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Her arms slid around his neck, clung. She swayed against him, deliberately giving him a tease of pelvis, a brush of breast. All promises, no substance.

She was not a good woman. Not a fair one. But she let out a wicked, low chuckle when he brushed something off the table-paper? Mail? Whatever. He needed a mattress and the only bed-type was far too many yards away.

“We don’t have time,” she murmured. “Didn’t you say we were going to dinner-?”

“Reservations. In an hour. Don’t care.”

“I thought you were starving.”

“I am.”

“We have serious stuff to do. We really don’t have time-”

This from the woman who was helping him swoosh mail and newspapers and keys to the floor, who’d already perched up on the table, who was sliding her hands inside his white shirt.

She was totally right. They didn’t have time.

For anything but this.

The chaos of the last two days disappeared. The wild sail back to Juneau, the jumbled flight and transfer arrangements, the chaotic connections with authorities at home and in Juneau-it had all been never ending, nonstop. Until now. With her.

Those small white hands handled the zipper on his dress pants so fast, he was ready to go, and there she was, laughing, coaxing him with more kisses, more speed. Her legs wrapped around him, bringing him closer, at the same time her tongue whisked damp, soft enticements down his throat, his chest, lower.

He put a stop to it.

She’d seduced him once, but the darned woman needed to learn to take turns. When she heard him laugh, she lifted her head, smiled up at him. “See, Harm?” she whispered. “That’s the thing. To steal moments of feeling good and being happy and just…being. With someone else. Just…”

Oh, yeah, now she wanted to talk? He hooked her legs under his arms, lifted them up and over his shoulders. He took his turn-and he made it a slow, long, lazy turn-whisking his tongue down, down, starting with the hollow in her ivory-soft throat. Then celebrating the shape and vulnerability and exquisite texture of each small, perfect breast. Then down, over her flat tummy, into her navel.

“Harm…” There, he saw her head drop back. She wasn’t laughing anymore. There was still a smile, but it was fragile, stark, intimate. “I don’t think I can…”

Yeah, he thought. That was the thing. She wasn’t a truster-which he understood, because he trusted no one, either. But that was exactly how he knew what to do, why, how. For her to believe that she could give her trust to him, he had to come through for her.

A man dreamed of work this good. His tongue dipped lower, lower, until he cupped his hands under her bottom, lifted her to him and sipped. She let out a cry of a sigh, a moan of longing and need. He tasted, savored, sank in.

She arched under his hands, then tensed until he felt the first vibrant tremors take her over, take her under. Before she’d recovered, he rewound her legs, this time around his waist, and plunged into her, hard and slow.

She called his name again, but this time on a hiss. The sound inspired him to dive deeper, slower, harder. They both seemed to crest on a roar of speed, a thrill of letting free…everything. For her. With her.

Moments later, they were both gasping for breath. “What you do to me,” she whispered, half laughing, half scolding, her tone so loving he almost lost it all over again. Unfortunately, they had to separate-the table was impossibly uncomfortable; both had to shift. And reality, of course, returned. They still had miles to travel in the coming hours.

Harm, though, figured he’d get more recovery time, because when she disappeared in the bedroom, he figured she’d take a lot longer than he would to get dressed and fixed up. Instead, he’d barely caught a fast reshower and changed and had a chance to sit in a living-room chair before she walked out of the spare bedroom.

At first, he thought a stranger had broken into the house and done something with his Cate.

It was just a black dress, he could see. But she’d done something with a scarf, added a little vanilla and dark chocolate in a low scoop under her neck. The heels were so high she almost reached his chin, not counting how long and sexy they made her legs look. Her hair was still a wreck, thank God, so at least he could recognize her. But the eyes looked smoky and dangerous, something tiny and expensive dangling from her ears.

“Who are you and what have you done with my Cate?”

She walked by him, chucked up his chin. “Didn’t you think I could clean up? But don’t start thinking I’d be any kind of corporate wife. I don’t do country clubs. Or private schools. Or being on boards.”

“But I’ll bet you do expensive restaurants.”

She brightened immediately. “I can be bought. That’s my price. Where are you taking me?”

“Nowhere around men if you’re going to wear those heels and look like that. Hell, I need oxygen before I can find the strength to drive the car.”

“Damn it, Harm. You go straight to my head. Cut it out.”

He didn’t want to cut it out. He strongly suspected she wasn’t normally into blushing, and his ego thrived on flustering her.

The drive wasn’t far, and he put the car on zoom, because both of them really were hungry and needed a decent meal. He admitted wanting to impress her, and he knew she’d like the restaurant. He’d been there twice. He couldn’t pronounce a thing on the menu, but everything went down easy. It was in an old house, each room uniquely decorated, but all had subtle lighting and long, graceful drapes and restful chairs.

The waiter offered them a wine list, then the menu-which Cate, with a glance at Harm, suggested they didn’t really need. “How about if you just bring us whatever the chef thinks is his favorite tonight?”

The older man smiled. “He’ll love that. And I think you will, too.”

This might be the only peaceful meal they’d have for days, Harm thought, and it was going to be perfect.

That illusion lasted maybe three minutes.

“Okay,” she said, after the first sip of wine, “maybe it’s time you told me about those first two wives.”

“Now you want to hear? I’ve offered a half dozen times.”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I just figured we’d have a more restful dinner if we didn’t talk about murder and larceny and all that for a little while.”

He was more than willing to tell her. “The first one was Zoe. We got married the day after my eighteenth birthday. She was pregnant. Neither of us had a brain, crossed state lines, found a justice of the peace, figured we’d somehow work it all out and conquer the world. We were 100 percent in love. Never doubted for a minute our love could endure anything-including her parents’ disapproval and mine.”

“So what tore it apart?”

“Not parents. Not poverty. Not idiocy. But…she miscarried in her sixth month. It tore us both up. I guess that has to sound pretty nuts for an eighteen-year-old kid to want a baby that bad. But I did. Anyway, neither of us had the maturity to survive the loss, at least not together, because we both caved after that. Nothing I’m proud to admit.”

“Cripes, Harm. That’s a sad story. What a thing to go through…” She suddenly shook her head. “What?”

By then the waiter had served dinner with a flourish of sterling and bone china. Cate hadn’t eaten two bites before she started in.

“The chef wouldn’t know fresh cilantro if it knocked at his front door,” she murmured. “And the wine’s all right, although there are certainly better choices. So do you ever still see her? Zoe?”

“No. We stayed in touch for a while. Then that disappeared except for an e-mail at Christmas. She’s been married for a while, on her third kid-I don’t believe her husband even knows there was a marriage before him.”

She had several more comments to make about dinner, but he wasn’t deluded that she was finished grilling him. “Well, you might as well tell me about wife number two, since we started this. And I certainly hope that story is a lot more scandalous than the first one.”