"Not tomorrow." All at once the heat in him cooled and the bubbles fizzled, swamped by a new wave of fatigue. He wondered if he was ever going to stop feeling tired all the time. He said with a smile of apology, "It's probably gonna be a couple days before I'm up to it, darlin'. Tomorrow they've got me scheduled for some more tests…more debriefing. Which reminds me-" he clutched the edge of the table and clumsily pushed back his chair "-my shadow's supposed to be picking me up at twenty-uh, make that nine o'clock, and if that clock radio over there is right, it's near that now. I'd better be getting downstairs."

"You have to go back?" She was on her feet, too, with her head held high. She kept her voice light, and because he knew she didn't want him to, he tried not to see the disappointment in her eyes. "I just assumed you were staying here tonight."

It was the moment he'd been dreading, and from the tense and defensive way she was holding herself, he wondered if she'd been dreading it, too.

"Jess," he said gently, "I can't. You wouldn't want me to."

She nodded once, quickly-and yes, half-relieved. "It's okay. I understand."

She didn't, though, he knew that. Overwhelmed once more with tiredness and a sense of failure, he tried to explain. "I don't…sleep well. I'm not used to sleeping in a bed-"

"Oh, hell, I knew it." Her voice was suddenly bright and quivering with melodrama. "My stars, it's this damn bed, isn't it?" She threw her arms wide to encompass the bed, which he'd already noticed took up a good bit of the room, and he knew she was trying to ease the awkwardness between them by making light of it. "It'd scare anybody off. Not to mention, it's just downright tacky."

"It is a lot to live up to," Tris agreed, coming up behind her. "I don't think my prison cell was as big as that bed." He lifted his hands, but didn't allow himself to touch her. Her scent, one he was familiar with but couldn't place, drifted to his nostrils, and he closed his eyes and drank it in, swaying a little with exhaustion and longing. So sweet…so clean.

God, the irony of it was terrible. He'd dreamed of her for so long…how she'd look…how she'd smell. How she'd feel. In his mind he'd explored her body, every inch of it. He knew…he remembered…every detail: the sprinkles of freckles on her shoulders and even across the tops of her breasts where her bikini didn't reach; the way her nipples looked when she was aroused; the tiny red mole, no bigger than the head of a pin, just where the two halves of her rib cage came together; the scar low on her belly from the Caesarean she'd had when Sammi June was born. How he'd loved to kiss her there…then lower…oh yes, lower. Now here she was, inches away…a breath away. His wife. And he could hardly bear to touch her.

"I have nightmares," he said, his voice ragged with his anguish. "I'm afraid I might-I don't want to hurt you." He knew how lame it must sound.

She turned back to him, moving in that abrupt, jerky way-and just like that, he was flashing back again to a Florida beach and the first time he'd ever set eyes on her, her body coltish, self-conscious and awkward, and at the same time so sexy. Sexy as hell.

"It's okay," she said, breathless and rushed, laying her hand along his jaw. As before, he curled his fingers around hers and drew them away from his face, carefully as he knew how. He wasn't used to being gently touched. "You're here. You're alive. That's all that matters." She paused, and he nodded. A smile trembled on her lips. "So. You'll be back tomorrow? After you're finished with the tests and the debriefing?"

He nodded, then started violently when the phone rang. She went to pick it up, and he waited for his heartbeat to slow down before he said, "That's probably Al now."

The big red-gold letters on the digital clock beside the bed said nine o'clock on the money, and he thought what a luxury it was to always know the exact time. He was accustomed to determining the passage of days by the waning of darkness and light, and weeks by counting scratches he'd made on the walls of his cell. One of the first things he'd do when he got back to the world, he decided, was buy himself a watch.

That reminded him of something he'd forgotten to ask Jess.

She put the phone down and turned to him, eyes too bright. "That was your ride. He's waitin' for you downstairs."

He nodded and reached for the cane he'd left propped against the bed. "Jess, there's something-"

"He said to take your time." She was hugging herself, and her smile looked strained. He wished he felt strong enough to put his arms around her and make her feel safe and protected, the way he used to. But he knew he wasn't.

"Come down with me," he said. "You can meet my shadow. Al's a good guy."

She nodded, and waited while he shifted the cane to his left hand and opened the door and held it for her.

"There's one thing you can do for me," he said, and she looked at him again in the eager way he remembered from when they were first dating. "Tomorrow, if you want…while I'm busy at the hospital, you…uh, maybe you could go shopping for me? Pick me up some clothes?" His smile slipped sideways. "Just occurred to me, I don't have any civvies."

"Sure, I'll do that. I'd love to." So eager to please him it made his throat ache. "Where-I mean…"

"I don't know what there is around here. Al can probably tell you. Or-did they assign you somebody?"

"They did-Lieutenant Commander Rees, my casualty assistance officer. He'd probably even take me. Oh-" her eyes darkened as they swept across his body "I don't know what size-"

"Just get me my old size," he said softly as he closed the door behind them. "I'll grow into 'em."

"Promise?"

He took a deep breath. "That's a promise," he said fervently. Then he put his arm around her shoulders and brought her to his side. Suspense hummed in his muscles until he felt her body relax against him, and there was an aching familiarity about her softness as she slipped her arm around his waist.


* * *

Back in her room half an hour later, Jessie closed the door and leaned against it. She felt drained and lonely. It had taken all the emotional stamina she'd had left to make brave small talk for Major Sharpe, and then to smile and let her husband slip away from her side and walk away. Funny-as apprehensive as she'd been about this reunion, and as awkward and difficult as it had turned out to be, watching him leave again had been the worst. She'd wanted to cling to him and cry like a child. Instead she'd kept her smile plastered in place and returned his little farewell wave-it had seemed so uncharacteristically tentative, for Tris-and then turned and walked back inside and up the stairs on legs that were suddenly trembly. Now, with no one to see her, she clamped her hand over her mouth and let the tears come.

Gulping sobs, she felt her way to the huge bed and sank onto it. Shaking, bereft, she reached blindly for something to hold on to-a pillow-and found herself hugging a large plump Teddy bear instead.

She stared at it in surprise, and then a gust of laughter replaced her sobs. Intermittently laughing and sobbing, she gazed at the fat brown bear while she mopped at her tears with the sleeve of her sweater. Whose idea had it been to leave her such a thing? she wondered, poking and tugging distractedly at its cheery yellow bow.

Heavens, she'd never been the Teddy bear type, even when she was little. Joy, now-she was the one for bears. Joy Lynn, Ms. Sophisticated New York Career Person, had bears all over her apartment. She had them on her bed and her sofa and her dressertop. She had one sitting on the back of her toilet, for heaven's sake.

Jessie had been…well, somewhere between the baseball mitt and the Nancy Drew type, which was a hard place for a Southern girl raised in the seventies to be. In fact, come to think of it, she'd had a hard time fitting into any recognizable niche, growing up in Oglethorpe County, Georgia.

Until Tristan Bauer had come along. Right then, for the first time in her life, she'd known exactly who she was and where she belonged.

She lay back on the bed, hugging the bear to her chest. With her eyes closed she could see him walking away from her, not the way he'd looked tonight, thin and worn, steps uneven, but on a night half her lifetime ago, striding down the second-floor walkway of a Florida beachfront motel, tall and strong and straight, head set with that proud and arrogant tilt, radiating self-assurance in almost visible waves.

And she, leaning against the wall outside her door because she feared her legs weren't going to hold her up if she left it, and her lips still throbbing from his kiss and her insides turning upside down, had called out to him. "You don't have to go, you know."

At the top of the stairs he'd paused to look back at her, one hand on the railing, smile tender, eyes dark with regret.

"You can stay if you want to," Jessie had said to him in a husky, grown-up voice that hardly trembled at all. Lauren Bacall, sexy and sleepy-eyed. But inside her head she was crying in panic, If you leave me now, I'll just have to die.

He sauntered back toward her while her heart tried to beat its way out of her chest, and when he was close enough to touch her he stopped. Smiling wryly, teeth white against his dusky skin, he murmured, "Darlin', much as I wish I could, I don't have any protection, and I'm pretty sure you don't, either." He lifted a hand and lightly brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers. Then he turned away once more.

And she'd known-she'd absolutely known-that if he went ahead and walked away from her then, it was going to be forever, that she was about to lose her one and only chance for true love and lifelong happiness. The man was gorgeous, and this was Florida, spring break. There had to be hundreds-no, thousands!-of girls out there on those beaches more beautiful, more sophisticated, more prepared than she was. If she let him slip away tonight she was gonna lose him-simple as that.