“Morning-afters aren’t really my specialty,” Austin said, “so I’ll apologize beforehand for being a bit of a clod.”

Gem straightened, clean clothes in one hand and the other holding the towel to her body. Her gaze slid down over Austin’s chest for a second and back to her face. Austin hitched the sheet a little higher.

“I’m not expecting anything in the way of…morning-after conversation,” Gem said with a quirky little smile. “Last night was last night, right?”

“I think that’s what we agreed on,” Austin said, but that wasn’t what she was thinking. She was thinking she didn’t want last night to be the last night, the only night, even though she had no way—and no right—to suggest differently.

“So I’m not going to say what you’ve probably heard so many times you probably don’t believe it any longer,” Gem said conversationally as she stepped into panties and jeans and somehow managed to get them on while still keeping the towel covering her chest and not showing anything else.

“What do you think that would be?” Austin said, wondering if Gem had any idea she almost never had a conversation worth mentioning, let alone remembering, with women in the morning.

“That I don’t usually do that sort of thing.” Gem frowned. “Actually, I never do that kind of thing.”

“It wouldn’t matter to me if you had.” Austin never really gave any thought to what a woman’s past might be when they were only spending a night together, why should she? They owed her no explanations. But this was Gem, and everything she needed to know had already been said. “I know that last night was different.”

“Do you?” Gem said quietly.

Austin sat up, letting the sheet fall. Nudity wasn’t anything that bothered her and false modesty was ridiculous at this point. “I do. For me too.”

Gem took off the wet towel and draped it over the bedpost. She was nude from the waist up, her chest slightly flushed from the heat of the shower still, her breasts uplifted and rose tipped. Austin wanted to groan but suppressed it. The time for that kind of connection had passed.

“Then we understand each other.” Gem slipped into a yellow button-down cotton shirt and closed it with steady fingers. She bent, shoved clothing into her duffel, and stood with the bag in hand. “I need to get out to the sanctuary. The storm has probably wreaked havoc with some of the nesting areas. I imagine you want to get settled and get to work too.”

Austin slid from the bed, pulled on jeans from the pile of discards on the floor, and shrugged into her shirt. She left it unbuttoned. Work. Yes, she had a lot of that to do. “Be careful out there. It sounds like the roads got pretty rough last night.”

Gem nodded. “I will. I…I hope your stay is productive.”

Austin ran a hand through her hair. “Thanks.”

Gem turned, opened the door, and paused. She looked back. “I won’t say good-bye, just in case.”

“All right,” Austin murmured. “Not good-bye, then.”

Chapter Eleven

The fog had lifted, leaving behind a cold, damp glaze on the railings, stair treads, and surfaces of parked cars. Scattered dryer-sheet wisps of clouds streaked the steel-gray sky. Gem turned up the collar of the denim jacket she’d pulled from her luggage, tossed her duffel into the backseat of her car, and headed down the nearly empty one-way main street. A few locals scurried along walking dogs, and others, bundled up in rain slickers and hunched against the wind, congregated in front of the coffee shop and diner, two of the only places with lights showing. Gem pulled over in front of the coffee shop and put on her emergency flashers. She hurried into the too-warm room, ordered a black eye from the harried teen behind the counter, and grabbed a muffin of nondescript ingredients to eat as she drove. All the things she would do on any ordinary morning, except this was no ordinary morning. She wasn’t fanciful enough to believe that a single night could change her life, but something had definitely changed inside her. Everything she valued was still the same—her job, her friends, her family, the satisfaction she found in small, day-to-day things like coffee and muffins—but those things no longer encapsulated her world. Something new had been added, and the solace she had once taken in the sameness of her life had vanished.

Gem sat in the car, sipping coffee and breaking pieces off her muffin, reluctant to drive away and leave the night behind.

Austin had somehow awakened her desire for the unknown. She hadn’t been eager to explore anything beyond the familiar since those last days with Paul and Christie. Those long-ago days had been different from the last twenty-four hours, so very different. She hadn’t sought or welcomed the experiences Paul insisted she’d enjoy, even though she’d vaguely acknowledged a desire for something she hadn’t been able to name then—a desire to save her marriage because she thought she should, the need to meet Paul’s needs, and beneath it all, the simmering unrest that only seemed to ease when she was with Christie. Easy to recognize in hindsight, nearly impossible to sort out from her fragmented emotions at the time. Now she knew that what had driven her to sleep with both of them had really been her desire for Christie, or at least, for a woman.

A tap on her window made her jump. A fresh-faced woman with short, wind-blown sandy hair in a navy flak jacket with an American flag emblem on one sleeve and a Rock Hill Police patch on the other smiled in at her. Gem rolled down the window.

“Morning, I—”

“You okay, ma’am?” The officer couldn’t be more than twenty or any cuter if she tried. She had dimples on her dimples. “You’ve been sitting here with the flashers on and the engine running for about ten minutes.”

“Sorry, I was lost in thought.”

“No problem. Not much traffic this morning.”

Gem finished her coffee and set the empty in the cup holder. “I have to go anyhow—is the causeway open?”

“Ought to be soon. They’ve been cleaning up out that way since dawn.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure thing. See you around.”

“Right.” Gem pulled slowly away, watching the cop saunter back to her patrol car in her rearview mirror. She had a swagger that looked good on her small, tight body. A faint zing of sexual interest shot along her nerve endings, and Gem caught herself up short. Really? Now she was cruising cute young strangers? What had Austin unleashed—or maybe more fairly, what had she been keeping caged? Not that it matters now. It’s over.

Gem turned off the main street onto the narrow spur leading to the causeway and, beyond that, the wildlife sanctuary. If the airport was functional and the causeway was passable, the other members of the research team ought to be arriving soon and she could get back into the swing of her life. She’d know about the road in a minute. Rock Hill Island was actually a peninsula connected to an island by a quarter-mile causeway with the marshlands on one side and the sound on the other. She rounded a bend and breathed a sigh of relief. The roadway was clear, although the effects of the storm were everywhere. The shoreline on the harbor side of the narrow concrete span was twenty feet narrower than she recalled, the erosion from the heavy surf and pounding rain having left deep trenches in the sand and layers of small rocks along the water’s edge. Tide pools collected in the marshes on the opposite side, but the waters had receded enough that the orange police barricades had been pulled aside to allow cars to pass.

She headed across, feeling as she always did that with every rotation of the wheels she was leaving the world behind. Usually that knowledge was accompanied by a feeling of freedom as she shed her daily responsibilities and looked forward to a few weeks of immersion in study and solitude. This morning she was anything but happy to be leaving the world behind. Austin was back in Rock Hill, and she wasn’t eager to forget her or what they’d shared.

The night with Austin had reminded her all too forcefully what passion felt like, and she’d rejoiced in it. She’d thought freedom was a quiet place of contemplation, but she’d relearned in the moments of abandoning herself to sensation that freedom was also the wild flight of birds on the wing, soaring above the clouds, diving into the currents, climbing into the heavens. Her skin tingled at the memory. No, she wasn’t eager to leave that behind at all.

With a sigh, she turned into the ten-car lot fronting the L-shaped, single-story stucco building housing the tiny visitors’ center and sanctuary offices. The long arm of the L extending toward the back had been allocated to the research team while on-site. A red pickup truck and a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with bright red turtle decals along one side were the only other vehicles. Her heart lifted. Emily and Joe had arrived.

Emily Costanzas was a turtle woman who traveled from Michigan every year to study the migratory and reproductive patterns of the freshwater and sea turtles that nested in the marshlands and beaches in late summer. The sea turtle hatchlings would be emerging at any time now, headed to the sea, where they would grow to maturity over the ensuing decades—if they survived. Joe Edelman was a grass man, an ecologist from Maine who studied the impact of migratory birds carrying seeds from distant places and how those transplants affected the biology of the sanctuary. Gem, Emily, and Joe were the three most senior researchers in their group, and they’d worked together for five years. More than colleagues, they were friends.

Gem hurried inside and down the corridor toward the conference room at the end of the building that served as a dining hall and meeting area for the team. Emily and Joe sat at a round Formica table in the center of the room with cups of coffee and a box of doughnuts.