She knew her smile was far too dreamy for her own comfort. "Stop it. You don't know me well enough to say that. You don't know the truth."

"And what's the truth?"

"I'm bossy, outspoken and don't follow rules very well." She squirmed a little. "Among other things."

"Yeah. So?" Lifting a hand, he tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear, then trailed his finger down her throat until her breath caught.

"That doesn't scare you?" she whispered.

"That you're bossy, outspoken and don't follow rules?" He looked into her eyes and laughed. "Maybe if you were my financial adviser, but no…" He traced her throat again, down to the very base of her neck where she knew her pulse had just leaped. "You don't scare me." He dipped his head and kissed the spot his finger had just touched.

The feel of his lips on her had her head falling back a little, her eyes closing. She told herself that the reason she didn't scare him because this… this thing between them wasn't going anywhere. Nowhere except quite possibly-hopefully-to the bedroom, and they both understood that.

She repeated it to herself to make sure she got it. This wasn't going anywhere. Neither of them wanted any such connection. No matter how many times she said it, however, it didn't seem to ring true, which led her to a bigger dilemma. Was this more than just girl meets boy, girl enjoys boy for summer, then girl moves on?

No. This was temporary only. Fun. Uninhibited. And at the moment, with his mouth cruising its way over her collarbone, hair brushing the underside of her chin, his hands on her hips, that worked for her. That worked really well.

Even though she suspected she'd need another pep talk soon enough. "Jack?"

He'd made his way to her shoulder, bared by her sundress, and he gave her a playful nip that he promptly soothed with a kiss. "Hmm?"

"Want to come in?"

He went still, then lifted his head and met her gaze. "For… another hot chocolate?"

"Not exactly." She winced. "I don't just work here. I, uh… live above the café."

"You do?"

"Yeah. I don't usually like guys to know because…"

"Because then maybe they'd show up when you didn't want them to," he guessed.

"Yeah. I'm sorry I didn't tell you."

"I understand, believe me, I do."

She imagined he did, for close to the same reasons. "I have some herbal lotion upstairs, made by a friend who really knows what she's doing. I could put some on your sore knee, see if it helps."

He blinked once, slow as an owl.

"I mean, unless you have something else-" Feeling silly, she turned away, reached for the door handle, but he stopped her and turned her back to face him.

"I'd love to come up."

8

The early evening ocean breeze had kicked in. It whistled over Sam and Jack, along with the sounds of the waves hitting the beach and the traffic on the highway.

Jack followed Sam up the back steps of the café to her apartment, watching as she pulled her keys from her tiny purse and unlocked the door. She stepped aside, holding it open for him, and in the swirling jade depths of her eyes he saw good humor, intelligence and… hunger. For him.

Thank God, he thought, and would have dug right in if it hadn't been for what he also saw there.

Affection.

Not the love-your-body, or make-me-feel-good-tonight kind of affection, nothing as shallow or as easy as that, but something far more, far deeper. He took a shuddering breath, wondering how to react.

A part of him wanted to run like hell.

Another part wanted to stand still and do as he'd never done before-absorb it, go with it.

Nurture it.

Clearly he was losing his mind. No woman had ever really gotten to know him for his sake, and no woman was likely to start. Not even Sam, who lived on the busy highway above a cramped lunch café and didn't seem to care about his celebrity or money-a woman who, until a week ago, wouldn't have known him from any other Jack.

But she knew who he was now, and if he'd learned anything over the years of being hounded by the public, by the press, by every single person around him, few people were unaffected by his celebrity.

Nope. As he'd told her during their midnight swim, he didn't want a relationship, no matter how tempting. Glorious as Sam was, and stimulating and beautiful and amazing, that hadn't changed.

"Stop thinking so hard, Jack," she said softly. "This isn't complicated. I just want to help soothe your pain."

Another confusion, as he hadn't told her his knee ached today. In fact, they hadn't really talked about that, or what he used to do for a living. She had just teased him about being retired.

He was used to dates who expected him to be the "star" the press had made him out to be. The simple truth was, women liked his celebrity, they wanted the perks that went along with it, and they expected him to provide them.

He'd known from the very beginning that Sam would be different. She still had no idea how damn attractive that had been to him. But now she'd casually mentioned his knee, which meant she had more than just a passing knowledge of him.

"You're not going to fit in here very well, it's really tiny." She took his hand and pulled him into the kitchen, which though as small as a closet, was warm and inviting. The floors were scarred hardwood but clean. Her table was made of wood, too, with two mismatched chairs that somehow worked in the place. Her cabinets had no fronts. Inside them, everything was neat as a pin.

"How long have you lived here?" he asked.

She lifted a shoulder. "Since I started working for Red full-time."

"Your uncle?"

"Yeah. And when he retired a few years back, buying this building was a natural fit for me. Of course, I'm mortgaged to my ears and I'll be paying out of said ears even after I am dead and buried…" She laughed. "And sometimes the home budget means eating whatever's left over from downstairs, but it's a small price to pay to belong somewhere."

He'd paid cash for his multimillion dollar home in the hills and hadn't thought twice about it. Having a ridiculous amount of money, he rarely looked at the prices of things, and he never, ever, had to eat leftovers to keep to his budget. Hell, he had no budget.

Sam looked at the chairs, then at his large frame and, with a small smile, shook her head. She led him out of the kitchen and into the living room, which was also small, warm and homey. Two bare windows looked out to the ocean. There were more beat-up wood floors here, and a surprisingly large, forest-green sofa that was plumped up with pillows and looked so inviting he nearly sighed.

The entire apartment couldn't have been more than six hundred square feet, not much more than his own huge large entrance hall, and yet he'd never felt more at home than he did right now.

"Sit," she said. "I'll be right back."

His body twitched at that promise, but when she came back, she hadn't slipped out of her clothes, she wasn't holding a condom between her teeth and she wasn't looking at him with heat in her eyes-all three fantasies which had been whipping through his head since she'd disappeared.

In her hands was a pale green bottle. "The healing ointment," she said, and sat on the coffee table right in front of him, between his sprawled legs.

An unwittingly erotic position that made his fantasies even harder to let go of.

She looked into his eyes. "What's the matter?" Other than being hard as a rock and you being oblivious to what you're doing to me, nothing. Nothing at all. "How did you know my knee is killing me? Or which one, for that matter."

"You're favoring your right one here and there." She opened the buttons down the sides of his sweats from mid-thigh to the hem. She uncapped the bottle and poured some of the stuff into her hands, rubbing them together, her gaze dropping to his right knee, and the six-inch-long scar running down the side of the kneecap.

"It smells awful," he said, wrinkling his nose.

"But it will feel heavenly." She put her hands on him, and he hissed in an involuntary breath.

"Cold? Sorry."

"No, it's…" Heavenly. Only he had no idea if that was because the stuff was soothing or because her hands were on him, rubbing slowly, so achingly slowly, that the rest of him wished it could cry out and feign hurt, too.

"How long since the surgery?" she asked quietly. "The last one? Nearly eight months now. It's fine. It's healed."

"And yet you left basketball."

His gaze lifted from her fingers on his flesh up to her eyes. "Fine and healed to walk are one thing. Fine and healed to play on a NBA court is another entirely."

"That must have destroyed you."

In all this time, no one had ever just put it out on the, table like she just had, not even his family. Avoidance had been done in love and affection, but it had hurt regardless. "Yes," he said a little thickly, shocked to find his emotions so close to the surface. "It did for a while."

"So what do you do now? With your free time, I mean."

"Let the general public dunk me at carnivals."

"Surely you needn't have been forced out of basketball entirely. You could… I don't know. Coach. Announce. Ref-"

"I do. I run leagues and ref for the rec center. Not exactly demanding, I know, but the change of pace was good. Now I watch late night TV without worrying about curfew. I eat what I want, drink what I want. I exercise for fun instead of necessity, and I no longer have to answer to a committee on every little decision I make, including, but not limited to, what kind of shoes I wear and how many hours of sleep I get a night."

"That must be… freeing."