THIS MIGHT BE our last night together. I don’t even know how to start the conversation about what comes after for us. But I know if anything’s going to happen between us, it’s going to be now. I’ve showered and changed into a short cotton skirt under a white cami. I’m barefoot and braless, and I won’t deny it’s so he’ll notice.

He’s got one of his favorite country CDs in the player as he moves around the kitchen, and I smile when I catch myself internally singing along.

He makes Chicken Provençal, over pasta this time, instead of rice, and serves it with red wine. It’s amazingly good, but I can’t really eat. My stomach’s in a knot, trying to figure out how this is supposed to go. Is he leaving? Will I ever see him again? Am I still his job? Or can we finally give in?

I’ve got more questions than answers, and Blake isn’t in a talkative mood, so we pick at our food in silence.

After we’ve cleaned up, I step out onto the balcony and rest my elbows on the rail. The lights across the suspension half of the Bay Bridge stretch out like a runway, drawing my eye to the city, sparkling like a jeweled tiara across the black water of the bay. It’s truly beautiful up here.

“Nice night,” Blake says from behind me.

I rest my chin in my hand. “I’m going to miss this.” I’m going to miss you.

For a several beats of my galloping heart, he doesn’t say anything. When I turn, I find him staring at me. “Are you packed?”

“I . . . I wasn’t sure about the clothes and things that you guys got for me.”

One corner of his mouth lifts in a sad smile. “It’s all yours, Sam.”

His smile pulls hard at my soul. It feels like a stone fist is crushing my heart. He hasn’t said anything about staying here after the case. Will he go back to L.A.?

“Will I see you again? After tomorrow?” The question rises up on a swell of despair, and it’s just now that I realize how close to losing it I truly am.

I want him so badly to say yes. “I really want that, Sam.” Despite his words, his expression is anything but sure.

If this is it for us, I don’t want to walk out of here tomorrow with any regrets. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wishing I’d had the guts to follow through.

I push off the rail and take his hand. “Come on.”

He lets me tow him into the living room, where I sit him on the sofa and turn up the music—one of his current country favorites. And then I move. I dance like I did that first night in the club. I close my eyes and dance just for him, putting everything I am into it and hoping he can feel me.

I catch the hint of his scent—warm and musky—before he even touches me, and when his hands slip around my waist and he presses his body against mine, every single one of my nerve endings bursts into flames. His fingers are in my hair, so soft, sweeping my long auburn locks away from my face. His lips brush over my forehead, like butterfly wings, on his way to my ear where his tongue strokes before he nips at my lobe. I don’t open my eyes, because the sensations flooding through my body—his delicious scent, and the feel of his hands, the sound of his soft moan—are already too much to handle. Seeing him would send me over the edge of control.

He strokes his fingertips gently through my tangled waves, and his breath in my hair, his body pressed against mine, feels so good.

Tears press against the back of my eyes, and I can’t stop them. When they trickle past my lashes, he kisses them away. And when I finally open my eyes, his are open and warm and it’s as if he’s seeing straight into my soul.

His gravitational pull turns into that of the sun. My fingers dig into his chest, grabbing handfuls of his shirt, and the next second, my mouth is pressing hard against his. He groans as his lips move over mine, devouring me. His tongue takes possession of me, twisting through my mouth as if trying to taste all of me at once.

I glide my palms over his chest to the buttons of his shirt and work them one by one, but my shaking slows my progress. I break the kiss and pull it over his head. My eyes follow the black lines of his tribal tattoo from the waistband of his jeans, up his left pec, and over his shoulder, to where it’s interrupted by the bandage on his upper arm. I lift my finger and trace its edges.

Goose bumps pebble the flesh of his arm, and his chest heaves as he struggles to catch his breath. His eyes are wild, gazing into mine, burning with a combination of barely contained desire and thinly masked fear.

Staring into those eyes, I don’t care what happens tomorrow. All I know is I want him tonight. I lift my shirt over my head and press against him.

He closes his eyes and tips his head back, breathing deep, as if trying to find some reserve of control. Apparently, there’s none to be found, because the next second, he grasps my ass and pulls me up so I’m straddling his hips. He carries me to the sofa and throws me down, pinning me under his body. His mouth finds my hardened nipple and he gives suck, setting off land mines under my skin. The shock wave travels straight to my groin, and I grind myself against the thigh he’s positioned between my legs. He presses his leg harder against me as his fingertips tease my other nipple into a hard peak. I can’t help the moan that claws up my throat, and he answers with one of his own.

“God, Sam,” he breathes. His eyes lift to mine as he drops kisses down my rib cage toward my belly button, where he swirls the tip of his tongue around my belly ring. His hands slide under my skirt and find my underwear, and he watches me with feral eyes, still swirling his tongue through my belly button, as he inches them down. I lift my hips, and he kneels on the sofa at my feet, sliding them off in one deft motion and tossing the scrap of fabric to the floor. His long fingers move slowly over me, stroking my most sensitive places before plunging deep inside me.

“Ah,” I moan as my muscles contract around his fingers. A groan rumbles out of him as he draws his wet fingers out of me and strokes my sweet spot.

“Oh!” I gasp, feeling an intense jolt of electricity spark my body to life in a way it’s never been before.

I roll my hips with the rhythm of his hand. He sucks his top lip between his teeth and his eyes flutter shut when I find the bulge in his jeans with my toes and press. When he opens them again, they’re on fire. In one smooth move, he tugs my skirt off and buries his face between my legs.

“Ahh!” I cry out when his tongue flicks the sensitive point there.

He slides fingers inside me, and swirls his tongue over the center of my universe. My long animal mewl fills the room as he brings me to that place that only he’s ever been able to take me. I buck and he growls low in his chest as he grasps my hips and sucks me. I’m barely coherent as I come, but what I know is I want more. I want all of him.

I spin with the sensation as Blake’s lips and tongue caress every inch of me on their way back to my mouth. He kneels between my legs and pops the button of his jeans. My whole body feels short-circuited, and when I reach up to drag his zipper down, my arm feels weak and shaky. But I manage it as he reaches into his back pocket for his wallet. I tug his jeans low on his hips as he tears open the condom and rolls it on, then gazes down into my eyes with a question in his. In answer, I pull him down on top of me and spread wide, letting him in. A second later I cry out, a sharp “Ah!” as he buries himself inside me to the root.

He thrusts again, hard and deep, and the center of my universe is right there, between my legs. I feel the spring in my belly winding tight again as he brings me back to the peak of sensation.

“Oh, God,” I whimper as everything inside quivers.

My body tells him exactly what I need, and he gives it to me. He moves inside me, hot and thick, and there’s nothing gentle about it. He’s all power and need.

Never have I felt so inside out, all my nerve endings on the surface—this crazy, blood-on-fire, synapses-on-overload, overflowing-with-pure-ecstasy feeling. His subtle male scent; the moisture starting to bead on his hot skin; the flex of his biceps under my hands; his firm pressure inside of me, stretching me and filling me in a way nothing else ever has; I take it all in, feeling his essence flow through me in slow waves of bliss. And what I need from him shifts. The singular need to feel him bring me to climax again gives way to something deeper and far more desperate—something that makes what’s happening between us feel so much bigger than just sex.

My head spins not only with the intensity of the sensations taking hold of me, but with the realization that I might be falling in love with this beautiful, infuriating man.

When the pressure has built to critical mass, I explode all around him with his last thrust, and it feels like we’ve both vaporized into pure energy. There’s an electric rush that sweeps from him into me, then back again. It totally knocks the air out of me and I lay gasping, my head back and my mouth wide, for a full minute before I can find oxygen.

He collapses on top of me, panting hard, and I relish the feeling of him there, finally as close as I’ve wanted him from the start.

“From the minute I saw you on stage that very first night, I’ve wanted this,” he breathes in my ear, “but I never dreamed how thoroughly you’d blow my mind.”

I glide my fingertips over his back and muse that he just said what I was thinking. No matter how much I’ve tried to ignore it or deny it, even through all the dissonance, we’ve always been in tune. I nuzzle into his neck. “Stay with me tonight.”

He presses up on his elbows and looks down at me, and that hunger’s not completely gone from his eyes.