“I don’t think so. I really should go in and do the dishes.”
“They’ll wait. This sky won’t. It may never be exactly this way again. One of those stars may fall.”
“Why, Hank Riley, I do believe you may have the soul of a poet after all.”
“I’ve always said you didn’t give me enough credit for having a soul at all. Come on, Annie. How can you be afraid of a poet?”
He heard her low chuckle as she came closer. “They’re the worst kind of romantic,” she retorted.
He reached out, grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the hammock. She fell half-across him, torturing him with the press of her breasts against his chest, the whisper of her breath across his cheek. She struggled for just an instant, then seemed to sigh.
“Stay, Annie,” he pleaded. “Right here beside me.”
After a long hesitation during which he remained absolutely still, she lifted herself up from his chest and resettled herself beside him in the wide hammock. Her head rested on his shoulder.
“Watch for a shooting star,” he said softly. “Then make a wish.”
“Don’t tell me you believe in all that?” she scoffed, her voice amused.
“You never know. I’m a firm believer in hedging all my bets.”
“Are you a gambling man, Hank?”
It was an idle, teasing question, but he took it seriously. He thought about it for several minutes before saying honestly, “I never thought I was until recently.”
“What’s your game? Poker? Blackjack? Horses?”
“Love.”
Ann’s breath caught in her throat. “That’s not a game.”
“I’ve always played it as though it was. What about you? Have you ever been in love?”
“Once. A long time ago.”
“What happened?”
She was quiet for so long he was afraid she might not answer, but it was a night made for sharing secrets. It was still enough and dark enough to hold a promise of endless privacy no matter what was revealed. “He left me.”
There was a lifetime of raw pain behind those three simple words. “Why would any sane man ever leave a lovely woman like you?”
“Because,” she said, her voice emotionless, “he was twenty-two and he was too young to want to be saddled with a wife and a baby.”
Though there wasn’t a sound besides the whisper of her voice and the occasional shriek of a gull, Hank knew she was crying. He could feel the dampness rolling from her cheeks onto his shirt, soaking it. The thought of her hurting for so many years made him ache inside. He wanted to enfold her in his embrace, to protect her from ever knowing such pain again, but he sensed that what she needed was to talk. He encouraged it by his silence.
“We were engaged,” she began in a voice that was now roughened by tears. “But when I went to tell him about the baby, he got furious. He wanted to go to medical school. He had all these plans, you see. He blamed me for trying to ruin them. I tried to make him see that it would be okay, that we could manage, but he walked out. I never saw him again. The next day I lost the baby.”
She laughed bitterly. “Ironic, isn’t it? If he’d stuck around, we wouldn’t have had anything to worry about.”
“You would have been miserable with a selfish jerk like that.”
“Maybe so, but at the time I thought my world had ended.”
“And you’ve spent the rest of your life making sure that no other man could get close enough to inflict that sort of pain.”
He felt her head shake.
“Yes, you have,” he insisted. “Or you’d have found someone else by now. Instead, you’ve filled your life with all the children no one else wanted to make up for the one this man didn’t want.”
“Now who’s playing psychologist?”
“Am I any good at it?”
“Not bad, actually.”
“Ann…” he began, but she pressed a finger against his lips.
“Just because you know about my past doesn’t change anything, though. Not between us.”
“Are you so sure of that?” he said, kissing her gently. The taste of her tears was on her lips. He wanted to go on kissing her until the memory blurred and finally faded altogether. Instead, he held back and watched her.
“Are you sure?” he repeated.
Blue eyes, fringed by long, sooty lashes, gazed back at him expectantly and he lost track of what he’d meant to say to persuade her to let go of the past. Provocative images replaced all thoughts of idle conversation. He swallowed hard past the lump in his throat as he finally tore his gaze away.
“Maybe you ought to go get some sleep,” he said finally.
She stared at him, then nodded. “Maybe so,” she said softly.
For just an instant, Hank could have sworn he heard regret in her tone, but then she was on her feet and striding toward the house with that long-limbed gait that stirred him so.
It was nearly an hour later when he finally dared to follow her inside. He’d hoped she’d gone to bed, but he found her at the sink, rinsing off dinner dishes with those familiar, sure movements. She’d changed clothes. A man’s wool plaid shirt hung nearly to her knees. Her legs were bare down to the bright yellow socks that had settled in folds at her ankles.
Looking at those legs was dangerous, he decided at once. Taking a beer from the refrigerator, his eyes locked instead on the movement of her hands, soft and slippery against the fragile porcelain. He imagined them sliding over his flesh with the same gentle touch, the same deft strokes, water cascading around them, cooling their burning flesh. His blood surged at the image. He could hear the pounding of his heart, feel the throbbing low in his abdomen. His grip on the bottle of beer was so tight, he was afraid the glass would snap. If she didn’t get out of the kitchen in the next five minutes, he was going to forget all of his honorable intentions and take her right there.
As if she’d guessed
