She trailed him out to the back of the SUV, which was already loaded with swimming suits, two root-wrapped rosebushes as presents for her mother, a long skirt to wear later, and some tools Craig was lending her father. She stood back up from the truck and blew a wisp of curl from her cheeks. “You’re going,” she told Charlie with an affectionate and most determined gleam in her eyes. “No more nonsense about being too busy. It’s too hot to work, you know my mother will kill you if you don’t show up, and you’re too darned old to be shy. Furthermore, you’re going swimming when you get there.”

Charlie gave her a disgusted look and hitched up his jeans. “I’ll go swimming when hell freezes over.”

“It just did.”

“You’ll have a fine time without me,” Charlie said stubbornly.

“But I won’t have to have a fine time without you.”

Charlie sighed. “You used to be agreeable when you first married him, you know. Now suddenly it’s all Miss Bossy and Sure of Herself-”

“Oh, hush.”

“Now what are you two arguing about?” Craig demanded from behind her.

“The same thing we’ve been arguing about all morning.” Sonia turned with a sneaky wink for her husband. “If we don’t get going, the lemon pie’s going to melt. We’re not leaving until Charlie gets in the car. The pie’s going to be ruined, I’m going to cry-”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Charlie said disgustedly, and headed for the passenger door. “She could wear down a rock,” he mentioned to thin air.

“He probably won’t talk to me for the rest of the day-dammit, wait a minute! I’ll be right back.” Sonia’s long legs took her flying back to the house. Her mother had given her an article on rose care that she’d promised to return today.

In Craig’s study, she rapidly sifted through the papers on the desk, knowing she’d seen the article there last. Her fingers found the four-page essay, but as she snatched it up, a file folder slid to the floor, spewing papers out.

“Only when I’m in a hurry,” she muttered as she bent over. Her hurried movements stilled when her eyes unintentionally caught the few lines of writing on the page. It was a receipt for services rendered-by a man in Chicago.

A faint frown furrowed her brow. The man was an investigator, according to his letterhead. And the money Craig had paid him was not insignificant.

Craig had never mentioned the investigator to her. Actually, in the past few weeks he hadn’t said anything at all about the incident in Chicago; she was so sure he had finally put it out of his mind. But this…

“Honey?” Craig called from outside.

An odd chill whispered down her spine. Quickly, she shoved the papers back into the file and returned it to the desk, racing with her mother’s article back to a pair of impatient men.

“It’s perfectly okay that you wanted to take the entire day getting ready,” Charlie told her. “I’m holding the melting pie you were so worried about.”

“Thank you, Charlie,” Sonia said solemnly, and slid into the backseat as Craig started the engine.

“How long are you two going to keep this up?” Craig wondered aloud. His eyes flickered back in the rearview mirror, settling on Sonia’s orange camisole with the white satin ribbons that looked precariously tied. Then up, to where her sassy lips curved in a delighted grin.

“It’s pinned very securely underneath,” she assured him.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing, Charlie.”

Sonia leaned back for the ride, stretching out her legs, closing her eyes like a sleepy cat in the sun. Heat seemed to have lethargically replaced blood in her veins. The men maintained a steady conversation in the front seat, but she was only quasi-listening, and her relaxed smile was only partly sincere.

Craig had hired an investigator to find their assailants? She didn’t understand. The Chicago police were undoubtedly doing everything they could to find the muggers, and regardless, emotionally and perhaps irrationally Sonia wasn’t certain she wanted the culprits found, if it meant she and Craig had to be involved again. The incident was done, over with, and nothing could undo it. Dwelling on it accomplished nothing; the image of the blond man with the strange light eyes only raised nausea in her when she did so-nausea and the sick memory of horror, of feeling so vulnerable and fragile…

Unconsciously, her fingertips rose to her throat. An opal rested in the hollow there, an opal in an onyx setting with a chain so delicate the gold rested like a whisper on her skin. Craig had replaced the original one more than two weeks ago. She hadn’t taken it off since.

She opened her eyes slightly, focusing on Craig in the driver’s seat. Love was in her eyes-eyes that were blue-green like the soft shimmer of water at dawn. Love for the man who had clasped that necklace around her throat in the middle of the night without saying a single word. She’d bring up the private investigator’s receipt with him sometime, but not now. The last thing she wanted on her mind today was the mugging.

Craig’s hair was getting a little shaggy in back, she judged critically. His shirt was white, a short-sleeved knit like a golfer’s shirt; her eyes traveled over his shoulders, muscular and taut, sun-bronzed and strong. As he turned to Charlie, Craig was squinting in the bright afternoon sun; she caught his profile, from the smoky gray eyelashes to the slight bump in his nose to the look of his smooth lips. That chin of his jutted out. Not an easy-to-manage chin.

The chin needed kissing. So did the mouth. So did the eyes, the shoulders. All of him, actually. What he needed, Sonia considered gravely, was to be brutally wrestled to the ground, his clothes ripped from him and very, very soft kisses forced on him, inch by inch.

“Sonia? You remembered the potato salad?”

Her face flushed with color. “It’s right here.” As they turned into her parents’ driveway, she found herself staring at Craig for one more instant. Vitality was beginning to radiate from him again; he exuded energy. And virility. And purpose. His stride was swift and free, no longer inhibited by pain with every movement; the worst of the bruises were gone. His headaches had lasted the longest and still happened sporadically-normal, the doctor had said. But Craig hadn’t had a headache in days, not even a twinge. He’d never admitted to having them anyway, but she’d become an expert at knowing the signs.

They still hadn’t made love. Sonia had simply dropped all sexual thoughts from her mind. To encourage that kind of action when he might be hurting again-no. Craig would have to be the judge of when. So it had been a few weeks, she acknowledged. So? Sonia well knew that Craig liked his loving long and lazy. Very long. Very lazy. Very slow, and on occasion terribly, terribly wild…

“Are you sleeping back there?” Craig opened her door, peering in with an amused grin.

Embarrassed, she bolted up and out of the wagon, rapidly snatching up the potato salad as she did. Charlie had already disappeared. Sounds of laughter and conversation rippled toward her from the side of the ranch house, by the pool. The yard was crowded with little people, big ones, old folk and young…and the smell of roasting pig filled the air. Sonia knew her parents must have started the barbecue at daybreak.

The sun filtered down in long yellow waves, dancing on the pool waters, catching the bright colors of the children’s bathing suits. Laughter resounded in the air; it was a glorious day for a barbecue.

“I didn’t think you were ever going to get here!” June Rawlings descended on them, in white shorts and long legs not unlike her daughter’s, her dark hair pulled back with a cheerful red scarf. She swooped down to kiss Craig, then Sonia, then helped them carry their stuff in from the station wagon. “Where’s Charlie?” she asked with surprise.

“Mike Henning caught sight of him the moment we drove in. They’re already over by the pool,” Craig told her.

“That man,” Sonia huffed. “Getting him off the ranch takes a bulldozer, and you know darn well we’ll have to pry him loose to get him to come home.”

“You don’t think by any chance think Charlie thrives on all the attention you give him, do you?” Craig asked wryly.

“Nonsense.” When Sonia bent over to reach for their swimming gear, her shorts rode up on her bottom, and then slid down respectably when she straightened.

Craig’s eyes darkened. The tightening in his loins was familiar. A certain loneliness ached inside him for the intimate touch of her, yet an unfathomable bleakness etched sudden tension on his features. Thankfully, neither his wife nor his mother-in-law noticed.

“Have we got it all?” June asked. “Sonia, you sweetheart, you didn’t have to bring a pie.” She gave her daughter an impish grin. “And now we’ll have to hide it. If your father catches even a whiff of lemon meringue, you know there won’t be a bite left by dinnertime.”

“I almost made two.” Sonia let out a delighted burst of laughter as two small children came barreling toward her from the long slope of the yard. Rapidly she filled her mother’s hands, freeing her own just in time to catch two curly towheads, neither much bigger than knee-high.

“Sonie, go swim! Sonie, go swim!”

“They’ve been driving Arlene nuts, waiting for you two to get here,” June said dryly.

“Do my sister good,” Sonia announced. “Where’s Uncle Craig?” she asked the youngsters. “Are we going to give him a good dunking in the water?”

Her niece and nephew launched themselves at Craig then, and he carried one child under each of his arms toward the house, both giggling and menacing him with dire threats as soon as they got him in the pool. He threatened them right back, which only made them giggle harder.

They took care of the food, changed into their bathing suits and greeted the other guests. Arlene fussed for a minute over whether the little ones should be forced to take naps and was hooted down. In the melee of noise and confusion, Sonia found her father. Stephen Rawlings was standing on the front porch with a group of ranchers, holding a glass of lemonade, his weathered face squinting in the sun. He was tall, and his hair was gray these days; a paunch was developing around his middle. And Sonia probably loved him more than life. She collected a kiss and quick squeeze before her husband yelled for her.