“Eric Lanagan!”

Devon straightened with a start. Lucy came bustling into the kitchen in her energetic way, the baby’s head bobbing against her shoulder. She halted and glared over it at her son. “Did I just hear what I thought I heard? You’ve been out all morning without breakfast? Look at the both of you-soaking wet and half-frozen-it’ll be a miracle if you don’t catch pneumonia-and at Christmastime, too. I think the two of you lack good sense.”

Eric’s eyes found Devon’s. They gleamed with amusement as he mouthed the words, “Treats me like I’m five.”

“Well, sometimes you act like it,” Lucy snapped.

Devon gasped in amazement and Eric exclaimed with a pained grimace, “Ma, how do you do that?”

“You think I can’t read lips?” She gave her son a look of smugly maternal omniscience.

Devon’s chest hummed with a warm little burr of amusement. She was beginning to look forward to the casual, sometimes bantering interplay between Eric and his parents, so different from the way things were in her own family.

“I’m going to heat up some soup,” Lucy announced, expertly shifting Emily into the crook of one arm as she began to turn on burners and bang kettles. “Devon, you-” she paused to throw her a no-arguments look over one shoulder “-go upstairs and take a nice long hot shower and get into something warm. You-” she transferred the glare to Eric “-just as well go upstairs, too, and put on some dry clothes. No sense in you taking your shower until you’ve pulled Devon’s car out of that ditch, which you’d better do today, before the snowplow comes by and buries it even deeper. But after you’ve got something hot in your stomach.”

“You want me to take the baby while you-”

“Hah-I’ve fixed many a meal one-handed with a baby on my hip, young man. Go on, now-get.” She jerked her head toward the door to the hallway and the stairs beyond, as a wing of nut-brown hair slid forward across her cheek to cover her smile.

Eric shot back a smart-mouthed “Yes, ma’am” as he placed Devon’s feet on the floor. They exchanged looks as they both rose. Devon opened her mouth, but it was Eric who spoke.

“Oh-Mom. Devon says she’d like to take you up on your invitation to spend Christmas with us-if that’s okay.” His voice was bland, so devoid of expression, in fact, that she threw him a questioning look. His profile gave her no reply.

“I’m glad you decided to stay was all,” Lucy said. Her smile was serene, as if, Devon thought, the decision had never been in doubt.

Chapter 11

“Y our parents are something else,” Devon said without turning from the window. She felt such a heaviness inside-strange that her voice should sound so light.

“Yeah, they are.” And even above the sound of water running in the kitchen sink, she couldn’t mistake the note of affection in Eric’s voice.

It was the next morning-December 23, two days before Christmas-and she was standing with her arms folded across her waist, watching Mike and Lucy’s early model four-wheel-drive SUV lumber down the lane, dragging a feathery plume of exhaust behind it. She watched it fishtail slightly-an almost jaunty little wiggle-as it turned onto the paved road. It was a beautiful, sparkly cold morning; the snowplow had been by earlier, and the sand truck after that. Mike and Lucy had gone shopping; the roads, they’d been told, were clear all the way to Sioux City.

Devon shifted her gaze to her rental car, which was parked in the driveway, still lumpy with snow and looking somehow forlorn, but otherwise none the worse for having spent a day and a half in a drift-filled ditch. Eric had checked it over and pronounced it driveable.

The roads are clear, she thought. I have my car. I can leave if I want to. Strangely, the realization failed to cheer her.

Yesterday afternoon while Eric was pulling the Town Car out of the snowdrifts, Devon had been on her cell phone to her office in sunny L.A., delegating and postponing meetings and other responsibilities-she was assured that her presence at her firm’s annual Christmas party had been missed-and to her parents in Canoga Park, explaining to them why she wouldn’t be spending Christmas Eve with them this year. They’d expressed regret, of course. Now, remembering her parents’ voices, subdued, emotionless, she felt this heaviness inside.

I love my parents. I do.

But she knew they were only words. And though she pressed them into her mind as hard as she could, like a tongue probing a sensitive tooth, no matter how hard she tried, Devon could not find the feelings that went with the words. She tried to remember hugging her parents, or them hugging her. She couldn’t. She couldn’t remember the feel of her mother’s arms around her. Couldn’t remember the sound of her voice, comforting her after a nightmare. Couldn’t remember cool hands stroking her forehead in a fever, or putting a bandage on her skinned knee. Couldn’t remember sitting on her father’s lap, having him read to her, or tuck her in at night.

Overcome with a terrible, panicky sadness, she turned from the window, already in full flight and thinking only of the stairs and the sanctuary of her room. Instead, she ran headlong into a solid object, one covered with a sweatshirt that was slightly damp. That smelled of baby powder, formula, dish soap and man.

“Hey,” Eric exclaimed as his hands closed on her upper arms.

Her head snapped back and she stared at him. Whiskey eyes, startled and golden, gazed into hers. She opened her mouth to say something-to protest, to explain?-what, she never knew. Just that suddenly, she was in his arms, and his hands were tangled in her hair and his mouth was hard and hot on hers.

Hungry.

And, oh, God, she was hungry, too. How good he tasted-fresh and clean, like joy and hope and sunshine and snow. Famished, she opened her mouth to him, and he brought all those things inside.

And it wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy her. Greedily, she clutched at his sweatshirt, filled her fists with it as she pressed her body against his, as if she were trying to soak him in, the very essence of all he was, trying to steal from him the warmth, the affection, the security and comfort, the gifts he’d been given in such abundance and hadn’t begun to appreciate.

A sob rippled through her and burst from her mouth. He uttered a groan and stifled it with his as he caught her harder against him.

Something-a shock, like lightning-sliced through her chest. The fascinating little bump that had pestered her heart so often came again-and this time exploded. Her heartbeat resounded through her head like thunder. She trembled. And opened still more…

His mouth softened, persuaded. She felt the prick of his beard stubble on her lips. The delicious tingle of his fingertips stroking her scalp. She heard their breathing, the little groaning sounds he made, the soft whimpers that were hers. She felt the wiry strength of the muscles in his back against her palms, the thump of his heartbeat against her breasts. She felt melting weakness, the overwhelming ache of desire.

Dimly, she was aware of movement-clumsy, awkward, directionless. Blind and uncaring, she let it carry her where it would.

Then he was sitting in one of the kitchen chairs and she was astride his lap, her hands tangled in his hair as she arched above him, her mouth the aggressor now. His hands, free now to roam at will, pushed up her sweatshirt to knead the muscles of her back, reached between their bodies to nestle her breasts and chafe their hardened nipples with his palms, then thrust beneath the elastic of her sweats to grasp her bottom and pull the softest and most sensitive part of her hard and tight against him.

And that, without separating, standing, unzipping, undressing, was as far as they could go.

Devon acknowledged it first, with a tiny whimper of frustration. Eric’s arms tightened in denial, his body tensed, and then his mouth withdrew from hers and his breath came in an exhalation that was more like a sigh.

“What the hell’re we doing?” It was a whisper that grated like windblown sand. The only reply she could manage was the smallest shake of her head, before she let it come to rest against his forehead. She heard another soft, sandy sound and realized that he was laughing. “Whatever it is, I sure hope one of us has the good sense to stop it.”

She cleared her throat, realized it was hopeless and whispered instead. “It seems to me, you just did.”

“Then how come nobody’s moving?”

“I don’t know about you, but my legs are useless.” She was shaking all over; some of it was laughter. She could feel her heartbeat and his, colliding in uneven rhythms.

“You’re shaking,” he said.

“No kidding!” Laughter gusted from her lungs. What she really wanted was to burst into tears.

And maybe it was fear that she might actually do that that gave her the strength, finally, to push herself away from him. To rise, jerky and uncoordinated, to her feet; to turn, hugging herself again, to the window. For a moment she stood blinking in the brilliance of sunshine on snow, and then in utter misery, closed her eyes and whispered, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened. God-we don’t even know each other.”

Behind her she heard the chair creak, and a gusty exhalation. Risking a glance, she saw that Eric was leaning forward with his elbows planted on his knees and his face buried in his hands, and for some reason she didn’t add the rest: Or like each other much, either.

Instead, she said tightly, “There has to be a logical explanation for this.”

Even muffled by his hands, the sound he made was replete with self-disgust. “Yeah, there is-I’m an idiot.”