Exhausted, Bree said quietly, “I’m fine, Hart. Really, I’ve always been fine. I never needed a caretaker before, and I don’t need one now. You never had to-”

“No, I didn’t have to.” Hart pressed one swift, fierce kiss on her mouth before lifting his head to glare at her. “Since you didn’t take your car, I figured you had to be camping out somewhere, but I didn’t figure you’d pick a mosquito haven.” He slapped irritably at his neck before fumbling with the rough white netting between them. “Actually, I did figure it, having very few options at this time of year.”

In a silent whoosh, Bree was suddenly buried in a tangle of mosquito netting. That wouldn’t have been so bad if Hart weren’t trying to bury himself with her. “Now just be patient for a minute, Bree.”

Patient? It was like tussling with a wild animal in the middle of the night. He leaned forward, the weight of his thigh nearly crushing her. She got a mouthful of mosquito netting when she tried to protest; vaguely she heard the zipper of her sleeping bag being pulled down, and then he was trying to tug her out of it as if she were a sack of potatoes. “If you’d sit still for a minute…” he growled at her impatiently.

It was hard to stay miserable when she was in so much danger of smothering. “What are you trying to do besides kill me?”

“There.” His voice reeking with satisfaction, Hart finished his contortions. Sitting cross-legged, using his head for the mosquito-netting tent pole, he wrangled Bree to his lap and more or less covered her with her sleeping bag for warmth. What wasn’t covered by her sleeping bag had certainly been covered by him. His arms were wrapped so tightly around her she could barely breathe. His lips pressed, hard, on her forehead, then in her hair. “I knew it was going to happen tonight,” he whispered.

“What?” He felt…disastrously good. Her cheek lay against the beat of his heart, and the longer he held her, the more his warmth filled up the terrible yawning hollow that the tears had drained. She felt comforted when she shouldn’t have felt comforted at all. It was past time she handled her own problems, stopped leaning on a man who’d upset her entire life and was a little too good with women. She tried to sneak a hand up to rub away the last of the tears from her cheeks, and found Hart’s hand already there.

The pads of his thumbs, very gently, brushed away the final glistening of salty sparkle beneath her eyes. “You had to break down sometime,” he said quietly. “It just couldn’t keep going on. Don’t you think it’s time you told me about it?”

She shook her head no, and in response, felt a scolding trail of kisses whisper through her hair.

“Tell me.” More kisses tracked down the side of her cheek and then back into her hair again. “I’ve had enough of guessing, and hearing it secondhand. Your father said something about your grandmother dying, and I milked Marie for every other clue I could get, but what is all this business about your ‘not being yourself right now’? I don’t know who this ‘yourself’ is supposed to be, but the Bree I know is a most appealing, extremely sensitive, richly complex woman. She’s a little stubborn.” He tacked a kiss just behind her ear. “She’s inclined to take other people a little too seriously. She looks a little like a drowned rat when she pulls back her hair.” He centered another kiss on her chin. That one lingered. “Dammit, Bree. Let me help you.”

His arms tightened around her when she tried to get up. Hart could be unforgivably stubborn. After a time, she leaned her cheek against his chest and sighed irritably. The mosquito netting made a cocoon around the two of them; outside was darkness, the damp loneliness of almost dawn.

It seemed forever before she found her voice again, a voice that tried to sound light and casual. “My grandmother was just…so special. I’ve had people I loved and who loved me all my life, Hart-it’s not as though I was ever deprived, but with Gram…she was a kindred spirit. There could never be anyone like her again. She embraced life every morning, every minute of the day. She could make you believe in rainbows…” Bree’s voice trailed off, a lump in her throat again.

“And you loved her.” Hart’s fingers started to comb slowly through her hair, sifting through it, soothing it.

“I loved her, I respected her, I wanted to be like her. She always said I was, but it wasn’t true. And when she died…something happened. I’m still not sure whether I felt it was Gram I failed, or myself. It seemed part and parcel of the same thing. Everything I’d always valued didn’t seem important anymore. I wanted that joy of life Gram had-I wanted to go after it…” Bree hesitated and then smiled wryly, raising her eyes to Hart’s. “So I dropped a perfectly secure job, I did a Dear John on my fiancé, I worried my parents half to death, I took off-hardly mature, responsible actions, now, were they?”

“I think,” Hart said gravely, “that in a sense those were very responsible actions.”

“Hart, your judgment is just not a help. You’re as off the wall as I am,” she whispered, and received a lopsided grin in reply.

“Now you listen. It isn’t crazy to go after what you want in life-it’s crazy not to. And as for your grandmother…” Hart shifted, trying to make a space for both or them to lie down. “You never disappointed her, Bree. I don’t need to have known her to be very sure of that. And whether you realize it or not, you’ve got the fighting instincts of a pro. I should know.” Once he’d settled her on his arm, he hesitated, leaning over her, and started restlessly sifting his fingers through her hair again.

“You should know,” Bree agreed.

“Sun’s coming up,” Hart remarked.

“I noticed.” Fingers of gray had stolen into the darkness. She could make out Hart’s face, the shadows and planes, the dark softness in his eyes.

“You look like hell when you’ve been crying, you know. Your face is all splotchy.”

“Thanks so much. I can always count on you to say the most complimentary-”

“Marry me, Bree.”

A robin twittered somewhere. Probably her imagination, Bree thought in a rush. When one started hearing voices, heaven knew how fast the rest of the mind could crack.

Chapter Twelve

Bree shook her head with a nervous little laugh. “First I lost my voice, and now my hearing seems to be going. I could have sworn you just said-”

“Marry me.”

Stunned, Bree tried to search his face in the dim light, but Hart’s eyes seemed to be shuttered beneath thick dark lashes. “You’re not serious,” she said.

“Of course I’m serious. You already know I love you. Whether you like it or not, you’re in love with me. I don’t really see that we have any other choice.”

“Hart.” Maybe he was joking. Of course he was joking. But being Hart, he would give her a really wretched demonstration of his sick humor when her emotions were in an upheaval and she couldn’t think straight. And that “You already know I love you” hurt. It hadn’t occurred to her before how badly she wanted to hear those words…but not said lightly, or accompanied by an offer of marriage.

Bree kicked out at the mosquito netting, and after thoroughly tangling herself in the white cloth managed to twist free and stand up. Hart bunched the cloth into a huge white pillow and leaned back against it, watching her. She couldn’t figure out the strange tension that seemed to grip his features; Hart was never tense. His voice was certainly as teasing as ever as he remarked, “You adore me, you know.”

“You’re full of peanuts. And-among other things-you just spent an entire dinner totally absorbed in another woman. Not to mention the beauties I saw bustling around your place like a harem of slaves.”

Astonishment shone from his eyes. “What on earth are you talking about? What harem?”

“Hart,” Bree said lowly, “you’ve had more women helping you fix up your place than a hive has hornets, and most of them looked like jailbait.”

A faint smile creased his cheeks. “Because they are.”

“Wonderful.”

“Reninger has six granddaughters. I told you about him-the man I went to dinner with, the night we…uh-”

“I remember,” she said stiffly.

“They’ve been friends of the family for years. I always see them when I’m on vacation.” He added mildly, “I diapered most of the girls a few years back.”

“They certainly haven’t needed that recently.”

“Beauties,” Hart agreed. “The two oldest are twins, seventeen, and they both definitely fill out a bikini. Nubile or not, I usually manage to control myself where children are concerned. And hard as it is to believe, I’m just too old to take on two at a time, much less six. Because most of the time they come en masse-”

“All right, Hart.” Bree could feel a flush of embarrassment heating her cheeks.

“Actually, they always help me set up house when I come here on vacation. And my mom usually houses the whole Reninger troop for a few weeks in August-”

“I get the picture,” Bree muttered uncomfortably.

“Sure?” Hart asked dryly.

“Very sure.”

“And as for my absorption in Marie over dinner, my sweet nitwit, I wouldn’t have had to pump her if you’d been a little less stingy talking about yourself. Getting information out of you is like pumping a dry well. But if you read any more than that into the attention I gave Marie, I’m going to be insulted. I happen to have,” he informed her, “much better taste in women.”

He didn’t give her much chance to answer before his tone changed. The lightness was suddenly gone, and his eyes held a quiet watchfulness as his finger traced her cheek. “Bree,” he said quietly, “you persist in imagining racy scenes in my background. I’m not saying I haven’t been around, but fidelity happens to be one of those old-fashioned values I could never quite shake. You’ll be stuck keeping me happy, honey, don’t doubt it. And I certainly don’t plan on giving you any reason to look elsewhere for someone to keep you satisfied in bed.”