“Um…” She cleared her throat and said unsteadily, “They’ve all gone to the lake house for the holiday-fireworks are legal in South Carolina. I volunteered to babysit.”

“You didn’t want to go?”

She shook her head and a smile flickered briefly. “That place has too many memories.”

He snorted. “You can say that again. I almost drowned there.”

“And,” she said softly, “you kissed me for the first time there.”

He gazed at her until his eyes burned, and the silence filled up with the rocking chair’s slow creaking…bees humming in the rose bush…a cardinal calling…a squirrel scolding…

“I know she’s beautiful and sweet and all that,” he finally said, nodding at the baby in Sam’s arms and trying his best to smile, “but is there someplace you can put her down for a bit? I’d really like to kiss you now. That peck you planted on me in Davao City-”

“Hold that thought.” She stopped rocking suddenly and rose, supporting the baby’s head as naturally as if she’d spent a lifetime doing that rather than flying World War Two airplanes and hunting down terrorists and rescuing journalists and hostages from Philippine jungles. Looking at once distracted and purposeful, she swept past him and into the house.

By the time he’d collected his wits and his cane and followed her, she was already halfway up the stairs. He paused at the bottom to wait for her, thinking she meant to come back down so they could talk, but she threw him a look over one shoulder and said, “Coming?” in a breathless and impatient way, like a child with a secret to share.

So he made his way up the stairs as rapidly as his healing thigh muscle would allow, feeling thoroughly bemused, and his heart pounding with more than just physical exertion.

He found her in a spare bedroom, bending over a portable crib. She straightened and turned when she heard him, then crossed to him in a flurry of motion, her arms already lifting around his neck, and her body came against him in a rush that knocked the breath from his lungs and every lucid thought from his mind.

The cane toppled onto the braided rug and lay there, unneeded and forgotten. His arms tightened around her as she kissed him, but only for a moment; there was too much urgency, too much hunger in him. His hands wandered, shaking, over her back and shoulders, her nape and the silky dampness of her hair…followed the taut ribbons of muscle along her spine to the firm and modest swell of her behind…relearning the shape and feel and texture of her. He felt dazed all over again at the miracle of her, astonished and humble and exalted at the same time.

Oh, but the kiss…he didn’t think she’d ever kissed him quite that way before. With exuberance and fierceness and fire and passion, yes-that was only Sam, the only way she could be. But not with this wildness. And something else, something deeper…something he didn’t dare hope for or give a name to. Something that felt…irreversible.

She kissed him hard and deep, holding nothing back, and he tasted blood and hoped it wasn’t hers. By the time she came up for air his lips were swollen and hot already, pulses thumped in his belly and loins, and his breaths were ragged gasps. With his focus narrowing, his goal and purpose suddenly urgent and clear and the word bed uppermost in his mind, he dragged his mouth from hers and croaked, “Don’t you want to-”

Misunderstanding his intent, she growled, “Shut up, Pearse,” and reclaimed his mouth like a hungry lioness. Her hands tugged at his shirt, his belt buckle.

Caught off guard and off balance, he staggered back against the door frame. She gasped and clutched at him, then burst into helpless laughter, which she instantly tried to smother against his shoulder. “Oh, God, Pearse, I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat, lifted her head, shook back her hair and gazed at him, eyes glowing with a fierce, wild light. “I didn’t even ask. How is your leg?”

“Healing,” he told her absently, as his hands worked their way along her shoulders to the sides of her neck. Cradling her head between them like a precious treasure, stroking her cheeks with his thumbs, he tilted her head back, lowered his mouth to her throat. She smelled poignantly of baby powder. When she moaned softly he moved his mouth to hers and kissed her, slowly and with infinite tenderness, in direct and deliberate contrast with the way they’d kissed before. And when at last he lifted his head and gazed down at her, her eyes were still closed.

“I wanna see it,” she mumbled drunkenly.

“What, my leg? Sam…it isn’t pretty.”

“Like I care.” She swayed forward, and her mouth was hot and humid on his throat…her tongue measured his hammering pulse.

He closed his eyes and said weakly, “Right here? Right now?”

“Nuh-uh…” Working her way up to his mouth in determined nibbles, she backed him across the hall and through another doorway. “This is better. It’s my room…”

She drew back from him, then, and placed her palms on his chest. She lifted her eyes to his and there was no trace of laughter or wildness in them. Instead they looked bruised and wounded. “Please, Pearse,” she whispered. “Let me see.”

Slowly, he began to unbutton his shirt. Slowly, he pulled it free, and his hands moved on to his belt buckle…then the zipper of his slacks.

She didn’t help him, didn’t hurry him, simply clung to his eyes as if they were the only thing in the universe, and he felt suddenly that this was the most intimate thing they’d ever done together, even more intimate than all the times they’d made love. It frightened him a little…more than a little…because he knew this wasn’t about sex, it was much more important than sex, more binding than sex…more permanent.

Her hands slipped lightly down his hips and thighs, following his slacks as they slid to the floor, and she sank onto the edge of the bed without a sound…heavily, as though her legs wouldn’t hold her any longer.

He held himself relaxed, trusting her completely, and she looked a long, silent time, her hands almost absently stroking the outsides of his legs. Then she leaned forward and carefully touched her lips to the ragged half-healed scar on the inner part of his thigh. His breath hissed between his teeth, but he didn’t move, and let his hands lie easily on her shoulders as she moved her mouth over him, lightly as breath, and the ends of her hair grazed his fevered skin, soft and cool as tears.

Then suddenly he couldn’t be still any longer. His hands slid upward along her neck…gathered her hair in greedy handfuls as he tipped her head back and bent down to kiss her. But instead of claiming her mouth as he’d meant to do, he paused and looked down into her fierce bright eyes, and his heart seemed to stop and the earth beneath him quake at what he saw there.

“Sam,” he whispered. “My Samantha…”

A radiant smile broke over her face, at the same moment tears seemed to burst from her eyes. Tears and laughter…like rain and sunshine. He’d never seen anything so beautiful.

He kissed her then, reverently…adoringly, bearing her slowly backward onto the tulip quilt that haphazardly covered the bed, and when he would have followed her down, she put her hands on his chest and held him away, still laughing through tears while she squirmed and tugged at her clothes. Then he was helping her skin off her shorts and T-shirt, and shoes and various articles of clothing were sailing into unknown corners of the room, until at last he brought his body and hers together with a profound and grateful sense of homecoming.

He held her close…so close he felt the shape of her ribs and the heart beating madly beneath them. Her woman’s scent and quivering warmth overwhelmed him, and yet he felt famished, as though he’d never be able to get enough of it. He felt her strong, capable hands on his back, and the tiny flaws and imperfections her occupation had given them, and it seemed the most erotic, the most exquisite pleasure he’d ever known.

He wanted to stroke her…explore every inch of her body with his hands…worship her with his mouth…feast on her with his eyes. But she was already moving beneath him, shifting in the small adjusting ways that would bring her body into perfect and intimate alignment with his, and who was he to resist? There would be time enough…a lifetime, he hoped…for the feasting.

And so her body welcomed his, and their coming together was different than at any time before…quieter, perhaps, but at the same time infinitely more intense. Though his jaws ached and his body shivered with the pressure of building emotions and passion thundered in his blood, he felt no sense of masculine triumph, no sense of coming into, of entering her body, nor even of a mutual giving and taking. Instead it seemed to him a gentle merging of mind and body, complete and irreversible…like two quiet rivers coming together, then flowing on as one…

And flow on they did, faster and faster, navigating giddily over rocks and rills, clinging together through wild rapids and crying out in terror and exhilaration as they tumbled over thundering falls…to drift at last into quiet pools, all their turbulence, for the moment, spent.

Afterward, it was Sam who spoke first. “Okay, Pearse,” she said in a gruff and crusty voice that was classically, typically Sam, as if trying to deny the emotional white water they’d just come safely through. “What the heck was that?”

He smiled down at her, framing her face with his hand, wiping the sheen of sweat and tears from her flushed cheeks. “Don’t you know?” he asked, amused and tender.

She gazed at him in silence for a moment, her eyes growing bright again, like stars. “Yeah,” she finally whispered, “I think I do. This is us from now on, isn’t it, Pearse?”

“You bet it is,” he said softly, lying back and drawing her against him, dazed, still, at this happiness that had somehow found him when he’d never expected it to happen at all.