Eight

“Did you know your mother had legs?”

Dulcy glared at Sally with a little too much irritation for the harmless joke. “It’s a dance, Sally,” she snapped, wishing with all her heart she felt better. “Get over it.”

Sally, darn it, laughed. “You look beautiful tonight, Dulcy,” she said, mimicking her tone. “Live with it.”

“You do,” Hannah echoed, the sincere surprise in her voice betraying both her painful honesty and the truth of how Dulcy had been living since her daughter had been born.

“Thanks, Hannah,” she retorted with a rub of her daughter’s head. “Many more compliments like that, and I may just expire.”

“My Fair Lady,” Sally intoned.

Dulcy scowled mightily. “You’re overplaying your hand, Sally.”

Even so, Dulcy felt as much a charlatan as Eliza Doolittle must have felt at her first formal function. Not because Dulcy was trying to mold herself into something else. Because she wasn’t sure just what she was supposed to be anymore. She’d become almost comfortable in her jeans and boots, as if they could protect her from the kinds of problems she’d been so prey to. She’d become asexual, almost invisible to the men who worked and cursed and fought alongside her without remembering she had breasts.

“This is stupid, Sally,” she protested again, smoothing her hands along the flowing gauzy skirt. “I didn’t need a new outfit.”

Especially something with nothing more than a silk camisole and embroidered vest to go with the skirt. She didn’t need to wear lipstick and eye shadow and mascara, either. She’d dug them out, anyway, along with her favorite old tortoiseshell combs to pull back her thick hair.

No braids tonight. Her hair was full and wavy against her shoulders. Dulcy ran her fingers through it, straightening it just like she did her clothes. She didn’t know why. It wasn’t like she was trying to impress her Uncle Mike or any of the hands.

It wasn’t as if she wanted Noah to look at her differently.

To notice that she did have breasts.

It was just a stupid barn dance after a hard day out in the sun.

“This is worth the price of the ranch,” she heard behind her and forgot every one of her objections.

Then she turned around and almost forgot her name.

He was just in jeans. Jeans and a soft white cotton shirt and gray jacket. His hair was still damp from the shower, and it curled at his neck. His beard was growing fast, making him look rakish and dangerous. His eyes…

His eyes settled on her in a way she hadn’t wanted since she’d been sixteen. His smile was every fantasy she’d ever owned about a man, and it was making her knees weak.

“We ready to go?” she asked, her voice unforgivably breathless and her hands ironing the sides of her skirt.

He gave his head a slow shake. “I’ll have to thank the Tiltons personally.”

“Why?”

“For giving me the chance to find out that you have more in your closet than plaid shirts and boot-cut jeans.”

Dulcy scowled, whirled around to leave. “You’re as weird as Sally tonight.” Her skirt followed her, brushing against her bare legs, whispering against her skin like a secret, and she remembered what was fun about wearing skirts.

She was almost out the door when he said something that stopped her in her tracks.

“Man of the Hour.”

“Oh, my God,” Sally breathed. “What a thought.”

“Don’t be silly,” Dulcy scoffed.

Silly wasn’t the word. Not for that movie. Even Dulcy had seen it, dragged by Sally in a moment of weakness when the bad weather had kept the work at a minimum and the cabin fever at a fever pitch.

Man of the Hour, Cameron Ross’s latest movie about a con man posing as a European prince, who ends up making the glittering, beautiful and lonely queen of a fictitious country fall in love with him. The movie had sported more diamonds than a baseball league, more tuxes than an Italian restaurant, more class than…more class than Dulcy had seen in one place in her life. Just the ball scene, in which the handsome, quixotic, charming Max Vanderhorn had seduced Queen Margot in full view of a thousand guests with just his voice and his thumbs had sent the temperature in the theater up at least fifteen degrees.

Man of the Hour. Never in her life had Dulcy wished for anything but what she had. Suddenly she wanted to smile like that queen had in Max’s arms. Suddenly she wanted to dance so fast the room spun around her. She wanted to find herself in a fantasy in which she was the sole sight in a handsome man’s eyes.

Even so, she turned back on her disheveled, scruffy boss and her plump, pretty cousin and her much-too-grown-up daughter, and she gave them the final word.

“Find me one person in a tiara and sash tonight who isn’t finalist for Miss Corn Crop,” she challenged them both, “and I’ll get up on the bandstand and sing the Man of the Hour theme a cappella. Now let’s get going before I change my mind altogether.”

It was another beautiful night. Above the half-finished barn, the sky arced away in deepening peacock like a silk blanket frayed at the edges by crimson. The breeze tugged at skirts and ruffled hair, and the lights strung along the beams gleamed gently on friendly faces. After a hard week of branding and a long day of carpentry, the neighborhood had gathered to relax, and relax they did. Children scampered around, preteens clustered in stiff groups to eye the groups of the other sex. Parents shared gossip and pocket flasks. In the corner the band warmed up, and at the back a table laden with potluck offerings attracted a steady line.

Dulcy felt as if she belonged with those teens, the gangly, uncertain ones who were still too long-limbed or acne afflicted. The ones not sure of their graces, their attraction or their place. She had never felt this way at thirteen. Amazing she should now.

“You’re saving some of the slow dances for me, aren’t you?” Noah asked in her ear.

Dulcy fought the inevitable fall of shivers his close voice incited. “I’m not much of a dancer, Noah.”

His chuckle should have been included in the encyclopedia of sin. “I doubt that.”

And then, without another word, he was gone. Weaving his way through the crowd that greeted him with the ease of a longtime neighbor, a backslap here and there from the ones who hadn’t had a chance to laugh over his introduction to town down at the Lone Star, a smile and a simper from the women who’d already heard on the grapevine how attractive their new neighbor was.

Well, Noah was. Attractive and charming and more. Dulcy, as usual, took her place along the chairs by the food and punch where she could catch up on the news and ignore the people who would ignore her. She kissed Miss Retta on the cheek and laughed with Vera and a couple of the mothers from school as if nothing were unusual, as if every one of them didn’t notice that no matter how hard she tried to the contrary, there was something very different about her tonight. She gossiped and visited, and knew every second of the time just where Noah was in the big, open building.

“He’s quite a lovely young man,” Miss Retta offered coyly from where she sat on a folding chair like a deb at her first ball. “And such a gentleman in the face of your rather formidable aunt.”

“Yes,” Dulcy answered automatically. “Wasn’t he?”

He should have said something to her by now. She knew about the phone call Ethan had made. Knew just what Noah had found if he’d booted up the computer, which he had. She’d heard him.

And yet, he hadn’t said a word.

Why?

Dulcy had been trying so hard in the small hours of the night when he’d been asleep to find the problem. She’d sent Noah out with the men to ride fences and learn the land, and she’d gone off in different directions with Hank to see what they could find that might explain their losses.

She hadn’t made any headway. Noah had to know that.

And yet, he hadn’t asked.

“Where’d he say he was from?” somebody else asked, all eyes tracking Noah like the royal box checking out serves at Wimbledon.

“Philadelphia.”

“But he has a Texan accent, doesn’t he?”

“Uh-huh. He grew up there.” At least, he’d intimated he had. Dulcy didn’t really know for sure.

She really didn’t know anything for sure about him, except what he’d told her, which was nothing. Except what she’d found out, which wasn’t important. She didn’t know where he’d been raised, who his family was, what had shaped him and led him here.

She didn’t know what had given birth to that longing she’d surprised in his eyes when he’d looked on the land, or the loneliness she suspected in the fact that in the time he’d been there not one person from his other life had contacted him.

In fact, the only other person she knew about in that other world was the ubiquitous Ethan, the one who always answered when she called, who always fielded the questions and put together the deals. Ethan, who sounded a lot like Noah, but without the accent.

Without the underlying intensity.

Ethan, who seemed to be Noah’s filter between the real world and this one.

Dulcy wondered why. She watched him move so easily among the people of this valley, as if he’d belonged here his whole life, and wondered what it was he kept from here.

What he kept from his other life.

He walked right up to where she was standing, his eyes alight, a cup of punch in his hand. Dulcy almost stopped breathing on the spot.

“Ladies,” he said, acknowledging the little cluster of women who all smiled back. “How are you all tonight?”

“You’ve been holding back on us,” Miss Retta accused.

Noah let an eyebrow slide north as he bent toward her, every inch the devoted gentleman. “How’s that, Miss Retta?”

She waggled a finger at him. “Just where did a businessman from Philadelphia learn so much about building barns?”

He laughed. “Same place I learned how to ride a horse. My uncle’s ranch in Texas. I learned all my practical skills there.”

“Did you learn how to dance?” she asked, as if announcing the next song. Behind them the band swung into a lively two-step.

Noah’s face fell. “My uncle was a heck of a horseman,” he apologized. “But not much on his feet. Probably too late now to learn, I’m afraid.”

Miss Retta straightened to the full extent of her genteel dignity. “It’s never too late to learn, young man. Not to learn properly, at any rate.”

Noah’s smile almost melted the plastic cup in Dulcy’s hand. “Miss Retta,” he countered. “Is that a challenge I hear?”

Miss Retta climbed to her not very considerable feet. “It seems it is, Mr. Campbell. Are you up to it?”

When Noah reached out to take Miss Retta’s hand, every eye within twenty feet misted over. When he let her lead him out onto the floor, everyone watched. Even Dulcy. Especially Dulcy.

Miss Retta hadn’t joined in one of these dances as long as Dulcy had known her. No man in town had asked her. No one had thought…

Noah had.

He bent over her now, his eyes alight, his smile as true as sunlight, his concentration on Miss Retta as if she were Scarlet O’Hara. Other people danced out on that floor. Even their attention was on the mismatched couple, and smiles grew like wildflowers before Noah Campbell’s sun.

Dulcy shouldn’t have been impressed. She shouldn’t have been enchanted. She shouldn’t have forgotten for one moment just how foolish it would be to fall in love with her boss.

“Oh, my God,” Sally breathed again, her voice hushed with true awe. “It is Man of the Hour.”

Oh, my God. Dulcy couldn’t have put it any better.

Noah danced with the little woman for three dances, the two-step and two slower waltzes. He stumbled a little and laughed and tried again until he looked almost as comfortable as his teacher. And then he brought her from the dance floor flushed and smiling in a way Dulcy had never seen in her life. He gave that lovely, well-known little woman something none of her friends had thought to give her, and Dulcy couldn’t manage the words that would thank him.

“And now,” he said, turning her way after making sure Miss Retta had her chair and her punch, “I think it’s time I tried this dancing stuff out on you.”

Dulcy almost turned around to see who was standing in back of her. “What?”

His smile grew to near-wicked proportions. “Well, now that I’ve learned how to do it, I thought I should put it to use. Before I forget it again, ya know?”

“Oh, I don’t…”

Someone gave her a push that landed her almost smack in Noah’s arms.

“Sure you do,” he said for her and took hold of her hand.

It had been so long since Dulcy had allowed herself fantasies that she had no preparation for what she faced out on that dance floor. She hadn’t dreamed into the night of the seductive feel of a man matching her step for step across a wood plank floor. She hadn’t imagined the rasp of his workroughened fingers along her back. She hadn’t allowed herself to ever imagine the heady warmth of his gaze on her alone as the floor and the people and the lights whirled by.

The band consisted of a couple of fiddles, a guitar and a mandolin. The music was as homespun as local humor. Even though she hadn’t done it much, Dulcy had danced in barns before, finished and not. Sally’s husband Bart had made it a point to get her to join in.

She’d never in her life spent five minutes like this.

Noah wrapped his fingers through hers and slipped his other hand around her waist. He focused his eyes on her as if she were his point of balance, and he led her around the room with unerring ease. He smiled at her as if what they were doing was a stupid joke everyone else could join in on, and yet, beneath that smile, Noah was letting her know something more. Something dangerous. Something heady and wonderful and wild.

Dulcy could swear she could almost hear him, like a humming along the edges of her fingers, a whisper in her ear she should catch if she turned her head quickly enough. A throb just beneath the sound of the music that no one else could pick up. She felt her skirt skim her bare legs and the air brush her calves. She felt Noah’s thighs slide alongside hers as they moved. She saw the lights glitter in his eyes and smelled the tang of his after-shave. She felt as if she were melting and freezing at the same time. As if she were struck dumb and yet wanted to tell him everything.

She felt as if once he set her back among her friends she’d keep spinning.

“This is stupid” was all she could say, unable to pull her gaze from his. Mesmerized by perfectly ordinary gray eyes.

“I know,” he answered, his voice a caress, his eyes dancing with humor.

“Then you know we shouldn’t be doing it.”

“Why? Because I’m your boss, or because you’re enjoying it?”

Dulcy couldn’t manage a lie simply because it was wise. “Both,” she challenged and made him laugh.

“Me, too. But then, I thought you didn’t care what people thought.”

“I don’t…I do.” She shook her head in frustration, only to be startled by the unfamiliar shudder of hair against her shoulders. “I don’t need them to get the wrong idea about why I got this job…look at me when you answer.”

“I am looking at you,” he insisted lazily. “I’ve been thinking about looking at you on the dance floor since Sally first told me about the dance. I have to admit, I’m not disappointed.”

At least she could scowl at that. “Please, don’t,” she objected dryly. “The flattery will go to my silly head.”

His gaze met hers again, and she almost stumbled. “Your hair is magnificent. Has anybody told you that?”

“Yes. And when I listened to him, I went from English class to prenatal class. You lied to Miss Retta.”

Spinning, surging, sweeping past all the people in her life as if they didn’t matter anymore. As if their place had been superseded. Still Dulcy couldn’t take her eyes from Noah’s.

“I never lie,” he protested.

“If you’ve never danced,” she retorted, “I’ve never changed diapers.”

His smile was bright and happy. “Oh, that. It wasn’t a lie. It was a…pick-up line.”

Dulcy couldn’t believe it. She laughed. It felt wonderful. She felt wonderful, as bubbly and light and graceful as she’d ever wanted to in those distant days when she’d only meant to outrage her very stiff parents.

“Thank you,” she said, anyway. “You made a very nice lady happy.”

“What about you?” he asked, leaning a little closer. “Am I making you happy?”

The music ended before Dulcy could answer. Before she could get her heart to slow enough for her to catch a decent breath.

“There’s something you should know,” she said, standing there stock-still in the middle of the dance floor as other couples trickled by toward food and drink.

Noah couldn’t seem to look serious. “What’s that?”

“I haven’t been honest about the ranch.”

Dulcy wasn’t sure what she expected. She still wasn’t sure why, after all the work to the contrary, she’d said it, except that it was the surest way she could think of to put some distance between her and her new boss.

She wasn’t prepared for Noah to grin.

“Finally,” he said, taking her hand and turning her toward the punch. “I thought you’d never say anything.”

That brought Dulcy to a full stop. In the corner the band swung into the “Orange Blossom Special,” and a few of the hardier kids came out to celebrate. Dulcy and Noah stood faced off.

“What does that mean?” she demanded.

“It means,” he said gently, “that when we get home from the dance we’ll start to work it out.”

“You knew.”

He nodded. “And you knew I knew. Why didn’t you say something?”

“Why didn’t you?”

His chuckle was indecent. “Is this what marriage is like?” he asked, and then tugged her off the dance floor before they got run over.

“You should have fired me,” she insisted.

They got as far as the line of chairs. “Probably,” he acknowledged, then faced her with as much sincerity as was in him on a night like this. “But only because you wouldn’t trust me to understand.”

“Understand what?” she retorted. “That you’re missing cattle and the spread sheet doesn’t add up?”

“Ethan and I already figured out what was wrong with the spread sheet. If you’d come to me about it, we could have had this conversation before we got all dressed up. Now, let’s enjoy ourselves and leave the problems at the ranch until later.”

There were a lot of things Dulcy could have said. All she could manage was to ask, “You figured it out?”

Noah’s smile this time was simple. “Yes. Now then, I came here to dance, and I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it with you, because I find that I can’t keep my hands off you, no matter who the boss is and who’s here to see him act like an idiot.” With that, he lifted a hand to run his thumb along the curve of her jaw. “I have the most horrible feeling, Ms. McCann, that the entire community is going to see me make cow eyes at you tonight. And even confessing to lying to me about the ranch isn’t going to dissuade me.”

It wasn’t Noah who looked like an idiot. When he strolled over to get drink refills, Dulcy found herself left behind gaping like a landed fish.

Cow eyes? Who was he kidding? What did he mean?

He couldn’t possibly mean what Dulcy was afraid he meant. He couldn’t mean that he was still humming like an electrified wire just from having held her. He couldn’t mean that the air seemed to empty out the farther away she got. He couldn’t mean that he couldn’t seem to get enough of the sight of perfectly ordinary eyes.

Oh, God, she thought in absolute despair. Of all the places to realize that she was falling in love, it had to be in the middle of a dance where every living person in the valley could watch.

It had to be with the man who’d insisted on keeping her on against everyone’s better judgment.

It had to be a man who kept his own secrets even better than he kept his business—and that should have made Dulcy angriest of all.

“Guess some of us just don’t have the same advantages as others,” she heard under somebody’s breath.

“Yeah. All Hank has to offer is twenty-five years’ experience.”

“Not to mention poor Josh. I still say it’s a sin that he didn’t get what was due him.”

It was nothing new under the sun. Dulcy had heard the accusations since she’d returned to the valley and taken over the ranch for Aunt Cordelia. Since she’d brought her little girl along as if the entire area didn’t know just what that particular story was.

It hurt this time. Their accusations felt so very unfair. Not because their attitudes had changed. But because hers had. Because she’d worked so hard for what she had and she could see its worth dimming in the face of an attraction she hadn’t anticipated.

An attraction she’d never wanted.

An attraction that had long since become something far more.

“Hey, Dulce, wanna dance?”

Dulcy turned around to see the sweet, homely face of Bart Bixby beaming on her. Sent, no doubt, by Sally to counter some of the petty spite she’d probably overheard.

It was the last thing she felt like doing in the world right then, but Dulcy smiled. “Thank you, sweetie. I’d love to.”

And so Bart took her out on the floor and stepped on her toes, and Dulcy thought about what she’d missed all these years out on a dance floor with only her cousin to keep her company. And when she walked off the dance floor, she kept on going until she found herself alone at the edge of the Tilton’s meadow where nobody could judge her.

“I didn’t think you were a coward,” he said when he found her.

Dulcy didn’t turn away from where she was considering the darkness beyond the lights and music of the dance. “I’ve been called lots of names in my life,” she said evenly without turning to face him. “That’s probably the only one not on the list.”

“Then why didn’t you stay there and face them?”

That got her to turn around. She couldn’t see Noah’s eyes. They were in shadows. His entire face was shadowed, as if Dulcy had just imagined him out of the cloth of her loneliness. The loneliness she hadn’t even admitted until he’d stumbled into her house.

His house.

Her life.

“Did you live in one place your whole life?” she asked.

“No. I told you that.”

“You haven’t told me anything. How many places did you live?”

When he answered, his voice was a little smaller. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“Everything.”

Dulcy waited. Noah stood there before her, hands in jacket pockets, head up as if preparing to defend himself. A position she knew all too well. One she hadn’t expected to see on him.

“So we traveled around a little. What’s that got to do with it?”

“Everything. You could reinvent yourself every time you went someplace new,” she challenged. “I can’t. There’s no crowd to hide in, no brand new start where nobody knows what’s gone before. I have to live with every mistake I’ve ever made. Every blunder, every humiliation…No matter how well I do—and I’ve done damn well, Noah—what I did when I was sixteen always comes back to haunt me.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that I worked too damn hard to end right back in that pool of water. I spent the last eight years making sure that the people in this valley would understand that I didn’t live up to all of their worst expectations.”

“And being attracted to me would ruin that?”

“Being attracted to you would set me back so far that getting pregnant at sixteen wouldn’t even be a problem anymore.”

“Then why stay?”

“Because, damn it, I should be able to. It’s my home. My family’s here. No one should be able to run me off.”

“But should they be able to make you miserable?”

Now her chin came up. “They don’t.”

“They do.” Noah stepped up to her, so close he blotted out most of the light, so close she could smell the soft whisper of soap on him. So close she fought just to breathe. “They made you into a nun, Dulcy.” He lifted a hand, brought it to her hair, let his fingers explore. “A sexless, cloistered, careful nun. Except that your habit is work boots and jeans instead of a veil.”

“They didn’t…” Dulcy couldn’t think. Noah’s fingers were inciting a shower of sparks along her neck. She’d never had a man’s hands in her hair. Not like this. Not as if he couldn’t keep his hands away, as if he were ingesting life from her through his fingertips.

“You don’t even go to movies,” he said, his face so close now she could see his eyes. His ghostly eyes. His ordinary, moonswept eyes. “No dreams, no fantasies, no fun. The only person you really let in is Hannah, and that’s not enough, Dulcy. It’s just not enough.”

Dulcy tried so hard to think. To object. “Sweaty palms isn’t reason enough to throw away everything I’ve achieved, either,” she finally managed to say, backing away against the fence. “I know. I’ve done it once, remember?”

His hand was still wound in her hair. He lifted the other to her chin, to lift her face to his. To force her to face the sky, as if she had a right to it.

“If this were just sweaty palms, Dulcy, I’d be the first one in a cold shower.” He chuckled, a rasp of surprise. “After all, I came here figuring I wouldn’t look at another woman as long as I lived.”

Dulcy laughed back, but the sound was high and much too breathless to be sarcastic. “Didn’t do a very good job of it.”

“I know.” He shook his head slowly, moved closer. “I know. Tell me what I should do.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. Before Dulcy could draw breath, he caught her mouth in a kiss. A real kiss, the kind that young girls dream of, soft and questing and sweet. His hands slipping along her throat and urging her closer.

Dulcy tried so hard to fight what was already a losing battle. “You shouldn’t play stupid…ah, games…”

His mouth was so hot, so nourishing and alive. His hands were so strong, big enough to carry, gentle enough to share. “I didn’t mean…”

“I can’t…” Dulcy forgot what it was she couldn’t.

She rose on her toes, lifted her own hands. Wrapped herself up in the thick luxury of Noah’s hair and took her own taste of him. Sweet punch and sharp whiskey and dark silk. Mastery and submission. Dulcy felt the rumble of a groan against her fingertips and shuddered with its power.

In the distance she heard the band swing into another song, something slow and sad, one of the ballads brought west about love lost and lonely wandering. Dulcy heard the minor notes wind through the summer night, felt them take wing in her as if their slow, thick cadence set the dance of Noah’s fingers. As if their pain echoed in the lonely places Dulcy had never expected in him.

Need.

Want.

Hunger.

Dulcy tasted them all on him, offered them back. Fed her own need with the rasp of his beard against her hands, the almost clumsy impatience of his hands against her waist, her back, her arms. She lifted against him, opened to him, begged him open in return. She held on, not because he was strong. Because he smiled. Because he courted old women and laughed with little girls.

She encouraged, because his touch brought her back to life, even though it hurt.

It hurt.

“Why me?” she asked, sounding so much like the sad song other people danced to.

Noah pulled her close, bent his head over hers. Held on tight, as if afraid of losing what he’d found.

“Dulcy…”

“I mean it…” She had to drag in her breath, like yanking on a hand brake. She had to understand, because her body was already way ahead of sense here, and she knew better. “It’s only been a week, Noah. I don’t understand it.”

His laugh was sharp and surprised. “Don’t look for explanations from me. Ethan was trying to tell me about profit and loss, and all I could seem to talk to him about was what your hair looked like.”

“I’ve tried so hard to be sensible.”

“I don’t think sense is involved here.”

“I know it isn’t.” Tears now, welling in the back of her throat like hot tar. Stupid, useless things that only meant she was much more confused than she’d thought. That this had gotten far too far out of hand. “I have to get back to Hannah.”

“Not yet,” he begged. Begged, as if Dulcy were that important. “Please.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and pretended. Just for a moment. It was something she hadn’t done for so long, she knew she got it wrong, because what she saw was her and Noah and Hannah. On the ranch. Happy. Whole. She saw something she’d never allowed before, not once in all these years.

She saw a family, and that stopped her cold.

“I can’t, Noah,” she said, not moving.

“You can do anything, Dulcy.”

He sounded afraid.

Afraid. Dulcy thought she was the only one who was afraid. So unnerved that her heart was hammering and her skin tingled in a thousand places.

Somehow she’d been struck by lightning, and she was reeling.

“You have to tell me about the books,” she insisted even as he tilted her head back again.

“Later.”

“I have to find those lost cattle.”

He kissed her again, nipping at her lower lip and letting his hand stray from the corner of her jaw. “In the morning.”

She sobbed with the effort to stand up. To stand still. To not take hold of his hand and just place it over her breast. To place it lower, where her body was starting to revolt against all that control she’d exerted over it along the years.

“No, Noah,” she begged, knowing damn well he heard what she was really saying.

His hand found the tender skin over her heart. His fingers, so callused and warm slipped beneath her camisole, and she let him. She felt her head fall back to give him better access, felt her thick, unruly hair brush across her back.

“Yes, Dulcy.”

He dipped to taste her throat with his tongue and her nipple with his thumb, and Dulcy let him. She begged him. She wanted him.

“Please…”

Please what? Please stop? Please don’t? She didn’t know anymore.

“Please…”

His hands, on her skin, tracing her lips, her eyes, tangled in her hair. His mouth, warming her, chilling her, nourishing her. Her body, shimmering with sudden, stunning need.

And then, suddenly, he stopped.

Dulcy was still dragging in a breath, wondering what had happened to those wonderful hands. Already Noah was four paces away, and his eyes were in the shadow again.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“What’s wrong?” he retorted, his voice suddenly sharp and certain. “What’s wrong is that I can’t get a straight answer from you about what’s going on.”