously erratic. Once, that would have instantly aroused alarm bells; now, he only worried that she had it all wrong.

He didn’t want to take but to give. To offer as much pleasure as Kay would let him give. If the desire he felt was a torment of frustration, there was still the greater desire simply to love her for the woman she was. His hands moved slowly, testing, as his mouth started exploring the soft skin of her neck.

One way or another, he got her top off and flung it on the floor. He knew he should have hung it up or…whatever a man usually did when he was removing a woman’s clothes.

Except that her skin was so pliant in his hands… Her faint whimper of pleasure caused his thighs to tighten unbearably, his lips to turn boldly possessive. “I love your pleasure sounds,” he murmured. “More, sweetheart. More, Kay…”

Her spine arched for the touch of his hand on her breast, and in response his lips sealed, hard, on hers. When her legs curled up, he couldn’t help sweeping a palm up and down the length of her stockinged calf and thigh. His fingers strayed to the top of her stocking and discovered a lace-edged garter. A fierce, primal craving flooded his bloodstream. There was something irreversibly exciting about garters and stockings. At least about Kay in garters and stockings. And the thought of taking them off her…hell.

Trying to ignore the runaway images in his head, he concentrated on listening to those soft, abandoned murmurs of hers, on touching her in a way she clearly wanted.

She very clearly liked the soft lap of his tongue in the hollow of her throat. She liked the caress of his hand on her thigh; her breath caught at the slightest touch of her breasts…but she didn’t breathe at all when he rubbed her nipple with his thumb. Her whole body turned warm for him; her eyes turned dark, sleepy, intense with emotion.

And the only problem with wanting to please her was that he couldn’t take much more. Her hand dropped in his lap-he was certain she didn’t mean that the way it felt, but unfortunately there was hell to pay. A certain portion of his body was so swollen he was in pain.

“Mitch?”

He’d been waiting for that faint sign of hesitation, but it still hit him like a grenade. A shudder racked his whole body, but he regained control. With immeasurable tenderness, he simply wrapped his arms around her and held her close until his teeth were able to unclench and his heart at least tried to batter out a normal beat. He’d meant to say nothing at all, yet the hoarse voice was clearly his. “Stay here tonight, Kay,” he whispered. “Just…stay with me. Lie with me.”

Chapter Nine

“Yes,” Kay said breathlessly.

“I won’t push you into making love. I just want to wake up with you in the morning, that’s all.” He tilted her head back to see a strange play of emotions on her face. “I mean it. We’ll just sleep. I won’t-”

“All right, Mitch.” Her voice had all the solidity of Jell-O. Her bones, too. When he picked her up in his arms, she wound her hands around his neck, her eyes frantically searching his face as he carried her over to the bed.

Just sleep? Every square inch of her body suffered instant withdrawal symptoms. She’d been about to say please very nicely, and it certainly wasn’t to just sleep.

Kay was touched as well as startled. Touched that he was willing to be that sure of her feelings before they made love. An old-fashioned man was terribly hard to find. Someone who respected as well as wanted her, someone who wanted to love as well as be loved.

He slid back the spread and blankets and eased her onto the cool sheets with a soft, lingering kiss on her mouth. Looking down at her, his eyes were as dark as his black opals, with just as much latent fire. Leaning over her, he unbuttoned and then tugged off her skirt with a single glance up, as if to confirm that she didn’t object to the intimacy.

She didn’t. When he drew the covers over her, he kissed her again. “Give me a minute to get the lights,” he murmured.

She waited, feeling both bemused and bewildered. When she heard him downstairs, turning off lights, she slipped off her stockings and settled under the covers.

The wind had become a wintry howl. Mitch was back in short order. In the darkness, he removed his pants and shirt and then slid into the bed beside her. Most possessively, he tucked the thick comforter around her chin before deliberately shifting to his side of the bed.

Kay waited expectantly. She had the measure of exactly how aroused he’d been just a short time before; the man took fire at even the slightest touch, but in the most giving way. He was special, so damned special.

And he was going to reach for her; she knew he was. And when he did, she would certainly forgive him for his good intentions. The point was that he’d meant them honorably, and anyway, at the moment she wasn’t overflowing with good intentions herself. It had been a very long time since she’d really wanted someone. It had been forever since she’d wanted anyone as badly as she wanted Mitch.

But he didn’t reach for her. She could hear his breathing; he wasn’t asleep. In time, she edged toward him, and then a little closer, and then curled around him like a kitten. At first, he reacted with utter stillness, but then his arms wrapped around her and he drew her cheek to his chest. His heart thumped a staccato beat in her ear, making her half smile. Mitch was not going to find it all that easy just sleeping.

She didn’t expect to either, but she was so incredibly surrounded by warmth. Desire became a narcotic, the darkness like a lover’s curtain. Such total trust…she couldn’t remember feeling that with another human being. With a sigh, she closed her eyes.

***

Watching her sleep, Mitch was fascinated. Dawn was sending the faintest light in at the windows, a gray color tinged with dusty rose that just barely illuminated the room. Kay’s lashes curled up on her cheeks, like black velvet on cream.

She was a sprawler, he’d discovered. During the night, she’d kicked off the covers and then twined around him for warmth. Every time he covered her, she just kicked off the blankets and gravitated toward him again.

At the moment, she was wearing a black half-slip, scarlet bikini panties, and the comforter. The sheet had disappeared hours before. The last time he’d tugged the comforter around her chin, the slip was wound around her waist and her bare breasts were trying to nuzzle against him. If that wasn’t enough to deprive a man of rest, the feel of her long slim leg tucked between his…

He hadn’t slept much.

“Mitch?” Sleepily, Kay’s eyes opened to discover Mitch propped up on one elbow, his eyes inches from her own. She smiled groggily. “What on earth are you doing?”

“Watching you wake up,” he murmured.

“That’s no fun.”

“That’s how much you know.” It would be so easy to reach under the covers, to stroke that warm, silken skin as he’d stroked it in the night. So easy to take her… She stretched sleepily, like a wanton cat, her eyes moody with sleep and her smile unbearably seductive. Easy to make love to her?

His body informed him that it was criminal not to. His head knew exactly what body part went where. That aspect of it wasn’t a problem. It was doing it right, pleasing her, the fear he’d damn well rush like hell, hurt her, not love her well…not love her the way he wanted to. That he’d disappoint her…

So, his hand slipped over rather than under the covers, over the curl of her shoulder and into her hair. He leaned toward her, and his lips touched her forehead. It wasn’t a kiss, but a craving to know what her sleep-warmed skin felt like. “You need,” he murmured, “blueberry muffins.”

“Pardon?”

“Muffins.”

She shook her head. Surely, that look in his eye would lead to a caress-but he vaulted most determinedly out of bed.

She noted that he’d slept in a T-shirt and Jockey shorts-undoubtedly in deference to her virtue. Darn lucky for his virtue that he wasn’t still within arm’s reach. The Jockey shorts really didn’t fit very well in the condition he was in. But she probably wasn’t supposed to notice that-he’d turned away as quickly as he could.

Still, she noted with approval that he wasn’t overly self-conscious about his body. He certainly shouldn’t be. He had an honest ripple of muscle in his shoulders, a flat, taut stomach and hard, smooth legs. Also, a flat little fanny that made her smile. The man was pure male, built on neat, strong lines, just the one bulge exactly where it should be and the rest physically fit without making a big deal out of it. At the moment, she was inclined to make a big deal out of it, and wished he’d get back in bed.

“Mr. Cochran?”

He tugged on a velour robe, glancing up as he belted it. “You just stay right there. I’ll bring up some coffee and muffins.”

He brought back the coffee and muffins and watched her strew crumbs from one end of the bed to the other as she waved a muffin around while she talked. The pillows were plumped up behind her, and the comforter tucked under her arms provided only the barest protection for his sanity.

“I can’t believe you can make muffins like this!” she exclaimed. “Heavens, if I thought I could get breakfast in bed every morning, I’d marry you, Cochran.”

“It’s just amazing what a woman will say when she’s exhausted. And you certainly should be. You did calisthenics all night, kicking and thrashing around.”

Kay hastily swallowed. “Did I keep you up?” she asked guiltily.

“Once I had you pinned down so you couldn’t move, I slept just fine,” he lied.

“So you’re that kind, Cochran.” Kay nodded sagely

“That kind?”

Kay waved her hands expressively as she reached for another muffin. “Bondage,” she clarified.

“I should have thought of that last night,” Mitch said thoughtfully.

Kay chuckled. “I’ve been accused of being trouble to sleep with before.”

“Have you?”

“Don’t come to any dirty conclusions, Cochran. I shared a double bed with my little sister until she whined for my parents to get us twin beds.” She cocked her head, licking a smidgen of blueberry from her finger. “Was I really that much trouble?”

“I’m still alive,” he assured her, “but barely.” The only thing in his head was dirty conclusions. Other men who’d covered her up. Other men who’d had the right to. He reached over to flick a crumb from her chin, his touch so gentle she could barely feel it, his head filled with not so gentle thoughts about murdering any other man who touched her.

“Mitch.” She reached for a napkin, and the comforter slipped to reveal every damn curve. “You’re being remiss as host,” she said teasingly.

“Pardon?” He forced his eyes up.

“A spare toothbrush,” she suggested mildly. “A comb. A little soap. It’s going to be bad enough going home looking like a bag lady, with saggy hose and wrinkled outfit and straggly hair. But I have a sneaky feeling that there are mascara smudges under my eyes-”

“There are,” he affirmed. He liked them. Actually, he was fascinated by them. Her makeup had begun to wear off before they’d gone to bed; he’d been intrigued by that process in itself. The flawless matte finish had gradually eroded to reveal a trace of freckles across her nose. Obviously, she was sensitive about them. But he couldn’t imagine why she wore the mascara; her lashes were already thick and soft, and those tiny flickers of black on her cheeks somehow made her look incredibly vulnerable.

He loved waking up with her. She was natural and easy and woke up in good humor, ready to start a day she already knew would be good. How could it not be good? She was in it.

***

Kay loved waking up with him. She’d been afraid it would be uncomfortable, awkward. It could have been-with some men.

But not with Mitch. Sex or no sex, there was a delicious feeling of intimacy between them this morning. There was laughter when he draped his robe around her, and more laughter as he stood gravely in the bathroom doorway long enough to “find out whether you squeeze the toothpaste in the middle.”

The kitchen looked post-bomb-squad after his simple exercise of making muffins. Mitch seemed startled at the mess he’d made, and his expression made her laugh again. She puttered around, cleaning up, because she liked puttering in the morning, while Mitch glared at her over his coffee cup, because by that time in the morning he obviously liked his cup of coffee, but he didn’t like the idea of her cleaning up his mess.

She didn’t like the idea of going home. He didn’t like the idea either, but she didn’t realize that until they were in the car and he pinned her down at every stop sign for a kiss. The kisses were getting disgracefully long by the time they arrived at her door.

He claimed she tasted good, and that he was hungry. He hadn’t had any breakfast; she’d eaten all of the blueberry muffins.

She would have to serve him breakfast, lunch and dinner, if he’d come inside with her.

But he left her on the doorstep.

***

“Kay?” Stix gave the front door a token knock-once he’d opened it and was already inside.

Lying on the carpet with a book in her hand, Kay garbled an “over here!” through a mouthful of apple.

“I can’t see anything but your feet,” Stix said with amusement. Her bare feet were propped up on the sofa. When Stix peered around the couch, he just shook his head. “You can’t be comfortable.”

Kay chuckled. “I’ve been reading upside down ever since I was a little kid. I can’t break the habit now. Good morning, incidentally. You’re certainly up at a disastrously early hour-for you. Particularly on a Sunday morning.”

“I came to talk to you.” Tossing his jacket on a chair, Stix made his way to the kitchen. After a moment, Kay heard him making coffee and reflected that by the time Stix actually married, she would have him very well trained for domestic life.

In the meantime, she yawned and returned to her book. Last night the temperature had hovered around ten degrees, and when she’d awakened to a white December morning, laziness had hit her like a submarine. She’d roused herself long enough to make breakfast, build a terrific fire and grab a pillow and a book. Her jeans and crewneck sweater were old and baggy, ideal attire for a somnolent winter morning.

Engrossed in her book, she barely glanced up when Stix set the steaming coffee mug down beside her. “Did you know,” she asked him, “that if you wrap some catnip in a chamois and hold it in your hands until the catnip gets warm, the next man to hold your hand will fall in love with you?”

“Is this a quiz?” Stix eased himself down on the floor, his long legs taking up more space than her entire body. Pushing up the cover of her book, he read, “Modern Day Witchcraft. I see your reading’s taken a decidedly intellectual turn, shortie.”

“You want to hear another good one?”

“No.”

“You take five strands of the woman’s hair and three strands of the man’s hair and weave them together, then toss them into the fire. This causes the man and the woman to be consumed by passion for each other.”

Stix looked patient. “Could we at least give serious conversation a whirl?”

“Certainly.” Kay set the book on her chest with a grin. Propping a pillow behind her, she reached for the coffee mug and took a sip.

Stix leveled her a steadfast stare, then cracked his knuckles like a nervous adolescent. “You know, it’s only ten days until Christmas. Are you planning to spend it with your folks?”

“Nope. Mom and Dad are taking a cruise, leaving on the twenty-sixth. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“No, you didn’t. What about your sister?”

“Jana’s planning to go with them. As always, it depends on her health.” Kay’s eyes clouded. “She’s been doing terrific lately, but from month to month that changes. She wants so badly to take a full-time job, but I don’t know if she can handle it.”

“You didn’t tell me that, either.” There was a plaintive note in Stix’s voice that made Kay’s eyebrows arch in surprise. “You free this afternoon? I thought we’d do a little ice skating. John’s set up a rink-”

She shook her head. “Can’t, Stix, but thanks. Mitch is picking me up at three. We’re going to his parents’ house.”

“His parents?” Stix echoed.

“You know. The people who brought him into the world. It’s a fairly common, phenomenon-” Stix’s booted foot nudged her thigh, and she chuckled.

“That’s exactly what I came to talk to you about, dunce. The birds and the bees.”

“I’d rather read. I teach that stuff all week.” She grabbed her book and opened to the appropriate page again.

Stix got up long enough to seek out the Sunday paper in the wicker stand by the couch. Folding himself back down on the carpet next to her, he crackled the paper and promptly buried himself behind it. “He’s becoming a fixture around here. I thought I just might bring that to your attention.”

“Are we by any chance talking about Mitch?” Kay asked demurely.

Stix rattled his paper irritably. “Let’s see,” he drawled. “Last Monday I found you both curled up in front of the TV set watching a horror movie.”

“A thriller, not a horror movie,” Kay corrected absently. Mitch had repeatedly rooted for the villain. After which they’d walked the streets of Moscow in the dead of night. Even her navel had been frostbitten, she’d told him when they’d come home. He’d gravely inspected her navel, and thawed it out with his tongue. And then he’d left her, very gentleman-like.

“And last Tuesday you were out. Which of course doesn’t necessarily mean you were with-”

“We were looking for furniture for his place,” Kay said defensively. She hadn’t wanted to go. She’d explained patiently to Mitch that she had no taste. He’d dragged her to Spokane anyway, just in time to see the stores close. At least the restaurants were open, and he’d fed her oysters. A first for her. Their rumored aphrodisiac qualities had worked for him all the way home; he’d had to get off the highway twice to taste various parts of her body. And then he’d left her at her door, very gentleman-like.

“Wednesday, too?”

“Wednesday, too.” On Wednesday Mitch had convinced her he was honestly serious about needing at least a couch. They’d even made every effort to hit the stores while they were still open, but when it came to trying out couches they’d gotten sidetracked. Mitch had gotten sidetracked. Comfort for necking was not a serious criterion in purchasing couches, and after trying out at least a dozen, they’d returned home empty-handed… Well, Mitch wasn’t quite empty-handed. And to her total shock, he’d left her at her door, frustratingly gentleman-like.

“Thursday you took the entire neighborhood cheering section to hear him speak at-”

“The university.” He’d looked so grave standing at the lectern. Grave and dominating and…fascinating to listen to. Mitch had talked of the mineral resources that had been destroyed over the years as a result of careless mining-the supply of gems alone could be critical to Idaho’s future. They’d finished up that talk at one in the morning at her house, over mugs of Irish coffee, and after that he’d left her at the door, disgustingly gentleman-like.

“Friday you canceled the poker game. You were taking a drive-”

“To Hells Canyon.” An insane place to fool around in winter. She’d been so out of breath from climbing that she was gasping-who would guess he’d take her up on such a crazy idea anyway?-and then they’d both missed the winter sunset, because he’d gotten the harebrained idea he was going to chase her laughter. He’d chased her, all right. When he caught her, he’d pinned her down. And when they’d gotten home at midnight, he’d done his usual doorstep routine, which was becoming increasingly maddening.

“And that was only last week.” Stix flapped the sports section. “Now, this week-”

This week’s activities had begun on Monday night. The not very glamorous activity was making goodies for the school Christmas bake sale; why did she continually volunteer for these things? The entire place had been sticky before they were through, and Mitch had cornered her in the back hall…

“Mrs. O’Brien thinks it’s charming. She’s delighted with you. Susan grins whenever your name is mentioned. The boys are counting on an additional regular for the Friday-night poker games. Everyone thinks it’s terrific,” Stix said darkly. “I’d just like a guarantee that you’re not out of your tree.”

“Hmm?” Kay whirled around. How long had she been staring into the fire?

Stix sighed. “You seem to have lost the thread of this conversation.”

“No, I haven’t, you sweetheart.” Kay twisted around and sat cross-legged. “It’s about time we had a talk about these protective instincts of yours. The problem is that you need a home of your own. People to take care of. One of these days you’re going to forget the trip your parents laid on you, and figure out that you don’t have to have a marriage like theirs. This devil-may-care bachelor’s life has gone on long enough.”

Stix looked faintly alarmed. “How did you manage to twist this entire conversation so fast? We were talking about you.”

“Samantha isn’t the one, dammit. Liz was, and still is. You think it’s an accident you only go for long, leggy blondes? You and Liz have both been extremely stupid for the last three years. If she’d married someone else, you’d be stuck, but as it is you can at least try one more time.”

Stix rapidly lurched up on his long legs. “Look, I don’t know how you got started on that, but don’t be ridiculous-it’s been over for years. The only thing Liz wanted was a ring around her finger and a houseful of kids.”

“Exactly what you want, you fool. Basically you’re a homebody. You can’t stand to be alone-you’re forever fixing things around here, the kids in the neighborhood gravitate toward you as if you were a pro football star, and you’re lonely as hell. I hate to have to tell you this, but you were born to be married,” she said smugly. She handed him his coat, since he seemed to be looking around wildly for it. “As for me,”she added firmly, “I can take care of myself. It’s you who can’t.”

“Look, Kay…”

“It’s easy to dish out advice, but not quite so easy to take it, now is it?” she asked sympathetically as he opened the front door, then turned back with a deliberate scowl.

“I’d just feel a great deal better if I knew him,” he said flatly.

“You do know Mitch. And you said you liked him.”

“That was as a man’s man.” Stix stuck his hands in his pockets and stared at the ceiling. “Listen,” he said gruffly. “You’re protected and all that?”

Kay burst out laughing.

He glared at her. “Just because you go around teaching it and all doesn’t mean that you’re overflowing in the sense department yourself. You’re a sitting duck for some guy with a really smooth line.”

“Thanks so much.”

“You’ve always opened your door to just anybody-witness, myself. People ask you for the shirt off your back and you strip-”

“Not literally,” Kay interrupted.

“That’s a relief. And another thing. You’re too damned honest. Men lie. There aren’t many women like you running around, you know, and if you think some guy wouldn’t take all he could get-”

“I think that was a backhanded compliment,” Kay murmured.

“Because if he’s putting the moves to you without some commitment behind it- Are you in love with him?” Stix asked abruptly.

Kay rose up on tiptoes. “Give us a kiss now and be on your way. I’m exhausted after all this advice.”

“You’re exhausted?” Stix gave her a peck on the cheek and pushed open the door. “You’re worse than a sister. I can’t handle all this responsibility!”

“Out!”

***

Three hours later, Kay was leaning over the bathroom sink, applying makeup. Every cosmetic bottle and tube she’d accumulated over the past ten years was piled on the counter in front of her. Ella Fitzgerald was serenading her from the stereo in the living room.

Ella was bubbling about the lady being a tramp.

Kay stroked some mascara onto her eyelashes, and then leaned back to judge its effect. Stix, she considered glumly, was an extremely amusing man. He was so darn sure she was having a wildly erotic affair with Mitch.

The fact was, Ella should be singing the old one, “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

She was beginning to think Mitch’s favorite pastime was turning Kay on…and leaving her high and dry.

Shoving the makeup containers back in the drawer, Kay wandered back to the bedroom to slip on her shoes. After deliberating over three other outfits, she’d finally settled on a pale green angora sweater and forest-green skirt. She was comfortable in the outfit, and she wanted to feel at ease when she met Mitch’s parents.

Rapidly, she took a brush to her hair, letting the strands fall loose and smooth to her shoulders. Just washed, her hair always looked streaked, a mane of gold and brown. Tonight, her eyes had a troubled luster-mascara-induced in part, but not all. Her mirror reflection reminded her that the soft angora of her sweater emphasized her high breasts and the simple A-line of her skirt showed off her legs. The effect of the outfit was supposed to be subdued, suitable for parent-meeting.

She did not particularly look like a wanton hussy, which was precisely what she felt like. Good Lord, the man respected her. She ought to be his major cheering section. He showed an incredible sensitivity to her feelings. He obviously didn’t want to rush her into a relationship she might not be ready for; and he certainly must care, or he wouldn’t be around seven days out of seven-nor would he be willing to endure the sexual frustration he was putting himself through.

That was fine. Wonderful.

Only she happened to love that big lug like hell. He was smart and he was funny and he was considerate…and whether he knew it or not, he was shy. He was rapidly turning into the same kind of life celebrator she was, just enjoying…being. Doing. It never mattered what they were doing; you’d think he was discovering laughter for the first time. To summarize it all rather rapidly, Mitch was the kind of man you locked up once you found him.

She’d looked too hard and too long to find one of that species. This time love hurt; it mattered so much.

His old-fashioned values about sex were rather sweet…weren’t they?

The doorbell rang. Kay gave herself one last glance in the mirror before heading out.

Yes, his values were sweet-but they had to go.

Chapter Ten

“Get those two men together and they just never stop talking. Come on, Kay, let’s get out of here and do something intellectually stimulating. Like gossip.”

Smiling, Kay followed Mitch’s mother from the living room, but not before she’d received duplicate winks from both Cochran men. Jane Cochran led her through a long hall, lit by a skylight and made wonderfully warm with dozens of hanging plants. The dining room was done in pastel brocade, and between that and the kitchen was a sort of nook.

“The butler’s pantry,” Jane explained. She reached up to the top shelf of a cupboard, and studied Kay with an examining eye. “I can’t tell if you’re a port or brandy lady.”

“Port would be nice.”

“Good.” Two crystal glasses appeared on the counter, then the bottle. Jane opened the long cupboard below the counter, and two stools appeared. She pulled them out and motioned Kay to one as she poured the wine. “Did you like that shrimp concoction for dinner?”

“I loved it,” Kay said honestly.

“You don’t have to say that, you know.” Jane’s smiling appraisal of Kay was affectionate, but it was nevertheless an appraisal. “I should have trusted my son’s taste instead of fretting all day about what you’d be like,” she confessed. “I’ve also been afraid all evening that I would ask personal questions, like how long have you been seeing Mitch.”

Kay chuckled. “I’ve been seeing your son for almost two months now.”

“And I won’t ask another question, I promise. If I did, Mitch would undoubtedly shoot me,” Jane said gravely. “Anyway, I’m not in the least curious about how the two of you met. Not that my son doesn’t talk to me, but getting personal information out of him is like getting blood out of a stone.”

“And I don’t want to bore you with what you don’t want to hear, but we met at the hospital,” Kay volunteered with a smile. “On alternate Saturday mornings I usually visit the children’s ward.”

Jane nodded. “Mitch has been doing that for a long time. I didn’t understand at first. I thought it would only give him painful memories.”

Kay cocked her head curiously, but Jane motioned her up with the tilt of her glass. “Let’s talk as we walk. I haven’t shown you the rest of the house.”

The house where Mitch had grown up was on one of Coeur d’Alene’s inland coves. The place was two-storied, and sprawled around turns and alcoves and rooms stuck here and there for no obvious purpose. Greenery hung from most windows; very old oils graced the walls, and each room had its own gentle color schemes, from mauve to pale blue to leaf green.

“I could kill my son. That monstrous barn he bought, and he still hasn’t furnished it properly after all this time. I’ve offered to help, but he’s an independent cuss, if you haven’t noticed that already.”

“I’ve noticed,” Kay said wryly.

“Takes after his father. There’s another one who won’t take anything from anyone.”

“I gather that it wasn’t so easy raising the pair of them,” Kay said dryly.

Jane chuckled, and then said honestly, “They expect too much of themselves, always have. Mitch is even worse than his father. All those years-he couldn’t stand taking a thing from us. It used to eat at him, which was so damned foolish. This was the room where he grew up,” she said abruptly, flicking on a light switch.

For a moment, Kay intently studied Jane before glancing into the room. The mystery of his scar and now his mother’s comments-all those years? What years? Startled, she glanced slowly around the room-and then rather rapidly back to Jane.

“I know,” Jane said wryly. “You were expecting a bed and leftover teddy bears. Well, it was Mitch’s idea to put all that stuff in the attic. Even before he made a down payment on that house, he started remodeling this room-over my vigorous protests, I’ll have you know. He claimed his father always wanted a place to putter with stones…”

The room looked like Mitch’s octagonal turret, with a long bench and special lighting, microscopes and alcohol beakers for testing gems in solution… Kay was beginning to recognize the equipment.

“There’s one room that’s specifically Mitch, that he couldn’t do anything about,” Jane said with satisfaction. “Come on and I’ll show you.” She glanced back at Kay. “You’re free to interrupt, you know. The men are always telling me I talk incessantly.”

“You don’t at all,” Kay protested instantly.

“Yes, I do. I absolutely love to talk. Aaron calls it gossip, but you know something? It isn’t gossip. I don’t like to tell tales about other people-I just like people. And the things that happen to them… Now watch this step…” At the bottom of the elegant flight of mahogany stairs, Jane had opened a door to another stairway. These steps were carpeted, dark and flanked by a wrought-iron railing.

A cement-floored laundry room led through an organized storage area to another door. When Jane flicked on a light, Kay’s lips parted in surprise. Jane chuckled. “Believe me, installing this was no small feat.”

“I can believe that.” The last thing she’d expected to see was a regulation-sized swimming pool. The scent of chlorine filled her nostrils. Pale blue tile surrounded the pool, and the water was a clear, smooth aquamarine.

“Of course, we built it for Mitch, and we’d planned to drain it after he left, but Aaron and I have taken to going for a swim after dinner every night. My husband claims we’re getting too sedentary,” Jane said wryly. “Do you like to swim, Kay?”

“I…yes.” Kay turned from the mesmerizing color of the waters to smile at Jane. Of course we built it for Mitch? “I rarely had the chance to use a pool, but my family went camping every summer, always by a lake. My father used to claim I had webbed feet.”

“Mitch, too. I swear his skin was water-wrinkled all summer. I can remember when he was eleven, I thought he was going to leave home over the issue of a boat. He mowed every lawn in the neighborhood, and then, when he had saved enough money for a little sailboat…we said no. We thought he was too young.” Jane grinned at her. “Mitch was long on harebrained schemes at eleven, not particularly long on judgment. You see all these gray hairs?”

“I don’t see a one,” Kay insisted.

Jane laughed, and they wandered back upstairs, still chatting. Mitch intercepted them in the kitchen-actually, he reached out and snatched Kay from behind his mother’s back. Winding his arms around her waist, he snuggled her against his chest and burrowed a kiss in her neck. “Now, don’t you believe anything my mother’s been telling you,” he growled.

“Take your hands off her, Mitch. You’re not taking her home yet. She’s agreed to stay for a few hands of bridge.”

“Kay would never do that to me,” Mitch informed his mother.

***

They played until ten. Mitch, for all his voluble protests, was an excellent player who remembered every card, to his mother’s annoyance. Every time Jane made one of her more “creative bids,” as she called them, Mitch and his father exchanged amused glances.

Aaron had claimed Kay for a partner, his slow winks and half smiles not quite ethical but certainly helpful to Kay, who hadn’t played much of the game. Aaron was the kind of man who very quietly took care of people.

Mitch was the same way. Though they’d talked of going to a movie after the dinner at his parents’ place, Kay expected that was merely to ensure that she wasn’t forced into more of his parents’ company than she was initially comfortable with. Once he saw she was honestly enjoying herself, he no longer pressed their leaving, but more than once she caught his eye on her, assessing her comfort, waiting for a sign that she wished to leave.

She gave him no such sign, but when the rubber ended just before ten, he stood up and announced that they ought to start for home. Jane looped an arm through Kay’s as she walked her toward the door. “I haven’t had near enough time to talk to you,” she complained. “I never even asked you about your family-big, small, medium-sized?”

“One sister,” Kay responded. “Jana’s younger than I am by eight years. My dad’s an engineer-he worked here at the university for a number of years. Five years ago, they moved to Connecticut.”

“You must miss them, especially around the holidays.” Jane delved into the closet for their coats. “Do you like children, Kay?”

Mitch coughed ostentatiously. “Mother.”

“I withdraw that question.” Jane gave her son a disgusted look. “You know, I was having a lot more fun talking with Kay when you weren’t anywhere around.”

“Were you?” Mitch asked wryly.

“In fact, you can go home and I’ll just keep Kay.” Jane winked at Kay. “Next time, just come without him.”

“And wear earmuffs,” Mitch advised, piloting Kay toward the door.

“I heard that. Aaron, are you going to let your son talk to me that way?”

“Could I get in a word?” Kay asked, laughing. “Dinner was terrific. I had a wonderful time-thank you for inviting me.” Impulsively, she reached over to give both Jane and Aaron a hug, before Mitch’s gloved hand captured hers and drew her firmly out the door and toward the car.

They were both laughing as he started the engine, and shivering as well. Huge snowflakes splashed on the windshield; the night had turned cold, and in the distance the lake was swallowing up the crystal flakes in its still black surface. “I wanted you to meet them,” Mitch said wryly. “But I didn’t have in mind subjecting you to five hours of my mother’s less than subtle questions.”

“I love her,” Kay insisted.

“I do, too.” Mitch patted her hand. “And I’ll bet you’d hold up well under Chinese water torture.”

Kay chuckled. “It sounds as if you put her through torture when you were a kid. The boat, when you were eleven?”

Mitch groaned. “Not that old story.” He shot her a sideways glance. “I was a nice kid. Really, I was.”

“Sounds to me as if you were hell on wheels. The stories you told me were tame next to the ones your mother remembers.”

“Hey. Who are you going to believe? My mother or me?”

“Your mother.”

“Talk about fickle. I’m going to trade you in for a more gullible model.”

Kay leaned back against the headrest, smiling. The heat kicked in, puffing through the vents in wonderfully warm waves. Through sleepy eyes, she regarded Mitch. His hands were firm on the wheel and he was battling icy roads, yet his tone was light and his smile relaxed. He hid things so very well.

The evening had uncovered more secrets about him. His parents were affectionate but not possessive or clingy; Kay could see the respect Aaron had for his son. Mitch had hardly been a pampered only child if he’d had to mow lawns at eleven-yet there was the pool.

Kay frowned slightly in the darkness. Something still bothered her about the pool. The Cochrans, for all the comfort and tasteful furnishings of their home, did not strike her as extravagant-and the lake was right there to swim in. Jane had said of course it was for Mitch, as if she’d taken for granted that Kay understood…something.

She half turned her head, still studying Mitch. He’d worn a brown sweater and dark flannel pants tonight. Even in the shadows of the car, she could see his strong profile, the deep-set eyes, the slash of a lazy smile when he felt her eyes on him. He was really an incredibly handsome man, yet those deeply etched lines on his forehead were more than just marks of character, and as she looked at the streak of white hair she wondered suddenly how she could have been blind for so long.

Mitch had been ill. Really ill.

The scar, the white hair, the lines, his unwillingness to talk about his recent past, and maybe even the pool had something to do with it. As she continued to look at him, she could excuse herself for not guessing before. He seemed so vibrant, so healthy and dynamic. The Marlboro Man was a sissy compared to the special brand of virility that Mitch so naturally radiated.

“Why so quiet?” he said softly.

“I thought you had enough to do just driving on these icy roads.”

“Nothing to worry about,” he assured her.

She shook her head. “I wasn’t.” Not as long as he was at the wheel. It was Mitch who had something to worry about, she thought wryly. Because his plan to leave her at her door like a gentleman was about to go awry. She had her own plan.

***

An hour later, Mitch pulled into her driveway. Tension played at the back of his shoulders and arms. The roads had turned increasingly glassy, not that he would have pointed that out to Kay. It hadn’t been the easiest of evenings as it was. After two mentions of Kay’s name, his mother had started pushing to meet her; he’d wanted his parents to meet her, but he hadn’t wanted his whole history laid out before her. And, apparently, it hadn’t been.

Perhaps he should have been easier on that score. His mother might be gregarious, but she had respected his desire to keep his heart problems a family secret from the day she’d learned it mattered to him. Still, he was relieved that the evening was over. Shutting off the engine, he glanced at Kay.

She was sleepily curled up on the passenger seat, his temptress. Her lashes curled on her cheeks, all delicate shadows, and her lips looked red and invitingly soft against her white face. She was buried in clothes, her collar tucked up against her chin, not even her soft angora sweater showing beneath the coat. Considering he could barely see an inch of exposed flesh, he wasn’t quite sure why just the look of her turned him on like a power switch.

He’d done his level best to keep his physical distance in the past few weeks. His level best was a failure. Not touching her was impossible…yet the more he touched, the more he felt that barrier of inhibition at the thought of making love to her. Time wasn’t helping.

He wanted Kay. He’d rather do without sunlight than stop seeing her; he could barely remember what his life had been like before he knew her. She warmed the wintry places, lit up the darkness, filled the big, empty spaces.

The touch of her inflamed him; even the simplest kiss set off a driving ache that clawed at his stomach and shuddered through him like a demon. He knew if he made love to her that it wouldn’t go well. He’d lose control, because he came so damn close to losing control as it was. She’d find herself with a fumbling, inept lover who would utterly fail her… He couldn’t stand the thought of failing her.

He leaned over, softly nudging her chin up with his curved fingers. His lips brushed hers like a whisper, and she smiled.

“I thought you’d fallen asleep,” he teased.

“I…nearly did,” Kay murmured.

He kissed her again, unable to deny himself that contact, wondering exactly why he was asking for more torture yet inviting it anyway. Her head tilted back so temptingly; her lips parted under his. He couldn’t prevent his arms from tightening around her when he felt her fingers glide up into his hair, drawing him back in and closer.

Gently, his tongue stole inside her parted lips. He made love to her mouth as he wanted to make love to her body. An infinitely gentle probing, a stroke into her soft, moist hollows, a withdrawal to taste and tease and that insistent intrusion again, less teasing this time, but a claim, a fierce, sweet possession…

He drew back, his breathing erratic, every muscle in his body so tense with frustration that he had to suppress a groan. He traced a gentle finger on her cheek. “I intended to have you home early tonight. We’ve been up late every night for how many nights now?”

“Four out of five,” she murmured, but she certainly didn’t sound as if she minded.

“Tomorrow-”

“You promised to take me skating,” she reminded him.

As if it mattered what they did. He tried to smile, drawing back. “Nine o’clock, wasn’t that your idea?”

She nodded.

“We’d better get you in so you can catch a good night’s sleep.”

“I do need,” Kay murmured, “a good night’s sleep.”

There was a strange little inflection in her voice. Mitch’s eyes flickered swiftly on hers. Then he got out of the car, the wind whipping around him abruptly, and hurried over to her side. He tried to shield the wind from her as she stepped out. “Turning into a regular gale,” he said gruffly. “If we don’t hustle, you’ll be an icicle.”

He had her protectively tucked into his shoulder, yet she barely took three steps before she suddenly stumbled.

He grinned, tightening his arm around her as they moved toward the front door. “My mother’s port?” he whispered teasingly.

Her fingertips suddenly brushed her temples. “Mitch?”

Her voice sounded oddly weak, not at all like Kay. Alarm pulsed through him as he hurried her the rest of the way to the door. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Really, nothing.” She fumbled for the key in her purse, then suddenly leaned against the house, her face in the shadows so that he could see only her big dark eyes. “Mitch, I don’t feel well. So…dizzy all of a sudden.”

“All right. Just take it easy.” His voice was soothing, yet he instantly took control. With one arm firmly around her, he groped for her key, unlocked the door and propelled her into the warm house.

“I’m so hot…” She swayed in the doorway.

Not wasting a second, Mitch shoved the door closed behind them and groped for a light switch. Rapidly, he unbuttoned her coat, trying to get a good look at her. Her face was tilted down; he couldn’t see her eyes, but her cheeks looked flushed. When he’d tossed her coat on the chair, he half carried her to the couch. “Okay, now, honey, just sit down.”

“I keep seeing double of everything…”

“Head down.” She resisted the ignominious position of her head between her knees, but he insisted. “I’m going to get you a drink of water, Kay. Please stay there a minute.”

“No. I just… Stay with me, Mitch. I don’t want any water. I feel so…cold.”

A moment before, she’d said she was hot. Mitch frowned and hesitated a moment. Stay calm, ordered a rational voice in his head. Everyone got sick once in a while; Kay was entitled to feel ill, occasionally.

Only she wasn’t entitled. Not Kay. He couldn’t stand the thought of anything being wrong with Kay; he’d had too much pain in his own life and wasn’t about to let her suffer any. Aware that his reactions were both emotional and irrational, he scooped her up in his arms. “We’ll just get you into bed,” he said firmly. “And I don’t want any arguments. If you don’t feel better in a few minutes, I’m going to call a doctor.”

Her head abruptly jerked back against his shoulder. “There’s no need for that.”

He would have smiled at the sudden anxiety in her eyes, if he hadn’t been frantically worried about her. “You’re not scared of doctors, little one?”

“No. I just…my doctor doesn’t make house calls. In the morning, I can call him-if I still feel ill.”

“Who said anything about your doctor? Mine will be out here in fifteen minutes flat if I call him.” Kay was badly mistaken if she thought he’d trust her welfare to a stranger’s care. Mitch led her into her bedroom and sat down on the bed with her, glancing at the pale violet walls. The room even smelled like her. Pushing her head to his chest, he pulled off one sleeve of her sweater. “Where are your nightgowns, Kay?”

“Look. There’s no need for a doctor.” Kay’s voice was muffled through the angora sweater. “It’s just…shrimp.”

“Pardon?”

“Shrimp.”

He paused, then realized he had the sweater stuck over her head and quickly tugged it off. “You mean my mother’s shrimp?”

“I have…an allergy.”

Kay’s head hung low; he was afraid she was going to lose her dinner. “An allergy? How could you be so silly as to eat shrimp if you knew-”

“I…thought I’d outgrown it. It isn’t a stomach kind of sick-it’s just this…dizziness. And feeling so cold. Mitch, I’m freezing!”

“It’s going to be okay, honey.” He stopped only once to run a hand through his hair, then went into action. The bottom drawer held nightgowns, or negligees, or whatever you called them. None of them looked warm enough, not when her teeth were chattering. When he finally found what looked like a cozy garment, she’d kicked her shoes off and was trying to tug off her nylons.

“I’ll do that, dammit,” he said fiercely. “You just lie down.”

“I’ll be fine in…a while. Really, you can go home, Mitch. I’ve managed before…”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” He pulled off the stockings, then her skirt, then tried to put the nightgown on her.

“I can’t sleep in my-”

“I thought you’d be warmer,” he said flatly.

She shook her head, very weakly, her hair hanging like a curtain in front of her face. “It…binds.”

His fingers fumbled for the front hook, only to discover she’d opted for a back-hooked bra this time. A double back hook. Dammit. Couldn’t the woman decide which obstacle course to set in front of him?

But then it was off and her breasts were free, white and soft, for a moment almost spilling into his hands. A little ball lodged in his throat and wouldn’t let him swallow. He tugged the nightgown over her head.“I have to take off my-”

“All right.” He slipped his hands underneath the striped flannel nightgown to pull down her satin half-slip. Rather than hear another argument, he slipped off the black satin panties as well. “Now get under the covers!”

Goodness. That sounded distinctly like a roar delivered between clenched teeth.

Kay, you are a wicked, immoral woman, her conscience informed her. And you’d certainly better make this good, because he will never forgive you if he discovers you’re putting on an act.

Chapter Eleven

“Mitch, you’re not leaving?”

“Of course I’m not leaving.” Tucking the comforter under her chin, he frowned furiously at her, as if she’d suggested something preposterous. “I still think I should call the doctor-how long do these attacks usually last?”

“Not very long,” she said swiftly. “The worst is right now, really. Could you just…hold me?” When Mitch hesitated, she said softly, “I know it’s silly. It’s just that I’m never sick. When I get dizzy like that, it’s kind of…frightening.”

Mitch moved forward instantly. “I know exactly what it feels like,” he said gently, “to be frightened when you’re ill. I’ll be here, I promise you.”

Guilt lanced through her at the emotional tremor in his voice. So, though, did other emotions as she watched him sit down at the foot of the bed and push off his shoes. His Adam’s apple was throbbing, particularly when his eyes swiveled around and assessed the infinitely comfortable expanse of bed. Very gingerly, he stretched out next to her, leaning up on one elbow to study her with narrowed eyes. “You don’t look flushed anymore,” he said gravely.

“The fever comes and goes. Mitch…” She raised her palm innocently to his chest. “You’re not going to be comfortable like that,” she whispered. “You’ll broil with the sweater on, and if you’re going to stay-not that you have to, just because I feel a little ill-”

“You practically collapsed at the door,” he said flatly, and sat up to tug off his sweater. “And if I ever catch you eating shrimp again-”

“Mitch, I’m so cold…”

Lying down and sliding an arm around her, he hugged her to his chest and at the same time ripped the comforter away from her. Leaving it tucked around her like that was no good. Wrapping her in it would be better. Fiercely protective instincts swamped him, a purely male conviction that no one had a right to take care of her but him. The lower half of his body was clamoring about other male instincts, but he was trying to ignore that. “If you ever-” he repeated.

With alarm, she realized he was planning to swaddle her like a mummy. She wiggled out of the blanket and closer to him, her arm snaking around his ribs. “This is better, much better,” she murmured. “I don’t feel nearly as dizzy. But your belt is sticking me.”

There was something in her voice… His hand abruptly stilled.

“Is it?”

“Very sharp,” Kay affirmed.

Her heart was beating erratically under his palm. Her flesh was warm, terribly warm; he could feel that heat even through her nightgown. And she was trembling-actually, a violent tremble shuddered through her body when his fingers, totally by accident, made contact with the soft swell of her breasts. And suddenly her heartbeat kicked in like a motorboat.

A very, very healthy motorboat. The thing was, Mitch was an expert in arrhythmia and galloping heartbeats. Kay’s pulse lacked even an itty-bitty symptom of stress. Further, the allegedly ill lady beside him was playing with his belt, and when he gently tried to nudge up her chin she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

His voice came out as soft as butter. “You’ve had this allergy a long time, have you?”

“Years.”

“And you still feel cold?”

“Freezing.”

Without another word, he untangled himself from her and stood up. Stalking around to the other side of the bed, he turned off the light. In the darkness, Kay could hear him removing his clothing, first the sound of a zipper, then fabric whooshing to the floor, and then silence.

A long silence. It seemed an eternity later that she felt the comforter being lifted, and Mitch, warm and certainly huge, slide in beside her. His long leg made contact with hers…pinning hers, actually, even as his arm seductively slid beneath her shoulders and folded her close. “Do you know something?” he murmured.

“Hmm?” He was bare and warm and pure male, the scent of him instantly surrounding her. Primitive drum rolls announced themselves in her bloodstream. Every pore was aware of him. For some absolutely crazy reason, she couldn’t stop the vulnerable quiver that chased up her spine.

His palm slid down her back, pushed up her nightgown and splayed on her bare bottom with an intimacy that she didn’t object to-it was just that Mitch had never been quite so aggressive before. “Kay?” he murmured softly. “You’re all through playing, lady. And I have this strange sudden impulse to take this big hand of mine…”

Those fingers of his drummed on her sensitive skin.

“Listen,” she said hastily.

“If I were you, I would be extremely quiet right now.” He found her lips in the darkness with no trouble at all.

She’d expected the kiss to be angry. It wasn’t. A gentle series of swift, soft kisses explored the shape of her mouth, and then faster than she could draw breath his lips crushed hers. Her lashes fluttered closed, and her fingertips climbed up to his shoulders. Over and over his mouth seared hers, clouding her ability to think.

She tensed, involuntarily, as if her body were suddenly aware it had unleashed a sleeping giant. Mitch wasn’t a man to be led on a string, in bed or out of it, and she suddenly felt as vulnerable as a butterfly. Yes, she’d wanted him to make love to her, but it was very rapidly occurring to her that making love to Mitch was not going to be like any other experience she’d ever had.

In one swift movement, he pulled off her nightgown. On the next stroke down, his hand traced the line from her thigh to her hip with a boldness that inflamed every inch of her flesh. “You thought you needed to trick me into wanting you?” he murmured. “I’ve wanted you from the instant I first laid eyes on you. You really didn’t know that?”

“Mitch-”

“I’ve dreamed of making love to you so many times, Kay. You’re so beautiful…your skin…the feel of you…”

Even in the darkness, she could see the glowing sheen of a fierce desire in his eyes. She watched his eyes even as she felt his hand flowing over her skin, kneading it, intimately curving the shape of her breast in his palm.

“I never held back because I didn’t want you,” he said roughly. “But be very sure this is what you want, Kay, because-”

“I love you, Mitch,” she said simply.

She buried her face in his shoulder, loving the crush of his hair-roughened chest and strong, tense thighs against her. His arousal pressed against her legs, and she felt in some mystical and perfectly irrational way that it belonged to her. His hands roamed over her body, arousing delicious feminine yearnings. She felt small, soft, crushable. The tiniest lick of fear was part of that, a primal emotion, an excitement in anticipation of being possessed by one stronger, larger, infinitely more powerful.

“You’re trembling,” he murmured.

“No.”

“Kay, I would never hurt you.”

“You are not hurting me.” She had to stop this silly trembling. She was a grown woman, well aware of exactly what was to happen. She tried so hard to take the mystery out of it for her students, because making love was a natural need that one should approach responsibly…but when Mitch’s lips closed on her nipple, her spine arched in one long, bewildered shudder. She didn’t feel in the least responsible. In fact, she didn’t give a hoot in hell if the whole world caved in.

“You do like that,” he murmured.

He sounded very pleased. She surged up, sealing her lips on his, letting him know what it felt like to be pressed into the mattress like booty, to have hands roam over him as if he were treasured territory.

“Kay.”

It wasn’t her fault it had gone too far. She was so crazy in love with him she couldn’t think and didn’t care. Desire wasn’t supposed to be like this. Wanting was a nice, pleasant, natural instinct; lovemaking was a delightful expression of affection and caring. Mitch was the one who’d turned it into something else. He was the one who’d made it into a wild, fierce hunger.

His palm slid down, cupping gently over her tender core, and her teeth nipped helplessly at his shoulder. “Mitch. Don’t play.”

“Oh, yes, sweet. We’re definitely going to play,” he murmured. His voice sounded as if it had come out through a long tunnel; he couldn’t help it. Nothing could stop the pounding of his heart. There wasn’t a chance in hell he could pull back, not this time.

His hand glided up, caressing the warm satin of her skin. Slowly, his lips dipped down to the hollow of her throat and planted a kiss that was infinitely loving. He kissed once, and then twice, and then firmly, gravely, reached over her to turn on the light.

She blinked in bewilderment, and an odd shyness. Mitch’s face, above her, held no smile. His eyes met hers with such intensity that she couldn’t possibly have looked away. “You’re more than I ever dreamed of,” he whispered quietly. “I love you, Kay. I’ve loved you from the moment I set eyes on you-but you have to know something before I can make love to you. Feel this…”

He took her palm and pressed it to his chest. She’d felt the scar before. His whole torso was covered with rough, springy hair, but there was that single smooth line. And it interested her not at all. She was concentrating on the love in his haunted, very dark, very brown, very liquid eyes.

“I caught a simple strep infection when I was fifteen,” he said in a low voice. “Only it didn’t prove quite so simple. It affected a valve in my heart. Repairing heart valves isn’t a big thing these days, and it wasn’t then, but a body can be rather fussy about what kind of foreign object it will accept. Mine was more than fussy. I tried three times.”

She swallowed, aching for him. “What you must have gone through. Dammit, why didn’t you just tell me?” She saw the moisture on his brow and fiercely brushed it away. “Mitch, didn’t you think I’d care?”

“You should have cared,” he said gruffly. His fingers combed back her hair with total tenderness, yet his body was tense as it hadn’t been moments before. “It wasn’t that many years ago that even new valves didn’t guarantee a normal…life expectancy. You have a right to know that. And to know that technology has changed for the better, Kay. Maybe I can’t give you a written guarantee that I’ll live to be eighty, but I can promise you that I have every reasonable hope…”

Yes. Her heart exulted in his talk of the future. This was no fly-by-night affair. And how she ached for him, for everything he had suffered through…but Mitch was trying, too darn hard, not to tell her something else. She could sense it in his hoarse voice, in the jammed-up thickness in his throat…

Her heart heard the words he wasn’t saying. She suddenly understood…so much. All that gentlemanly leaving her at the door, all that respect, all that not rushing her into bed…such a fraud. It had been most unfair timing for a man, to be out of commission in the years when most men were sowing their wild oats. Mitch was a virgin. And worried about it. Unable to admit it to her.

Oh, Mitch, she thought tenderly.

But Mitch was still talking about irrelevant details. “I’ll understand,” he whispered, “if you don’t feel…comfortable with that. I should have told you, Kay-”

“I love you,” she said vibrantly, and pressed her lips first to his scar, then trailed up to the hollow of his neck. Suddenly, he was totally still. Did they give out prizes for nervousness?

“I don’t take any drugs at all, not anymore. I don’t want you to think you’d be stuck with some kind of…pill factory. There’s no reason to believe…Kay…”

He wanted to talk. Her so-reticent man all of a sudden wanted to chatter. Kay, smiling in the darkness, felt the utterly delectable pleasure of knowing the man was about to be hers. She’d never before understood that peculiar satisfaction a man got from making love to a virgin; every feminist cell in her body had always scoffed at the myth.

It wasn’t a myth. How infinitely special she felt to be his first. How terribly she wanted it to be right for him. Ever so tenderly, she let her lips trace the line of his scar, then pressed a kiss on each of his male nipples, those tiny orbs buried in a mat of chest hair.

“Kay.”

Subtle as a whisper, her fingertips glided down to his thighs. “The pain you must have gone through, Mitch…”

His voice had the rasp of impatience. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all long over with. But you had the right to know…Kay.”

Her fingers closed on him, and she felt an electric volt shoot through his body, a restless heat suddenly radiate from his muscles. He shifted, pulling her closer to him when she couldn’t possibly be any closer, his lips busy-busy, all over her skin, everywhere he could reach.

“I wish I had been there for you,” she whispered. “I wish I’d been by your side through all of it. Come to me, Mitch…”

He surged over her, his mouth sealed on hers and his arms holding her as if she were unbearably precious. She welcomed the weight of him. She welcomed the huge shudder of need that ached through his body, the glaze of wanting in his eyes, all the messages that he was losing control. “I don’t want to hurt…”

“You won’t. You won’t. Come to me…”

Her fingers had every intention of guiding him; as it happened, that wasn’t necessary. Mitch had massively well-developed sexual instincts; she should already have guessed that. His body knew exactly what it wanted and where it wanted to go, and when she felt that probing heat inside the core of her for the first time, she cried out.

“Kay-?”

“It’s fine,” she whispered roughly. “So beautiful, Mitch.”

***

“I believe…” Mitch cleared his throat. “I believe we just set a track record.” Propped on one elbow, he slowly stroked back the hair on her forehead, over and over. “Not that there’s anything wrong with setting records, but, Kay, I wanted you to-”

“Mitch.” Kay smiled sleepily up at him. “Take a good look, would you? See what a disgracefully satisfied woman looks like.”

His lips curled just slightly as he leaned over to brush a kiss on her lips. His ninetieth in the past twenty minutes. “You look beautiful,” he announced.

She reached up to touch the bristly growth on his cheek with her fingertips. Mitch was having a terrible time meeting her eyes for more than a second at a time. Her very serious man didn’t really want her to see that he’d just discovered Christmas.

“We went too fast. It wasn’t fair to you,” he continued, his mouth pressing a kiss into the hollow of her palm, then dipping down to the tip of her shoulder.

“We might just both have been in a terrible hurry to make love. Did you ever think of that?”

“I thought of that.” He suddenly shoved back the covers that he’d tucked protectively around her minutes before. “I still think we went too fast. I didn’t have nearly enough time to savor the feel of you.”

“Didn’t you?”

“I really think-” he kissed the underside of one breast, studied its swollen tip with immense satisfaction, and glanced back up to her eyes with a frown “-that we’d better do it all again. In slow motion this time.”

***

“Mitch, you must be sleepy.”

“How’s your allergy, Kay? I’m checking for dizziness. For instance, does this make you dizzy, and this…”

“Why do I have the feeling you’re never going to let me forget that little lie?”

“Little?”

Kay was silent. “Mitch, I…care,” she said softly. “I care so much. I needed to show you that, and I needed to know if you wanted me-”

“How could you possibly have doubted that I wanted you? After seeing you, I’ve been going home to lie in the snow for hours at a time.”

“Have you?” she asked wryly.

“Let’s go back to discussing your allergy. Shrimp, wasn’t it? And the symptoms were alternate hot flashes and chills, followed by a weak feeling and dizziness. Now, if we try to duplicate those symptoms…”

***

“Mitch, we have to eat.”

“Why?”

“This way lies starvation,” she explained patiently. “Think of blueberry pancakes, drowning in syrup. Think of a steaming cup of coffee, and cinnamon rolls just out of the oven-”

“And I’m going to make every one of those things for you,” Mitch promised gravely, “in just a little bit.”

***

“Good Lord, the woman’s still in bed at one in the afternoon. What is this laziness all about?”

Kay opened one sleepy eye and groaned.

“The pancakes died,” he informed her. “I held the last rites over the garbage disposal. But scrambled eggs I could manage, and the cinnamon rolls are warm-at least on the outside.” Mitch set the tray down on her bedside table. Leaning over the bed, he forced the comforter out of her hand and gradually peeled it down to reveal her face. “Who would have guessed you’d turn out to be such an indolent hussy? We’re four hours late for our skating date.”

“What a terribly cold idea.”

“Open your eyes. Come on, you can do it.”

“I can’t.”

“Trust me, you can.” He waved the steaming cup of coffee in front of her nose to tantalize her nostrils. “You know the old proverb about early to bed and early to rise? I think we’ve blown it.”

“I think you’re right.”

“So much for health, wealth and wisdom.” He plumped up the pillow behind her, forced her limp frame up against it, set the tray on her lap and perched on the side of her bed, watching her with the air of the cat that caught the canary.

There was really a very silly grin on his face.

She expected there was an equally silly grin on hers. Every inch of her body felt utterly, thoroughly loved, and the look of him was enough to initiate another onslaught of wanton yearnings. Mitch had lost all traces of inhibition rather quickly. In fact, he had a talent for improvising variations on a theme like a jazz pianist.

The first time, yes, had been fast. What can you expect from a keg of dynamite? And just maybe there’d been a hint of awkwardness; Mitch had been far too concerned about hurting her, so very worried she would guess he was a virgin…

And she had loved every moment, savoring the man’s innate capacity for loving, his tenderness, the explosive richness he brought to intimacy. The second time she’d soared past ecstasy, but it was still the first time she would always remember.

For the rest, he was the fastest learner she’d ever met. A prodigy. And he was looking disgracefully proud of himself for producing an exhausted woman propped up against pillows, who undoubtedly was going to walk as if she’d spent the past five years riding a horse.

No one, by contrast, had the right to look that energetic and virile after a night without sleep. He’d showered; his hair was still damp. And he must have used her razor, because there was a tiny nick just below his chin.

She set down her cup and stared back at him. A wave a love filled her up, bubbled over. She shoved aside the tray, crawled over to Mitch on her knees and assaulted him. When he crashed flat on his back, she straddled his ribs and waggled a forefinger in front of his nose. “I’ll take you skating,” she said severely, “only if you take that silly smile of your face. Because if you don’t…”

“Ah. Here come the threats of a violent woman.”

“If you don’t, I’ll wipe it off myself.”

“You do that,” Mitch advised. Long brown fingers closed around her hips as he glanced down. “You know, this is a potentially very interesting position…”

“That’s it. Now you suffer.” She grabbed a pillow, mercilessly smothered him, and victoriously vaulted from the bed in the direction of the shower. Which would have worked out fine, except Mitch joined her.

***

They made it to the skating rink at a few minutes before five. It was a makeshift rink, set up in a field between two old houses. By the time they arrived, it was already dark, and anyone with any sense had already gone home. A nasty mixture of rain and snow pelted down helter-skelter, and a north wind whistled through treetops like a poltergeist.

Mitch was insistent. He was also fussy. “You know, I’ve been tying my own laces for a few years now,” she informed him.

“I saw how you tied them. You need support for your ankles, foolish one.” He wrapped the string around her skate yet another time and knotted it, leaning back on his haunches to survey his work. “Ready,” he pronounced.

“You’re sure there isn’t something else you want to criticize about the way I’m put together?” she said demurely.

He offered one of his slow, lazy grins. “Now, do you really want more trouble than you can handle?”

“I’ve already taken on more trouble than I can handle,” she said in the tone of the long-suffering, gave him a pointed glance and rapidly shoved off.

It took a moment to gain her balance. She’d skated every winter since she could remember, but the rink was pitted and scarred from a day of too many skaters. After a few minutes, she found the smooth spots, and a few minutes after that she tried out a little fancy legwork, just in case Mitch was looking.

Mitch was tying his skates. When he finished, he put his gloves back on, glanced up once to see Kay mightily showing off, and grinned as he carefully got to his feet.

“Mitch?” Kay gave him a funny look.

Paying no attention, he shoved off. Exultation had been singing in his bloodstream for hours; it refused to stop. Sweet, cold air rushed into his lungs; the wind whipped his face and snow blinded him. He didn’t care. Energy desperately needed to be expended; he had oceans of the commodity. He hadn’t slept and couldn’t imagine feeling tired; he’d barely eaten and couldn’t imagine feeling hungry.

Kay was the source of all that manic energy.

He saw a perfectly ridiculous look of concern on her face before one skate went out from under him, and ice-probably the hardest substance in the universe-came up in a crashing hurry to meet his rear end.

In a rush, she skated over to him and crouched down. “Darn it. Are you all right?”

“I may never sit again, but yes.”

She reached out a hand to help him, but he just waved it away and got up, trying to coax his skates underneath him again. At best, his motions lacked…grace. Kay, finally certain that he wasn’t seriously hurt, shook her head at him ruefully. “You know, I only suggested we go skating because it’s that time of year. You didn’t have to take me up on it.”

“I promised you a week ago that we’d go. I don’t break promises. Just give me a minute.” He wobbled tentatively to her side. “Heck. Hockey used to be my game. This is ridiculous.”

“But how long has it been since your hockey days?” Kay asked bewilderedly.

“About thirteen years.” He took one long glide and then another, and turned to face her with a triumphant grin.

“Mitch!”

One of his hands wildly flailed the air, then the other, but he stayed on his feet by some miracle. “Now all I need is a hockey stick and a puck.”

That man, Kay thought wildly, needed a keeper.

She glanced around once, then twice, but there was no one else volunteering.

Chapter Twelve

“Mitch, I am not going to catch pneumonia. For heaven’s sake-”

Paying no attention whatsoever to her grumblings, Mitch finished wrapping Kay in his robe, grabbed her damp pants and socks and the rest of her clothes, and pointed a scolding finger at her. “Now you just stay there,” he ordered, before deserting the living room.

She muttered darkly to herself and took her freezing bare toes abruptly over to the fire, trying to turn up the cuffs of the navy robe she was swaddled in so she could at least see her hands. Honestly.

Not that Kay had any appreciation for bossy, overbearing men, but there was a cheeky smile on her face as she curled up on one of the huge pillows by the hearth. Mitch’s living room was a wonderful place to be on a frigid evening. The white stone fireplace took up one entire wall, and the massive fire he’d just built was roaring away. Who needed furniture? Dancing shadows played on the richly painted walls and cathedral ceiling, sparking endless imaginative fantasies…knights in their drafty old castles, deserted haunted houses, princesses locked in towers…

Mitch pushed open the door with his foot, carrying two steaming mugs. “Are you warm?”

“If you put a few stones on the floor, we could probably have a sauna in here,” Kay said mildly.

“If you think I’m ever going to listen to you again, you have another thought coming. ‘Just one more hour, Mitch,’ said the lady with the frozen toes. If I’d known…” Mitch handed her the mug of hot cider and bent over to place yet another log on the fire. Tongues of flame shot up the chimney, sending a fresh wave of shadows on the walls.

“You were pretty good, once you got your skating legs back,” Kay remarked, not wanting to go overboard lest the praise should go to his head. Mitch had been doing flips and jumps within two hours.

“It’ll take more than one time on the ice.” Mitch pushed several more pillows behind her back. “Used to be a forward on a neighborhood hockey team. At the time, I thought I was pretty hot stuff… Now you look comfortable.”

She shot him an amused grin. Finally, he was satisfied, now that she was languishing back on the pillows like a sultan. Or sultaness. Most sultanesses, on the other hand, weren’t buried in oversized navy blue robes, folded over three times at the cuffs.

He settled down next to her, wrapped a hand around her bare foot to ensure that it had reached the boiling point, and took a sip of the well-aged cider.

So did Kay. The warm, tangy liquid slid down her throat, adding to a feeling of incredibly lazy well-being. The fire’s heat had long since thawed her freezing limbs. Mitch was overdoing the caretaking role a bit, but she knew it would pass. A little overprotectiveness was natural to males of the species, particularly when they first claimed their own territory. And Kay felt very claimed, relishing the way Mitch’s dark eyes checked in every second or two, as if he needed to be certain she was still there.

She was definitely there. Whether he knew it or not, she was humming “All My Tomorrows” under her breath. For a moment, Mitch faced the fire, and though flame and shadow captured the character lines on his face, he was relaxed, a softer Mitch than the one she’d first met, and much more open.

He turned toward her, and the sudden vibrancy in his eyes made her catch her breath. “What are you thinking?” she asked softly.

“Of you.” He uncoiled and sprang up, his eyes never leaving hers, and then a slash of smile brought a mischievous look to his face. “Of something I’ve been wanting to do to you from the very moment I met you.”

“Which is?”

He shook his head. “You’ll have to wait a minute.”

With a lithe step, he disappeared from the room again. Kay took a last sip of cider and set down the mug, thinking wryly that he could bottle his restless energy. He hadn’t been able to sit still from the instant they’d woken up that morn-that afternoon.

Her mind flickered back to their time on the skating rink, to watching Mitch fumble and grope and get back on his feet after countless falls. Most people would have given up. Most people didn’t have Mitch’s determination, that intense drive of his to fight for what he wanted, to achieve what he expected of himself. After two hours he’d remastered those skills he’d once had, but she had no doubt he’d have pushed himself further if she hadn’t pleaded cold.

A brooding softness touched her features as she stared into the fire, until she heard the sound of Mitch’s step behind her again. Glancing up, she was startled to see him carrying a blanket and a soft felt knapsack, both of which he plopped down next to her. “You’re about to get Cochran’s super-duper lecture on garnets,” he told her. “Unfortunately, you have to strip to get it.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s necessary. Trust me.”

“I do trust you. I just-”

“There’s no need to look wary. I haven’t got that kind of energy left, as you should know. Besides, why on earth would you jump to that conclusion just because I want you to take off your clothes? You’re not cold?”

“I didn’t say I was cold. I’m sweltering. I just-”

“Well, then.” He tugged at the sash of the robe, and then snatched at the voluminous sleeves. His movements were most efficient. Soon, she had nothing on but a pair of silk panties. The rest of her clothes had not been all wet when they’d first come in; he’d just insisted they were. “Now,” he said firmly, and then didn’t do anything at all, just let his eyes drift over her firelit flesh. “Now,” he repeated vaguely.

“The super-duper lecture,” she prompted him.

“Ah.” He unfolded the blanket and installed her on it with the pillows behind her. She watched, half smiling, as he perched on one hip next to her and reached for the knapsack. “This is a very serious business,” he told her.

“I can see that.”

“You’re going to have to listen very hard. Exams for this class are extremely difficult.”

“Already, I can see that I’ve had professors who were easier to please. No one, for example, ever required that I attend class in this particular condition.”

Mitch grinned, dug into the knapsack and pulled out a handful of gems. Very gently, he dropped them on her bare flesh, and then brought out another handful. Pushing aside the sack, he stretched out next to her and slowly started to rearrange the jewels-on her neck, her bare breasts, the flat, warm satin of her stomach…

“All garnets…” He cleared his throat. “All garnets are of the species almandite, found only in rocks of metamorphic origin… Actually, they’re made up of silicate minerals.” One ruby-red stone toppled from the tip of her breast to the crevice beside it. His eyes stole up to hers as he replaced the gem. “This first part of the lecture is kind of boring. Want to skip it?”

“I am not,” Kay assured him breathlessly, “bored.”

Neither was Mitch. He’d dreamed of showering her skin with gems. The reality was far more potent than the fantasy. The fire itself would have been enough, the way the flames added a luster and softness to her bare flesh. The stones had their own fire, and with every breath she took, thousands of scarlet and gold and emerald streaks darted over her breasts and throat and stomach.

The effect was not what he’d expected. The sensual look of her cloaked in jewels-that he’d expected, even the lush, erotic surge that sent heat all through his body. But he had not realized that the richest of stones would fail to compete with the warmth and fire and allure of the woman herself.

“Mitch-”

“Yes,” he said swiftly. “Garnets come in all colors. Witness-” His knuckles grazed her breasts as he plucked up a single stone and lifted it to the fire for her to see. “The standard dark ruby-colored garnet. The birthstone type. Pretty enough?”

“I-yes. Spectacular.”

“There are lots of those around. No big deal. Some semiprecious stones are a big deal, because their value is determined not just by quality, but by rarity. Certain kinds of garnets have more value than the precious stones they resemble. Such as this tsavorite-almost impossible to tell from an emerald, yes?”

She glanced at the incredible stone, and then at Mitch. “Beautiful,” she murmured, but it wasn’t strictly the stone she had in mind. A lock of dark hair had fallen over his forehead; she longed to brush it back. At the throat of his open flannel shirt, she could see the crisp spray of dark hair and could remember the feel of that hair against her bare skin. He was so very much a man.

The banked fires in his eyes were fooling her not at all, but it was more than sexual feeling that stirred her. It was an aching awareness of the man who was learning to share his feelings, who had so very much emotion inside him. An ache for his past loneliness…a loneliness that had lasted for way too many years.

“This one-” Mitch gently scooped a stone from her navel with a wicked grin “-is the most valuable. A demantoid garnet. Not found, regrettably, in Idaho-not yet, anyway. Geologically, there’s no specific reason why some couldn’t be discovered here, but for the moment that’s talking pipe dreams.”

Her fingers softly curled around his wrist. “As much as you loved it, you couldn’t skate, Mitch?” she whispered softly. “Even sometimes?”

If he hadn’t pressed a finger on her lips, she might have believed he hadn’t heard her. “We’re getting to the important part of the lecture,” he told her. “Star garnets. The Star of Idaho-” He raised another stone for her to see. “When the light is just right behind it, there seems to be a six-rayed star inside it. Actually, the star effect is a flaw in the stone-rutile…” There was no waiting, not any longer. “This last stone,” he said quietly, “is mine.”

Mitch’s eyes held hers, the faintest hint of a lazy smile on his mouth as his fingers carefully stroked the intimate triangle between her thighs. It was no accident that a certain gem had spilled there. Kay’s breath caught. “Yours,” she echoed.

“Totally.” He leaned over and roughly brushed his lips on hers. “Totally, Kay. No one else will ever know her.”

“Mitch-”

The strangest emotion clawed at her soul, even as he was pressing the stone into her palm. “No one’s ever seen it before, Kay. It’s just been registered, a week ago. A new stone’s still discovered from time to time, even now-but not often. An eight-sided garnet-it’s been months since I mined the first group of them and had them studied and evaluated, but I knew. I knew the first time I laid eyes on her…”

She sat up, reluctantly dragging her eyes from Mitch’s face to look at his stone. Moving it carefully back and forth between her fingertips, she was captivated by the play of flickering sparks within. The star was like a secret, only revealed when one moved the stone with precious care, and then the silver darts played up against the dark ruby background, infinitely fragile yet as brilliant as sunlight. When deprived of light, the star was lost.

“When you register a new stone, you have to name it.” Mitch pushed the garnets gently off her, urging her back against the pillows. “Kaystar,” he murmured. “Do you like it? Sort of like Telstar. Open, love.”

Her lips obediently parted, welcoming the possession of his as a rush of jumbled feelings exploded in her head. His mouth molded over hers and his palm slid down her fire-warmed skin and the room tilted. She closed her eyes, savoring the gift he had offered her. “Mitch,” she whispered when his mouth lifted from hers to skim kisses down the side of her throat.

“Don’t tell me the name is corny. I’ve been afraid you would think that. I’m not a sentimental man, Kay, but there was no possible way I could name it anything else.”

“It’s beautiful, Mitch.” Softly, her fingers stroked his cheek, loving the fierce vulnerability in his eyes. “More than beautiful.” Her other hand moved to undo the buttons on his shirt, one by one. Finally, there was room for her palm to sneak inside, to stroke his warm flesh, to feel the beat of life beneath her fingertips. Unconsciously, her finger traced the smooth line of his scar.

He bent to kiss her again, but his hand closed over that single roaming finger of hers. “You still want to know, don’t you?” he said quietly. “It’s bothered you ever since we went skating.”

“Not to pry,” she whispered. “Just to share, Mitch. I want to share everything I can with you.”

Straightening up, he drew off his shirt, and then came down to her once more. His head bent as he slowly traced a finger around one breast, raising gooseflesh, but he didn’t stop. “It wasn’t,” he said roughly, “like being an invalid. No, there was no skating, but I was hardly bedridden, either. I could swim. Some. I could learn, I could study, I could talk to people. I wasn’t some inanimate…parasite.”

“Mitch,” Kay whispered.

“What?”

“Get that tone out of your voice,” she said softly.

“What tone?”

“The anger. Who exactly are you angry at, anyway?”

Mitch hesitated, and then half smiled, his fingers reaching up to sift through her hair. “Myself. For all those years I couldn’t do the things I expected of myself as a man.”

“Mitch, that’s so damned stupid.” She sat up, her hair shimmering behind her to catch the firelight. Her voice was a fierce, low cry, muffled as she pressed her lips to his chest, her arms wrapping tightly around him. She felt the kiss on the crown of her head, and then another. “Why three?”

“Three?”

“You said there were three operations…”

“Because a body,” he growled, “sometimes rejects the new valve. They put you on an operating table and they open you up, and then they decide what kind of valve they’re going to put in. A goat valve? A pig valve? Maybe a plastic one. There’s a choice of better than two dozen. They tried two and my body didn’t like either one. Now what do you want to know?”

He was so defensive suddenly, yet his lips scored kisses down her throat, into the hollow, tracing the line of her collarbone. When his tongue flicked out to taste that same warm skin, she caught her breath and struggled for control. It mattered that he finish it. For his sake, not for hers. “And the third time?” she whispered.

He sighed, raising his eyes directly to hers. “The surgeons didn’t want to perform the third operation,” he said flatly. “Six or seven hours under the knife is stress enough, they told me, but when the body rejects a new valve, suddenly the heart is under a lot more stress, and it becomes a matter of life or death. So I had two choices-no more operations and living the rest of my life as a sedentary recluse, or gambling on surgery one more time. Honey, don’t. I knew damn well you wouldn’t be satisfied until you’d heard the whole story, or I wouldn’t have told you…Kay.”

Her whole body was trembling. He’d almost died? He’d made a choice in which his life was at risk. She wound her arms around him, bit her lip and forced back tears.

“It’s over,” he said roughly. “Forget it, Kay. You wanted to know. Now you know. We’ll never talk of it again.” His face was grave, hovering over hers, worldly and old and fiercely possessive as he stroked her hair and took her lips again and again, willing a different kind of trembling to overtake her body.

The soft blanket crushed against her bare skin. Fire licked and spit in the hearth, and shadows climbed up the walls. Their breathing became increasingly labored. Once, Kay felt a cool, smooth gem beneath her and Mitch’s hand swept it away as if it were a bothersome pebble, almost making her smile. His precious stones were suddenly not so precious. There was clearly only one thing on his mind.

And he was different.

He wasn’t a new lover anymore. He knew exactly what he wanted and he claimed it. His touch was tender and in no way rough, but there was a dominance, a sureness as he claimed his right to touch, to stroke, to kiss, to tease.

Mitch was primal male, strong, overpowering. When he stripped off the rest of his clothes and she saw his naked body by firelight, she felt a searing awareness of her own vulnerability. What hurt him, hurt her. What gave him pleasure gave her infinite quantities of the same.

With exquisite tenderness, he entered her. She surged toward him in a frantic attempt to be part of him. For his years of loneliness-and for her own, for she suddenly realized that until Mitch she had been lonely-there was no possible way she could get close enough. Her heart suddenly ached with fear, and Mitch whispered to her, over and over; he whispered silken love words and he whispered promises of a golden world inhabited by just the two of them, and on a satin thread of ecstasy, he claimed her soul.

***

Except for the crackle of Sunday newspapers, there was total silence in Mitch’s bedroom. With a pillow behind her head, Kay lay flat on the carpet, with her legs crossed and her feet propped up on Mitch’s lap. A coffee mug was perched precariously on her chest as she turned a page.

Mitch was sprawled more conventionally on the couch, one hand holding the paper and the other resting on Kay’s ankle. When he tossed down one section to pick up another, he inevitably glanced down at Kay with an amused smile.

“You’ve been reading the classifieds for better than twenty minutes.”

“Want ads are fascinating. Especially the personals. Listen.” She crackled the paper. “‘DWM.’ I assume that means divorced white male? ‘Looking for nice lady around fifty. Don’t smoke or drink, financially secure, not fat-but no heavy night action.’” Kay laid down the page. “I thought it was funny when I first read it. Now I think it’s sad.”

“Resist the urge to call him up and take him home,” Mitch advised dryly.

“I wasn’t going to,” Kay said indignantly.

“I know you better.”

“Well, the poor guy. Having to advertise in the paper. He sounds so lonely…”

Mitch reached down and replaced her want ads with the safer sports section. “It’s no wonder you fill that house of yours up with orphans. And don’t read page six. The guy who tore a few ligaments made three million dollars last year.”

“Which would hardly make up for-”

She heard Mitch sigh heavily, and mutter something under his breath that sounded distinctly like “softie.” Grinning, she flipped through the sports section until she found the crossword page. She raised a hand and found Mitch dropping a pencil in it before she even needed to ask.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You’re getting pretty good at that.”

“At what?”

“Anticipating what I want to do before I want to do it.” Kay sighed. “Could you have anticipated that I just spilled the last of my cold coffee on my sweat shirt?”

Mitch chuckled. “If you’re determined to read lying on the floor-”

“I am.”

“Well, then.”

Kay set down the empty cup and newspaper and stood up with a disgusted look at the stain on her stomach. “I’m becoming slovenly,” she announced. She took two steps toward the bathroom before flipping her head back. “And if you loved me even a thimbleful, you would have instantly denied that.”

“I’d rather help you take a shower.”

“A spot no bigger than a quarter hardly rates a shower.”

“See? You’re becoming slovenly.” Hooded eyes studied her. “I could wash all the difficult places for you,” he coaxed. “The backs of your knees. Between your shoulders-”

“And then you’d want me to wash all those difficult places on you, too.”

“You have a dirty mind,” he said admiringly. “You’re also smart.”

“What I am is still wandering around in yesterday’s clothes. And instead of going home and making the necessary repairs, I discover you’re as bad a Sunday paper addict as I am.” Flipping on the light switch, she disappeared into the bathroom, rubbing briskly at the stain on her stomach with a washcloth.

“We could move your things over here, and then we wouldn’t have that problem,” Mitch called out. “We could even get married and make it legal.”

Kay’s hand stilled, and her head abruptly lifted. The teasing note had suddenly left his voice. And a disgraceful image confronted her in the mirror; a woman whose hair hadn’t seen a curling iron in twenty-four hours, a face without makeup, lips that were redder than usual-and with good reason.

The lady looked definitely well loved.

The lady felt definitely well loved.

“Kay?”

She loved him. She’d loved before, but no one like Mitch, never like Mitch. And she couldn’t think of anything she wanted more than to wake up next to him, day after day, for the rest of her life. So why did she feel so anxious, suddenly?

“Have you drowned in there?” Mitch called out mildly.

“Nope.” Tossing down the washcloth, she hurriedly whipped Mitch’s brush through her hair and bounced out of the bathroom, her smile ready and her heart quaking.

Mitch only needed one look. “I shook you up?” he asked quietly.

“Of course not.”

“And badly? Come here, you.” He raised an arm at the same time that he shifted to a sitting position and set down the paper.

Dressed in old cords and a sweatshirt far older than hers and still barefoot on this lazy morning, he still had a special alertness in his eyes that unsettled her as he grabbed her hand and pulled her down beside him. Before she could dissemble, he’d gently brushed back the hair from her forehead and tilted up her chin so there was no hiding from him. Leaning over, he first kissed her forehead, then the very tip of her nose. “I happen to like the idea of your things hanging next to mine in the closet. Don’t tell me that idea terrifies you?”

His voice was deliberately gentle, teasing. “Hardly,” Kay said with equal lightness, but she couldn’t stop the little catch in her voice.

“Toothpaste would be cheaper if we could buy two tubes at a time.” His lips touched down on her chin.

“Think of that.”

“We could fight about all kinds of things. Drawer space. How many rooms we’re going to do in red. Whether we’re ever going to let you eat blueberry muffins in bed again. Who’s going to clean up after I cook. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

Unfortunately, it did. She nuzzled her cheek in the hollow of his shoulder so he would stop tantalizing her with those itty-bitty kisses and tried to frame a coherent reply. He didn’t give her the chance.

“I’m not going to let you go, you know,” he murmured. “You didn’t think I just wanted an affair, Kay?”

She shook her head, closing her eyes as she felt the gentle stroke of his hand down her shoulder and arm. The touch wasn’t sexual but soothing, protective. The nagging anxiety in her head made no sense; she couldn’t even name it. Mitch sounded as sure as she felt. She wanted desperately to believe that his feelings were just that strong, but his proposal had followed too close on the heels of their first lovemaking. For Mitch, that lovemaking had been the first time ever, even if he didn’t know she had figured that out. Sexual feelings often carried that sweet label of love with them…and just as often one set of feelings could be confused with the other. “We haven’t known each other very long,” she ventured quietly.

“That one won’t go, love. People change. I expect to still be getting to know you fifty years from now.” When she parted her lips, Mitch raised a firm fingertip to them. “You want time,” he said softly.

She nodded unhappily, miserable at the thought that she was hurting him. She didn’t want time-she wanted to give him time…but she couldn’t tell him that.

“So you’ll have your time. A little of it, Kay.” His dark eyes seared hers. “I already know that time is the most precious commodity there is. Don’t waste a second of it, Kay. You can never have it again.”

“Mitch-”

He stood up abruptly, turning away from her. Something had changed in Kay’s feelings; he didn’t know what it was. She’d shown no hesitation in pursuing the relationship…until now.

Until they’d made love. Dammit. Had he failed her?

Chapter Thirteen

“Oh, yeah? So how exactly are you supposed to tell when it’s love and when it’s just sex, anyway?”

Why, Kay thought wryly, did her ninth graders have to ask the really big questions today? It was the last day before Christmas holidays; now her ninth graders had decided to get into it?

“If you want a pat answer to that one, I don’t have it,” Kay admitted. She had divided the class into discussion groups, and she’d made the unfortunate mistake of pausing by her six most inquisitive girls. Sprawled on the floor, festooned with pinned-on holly and Christmas bells, the ninth graders looked too young to be asking such questions. “No one’s ever been able to come up with an exact list of symptoms of being in love.”

“But you said experimenting with sex just for sex’s sake was a sure way to get hurt,” Janey objected. A freckle-faced girl with a long ponytail, she habitually squinted and only wore her glasses during tests.

“I did.”

“So we were talking about really caring for somebody. How’s that wrong then, as long as you really care?”

Kay crouched down, the group moving to make room for her in their circle. “There is never anything wrong with your feelings,” she said gently. “We talked about that, and it matters that you understand and believe it. And I wasn’t trying to make a rule for you as to what you should or shouldn’t do with your boyfriend-or boyfriends. Your values are the ones that are going to have to determine that. I was suggesting that you see the difference between sexual feelings and love feelings. They can be related but they’re not the same.”

“Janey, you keep asking the same dumb questions,” Roberta said in a bored voice. “When are you going to get the picture? Sex is a big high. So is the free fall when you jump off a cliff. Landing is the cruncher, so don’t get carried away by the first big thrill.”

“I don’t remember putting it quite that way,” Kay said wryly.

“You didn’t have to,” Roberta said, leaning back with a yawn, all Miss Experience. “I never thought sex was all it was cracked up to be, anyway. I mean, why risk getting pregnant for a five-minute rush at a drive-in movie with a payoff of a Coke at McDonald’s afterward? No thanks.”

Janey’s eyes widened. “Have you really-?”

“We’re talking about values, ”Kay interjected rapidly. “Being sure that the pleasure of being physically close to someone isn’t all we’re really feeling when we call it love. Sexual feelings are so powerful at times that they can be confused with love. If you take your time, and know your partner well, you have a much better chance of being sure of your feelings. Now, does that help, Janey?”

Janey hesitated.

“She wants you to give her permission to go one more step with Jeff,” Roberta said wearily. “Miss Sanders isn’t going to do that, you fool. She just said that if you don’t feel sure about your own feelings, you should lay off until you do. In other words, tell him to get his hands up five inches or take a hike.”

“Roberta.”

“Sorry,” Roberta said unrepentantly. “I’ve liked this class, Miss Sanders,” she added. “You’re terrific, but sometimes you have to talk a little straighter. I mean, her boyfriend’s telling her to-” Kay’s hand clamped across Roberta’s mouth “-or get off the pot. And you’ve tried to tell her a dozen times that he doesn’t have the right to push. In other words, she should tell him to stick it up his-” Again, Kay’s hand sealed Roberta’s mouth.

The sound of the bell had never been so welcome to Kay’s ears.

When she left the school building, Kay noted speckles of white fluff in the air, but the snow really wasn’t trying very hard. A big, lukewarm, watery sun peeked out from behind a few gray clouds, and the sidewalks were wet.

Restlessness stole into her bloodstream, and refused to leave. The kids had been infected with it, except for that last class. Everyone was filled with that sense of anticipation that dominated the holidays. Expectations and anxieties and hopes, and suddenly the world turned high-strung.

Walking it off seemed the best answer. Mitch was out of town for the day. At home she had nothing more interesting to do than clean; being Kay, she had already bought most of her presents by Thanksgiving. That would have left the tree still to do, but Mitch had taken care of that three days before.

A fleeting smile touched her features, and then died. Mitch was serious about wanting to marry her. She was desperately serious about wanting to spend the rest of her life with him. She had no doubts whatsoever about her own feelings. When you found a man who shared the important things, a man who was a giver, who was intelligent and warm and gentle and exhaustingly creative when the lights were out…you latched on to him, and you didn’t let go.

It was Mitch’s feelings that increasingly concerned her. How many times had she said it to the ninth graders? First sexual feelings are incredibly powerful. But they aren’t necessarily love.

That shimmer of doubt kept edging up into her consciousness. Mitch hadn’t played before. Naturally, his feelings were running pretty strong and pretty sure-but just as naturally, they could be entirely sexual. When the fireworks simmered down, maybe he was going to wish he had a few more notches on his belt.

Who was kidding whom? She was a perky lady with big eyes and a nice figure…and she’d had the sense-and the bullheadedness-to coax him out of his shell. But she was hardly a femme fatale. With a little more confidence who was to say he couldn’t at least look around for a lady who was less rosy and more voluptuous and who could grow plants? That he’d get the invitations she had no doubt.

Since the weekend, she’d been trying to give him space. For weeks, they’d been seeing each other almost daily, and Kay couldn’t have felt worse, thinking up excuses why she was suddenly busy every day of the past week. On Wednesday, he hadn’t listened; he’d barged in with that huge crazy Christmas tree… They’d laughed so much…

And she’d sent him home alone, truthfully the last thing she wanted to do. But Mitch had to be sure of his feelings for her. A woman felt something special for her first lover; there was no reason why a man should feel any differently. That first introduction to sexual pleasures could overwhelm a relationship, and that was exactly what she was afraid was happening with Mitch. If she could talk to him…but Mitch was long on male pride, and his lack of experience was something he clearly hadn’t wanted her to be aware of.

Talking wasn’t the problem anyway. Time was. Time out of bed. Time for Mitch to see exactly what they had apart from sexual chemistry.

Time, Kay thought glumly. It sounded good, but after only a week without him, she was miserable. What if he used that time to look around and try his new wings on the rest of the female population?

***

Rhoda took one look at Mitch and burst into peals of laughter. “Merry Christmas, Santa!”

Mitch scowled. “Just tell me where I can get out of this outfit before I turn into a furnace.”

“Mitch, it’s adorable,” Rhoda protested teasingly.

Mitch glanced around the corridor and then pulled out the pillow that was padding his stomach. Dots of moisture beaded his forehead from the heat of the Santa suit. Kay had talked him into the charade…and truth to tell, he’d enjoyed every minute of it. Kay had wrapped the dozens of presents and put them in a huge sack. She’d also pasted on the cotton fluff that was itching his chin like poison ivy. It really wasn’t a nice thing to do to a man at five o’clock in the morning.

And now it was nine, and parents were starting to flood into the hospital. Kay and Mitch had thought about those first lonely hours when the children were awake and no one was there, when memories of other Christmases weighed down on them, when they pictured their siblings tearing the wrapping paper off presents around the tree at dawn…that was the hour Santa had decided to visit the hospital this year. And Mitch had the terrible feeling Kay was going to talk him into doing it next Christmas as well.

“I’ve lost Mrs. Claus,” Mitch growled to Rhoda.

“She’s in the nursery.” Rhoda’s eyes couldn’t stop teasing.

“I’ve also lost my clothes.”

“You know, just watching the two of you this year was almost worth having to work over the holidays.” Rhoda motioned to the supply room near the nurses’ station. “Kay stuck your clothes back there, if you really have to change.” Her eyes flicked past him and then widened. “Mitch,” she whispered.

Mitch pivoted around, to see a little boy trying to maneuver himself down the hall in a wheelchair. His eyes were like black diamonds, staring at Mitch. Mitch’s features softened; he wielded his all-but-empty sack in front of his now-too-flat stomach, and let out a brisk “ho-ho-ho” as he sauntered off, hot as an oven, to spread a little more Christmas cheer.

***

An hour later he wandered toward the nursery, feeling infinitely cooler in a simple pair of navy flannel slacks and red shirt. He’d conned Rhoda into letting him steal fifteen minutes in the nurses’ shower, and his hair was still slightly damp…just as his cheeks were still a rather flaming red from the removal of his beard glue.

He passed room after room, occasionally hearing a little voice breathlessly relating to parents how Santa had already been there that morning, but beyond a vague smile, he paid no attention. At the moment, claiming Kay was the only thing on his mind.

Huge glass windows encased the soundproof nursery. A dozen cribs were lined up in the center of the room, only four of them in use. One red-faced urchin was screaming its tiny head off, and two others were swaddled white bundles of sleeping bliss.

The fourth baby was in Kay’s arms. Mitch paused, staring at her through the glass. The last time he’d seen her she’d been dressed as Mrs. Claus-white wig, rotund tummy and all. Her face had been animated and full of laughter; she’d been tossing up ribbons and silver paper and gleefully making a terrible mess for the hospital staff to clean up.

At the moment, there were tears in her eyes that wrenched his heart. She’d changed to a scarlet dress, and her hair was a smooth taffy curtain. A diaper was draped over her shoulder and she was rocking her precious burden.

She glanced up and caught sight of him, her smile as instant as the rapid blinking of her eyes. He went through the steel door into the tiny anteroom with masks and gowns, and then pushed open the second steel door.

“Aren’t you supposed to have a gown on?” he whispered.

“Not on Christmas,” Kay chided, which truly had no rational basis whatsoever in terms of hospital policy.

He moved forward when she motioned him closer. He couldn’t see much of the little one she held in her arms. Just an extremely wrinkled red face and a tuft of a black curl at the top of his head. Bleary blue eyes focused haphazardly in his direction, and then closed again.

“Someone left him,” Kay hissed. “Just left him. And on Christmas!”

He could barely hear her over the caterwauling of the other infant, but he could see the shimmer of tears in her eyes, and felt utterly helpless. Kay glanced at the baby crying in the crib, and handed her bundle to Mitch. “You take him,” she murmured, and then, “just support his head, Mitch.”

“Wait!” he whispered as he balanced the swaddled baby, but Kay was already bending over the other crib. With the screamer in her arms, she turned around with a grin for him, and motioned to the white rocker in the center of the nursery.

“You rock. I’ll pace,” she whispered.

“Why are you whispering? That one’s screaming loud enough to wake the dead, and it doesn’t seem to bother any of the others.”

She shook her head. Mitch sighed and settled gingerly in the rocker, terrified the thing would creak and the baby would cry.

“He’s not made of glass,” Kay chided, clearly amused at the way he was holding the baby.

“He’s terrifying,” Mitch said gruffly. “Give me a terrible two-year-old any day. I can deal with those.”

“You’re doing just fine.” Supporting the baby, Kay leaned down to kiss him on the forehead. “You were beautiful, Mitch. A beautiful Santa. Your visit made a lot of difference this day, to an awful lot of kids.”

“I wasn’t alone.” The blanket slipped from around the baby; he couldn’t figure out how. Before he had that fixed, a tiny toe escaped as well, and he found himself staring at the little toe. As he tried to wrap the ridiculously small blanket, a thought struck him. “Kay, you’re not taking this baby home?”

“I’d love to take him home,” she said fiercely, and sighed as she laid the second child back in its crib, fast asleep. “I can’t believe a mother would just leave him, and if I didn’t know there are tons of potential parents waiting to adopt…”

When the blanket was arranged and his baby still hadn’t started crying, Mitch relaxed, finding a sort of right-side-up football carry that the baby didn’t seem to mind. “I get the feeling we’re going to be a little late for the family dinner,” he drawled.

“Do you mind, Mitch?”

Mind? He considered himself extremely lucky that they weren’t taking a two-week-old infant home. Loving Kay was knowing she had an instinct for finding the world’s loneliest, and taking them in. And loving her meant anticipating any number of potential disruptions in a quiet life in the years ahead. “We’re in no hurry, honey,” Mitch agreed, but he was more than half mesmerized at the thought of his own child in her arms.

“The nurses will flood back in here at feeding time. They were just so busy before, particularly this morning, and then this one-I didn’t think he should be left alone.”

“It’s all ri- Kay. It’s-” Mitch’s face became peculiarly contorted.

“Silly.” Kay snatched the baby from him. “Did you wet on poor old Mitch?” she cooed at him. “You just scared him out of his mind, darling.”

***

“I was not scared out of my mind,” Mitch growled as he pushed open the front door of her house and patted her rear end with unerring aim until Kay was safely out of the driving wind.

“Of course you weren’t,” Kay said placatingly, and started giggling again as she tugged off her coat. “You’re so good with the kids. Who would have guessed that a massive lug like you would be terrified of a ten-pound baby?”

“If I make you a cup of coffee, will you lay off?”

“Nope. No coffee. Just give me four and a half seconds to change and another three full minutes to call my family, and then we’ll be on our way.”

“You don’t need to change.”

“I do, too. I’m not going to your mother’s house smelling like baby powder.”

She was in such a rush, plugging in the tree lights, dropping the Santa suits, taking off her coat, slipping off her shoes in the middle of the floor. He had plenty of time to block her path back toward the bedroom, and in one fell swoop he wrapped her up and hugged her. Just…hugged her.

“Oh, Mitch.” She returned his hug, and then for an instant her head tilted back, and her eyes seared his with an intensely searching expression that he couldn’t fathom. Before he could question her, she wriggled free. “Let me go, you oaf, or I’ll tell your mother you held us up by seducing me.”

“Are you kidding? My mother wouldn’t believe you, and my father would serve you champagne.”

“Your father knows I’m a good woman. Unlike what you think.”

“Come back here and I’ll show you what I think.”

“Don’t you come near this bedroom. We’re late enough,” Kay called as she disappeared down the hall.

“What about zippers and stuff?”

“No excuses.”

Mitch, smiling, stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered aimlessly while she changed her dress. The huge Christmas tree was set up with winking lights, a dozen strands. She liked lights. She also liked to decorate the tree with every handmade ornament any kid had ever given her. The whole place smelled like holly and pine.

And he was going to have Kay and the holly and the pine to himself for a couple of days over the holidays. He’d talked her into a mini-vacation at the hunting lodge up north…and it had taken some talking. She too damn clearly hadn’t wanted to go.

He’d put on a casual air every time he’d been around her. A man didn’t wear hurt or anxiety on his sleeve…and he’d been afraid of pushing her too far. He couldn’t risk losing her altogether. But he was well aware that Kay had not shown any reticence in their relationship until they’d made love.

He couldn’t imagine any more explosiveness than they’d experienced making love together. Kay was totally responsive, so completely uninhibited and free in her loving that he knew she was satisfied. Or did he just want to believe that? How the hell was he supposed to measure it?

“Done. Okay?” Kay whirled in the doorway, showing off an emerald-green dress with that strange extra material under the sleeves, like the garments he saw in magazines.

His lips twitched in a smile. “Beautiful.”

She made a face. “It’s a shame I can’t believe you. You’re so darned biased… Mitch, I have time to phone my parents, don’t I? I know we’re late, but if I don’t get through now…well, you know how the lines are around the holidays.”

“Of course you have time.”

She flashed him a smile, one he could see in a glance didn’t reach her eyes. He trailed her as she crossed into the kitchen and started dialing.

“She’ll be all right, you know,” he said quietly.

Her soft eyes lifted to his. “Jana?”

“She was fine two days ago when you called,” he reminded her gently, understanding perfectly why her mood had suddenly shifted.

“I know that, but…” Kay spoke to the operator, then leaned against the counter as she waited. “You know, you’d love Jana, Mitch. She’s pretty and she’s funny and she’s got your kind of courage… Mom? Merry Christmas!”

Mitch watched her a moment longer, long enough to ensure everything was all right at her parents’ home. He could tell from her expression, not needing to hear any of the conversation, just as he understood her mood change whenever her sister’s name was brought up.

She’d told him a great deal about Jana’s illness. About the latest remission of two years, about the years when the family was afraid Jana wouldn’t make it, of Jana’s trial by pain. He felt he knew Kay’s sister, from having shared the similar lengthy trial of a lonely illness.

More than that, he felt protective of Kay because of it. She felt guilty about not being physically closer to her family; she worried about her sister constantly and felt helpless to do anything for her. Mitch’s family had been in those shoes-those of the helpless bystanders. There was a kind of life’s trial that had to be faced alone; it hurt those closest because there really wasn’t anything they could do. He understood so much of what Kay was feeling…

And felt intense relief for her, as he watched the sparkle return to her eyes, a giggle echo in her throat as she chattered into the phone. Everything really was fine with her family, and her mood picked up again.

“Mitch?”

He shook his head, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was bullied into picking up the phone, coaxed into meeting three people talking all at once on the other end. Jana’s voice was soft, like Kay’s; her mother told him to not allow her daughter to let strangers into the house; her father asked him about the football season, and they made a bet on the Super Bowl. Mitch didn’t have the chance to say much in return, which was probably just as well. By the time Kay snatched the phone back, the only thing in his head was how to break it to them that he had every intention of claiming one member of their family permanently.

Waiting for her, he leaned against the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, enjoying the sound of her animated laughter as she told her sister about their hospital visit that morning.

Only by chance did his eyes flicker to the kitchen table. A letter lay there; he didn’t really mean to look. He didn’t look; it was more a question of catching the “Hi Hot Stuff” in the greeting and a string of x’s and o’s scrawled near the distinctly masculine “Drew” at the end.

A fist clenched in his pocket. It seemed to be his.

“Finally.” Kay hung up the phone and raced into the living room for her coat. “Darn it, I’m sorry, Mitch. I figured on a three-minute call and should have known that would turn into at least twenty. Are we going to be late? That’s a terrible thing to do to your mother on Christmas.”

“We won’t be late,” Mitch soothed, trailing after her with a smile. “I told you, I called Mom from the hospital-”

“The pie. You would actually have let me walk off without the pie!” She scurried back toward the kitchen and shouted, “It’s gone! It’s been stolen!” She rushed back in alarm, only to see the dish sitting peacefully in Mitch’s hands. She chuckled. “I have to admit you’re smarter than some,” she mentioned as she buttoned her coat before taking the pie.

“Was that a compliment or an insult?”

“I love you, you fool. Take it any way you like.” She grinned at him, holding open the door.

“Who’s Drew?” he asked idly as he reached for his car keys.

“Drew? You mean Andrew?” Kay slid into the seat, breathless, and immediately shivered violently. “Instant heat would be welcomed.”

“Coming up. And yes, I meant…Andrew.”

“A very old and very good friend. He thought he wanted to be a minister when I first met him in high school. We palled around for years. We even kept in touch after he moved out of state. To live with a girl who could have rivaled Mae West, no less. Some future in the ministry.” Kay hugged her hands under her chest, grateful for the heat flooding into the car. Her eyebrows lifted in sudden surprise, as if just aware of the question. “I must have told you about him before?”

“You’re shivering like a scared rabbit. There’s a blanket in back if you can’t wait for the heat to do its thing.”

“I’ll survive.” Kay smiled.

Mitch did, too. Sort of.

Andrew. Another one of her men from the past. Just friends. Or lovers?

Experienced lovers. Unlike himself.

Chapter Fourteen

Kay killed the snowmobile engine with a push on the button. Flipping up the mask on her helmet, she sighed, relaxed, and leaned back on her elbows.

Mitch’s snowmobile continued to zoom ahead, then did an abrupt circle, roared back in her direction and stopped abruptly. His machine was as snow-covered as hers was, and with his suit and helmet totally encrusted, he looked something like the abominable snowman. Particularly when he swung one long leg over the side and started stalking toward her.

“We’re never going to get there if you keep doing this,” he scolded, not for the first time.

“I couldn’t help it.” She motioned all around her.

Moscow always received its share of snow in winter, but often enough it was the kind of snow that pelted down…and then melted. This high lake country around the Kootenai River was something else. Kay knew it was a lumbering region in summer, but Mitch’s cottage was accessible only by snowmobile at this time of the year.

She’d never been this far north before. Steep slopes had given the three-hour ride a roller-coaster quality. Over each rise there seemed to be a lake or stream hidden in the mountain folds. The sun had to fight to soar through the growth of old cedars and giant firs, so snow-laden they were drooping. In places, the wind-driven snow completely buried the trees, and they looked like mammoth ghosts, whimsical giant figures about to take off and walk.

Kay motioned again, entranced by the curve of silver stream they’d just passed. A foot-high shelf of snow curled over its banks; the sun had put a glaze of rhinestones on it. The air was so pure and fresh it hurt her lungs, and the sky had that incredibly clear blue of aquamarine. “It looks as if no one’s ever been here before-ever,” she said helplessly.

A lazy slash of a smile lit Mitch’s wind-reddened features as he bent over her and matched extremely cold lips to hers. “I knew you’d like it.” His warm eyes settled on hers for a long moment before he moved behind her and made sure for the dozenth time that her pack was secure on the back of the snowmobile. “This used to be mail-order-bride country, you know.”

“For the lumberjacks?”

“For lumbermen. Miners. Outlaws. Whoever was foolish enough to try to carve a living out of the wild. Old-timers say that anyone living alone here for long ‘got as goofy as a wooden watch.’ No matter what the season, they were cooped up. Eight feet of snow in the winter, and in summer the undergrowth could get so thick in the woods that you couldn’t travel through them.”

“How did they travel, then? Your family started around here way back, didn’t they? How’d they get the timber out, if there weren’t any roads?”

“They used the rivers. And as for simple visits between folk, the Kootenai and Kalispell Indians built some strange-looking sturgeon-nosed crafts. Kootenai canoes, they were called, ideal for traveling the rivers. And you’re not going to get me talking again until I have you nice and warm in front of a fire with a mug of hot coffee in your hands.” He tucked one snowmobile glove under his arm, and felt her cheek with his bare fingers. “You’re freezing,” he informed her.

“Am not.”

“You’re also hungry.”

“Am not.” She grinned.

“And it’s going to be dark in two hours. Did I tell you this area has its share of grizzlies?”

“Don’t give me that. Bears sleep during the winter.”

“Black bears sleep during the winter. But grizzlies…”

Kay righted herself promptly, not that she seriously believed him. Casting one lingering glance at the idyllic scene, she started the snowmobile engine. The vibrating roar filled her ears, and she adjusted her visor.

Leaning forward to keep the snow from rushing onto her mask, straddling the seat, she felt something like a jockey in the Kentucky Derby. A couple of hours before she’d been wary of the snowmobile; by now she was into the spirit of it. The thing liked to race; she’d just let it have its way-and had elicited Mitch’s roaring laughter when she pitched headfirst into a snowbank some time before.

Her fingers and toes were long past freezing and had gone completely numb. As she followed Mitch’s spray of snow in the distance, she thought dismally that she was doing a terrible job at keeping a handle on caution. She’d balked at the idea of spending three days alone with him, for the very reason that she knew darn well they would turn out as terrific as these first few hours.

Her heart couldn’t afford to get in deeper; she was in hock to Mitch, and heavily, already. When he’d tried to give her the star garnet for Christmas, panic had set in. She couldn’t accept a gift like that unless they were…committed. She was committed, but she just couldn’t be that sure of Mitch. She knew what he thought he wanted, but she couldn’t get it out of her head that the special feeling for a first lover would fade, that he’d suddenly be looking for other women and other sexual experiences.

She’d hurt him badly when she refused to take the garnet pendant. They’d been stiff with each other for the first time on the drive up here. Kay didn’t know how to broach the subject of his inexperience, which had clearly been a tender one for Mitch for so long…but then, as civilization had sped behind them, as the landscape changed to wild white mountains and bubbling streams, laughter had so naturally broken through. How do you keep your distance from a man you love more than life?

At his cabin, they’d be alone, and she’d have the chance to talk to him-she’d make the chance.

***

Wielding an armload of logs, Mitch pushed open the cabin door with his boot. Dropping the wood on the ketch beside the wood stove, he unzipped his snowmobile suit halfway and glanced around in search of Kay.

The log cabin was one big room with a raised potbellied stove in its center. The snow outside was knee-deep, and it curled on the windowsills like whipped cream. Inside, the stove was really popping, and the cedar logs let off their woodsy fragrance, which permeated the cabin.

The cabin was already toasty. Mitch pushed off his boots at the door and started stripping off the snowsuit, his eyes roaming the room restlessly. A twelve-point buck elk’s head hung over the couch; its eyes always stared back if you looked long enough. A double bed took up one corner; Kay had already removed the cover from the feather bed and fluffed it out.

She’d also set a kettle of water on the stove. And checked out the books in the ceiling-high bookcase. He smiled. Every cupboard in the kitchen area was open, obviously recently explored.

He might have thought she’d disappeared altogether if the trapdoor in the far corner hadn’t been open. Rubbing his hands together, he wandered to the opening and crouched down on his haunches.

“I would think you’d have the sense to warm up by the fire,” he called down.

“You’re back,” Kay announced unnecessarily. “Mitch, there’s enough food down here for an entire winter!”

“Of course there is. Anyone crazy enough to come up here in the dead of winter could get stranded.”

“When I saw there was no food upstairs, I got a little concerned,” she admitted. “But I never dreamed-”

“If we kept it upstairs, it would freeze-or spoil, during the long periods no one’s around. The generator obviously isn’t kept on when no one’s here, and you can’t count on it anyway through a long snowstorm.”

“The bathroom’s adorable,” Kay mentioned.

He grinned. “You like that?” The tiny cubicle just off the main room was big enough for a chemical john and that was it. A big claw-foot tub stood next to the pump sink in the kitchen area and could have contained two grown men. A propane heater promised enough hot water to fill the tub, but privacy was another story.

Privacy was not exactly what he had in mind for Kay these few days anyway. The holiday had not prompted much intimacy so far. Actually, none, although there were occasions he could have taken advantage of if the lady had shown the least inclination. Furthermore, Kay had reminded him twice on the way up that she wanted them to get back for a New Year’s Eve party at Stix’s.

An insensitive fool could tell Kay was turning cool. Mitch was not insensitive. Kay was her usual bubbly self, but it was obvious she suddenly wanted to play it light…and it was obvious to him that in some way he’d disappointed her as a lover. Nothing else could be wrong; in every other way they blended like two peas in a pod. And the worst of it was he couldn’t imagine any lover more satisfying than Kay-for him.

He’d felt as touchy as a wounded bear on the drive up. That edginess had only gradually eased on the snowmobile ride; his mood had lifted as Kay’s natural exuberance had broken through her odd quietness of the past few days. Her smiles had made him smile; her daredevil antics on the snowmobile ride had alternately made him roar with laughter and want to turn her over his knee.

“I love it,” Kay announced as her head popped up through the trap door. “Help!”

She handed him foodstuffs, one by one. Coffee, tea, a bottle of wine. Flour. Canned stew, sugar… “We’re having stew for dinner. With homemade biscuits, and I’ll be darned if this doesn’t look like homemade jam. And here are the pickles-”

“Pickles?”

She pushed the trapdoor shut and locked it, then turned to retrieve the food from his arms. “Everyone loves dill pickles,” she informed him. “Furthermore, there’ll be a fruit salad. Not necessarily a fresh fruit salad, but what do you want to bet by the time we get this fixed you’ll be so raving hungry you couldn’t care less?”

The corner of Mitch’s mouth was twitching. “We brought steaks, you know.”

“We’ll have those tomorrow. When I’ve figured out how to cook on the wood stove without destroying everything. You-” Kay pointed a wagging figure in his direction. “Just stay out of my way and let me go.”

He wouldn’t. She should have known better, Kay thought wryly. He started baking potatoes and cooking the steaks before she’d begun the fruit salad; he took the dough for the biscuits out of her hands and set the table before she even found the plates. Arguing with him accomplished nothing beyond having her wineglass refilled and her fanny consolingly patted as he worked around her.

They used the coffee table as their dining room. Seated cross-legged across from each other, Mitch fed her a warm biscuit, dripping with butter and honey, just as if she were incapable of feeding herself. To her total embarrassment, once she’d swallowed the morsel, she yawned.

Mitch chuckled. “Late nights just don’t go with hours in the cold and a little wine, now do they?”

“I’ll wake up,” she promised.

“By the time you get your bath after dinner, you’ll be so sleepy you won’t even appreciate the feather bed.”

“My bath,” Kay echoed vaguely.

“Your bath,” Mitch affirmed.

Kay chewed rapidly on another mouthful of steak, regarding Mitch through feathery lashes. She’d evaded intimacy for days, not from preference but from common sense. You don’t judge the heat of the fire by getting burned up in it. A little distance for Mitch’s sake, and she hoped he’d see they had more than sex together anyway.

She took a sip of wine. “Actually, I don’t need a bath,” she mentioned.

“You’ll love it. Melted snow is so soft that it’s like silk on your skin, and if we drag the tub over by the stove you’ll think you’re in a sauna.”

“Hmm.” There was just a hint of a stubborn cast to Mitch’s chin; she’d never noticed it before. His dark hair had been finger brushed; there was a shadow of stubble on his chin. A red flannel shirt hugged those strong shoulders of his, and in the light of the stove and the kerosene lamps, his features took on dominantly male shadows. Don’t-argue-with-me shadows.

“Is taking a bath a prerequisite to being invited up here again?” she questioned wryly.

“All guests are given a claw-foot baptism the first time they come here,” he explained.

“A Cochran custom.”

“You’ve got it.”

“And have you got another backwoods story for me?” she asked with a chuckle.

As if on cue, she heard the faint piercing howl of a wolf in the distance and started. Mitch, standing up to gather plates, leaned over to plant a kiss on her forehead. “That’s the other reason you’re taking a bath. This is a strange place with scary sounds in the night, and a hot bath will guarantee that you sleep well in spite of yourself.”

“I expect I’ll sleep well regardless,” Kay insisted, which had the same effect as trying to make an arrow pierce through steel.

Snow melted at a very slow rate. Mounds of snow produced very little water. The dishes were long done before the tub was a third filled; she’d lost a trivia game before it was two-thirds filled; and by the time it was full and she was staring at it interestedly with all her clothes on, Mitch seemed to be refilling her glass again-this time with a spiced mulled wine that had the effect of a potent sleeping pill combined with an aphrodisiac.

“You don’t need this sweater,” Mitch remarked.

He was so right. She hadn’t needed the sweater in hours. The wind had picked up outside, but though it whistled around the windows, the inside of the cabin was marvelously warm. Mitch’s hands were marvelously warm as they unbuttoned the shirt beneath her sweater, and then that garment, too, was tossed aside… She stared in amazement; he’d actually managed to hook it on one of the elk’s horn points.

“He was staring at you,” Mitch explained gravely.

Kay giggled. “It wasn’t personal. It’s obvious that he stares at everyone.”

“Not at you. He has no right whatsoever to stare at you. Particularly…”

The bra went, then she felt his hands on the zipper of her pants. Somewhere in the muddled part of her brain, she was saying to hell with it. Mitch’s hands felt good. The look in his eyes warmed her blood, and the moment she slid into the hot water and leaned her head against the side of the porcelain tub, her eyes closed in sheer ecstasy.

She really hadn’t had so much wine; she was simply exhausted, physically and emotionally. The water lapped over her and soothed her weary muscles, and on the far side of the room, Mitch turned down both of the kerosene lamps. Soft shadows exploded in the silence; the crackle of the fire in the stove was mesmerizing, and she only flicked open an eye because for some odd reason the water level suddenly rose.

Mitch stepped in, and when he sank down, the water threatened to overflow. It did splash a little over the sides when he reached out both hands and pulled her to him.

“My hair’s going to get all wet,” she said. Not exactly the most brilliant conversational gambit she’d ever come up with.

“You’re absolutely right. Your hair is going to get all wet,” he agreed.

She caught the hint of a lazy smile before his lips nuzzled down to the hollow in her damp shoulder. She considered worrying about the space in the tub, but truthfully the old thing was huge. She considered worrying about drowning, but that didn’t seem of any particular immediate interest.

He wanted her. Now. Urgency dominated the intimate caresses he lavished on her body; his mouth claimed hers, tilting her head back so that she had the strangest sensation of floating in a dark, warm world of the senses. His skin was so slick, so warm, his chest muscles sleek and slippery against her breasts.

Desire pulled at her, with the lulling promise of a pied piper’s flute; she felt swept along, carried by the power of emotion that vibrated from Mitch. He laid her back, only to slowly propel her legs around his, tucking her around him. As he rained slow, insistent kisses on her face, murmuring to her, she felt the warm, silken thrust of his body inside her.

Her breath locked somewhere in her throat. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his damp shoulder.

“Look at me,” he whispered.

Such black eyes locked with hers. Dots of moisture beaded Mitch’s forehead like crystals. His face had a faint reddish glow, half shadow, half firelight. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” he whispered. “Do you have any idea how good you feel around me, little one?”

His thighs tightened around her and she closed her eyes. “Mitch…”

“So slow in water,” he murmured. “I can last in water for a hundred years for you. It’s like the friction of silk, and for you it’s going to go on and on until you can’t stand it…”

“Mitch…”

His lips caught the name, captured it, held it. He would show her. He could think of a thousand creative ways to give her pleasure; she just had to give him time to learn them all. A lifetime. For the moment, he had now, and there was no way she could escape from him before he’d erased the thought of any other lovers from her mind. Experience or no, there couldn’t possibly be anyone who’d ever love her more.

***

Kay smiled in the darkness, as wide awake as she had been sleepy an hour before. Mitch’s arms were warm around her. The feather bed felt like a cushion of clouds, and a freshly fed stove was sending out noisy little sparks that toasted the dark room.

She’d put on a long flannel nightgown moments before, modeled it for Mitch, and admitted she’d bought it for the trip north because it looked sort of north woodsy. He liked it very much, he assured her…as he stripped it off her.

The wolf howled again in the distance, and she wrapped her arm more tightly around Mitch’s waist. “You’d think it would get tired and go to sleep, wouldn’t you?”

She felt Mitch’s smile rather than saw it. “It’s just a boy wolf calling for his girl. Don’t get uptight.”

“Do I feel uptight?”

“No.” His fingers smoothed back her hair. When he tilted her chin up, she could almost see his eyes sparkling in the darkness. “You definitely don’t feel uptight,” he murmured.

“You can’t expect to come this far north without hearing wolves,” she whispered reasonably. “They provide…atmosphere.”

“And yet you dropped that extra log in front of the door just in case they got in through the bolted door.”

Her palm connected with his rear end, a love pat for his sass, and then lingered. How could a man with such broad shoulders have such a flat little fanny? Men were built very strangely. Her palms slowly rediscovered that strange territory, with sheer sensual pleasure. He felt good. Every inch of him felt good. And he’d just taken her to ecstasy and back again, to peaks she’d never imagined, to delights in intimacy she’d never felt before.

In silence, she stroked his smooth, warm skin, until she felt the whisper of his lips on her forehead, and her hands stilled. The way his fingers combed back her hair, over and over, the way he let the silken strands wind around his fingers, the way his eyes met hers in the darkness…it seemed a moment in time, always hers.

“Mitch?”

“Hmm?”

Her fingers touched his face, tenderly amused at the rapid growth of beard on his chin. “You could have told me,” she said softly. “I only love you all the more for it.”

“Tell you what?”

“That I was your first.”

Tension whipped through his body so fast that he could feel a tight knot forming in his stomach. Until that instant, he’d wanted to believe there hadn’t been anything that shouted inadequate, untried about his performance. “I wasn’t aware that…you knew.”

“I didn’t know, ”she assured him gently. “Not in any physical sense. It was something that I figured out because you’d been ill for so long, and at that particular time in your life-” He was quiet, so quiet and so tense, that Kay felt bewildered. “You’re a beautiful lover,” she whispered, “and I just wanted the chance to share that with you, Mitch. You made me feel all the more special because I was first with you.”

His arm dropped away from her, and he turned over on his back. “Is that what you felt?” he asked. Had she gotten a kick out of being his first? Before she moved on to more experienced lovers?

His tone could have chilled the tropics. A night that couldn’t possibly go wrong seemed to be going very wrong very quickly.

“You’ve been pulling back, Kay. Do you think I haven’t felt it? Your refusal to accept the necklace was only part of that. You’ve been pulling back from the minute I mentioned marriage.”

Something terribly thick seemed to clog her throat. “For your sake,” she said quietly. “I don’t believe marriage is what you want, Mitch.”

He gave her credit for trying to let him down gently. “Or what you want?”

His cold tone pierced her like a knife. “What I want? Mitch, listen. People…feel differently toward the first person they make love with. It’s not always a lasting thing… I mean, a lot of people have to test out other waters and-”

“I hear you,” he said roughly. “But I definitely don’t need to hear anymore. Enough’s enough, Kay. Leave it at that.” Maybe he’d been expecting to hear that, ever since she’d turned cool. Maybe she’d never felt anything lasting for him. He’d been a “first” for her-that was all.

Kay’s lips parted, with a dozen words trying to pour out. Anxiety and distress tore at her heart. “Mitch…”

“There’s nothing more to say, Kay. You’re absolutely right-I just hadn’t thought about it like that before.”

In time, she turned on her side, and a very long time later he finally heard her restless tossing turn into a restless sleep.

He stayed on his back and closed his eyes. He knew that she’d wanted to talk further, but he’d already heard the only thing that mattered. Being his first had been special for her, but she didn’t want him confusing that with something lasting. Now it all made sense; he knew why she’d pulled back the minute he’d mentioned marriage. More talk wasn’t necessary. Kay would only try to be gentle on the letdown.

He didn’t want her gentleness. If he couldn’t have her love, he simply wanted to extricate them both from the relationship as rapidly and painlessly as possible. For her, and for him.

She lay only inches from him. And yet miles distant. In the middle of the night, she kicked off the covers, and he firmly tucked them back around her.

Once he got up to add more wood to the fire.

At dawn, he had their things packed to return home. A fierce ache racked through his bones, like the loneliness of the north wind seeping through his soul. All the physical pains he’d suffered in his life were nothing next to this. He’d fought so hard for life, only to discover that it meant nothing without Kay.

Chapter Fifteen

Kay sprayed some perfume on her wrists, smoothed down the silver jersey tunic and stared glumly at the mirror. She couldn’t have been less in the mood for a New Year’s Eve party.

She was dressed to seduce the world, which didn’t help. The silver top was slinky and low-necked, and she wore it pneumonia-style-braless. Since she never went braless, she’d hoped that naughty feeling would transform a mood gone dismal; it wasn’t working. The eye makeup wasn’t working either. Or the perfume. The silver skirt should have at least given her some self-confidence; it hugged her hips and showed off her legs, but unfortunately she really didn’t give a damn.

The doorbell rang. She refrained from jumping a foot and a half, managing to walk to the door with reasonable sedateness.

“You’re early,” she remarked with a deliberately light tone and a smile as Mitch stepped inside.

“Only by a few minutes.”

She hesitated. “Mitch, this really isn’t necessary. You don’t have to follow through with this, just because we’d already agreed to go…” She devoured him with her eyes. He looked utterly devastating in his dark suit and red shirt, his hair brushed back and his eyes as cool as arctic ice.

“I said we’d go, and we will. You could hardly find someone else to go with at this late date.” He devoured her with his eyes, furious she was going out in public without a bra, entranced at the line of her hip as she bent over to pick up her coat.

“I could have gone alone.”

“And had explanations to make. Forget it, Kay. It’s nothing. You can go your own way when you get there and I’ll go mine.”

“Fine.” She spit out the word with a lethally polite smile. “That sounds wonderful. Exactly what I had in mind.”

“Good.” He stopped himself from yelling at her for not buttoning up her coat. If she wanted to expose her entire chest to the icy wind, that was her business.

He felt used, and he wasn’t likely to forget it. He hoped she’d enjoyed being someone’s first. He ushered her out to the car, opened the door, refrained with exacting precision from touching her and slammed the door in her ear.

Kay winced, crossed her legs nervously, arranged the purse on her lap and tried hard not to let her teeth chatter in the frigid air until Mitch could get the heater going. Chattering teeth would be a hint of weakness, of human feeling. She had no human feeling for Mitch. She felt used, and she wasn’t likely to forget it. The instant she’d brought up the subject at the cabin, he’d whipped out of the relationship like a man set free. He just hadn’t thought about it like that before, he’d said; maybe not, but as soon as she’d pointed out that first didn’t have to be last, he’d all too quickly agreed. He hadn’t been able to take her home fast enough the next morning. She’d been the first notch in his belt; she had no doubt there’d be thousands of others after her.

The heat hadn’t begun to work by the time Mitch had driven five doors down the street and parked the car again. They could have walked, Kay thought wryly. A car rolled up behind them, and they would unfortunately be pinned in. Mitch didn’t seem to notice.

“Listen, Mitch…” she said as he opened the car door. She glanced up at him, to see those frigid dark eyes glaring at her. Still, she tried. He wasn’t likely to know many people at Stix’s party; it was sort of an old friends’ reunion from high school. Why Mitch had insisted on keeping the date…but Mitch was stubborn like that. “Look, I’m sure you really don’t want to be here. I’m not in a mood for a party myself, and it’s not like-”

“I am very definitely in a mood for a party,” he corrected.

Well, maybe he was. After all, it was an opportunity to meet a lot of women, Kay thought bitterly.

Noise and smoke rolled out the door as Mitch opened it. Stix, five inches taller than anyone else, immediately spotted them and bore down as if he’d been waiting just for the two of them to show up. Kay was treated to a bear hug that lingered and a strangely glassy-eyed stare with a hint of sadness. Before she could make sense of that, Stix was swinging a hand in Mitch’s direction. “You damn well better take care of my best girl, hear?”

Obviously, Stix had already had his share of holiday spirits. Kay extricated herself from his abundant affection and glanced around hopelessly at the milling crowd. Dancers had rolled up the rug in the dining room and were gyrating to a primeval beat. The noise level precluded conversation, and most faces were flushed. Most faces were also at least somewhat familiar, more Stix’s crowd than hers, but certainly not strange.

She glanced back at Mitch uncertainly, to find that unreadable stare of his settling in on a roaming blonde. His suit jacket had disappeared with his topcoat, and Stix had pushed a drink into his hand before dissolving into the crowd. Mitch’s eyes darted only momentarily back to hers. “Feel free to have a good time…” He motioned to the crowd.

Hurt pulsed through her for a second and a half, but she had enough pride to stiffen her spine. The roaming blonde cast Mitch another sideways look, and Kay stepped forward. If he wanted a few more notches in his belt, she was about to introduce him to the best notch carver in Moscow. Stephanie had been the busiest girl in high school; on successive Friday nights she’d worked her way through the entire roster of senior class boys. Some ten years later, in a white silk jumpsuit without a damn thing underneath it, she was clearly still ripe and ready.

“Stephanie!” Kay said delightedly.

Grabbing Mitch’s hand, she ignored his startled jolt, and beamed at the sultry blonde. “I haven’t seen you in so long,” she said vibrantly to the other woman. “This is Mitch Cochran. Mitch, Stephanie is one of my oldest…friends…”

Now, she hadn’t meant to hesitate on the word. Neither seemed to notice. Mitch’s eyes were riveted on the pair of nipples poking out of white silk; Stephanie thrust them forward, and Kay catapulted to the bar for a drink.

A grinning man behind the bar served her something or other. She took a sip, and grimaced. Rum. There was probably something more terrible tasting than rum, but she didn’t know what it was.

Roger caught sight of her and dragged her to the floor for a dance. Roger was nice-looking and bearded and soft-eyed, and she’d known him for years. The song was an old Michael Jackson number; no one could resist the primitive rhythm, and Roger could swing his pelvis like a reincarnation of Elvis. Unfortunately, the only thing Kay was in the mood to beat was Stephanie.

Mitch seemed to be getting along fine with her. Just fine. He was leaning over, trying to hear what that itty-bitty voice was saying. Undoubtedly, something priceless. And luckily, those nipples of Stephanie’s weren’t sharp, or she’d be ripping out of that jumpsuit and standing stark naked.

“Kay?” Roger broke into her thoughts. Clearly, he wondered why she wasn’t dancing anymore.

Kay blew him a kiss and maneuvered around the other dancing couples in a beeline for Mitch. She grabbed his arm from behind, smiling brilliantly when both he and Stephanie turned startled stares at her. “The music is terrific, isn’t it?”

Stephanie looked bewildered.

“I saw you were having a good time,” Mitch said flatly. “Don’t interrupt your fun on my account. I don’t dance.”

“I love to dance,” Kay said lightly. “Stephanie, Roger was looking all over for you.” Kay’s eyes skimmed the crowd. If he wanted notches, he could have his notches. But Stephanie wasn’t going to carve them. She hooked an arm around Mitch’s elbow, ignoring his stiffness, leading him inexorably toward a curly-headed brunette in black.

Janet at least had a brain. She was a little flat-chested, but she was presentable, intelligent and had a fantastic sense of humor.

Mitch got the message. Oh, he got the message. She was working hard at pairing him off with some other woman. Anyone but her. She didn’t give a damn.

“Kay always had the silliest sense of humor.” The brunette somewhere way below him giggled.

He glanced down. She was there, all five feet one of her. What was her name? Jane? No, Janet. “Do you want a drink, Janet?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He edged through the crowd and brought back two drinks from the bar. In the distance, he could see the flicker of star-bright silver. A burly man had his arm around Kay’s shoulders; a tall fellow swooped down for a hug. More old lovers, undoubtedly. She was laughing merrily. In her element, entertaining the boys.

“You like baseball?”

Mitch’s head swiveled around. “Football, hockey, basketball.”

Janet shrugged. “What do you do?”

“I’m in geology. You?”

She was a professor at the university. Mathematics. One of his best subjects. They had a few university friends in common, and they battled to keep up a conversation over the noise in the crowded room. But Mitch’s eyes kept straying to Kay.

She was talking to a couple, waving a drink in her hand, but there was a black-haired bastard eyeing her from across the room. Her face was flushed, her eyes overbright, and he saw her finish the drink, make a dreadful face and set the glass down on a table.

It wasn’t like Kay to drink too much. The black-haired creep wandered closer and then zeroed in on her. Kay glanced up and nodded, and Mitch watched them move to the dance floor. The number was fast, and her breasts were moving with tantalizing rhythm to the beat.

“Good heavens!”

Mitch glanced back at Janet, then with a wry look at the half-spilled drink in his hand. “I didn’t spill it on you-”

“No. Someone must have bumped you from behind. It’s so crowded in here…” Her eyes very shyly invited.

Mitch stifled a sigh. “Could I get you another drink?”

“Sure.”

When he came back with Janet’s screwdriver, Kay was still on the dance floor. Her current partner was a tall blond man with a mustache. She obviously knew him well. Very well, from the look of the hug she gave him.

Mitch handed Janet her drink and gave her his warmest smile. “You’ve been at the university how many years?” he questioned.

“Five.”

The music changed to a slow number. The blond tugged Kay close, and for a minute Mitch lost sight of them. There were too many people and too much smoke, and a half-dozen more couples had crowded the floor to dance to the seductive love song.

“Mitch?”

He forced his head back in Janet’s direction. “Sorry?”

“I just asked you-”

Kay had her hands on the blond’s shoulders. No big deal. Then the man’s hands were on her shoulders, which was also no particular big deal. Except the blond’s hands started roaming. Someone cut in front of them, and Mitch couldn’t see.

“Listen,” Janet said politely.

“Just a second, okay?” Mitch murmured. He smiled, handed her his drink and turned around. His smiled died. The blond had just made a terrible mistake, letting his hands roam down to Kay’s hips.

If he ended up alive, he’d be lucky.

***

Kay shifted nervously, trying with body language to communicate to Hal that New Year’s Eve was a festive occasion, that she forgave him ninety times over for the seven scotches he’d already had, and that she wished he’d keep his hands to himself.

When body language failed, she tried a polite “Hal,” to get his attention.

But his head seemed to be drooping over her shoulder.

“Hal,” she repeated cheerfully.

His big blue eyes met hers. “I love you, Kay,” he said groggily. “I loved you in high school. Did you know that?”

“I…no. Listen-”

Long before she could finish the thought, Hal’s roaming hands were whisked off her flesh as if airborne. Startled, Kay jerked up her head to find Mitch’s lethal eyes bearing down on an unsuspecting Hal. She didn’t have a chance to close her mouth before a long, strong body insinuated itself between her and her dancing partner. “Take a real long hike, won’t you, sport?” Mitch tried to make his voice cordial.

“Kay?” Hal’s limpid blue eyes registered total confusion, but already he was two dancing couples distant. Mitch wasn’t exactly moving in slow motion.

Tough, sinewy muscles jammed most intimately against hers, bearing her off into a corner. “Would you like to see that little mustache of his pulled out hair by hair?” Mitch murmured.

“Hal?”

“For two cents, I’d rearrange the knuckles on those busy hands of his.”

“Mitch-”

His lips covered hers. Her arms seemed to be waving around in midair, until she found the material of his shirt to hold on to. She felt the tension of a man who was furious, the tenderness of a man who loved beyond measure and the sheer sexual vibrations of the only man who stirred the same instant, abandoned response in her.

It wasn’t the kiss of a man who had his mind on pursuing other women. Actually, it wasn’t even a nice kiss; that sweet pressure on her lips radiated possessiveness and jealousy and anger…dreadful character traits. Who would have guessed Mitch had such a temper?

Mitch’s lips lifted only when she made a tiny sound at the back of her throat. “Dammit. Did I hurt you?” he growled.

“Not really.”

His mouth homed in on the target. People were staring. They seemed to be smiling as they stared, though. Kay closed her eyes so they would all go away. Mitch was communicating some very intimate things; Mitch had always been very good at communicating very intimate things with kisses. The distant, cold man who’d arrived at her house to escort her to the party had disappeared. The man who was holding her like a tightly wrapped treasure was not at all cool, not at all in control…and Kay’s heart was inexplicably taking off on its own private jet flight. She remembered her fears that he’d want to try out his wings with other women… Well, it was hard to hold on to those fears when he was making it so very clear that a Kay-and-Mitch team was the only thing on his mind.

Mitch’s lips gradually lifted when he was sure he’d made it absolutely clear that the chemistry between them wasn’t something she should be in a hurry to throw away. His eyes locked with hers; the noise of the party returned, and he grabbed her wrist in a handcuff grip. “We’re going home,” he said flatly. “Hug all the men you want to on the way out. Just understand that every one of them is going to be decked flat out.”

It seemed wisest to just wave her goodbyes in passing. Stix would probably have been the exception, but Kay caught only a glimpse of his shaggy dark head above the crowd. Actually, there was a strangely bleak stare in Stix’s eyes, fixed directly on the two of them, before she saw him turn and make a beeline for the bar.

Polite goodbyes to the host were not Mitch’s immediate priority. Coats were, and theirs were buried amid tons of others. Mitch grabbed hers, pulled it on her and buttoned it before opening the door. On the porch, a fresh fall of snow greeted them, newly arrived in the past hour. Unfortunately, though, three cars were blocking his.

“We’ll walk,” he growled.

“All right.”

“I really wouldn’t argue, if I were you!”

“All right, Mitch,” she said mildly.

A distance of five houses wasn’t a long walk. Kay, racing along at his side, stole an occasional upward glance. Mitch looked meaner than a wildcat in a cage. Her feminine instinct wanted to pacify the wounded beast…but her heart seemed a great deal more sure of Mitch than her head was.

He didn’t talk until they’d reached the front porch and she was fumbling for her key. He grabbed it from her, shoved it in the lock and pushed open the door. She was barely inside before he slammed it and ordered her to take off her coat.

“It isn’t going to work, keeping it all nice and light and civilized, ”he said flatly, yanking off his coat and tossing it on a chair. “Maybe that’s how you usually end things. I don’t know or care. At the moment, I don’t feel the least bit civilized, and if you think anything is ever going to be over between us, you’re out of your mind.”

“Look, Mitch. You were the one-”

“I’m going to marry you, Kay. I know what you feel and I heard what you said, but you never really gave us a chance. You’re not going to tell me you’ve had a lover who loved you more than I do because it just plain isn’t true. Tell me you weren’t satisfied in bed,” he roared.

She shook her head, tears shimmering in her eyes like diamonds. “Why would I want to tell you that?” she whispered. “Why don’t you tell me that I was just the first notch on your belt, and you were already thinking about…branching out? Trying your wings? I told you you wouldn’t want something permanent once you-”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I saw you at the party,” she said stubbornly, folding her arms across her chest, not about to be intimidated just because he was standing there like a glowering behemoth. “You could hardly take your eyes off Stephanie.”

“That woman you threw in my direction?”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t have heart failure when she tossed her chest in your direction,” Kay said furiously.

“I had heart failure when you let that creep put his hands on you.”

Kay hesitated.

Mitch didn’t. His arms slid around her, gathering her up. He inhaled the sweet perfume that was Kay and savored the silken feel of her hair against his chin and he trembled, feeling the pliant crush of her breasts against him, so familiar. His voice came out in a hoarse rasp. “You need an experienced man in your bed, Kay? You’ll have one. For the next fifty years, you can play teacher.”

“You never needed a teacher, you fool. Can’t you tell when a woman’s happy?” A single tear rushed down her cheek; she tilted her head and raised trembling lips to his. “But you took off like a shot when I said the first word about your wanting to test out other waters.”

“You took off like a shot after we made love the first time. What was I supposed to think?”

“Just what did you think?”

“That you weren’t…satisfied. That you were subtly trying to tell me you wanted to move on.”

“Why the Sam Hill would I want to do that?” Kay’s voice came out in a breathy roar of outrage. How could such an intelligent man be so unutterably dense? He’d mixed up everything.

Mitch’s lips suddenly twisted in an uneven grin. A ruddy flush returned the color to his face, and his dark eyes glinted at hers, coming closer. “Darned if I know. You’ve got it all, you foolish woman. I’m more than willing to shower you in jewels, I’ll buy you plants until you’re a hundred and three, and I absolutely adore you, Kay. How on earth could you have gotten everything so totally mixed up?”

“Me?” It was amazing how one could shout through laughter, as if both of them were suddenly aware that the argument was over. It was just as amazing how fast a room could turn silent. How shadows could turn soft, how colored lights on a Christmas tree could suddenly spin and blur when the thing wasn’t moving at all. Only Mitch was moving, filling her world, the love on his face filling her heart.

His lips molded hers like warm honey, soft, smooth and sweet. “Don’t you ever be so foolish again,” he whispered. “I don’t want anyone but you, Kay. I don’t need anyone but you. If I’ve had to fight for life every inch of the way, you’re the reason why it’s been worth it. The chance to love you, live with you, be with you-”

“You don’t have to shower me with jewels, Mitch,” Kay returned softly. “I just wanted to be sure…that you would be happy.”

Mitch’s thumb gently traced the line of her cheek. He drew back. Kay watched the play of emotions on his face, the last of the tension fading to a lazy, loving tenderness, the dark intensity in his eyes subtly changing to just a hint of the hell-bent-for-leather mischief-maker he had been once. “I’m not happy,” he growled.

“You’re not?”

He cocked his head in the direction of her room. “Hey, teach,” he drawled. “If you’re still concerned that I’m looking for ‘experience,’ a few wild oats to sow-maybe you’d just better give me a few private lessons.”

“I’ll do that,” Kay said gravely, and shook her head. “These slow learners…honestly. A woman could spend her entire life-”

“Exactly,” Mitch agreed, “what I had in mind.”

About the Author

Jennifer sold her first book in 1980, and since then she has sold more than eighty books in the contemporary romance genre. Her first professional writing award came from RWA-a Silver Medallion in l984-followed by more than twenty nominations and awards, including being honored in RWA’s Hall of Fame and presented with the RWA Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award. Jennifer has been on numerous bestseller lists, has written for Harlequin Books, Avon, Berkley and Dell, and has sold over the world in more than twenty languages. She has written under a number of pseudonyms, most recognizably Jennifer Greene, but also Jeanne Grant and Jessica Massey.

She was born in Michigan, started writing in high school, and graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in English and psychology. The university honored her with their “Lantern Night Award,” a tradition developed to honor fifty outstanding women graduates each year. Exploring issues and concerns for women today is what first motivated her to write, and she has long been an enthusiastic and active supporter of women’s fiction, which she believes is an “unbeatable way to reach out and support other women.” Jennifer lives in the country around Benton Harbor, Michigan, with her husband, Lar.

***