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were crazy to come back up here that summer… And you stayed with him that whole month before he died—”
    “I left the minute I was eighteen and never really came back. I knew I was all he had. He knew how I felt; he told me so before he died. The respect of one man for another—I never had it for him, and I was wrong. But I didn’t know how much it mattered that he didn’t have it for me.”
    “I don’t understand,” Erica said, her voice growing angry. “Kyle, I don’t have to understand. He was wrong.” She slipped the dress over her head impatiently. She shivered a little, but the cool night air was like silk on her skin. Moonlight brushed the delicate lines of her collarbone and shoulders, her long, slim thighs. Her mind was racing, trying to find the right words to say to Kyle, trying to understand how and why his feelings for his father had so painfully changed him from the man she had married.
    Her hair fell in a slow-sweeping red-gold arc as she bent to remove her panties. When she straightened, her entire profile was illuminated, her skin tinged with the satin sheen of moonlight. “Listen,” she began.
    He was out of bed, moving up behind her. He pulled her back against his chest, nuzzling her hair back with his chin so he could kiss the hollow in her shoulder. “We can’t have you standing in that window, love. Anyone passing by would undoubtedly have an accident. The look of you—that natural sensual grace of yours—could well cause a five-car pile-up.” His lips dipping for her shoulders again, he added gravely, “We can’t have that on your conscience.”
    She remembered that low, vibrant tone of his all too well; her heart instinctively changed beats. She felt warmer suddenly, in a way she hadn’t felt warm for weeks, loving the feel of his calloused hands on the smooth skin of her stomach. “There’s never anyone out here at this hour. Except,” she qualified, “raccoons.” There were two tiny beacons that could have been raccoon eyes in the distance, bright pinpricks behind a giant oak.
    “They’ll have to go. This is my view,” he asserted, and she chuckled, turning in his arms to face him.
    He was naked. It seemed a century since she’d felt free simply to run her hands over his arms, over the smooth contours of his shoulders. “It never occurred to me that you might be jealous of raccoons,” she remarked innocently. “Do you have the same mistrust of foxes? Squirrels?”
    He took a nip of the tender skin of her neck. “I’m jealous of the air that touches you, Erica. A well-kept secret.” His voice was so low she could barely hear it. His weariness seemed to have disappeared. The vibrant sheen in his eyes caressed her as intimately as his hands.
    She hadn’t forgotten what they had been discussing; it mattered too much…yet she closed her eyes for a second at his seductive touch, savoring the sweet rush of heat in her limbs. This was Kyle again, not the stranger whose distant manner so frightened her. She craved his warmth, hungered for closeness, yet she wanted a mating of more than bodies. “Kyle…”
    He pushed her gently toward the bed. The sheets felt oddly cool against her warmed skin. “Don’t talk.” He leaned over her, smoothing back her hair, stealing the pillow away from her head so she lay flat and vulnerable. His lips brushed hers fleetingly, his thumb tenderly caressing her cheek. “No more talk,” he whispered fiercely. “I know your loyalty, Erica. God, I never meant to drag you into this.” His mouth suddenly claimed hers, with a searing pressure of urgency and hunger. “When I first met you, you were like sunlight in a very dark world,” he murmured. “You’ve never changed, not for me. Sunlight and softness, elusive and fragile; I wanted to protect you, shelter you, in a way you can’t possibly understand. I need you as I need breath…”
    “Kyle…” It wasn’t his words so much as the desperate intensity she sensed behind them.