"Just you, Tess. The girl on the school bus. Then you became Mac, the woman so far beyond my reach that all I could do was cut out pictures of you. And now you're Tess again, and you want to go to bed with me. I don't think you can quite realize how incredible this seems sometimes."

"No more incredible than you are to me. Kenny Kronek, the boy next door. Who'd have believed it?" She smiled and repeated, "Take me to bed, Kenny… please."

He picked her up like a groom carrying a bride from a church and headed for the brighter light of her bedroom, her arms coiled around his neck and her mouth pressed to the warm hollow behind his jaw. His skin smelled like sandalwood. She tasted it, made a small wet patch on his smoothly shaved neck, and the scent became flavor on her tongue.

"You taste good," she said.

Above her head, he grinned. "You're getting ahead of me."

"Hm-mmm," she singsonged, meaning, No I'm not. "And I know whereof I speak, Mr. Kronek."

He was still grinning as he reached their destination and released her legs. She landed on the foot of the bed, kneeling, the robe puddled around her, and lifted her hands to the black onyx studs down his shirtfront. While he began freeing his cuffs he let his knuckles bump her breast-a pebble over a washboard-bringing them both smiles.

She smiled at his shirtfront.

He smiled at the top of her hair, then kissing it, bent at the waist and got rid of his shoes.

"We both knew this would happen tonight, didn't we, Kenny?"

"Yes, we knew." He found a condom in his trouser pocket and tossed it onto the bed behind her. She undid his waist button, he the zipper, and together they got rid of everything but his shorts. They were silk. Green silk with orange cats on them.

"You wear silk shorts?" she said, surprised, delighted, sitting back on her heels to ogle them. "With cats?"

"They're new. I figured that's what a guy should wear to take Tess McPhail to bed."

"Don't say that as if all kinds of guys have figured the same thing, because there haven't been that many."

"We can talk about that later, Tess, okay?" he said, drawing her back up to kiss her.

"There are lots of things we've got to talk about later."

"Mm-hmm."

He was naked and she was just about as he went down on one knee and plunged his face into the gap of her robe to take his turn at tasting. A very slow sweet turn before pushing the robe off her shoulders and tumbling her sideways onto the smooth ecru sheets. They fell in one swift motion at the same moment that they touched each other intimately for the first time-a sweep, a fall, a lunge-it was all of these, and silent except for their harsh breathing.

They explored with a shared sense of wonder, first with their eyes open, then with eyes closed, kissing tenderly, then not so tenderly as some primal force took control.

Once he whispered, "Oh, Tess…" because there were no other words in this foolish man-made language to do justice to what he felt.

And she answered in kind, repeating his name, "Kenny… Kenny…" because she, too, found no other words adequate.

Much later, he whispered, "Like this?"

And she breathed, "Yes…" arching her throat.

And later yet she found the foil packet in the sheets and said, "Put this on now… please," and watched, unashamed, as he did.

As he knelt to her she reached up and touched the hair at his temple, feeling a compulsion to say to this man something she'd said to no other. "Let me say it now, Kenny… I love you."

She loved the look that overtook his face: joy and disbelief after her long refusal to admit it.

"Say it again, Tess."

"I love you," she repeated, with wonder seizing her soul, quite stunned by the force of the words, spoken at last. "Oh God, I do, I love you!" she rejoiced.

He turned his face into her palm and kissed it.

There were tears in her eyes as he entered her and elevated them both to a state of splendor. Then he pressed deep, past the flesh, into the soul, into the heart of her.

There had been, in Tess's life, no moment as magnificent as this, saying the words, meaning them, manifesting her love in this most perfect way.

"I love you, too," came his jagged whisper as he began moving, finishing what they'd started one dark spring night in a backyard on the grass beside some crickets.

It was two-fifteen. They lay in the lamplight, tired but unwilling to admit it, wanting to waste not a minute of this night. Their faces were close on a single pillow, and their bodies scarcely linked. Gravity pulled at the skin beneath his eyes and showed her where a wrinkle would lie in the years ahead. She followed it with one fingertip and repeated what she'd said earlier. "Kenny Kronek, the boy next door-whoever would have thought it?"

"Not me," he said with his eyes closed. "Not in a thousand years. Not with Tess McPhail."

"I'm just flesh and blood like anybody else."

"No. Not like anybody else." His eyes opened. "Not to me. I've loved you so long that I can't remember when I didn't."

She thought of the file of newspaper clippings he kept in his office, and believed him. "Oh, Kenny."

"It's true. You were the one I never forgot."

"I'm sorry I can't say the same thing back to you. But I only found out how wonderful you are this spring, and even then I resisted falling in love with you." Her fingertip trailed down to his lower lip and rubbed it softly. "Wanna know something?"

"Hm?"

"After I left Wintergreen I kept remembering that night of the wedding dance in Momma's backyard, and wishing we'd done more."

"You, too?" he replied lazily. "I'd think to myself, man, how stupid can you be? Why didn't you do it while you had the chance? Tess, I wanted you so much that night."

"I wanted you, too."

"Then all of a sudden you were gone and I'd lost my chance. After you left I'd look across the alley at your mother's windows and get so damned lonely knowing you weren't there anymore."

"And whenever my phone would ring my heart would leap, thinking it was you. And when it wasn't, I'd feel so unbelievably let down. It was this new and… and almost consuming feeling, missing somebody that much."

"Why didn't you say so?"

"I don't know." She shrugged. "Scared, I guess. Because of the intensity of my feelings. Doubting they could be real."

"It was different for me. I knew it so soon after you came back home."

"Even though you were living with Faith?"

"Faith and I had become a huge convenience. She ironed my shirts. I mowed her lawn. But you can't build a lifelong relationship on convenience. At least, I can't. I knew I had to make a break with her, and when you came back to town I began to realize that with Faith, this part of it… the sex was… well… it was…"

"Go ahead. You can say it. You can say anything to me."

"All right. Unsatisfying. It had become… well, mechanical, sort of."

"Mechanical," she mused aloud.

He considered what might be construed as a breach of confidence and decided he could say this much: "She didn't like to get messed up."

His frankness caught Tess by surprise. She felt a grin threatening but pulled it back into line. Though she tried not to laugh, a little snort fizzed up, and she covered her mouth too late to hold it in. Above her hand her eyes danced with mischief, and finally she said, "The woman didn't know what she was missing."

At first she thought she might have offended him but then he, too, caught the bug and laughed-a big, hearty one that threatened something else entirely. "Oh, Lord, don't laugh!" she warned, clutching him tight around the middle.

But it was too late. The link was lost and they were forced to make repairs.

It took a few minutes then before they were back in bed, snuggled up against three stacked pillows, covered by the smooth sheets with Tess tucked comfortably under Kenny's arm and one knee pulled up over his thighs. Behind her shoulder he unwrapped the last piece of chocolate, gave her the first bite, then popped the rest into his mouth.

"All right," he said, tossing the foil ball onto the night-stand, "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"I'm asking about your former sex life. How many before me?"

"Do I have to tell?"

"No."

She peered up at him, surprised by his answer.

"Four."

"Four!"

"All before I was twenty-eight. That's the year I hit it really big and realized I had to be more cautious. Fame works against you in that way. You never know what men are after. It gets… very lonely."

"Were any of them serious?"

"No."

"What about this musician you were seeing lately?"

"No. The truth is, he tried, but that was after I'd been back home and seen how good you were to Momma and sung in your choir and rolled around with you in the backyard and you made other men seem icky."

"Icky?" He grinned at her choice of words. "I did that?" He pulled his chin back to look down, but could see only the top of her head.

"Absolutely."

"So are you saying you've never been in love before?"

"I didn't have time to fall in love. I had places to go, things to accomplish. And then I accomplished them and…" She absently rubbed his chest before continuing thoughtfully. "It's a funny thing… I used to think my life was so full without this, without you, and I never knew how I was fooling myself. I thought I had it all… till now."

The chocolate was gone from their tongues. They lay for a while in the smug afterglow of first love, feeling lucky, and sated, and very reluctant to part, come Sunday. They had tomorrow to spend together, then her concert tomorrow night, but after that he'd have to go back to Wintergreen, and she'd have to go back to Nashville. And what then? A long-distance affair?