“Not sex.”

“Yeah, except for that, but sex isn’t everything. He was very supportive of my career and we took care of each other in every way that really matters.”

His warm, rough palms slid up her arms to her shoulders. “Sex matters, Clare.”

“I know, but it’s not the most important thing in a relationship.” Sebastian made a scoffing sound, but she ignored it. “We were planning to go to Rome on our honeymoon so I could research a book, but that’s all gone now. And I feel foolish and…empty.” Her voice broke and she raised a hand and wiped at her eyes. “How do you love someone one day and not the next? I wish I kn-knew.”

Sebastian turned her and placed his hands on the sides of her face. “Don’t cry,” he said, and brushed her wet cheeks with his thumbs.

The distant sound of crickets chirping mixed and mingled with “Son of a Preacher Man” softly pouring from the stereo. Clare looked up at Sebastian’s smeared dark outline. “I’ll be okay in a minute,” she lied.

He lowered his face, and the light touch of his lips stopped the air in her lungs. “Shh,” he whispered at the corner of her mouth. His hands slid toward the back of her head and his fingers plowed through her hair. He placed soft kisses on her cheek, her temple, and her brow. “Don’t cry anymore, Clare.”

She doubted she could if she wanted to. While Dusty sang about the only boy who could ever teach her, shock clogged everything in the center of Clare’s chest and she could hardly breathe.

He kissed her nose, then said just above her mouth, “You need something else to think about.” He gently pulled her head backward and her lips parted slightly. “Like how it feels to be held by a man who can get it up for a woman.”

Clare placed her hands his chest and felt the solid muscles beneath the thin dress shirt. This could not be happening. Not with Sebastian. “No,” she assured him a little desperately. “I remember.”

“I think you’ve forgotten.” His lips pressed into hers, then eased back a fraction. “You need a little reminding by a man who knows how to use his pickle fork.”

“I wish you’d forget I said that,” she managed past the constriction in her chest.

“Never. Although I can’t imagine anything the size of a pickle fork being much use to anyone.”

She gasped as his mouth opened over hers and his tongue swept inside. He tasted like scotch and something else. Something she hadn’t tasted in a very long time. Sexual desire. Hot and intoxicating, focused directly at her. She should have been alarmed, and she was a little. But mostly she liked the taste in her mouth. Like something luscious and rich she hadn’t had in a while, and it poured all through her, warming the pit of her stomach and the empty places inside.

Everything around her receded away like a low tide. The party. The crickets. Dusty. Thoughts of Lonny.

Sebastian was right. She’d forgotten what it was like to have a man make love to her mouth. She couldn’t recall it being so good. Or perhaps it was that Sebastian was so good at it. Her palms slid to his shoulders and the side of his neck as his slick tongue teased and coaxed until she gave in and kissed him back, returning the passion and possession he fed her.

Her toes curled in her Kate Spade sandals and she ran her fingers through the short hair brushing the collar of his shirt. His mouth never left hers, yet she felt the kiss everywhere. His wet mouth on hers turned every cell in her body needy and greedy and wanting more.

She rose to the balls of her feet and pressed into him. He groaned into her mouth, a deep sound of lust and yearning that fanned her ego, flamed the feminine fire deep inside that she’d allowed to die to a small ember. She turned her head to the side and her mouth clung to his.

His hands slid to her waist and his thumbs fanned her stomach through the thin cotton of her dress. His fingers pressed into her and he held her against his lower belly, where he was hard and swollen. He wanted her; she’d forgotten how truly good that felt. She kissed him like she wanted to eat him up, and she did. Every last bite. At that moment, she didn’t care who he was, only how he made her feel. Wanted and desired.

He pulled back and gasped for breath. “Jesus, stop!”

“Why?” she asked, and kissed the side of his throat.

“Because,” he answered, his voice sounding both rough and tortured, “we’re both old enough to know where this will lead.”

She smiled against his neck. “Where?”

“To a quicky in the weeds.”

Clare wasn’t that far gone. She dropped to her heels and retreated a few steps, leaned her back against the tree and took several mind-clearing breaths. She watched Sebastian comb his fingers though his hair and tried to make sense of what had happened. She’d just kissed Sebastian Vaughan, and as crazy as that sounded inside her head, she wasn’t sorry. “You’ve been practicing since you were nine,” she said, still a little dazed by it all.

“That shouldn’t have happened. Sorry, but I’ve been thinking about it since the night you stripped in front of me. I remember exactly what you look like naked, and things got out of control and-” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t started crying.”

Her brows lowered as she stared into the darkened shadows and raised her fingers to her lips, still moist from his kiss. She wished he hadn’t apologized. She knew she should probably be mad or appalled or offended by the way they’d both behaved, but she wasn’t. At the moment, she didn’t feel offended, appalled, or even sorry. She just felt alive. “You’re blaming me? I’m not the one who grabbed and assaulted your mouth.”

“Assaulted? I didn’t assault you.” He pointed at her. “I can’t stand to see a woman cry. I know it sounds clichéd, but it’s true. I would have done just about anything to get you to stop.”

She was sure she’d be sorry later, though. Like when she had to see him in the light of day. “You could have walked away.”

“And you’d still be bawling your eyes out like you were the night at the Double Tree.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Once again, I did you a favor.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Not at all. You stopped crying, didn’t you?”

“Is this your ulterior motive crap again? You kissed me to help me out?”

“It’s not crap.”

“Wow, how noble of you.” She laughed. “I suppose you got turned on because…why?”

“Clare,” he said through a sigh, “you’re an attractive woman and I’m a man. Of course you turn me on. I don’t have to stand here and try to imagine what you look like naked, I know you’re beautiful all over. So of course I felt something. If I hadn’t felt some measure of desire, I’d be damn worried about myself.”

She didn’t bother pointing out that his desire measured about eight hard inches. She wished she could conjure up some righteous indignation or anger, but she couldn’t. To do that meant she’d have to be sorry. Right now, she wasn’t. With one kiss he’d given her back something she hadn’t even known she’d let slip away. Her power to make a man want her with nothing more than a kiss.

“You should thank me,” he said.

Right. She probably should thank him, but not for the reason he thought. “And you should go right ahead and kiss my butt.” Lord, she sounded like she was ten again, but she didn’t feel like it. Thanks to the man in front of her.

He chuckled, low and deep in his chest.

“In case you’re confused, Sebastian, that wasn’t an invitation.”

“It sure sounded like an invitation,” he said. He took a few steps back and added, “The next time I’m in town, I just might take you up on it.”

“I don’t know. Will I have to thank you?”

“No. You won’t have to, but you will.” Then, without another word, he turned and walked away, not in the direction of the party but toward the carriage house.

She’d known Sebastian all of her life. Some things hadn’t changed. Like his attempts to talk around her and make her think day was night, to feed her lines of bull, and on occasion make her feel wonderful. Like the time he’d told her that her eyes were the color of the irises growing in her mother’s garden. She couldn’t remember her age, but she did remember that she’d lived on the compliment for days.

Clare felt the sharp edges of the tree against her back as she watched Sebastian step onto the porch of the carriage house. The light above his head turned his hair gold and the white of his shirt almost neon. He opened the red door and disappeared inside.

She once again raised her fingers to lips made sensitive by his kiss. She’d known him most of her life, but one thing was for certain, Sebastian was no longer a boy. He was definitely a man. A man who made women like Lorna Devers eye him like a piece of smooth, mouth-watering decadence. Like something she wanted to sink her teeth into just once.

Clare knew the feeling.

Ten

The second week of September, Sebastian boarded an international flight bound for Calcutta, India. Seven-thousand-plus miles and twenty-four hours later, he boarded a smaller aircraft for the plains of Bihar, India, where life and death depended on the whim of the annual monsoon and the ability to find a few hundred dollars to battle kala azar-black fever.

He landed in Muzaffarpur and drove four hours to the village of Rajwara with a local doctor and a photographer. From a distance the village looked bucolic and untouched by modern civilization. Men in traditional white dhoti kurta cultivated the fields with wooden carts and water buffalo, but like all underdeveloped parts of the globe that he’d reported on in the past, Sebastian knew this peaceful scene was an illusion.

As he and the other two men walked the dirt lanes of Rajwara, swarms of excited children surrounded them, kicking up dust along the way. A Seattle Mariners baseball cap shaded his face from the sun, and he’d filled the pockets of his cargo pants with extra batteries for his tape recorder. The doctor was well known in the village, and women in bright saris emerged from thatched huts one after the other, speaking rapidly in Hindi. Sebastian didn’t need the doctor to translate to know what was said. The sound of the poor begging for help spoke a universal language.