"You have much more hair on your chest than you used to," she noted shakily.

"And most of it's gray."

"Gilding," she praised softly. Her heart lifted expectantly as he slowly moved toward her, sliding the towel from about his neck with singular lack of haste. He ran it down the shallow ravine between her breasts, where beads of moisture caught the light and sent it radiating like polished chips of amber. Their eyes clung while the towel skimmed her naked back. "You're beautiful, Rachel. Perfect. Too perfect for this world." Then Tommy Lee dropped to one knee and meticulously dried her legs. When he arose, his eyes locked with hers as he drew the towel from her fingers and tossed it aside with his own.

He stepped back. His eyes slid down her exposed body, but when they reached her stomach, the dark brows curled and he flashed her a questioning look.

"Rachel, what's this?" Automatically he reached out.

Automatically she shielded the scar. "Nothing… nothing."

He clasped her wrists and drew them to her hips, searching first her stomach, then her eyes again. "You had the baby by cesarean?"

"It doesn't matter," she reassured him.

"Doesn't matter?" He made a throaty sound as with one swipe he lifted Rachel and placed her diagonally across the bed, bending over her. Gingerly he touched the pale scar. "Everything about you matters. That's what this is from, isn't it?"

Tears shimmered on her eyelids, and her heart eased with the blessed relief of sharing it with him at last, after all these years. "They said I was too small to deliver it naturally."

His eyes seemed unable to pull away from the telltale line running from just below her navel into the black pubic hair. He traced it with four curious fingertips. Then his eyes darkened, glittered, and filled with the past as he opened a hand wide upon her stomach and uttered thickly, "Our baby… God, she was our baby. Think of the waste…"

His voice broke, and suddenly he bent to caress Rachel's stomach with his face, placing warm lips at the spot where the scar disappeared into the dark triangle, breathing on her while wondering at all she'd gone through because of the seed he'd planted within her, letting the hurt rush back and take him one last time.

He felt a sting behind his eyelids and slipped both arms around her hips, cradling his cheek against her warm stomach. "Rachel, I wanted to marry you so badly, and keep her. I wanted to take care of you and have other babies with you, and watch them grow, and get old with you."

It had taken Rachel years to get beyond self-pity and regret, but at the sound of Tommy Lee's emotional outpouring, sensing how close he was to tears, her own eyes blurred. "I know, darling, I know." She rolled to her side, coiling about his head and shoulders, caressing his warm skull while they let the anguished past in to be cleansed.

"What did she look like?"

She closed her eyes, remembering.

"She had a perfect cap of dark, dark hair, just like yours…" Her fingers knew again that hair, finding it crisp now at his temples, while she rued each wasted year that had grayed him and thinned her and kept them from knowing these changes daily. "And gray eyes in a face with the tiniest, most perfect mouth I'd ever seen. I only got to hold her once."

"Rachel… Rachel…" His tortured words were muffled against her, and she saw again the rosebud mouth of the child they had created together, while the pain billowed within them both. "Our baby…" he murmured-a prayer now. "I wanted her… took you both away from me… my Rachel… all these years…"

They had only one means of solace to offer each other, and as his mouth, hands, and body moved over her in recompense, her heart cried and sang at once. Their lovemaking was fierce this time, an attempt to dissolve a past that could never be dissolved, for when they came together in cataclysm, that past bound them more surely than vows.

The bedside clock read 3:18. The lamp glowed softly on two dark heads and across the yellow and white bamboo-designed sheets that covered Rachel's breasts as she lay tucked in the shelter of Tommy Lee's arm. He was propped against a cache of ruffled pillows, smoking, her temple pressed to his slow-thudding heart.

"And what happens now, Rachel?" he asked, staring at the surface of the pool beyond the open shades.

"I don't know."

He took a deep, thoughtful drag, and she heard the air enter his lungs beneath her ear. "Then I'll tell you. You marry me, the way you should have twenty-four years ago."

Her fingers stopped combing the coarse hair on his chest. How simple things became in the throes of passion; how complex upon reconsideration.

"Oh, Tommy Lee, how can I marry you?"

"Do you mean, what would people say?" His voice held a honed edge as he rested a wrist across an updrawn knee.

What would people say? She had pushed the question aside all night, but now it pressed for an answer. "Owen's only been dead for a few months."

"And the fact still remains that I've had three wives and a stable of lovers the whole county knows about, and I've spent a hell of a lot of years drinking like there was no tomorrow, and you're scared it set a pattern I can't break, is that right?"

She tried to sit up, but he held her fast.

"Rachel, don't run away. Did you think I kept after you for nothing more than a roll in the hay, and now that I've had it I'll let you walk out of my life again?"

"I didn't think that, I just..." Just what? Needed my sexual thirst slaked? Wanted to see if I could still bring Tommy Lee Gentry to heel? Am I so shallow that I'd use him, then toss him aside, knowing all along how vulnerable he is where I'm concerned? Slowly she pushed herself up. He let her go this time, watching her naked back curl and the side of one breast slip into view as she doubled her arms across her updrawn knees.

"You just what, Rachel?" His voice sounded brittle, hurt already.

Miserably she dropped her forehead onto her arms and shrugged.

"You don't have much faith in my reformation, do you?"

She felt small and guilty while silently admitting the truth.

"Well, you would if you could crawl inside my body and know what I've felt for you all these years. Without you nothing and nobody mattered. Now everything is possible. Don't you understand, Rachel? Even I matter now."

She lifted her head and stared at the wall, torn by his words. "We have to be honest with ourselves. Are you sure we aren't just… just searching for our lost youth in each other?"

He studied her naked rump, the delicate shadow disappearing down its center, the sheet caught in the fold of her hip. He drew deeply on his cigarette, forced his eyes away from her so he could think more clearly. "I can't answer for you, but I know how it is for me. If it had happened overnight I might suspect that was true. But I told you before, it's been going on for twenty-four years, every time I'd see you on the street or in your car or going into your daddy's bank."

At the mention of her daddy, Rachel's head swung around and their eyes clashed momentarily before she turned away again. He worked the edges of his teeth together, then studied the glowing tip of the cigarette while drawing circles with it on the bottom of the ashtray. "You're still scared of him, aren't you, Rachel?" he asked quietly.

Was she? She didn't want to think so, but she couldn't deny how much she hated the thought of all the strife there was bound to be if her father found out about tonight. And there was a facet of her misgivings that Rachel had been afraid to examine too closely up until now, because she didn't want to believe it might be true. But she could hold it inside no longer.

"By marrying me, you'd show them all, wouldn't you, Tommy Lee? You'd have your revenge for what they forced us to do all those years ago?" It was a thorn that had pricked each time he'd called, each time she'd seen him over the past several months. No, she didn't want to believe it, but wasn't it possible?

"Is that what you think, Rachel? That I'm only using you to get back at them?"

She covered her face with both hands and shook her head until her hair fluttered. "Oh, God, I don't know what to think. All of this would be so much simpler if you'd made your peace with your parents, and if they'd made their peace with mine. But everything's so… so complicated!"

His warm palm caressed her back, sending shivers around her ribs to the tips of her breasts. "There are some things I can't change. But those that I can, I have. I love you, Rachel… for yourself, and for no other reason. And that's why I want to marry you. You've got to believe that. You're the only thing I ever wanted… not other women, not… not liquor and fast cars and shiny boats and..." He broke off and dropped his head back wearily, letting his eyes slip closed and swallowing noisily. "Oh, God, Rachel, I'm so tired of being that way. I need you in my life to give me some peace at last."

A sob escaped her throat as she whirled and flung herself into his arms. He caressed her head, embracing her with a strength close to fury, shutting his eyes against the thought of facing more Rachel-less years, now that he'd come this close.

"Oh, Tommy Lee, I'm so mixed up. Sometimes I don't think I deserve you. You've been more faithful to me than a husband in a lot of ways, no matter how many women you've known."

"There haven't been any others since the day of Owen's funeral. Nobody but you, Rachel. I love you so much… do you really think I'd blow it all now that I stand a chance of having both you and Beth in my life again?"