Читать книгу Secret Agent Sam - Kathleen Creighton - Страница 9

“I met her in the White House rose garden,” Cory said, following a gleefully profane exclamation from Tony.

He could still smile, remembering that day, but carefully, tentatively, with great care not to jostle the memories too hard. The turbulence of seeing her again had shifted and tumbled them—and the feelings that went with them—inside the compartment he’d stuffed them into years ago, and right now he feared if he opened that door too wide and too suddenly they might tumble out and bury him.

He spoke rapidly to get past the danger.

“There was a reception for us—for him, really—Lieutenant Bauer—I was more or less an afterthought. The guy was a genuine hero, and you know what the media does with heroes.”

“Aren’t you the media?”

“That’s why I get to bad-mouth—it’s like family. Anyway, you’re not the media when you’re part of the story.”

“But you wrote those stories.”

“Yeah, mainly to get through it. Get past it. I wonder, sometimes, how it would’ve been if I hadn’t had that outlet. I know Tristan had a tough time of it—of course he’d been gone a lot longer than I was. They only had me a few months. Him they’d had for eight years.”

“Hard to imagine. Impossible, maybe.”

Cory nodded, the knots in his belly relaxing a little. He was always more comfortable concentrating on someone else’s story. “It was tough on his family. They’d assumed all along he was dead. Jessie—his wife—hadn’t remarried, though, which was one good thing. What a mess that would’ve been. Still, it was hard—they had a lot of readjusting to do. But it was hardest, I think, on Sammi—on Samantha. She was just a kid, a ten-year-old tomboy when she lost her dad. That’s how he remembered her—how he described her to me, when we were together in that Iraqi prison. He talked about her all the time. A tomboy with ponytails. With bandages on her knees from playing soccer.” A smile fluttered like a leaf on the gust of his exhalation. “Let me tell you, that’s not what he came back to.”

Not even close.

Oblivious to nuances, Tony whistled. “I guess not. She’d have been what, then—eighteen?”

“Yeah. In college. A grown-up woman, the way she saw it.”

“Still just a kid, though,” Tony said in a musing tone, then threw Cory a quick frown as it finally hit him. “What, you’re telling me you had something going with her? I never figured you for a cradle robber, man. You must have, what, ten or twelve years on her?”

“It wasn’t my intention,” Cory said, putting his head back with a sigh. “Believe me. Well—” the smile this time was brief and wry “—not at first, anyway. Not that I didn’t fall for her. That happened probably the first minute I laid eyes on her.” He threw Tony a look and shifted uncomfortably. “Well, you’ve seen her.” He glanced toward the window and his heart gave a jolt as he saw the tall wavery figure in khakis and a baseball cap striding toward them across the scorched grass.

Alerted by what he saw in Cory’s face, Tony, too, turned to look out the window. After a long moment he said in a reverent tone, “I can see how she’d get your attention, yeah. Even dressed like that I can see it.”

“It wasn’t about her looks, though.” Cory waggled his shoulders, uncomfortable even with the thought. Blond hair, brown eyes, long legs…great legs…okay, sure, she’d had all that. So had any number of other women he’d met in his lifetime and over the course of his career, in one variation or another. But Sammi June—Samantha—there’d just been something about her. So much…more.

“So, you had it bad for the college kid,” Tony said. “So, what happened?”

“About what you’d expect, I guess. Didn’t work out.” Cory lifted one shoulder and closed his eyes, hoping maybe Tony would take the hint and let it drop.

Naturally, he didn’t. “Didn’t work out? That’s all you have to say?” His voice rose in pitch as it lowered in volume. “Look, man, I know you. You’ll make a story out of a trip to the 7-Eleven.” With his eyes shut Cory felt the voice come nearer, and drop to a conspirator’s mutter. “Hey—I saw your face when you recognized that woman out there a while ago. Like you’d been whacked upside the head with a plank.” There was another pause while Tony settled back in his seat again.

After a moment he exhaled in an exasperated way. “Look. Three years ago I stood by your side and handed you the ring while you got married to a woman who just happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to this pilot of ours—don’t think I didn’t notice that—and I gave up my couch when you divorced that same woman barely a year later—not that I minded. I never liked her that much, anyway. Now, I may be crazy, but I’m getting the idea there’s a connection there somewhere. So trust me, ‘didn’t work out’ ain’t gonna cut it.”

“What do you want me to do? I can’t very well get into it now,” Cory threw back at him in an exasperated whisper. “She’s gonna be back in here in a minute.”

“Yeah, well…don’t think I’m letting you off the hook on this one, pal. First thing when we get to Zamboanga—okay the second, but once we’ve got a couple of cold brewskies in front of us, I want the whole story. I’m not kiddin’, man.”

Cory let out his breath in a gusty sigh.

Of all things to happen, he thought. On this, of all assignments. It had to be the mother of all coincidences.

Or maybe just fate, catching up with him.

Outside on the steps, Sam paused with one hand braced on each side of the door as if she were preparing to withstand a gale-force wind. Which she supposed she was in a way, or at least the emotional equivalent. And so far she wasn’t pleased with the way she’d held up in the face of it. No excuses, she’d had plenty of time to prepare. She should have had her emotions battened down a whole lot better than this.

One thing, one small triumph she could cling to: the look on Cory’s face when he’d realized who his pilot was. Hah—complete and total shock. His face had gone ash-white. You might be able to control your expressions and voice, Pearse, but there’s not much you can do about your blood vessels.

He’d had absolutely no clue, she was sure of it. And his reaction to seeing her again told her one thing: The man still had some feelings for her.

Okay, so she was probably never going to know exactly what those feelings were, but at least she knew he wasn’t indifferent.

A little buzz of something—excitement? Triumph?—zinged through her and a smile curved her lips. Indifferent? Not by a long shot.

The smile stayed put while she got the steps pulled up and stowed away and the door secured. The smile was still in place, feeling as if it had been molded out of clay and drying fast, as she started up the aisle, nodding at Tony Whitehall, who had turned to look at her with an expression of unabashed curiosity, and a glint in his exotic golden eyes.

She wondered what Cory’d been telling him; she knew Tony had to have asked about her the minute she was out of earshot. And what an internal battle that must have been, she thought, between Cory’s two selves: On the one hand, the reporter, who’d made a life and a career out of finding out secrets, getting to the bottom of things, solving mysteries, telling the story. On the other, the intensely private man who’d mastered the art of protecting his own secrets.

He, naturally, seemed completely unperturbed by her presence, or anything else, for that matter, sitting square in his seat, face forward, head back against the headrest. He looked as if he might even be enjoying a little nap.

But she knew better.

Or did she? Had she ever been sure what was going on behind those deep, all-seeing eyes?

“Air controllers at Davao City airport have cleared us for takeoff. If you-all wanna fasten your seat belts, we’ll be getting underway in a few minutes,” she announced in her this-is-your-captain-speaking voice, pausing to check that the two men’s bags had been properly stowed in their compartments. “We should be in Zamboanga in about an hour and fifteen minutes.” She threw Tony Whitehall a smile and a wink.

She didn’t look at Cory, but to her great annoyance, felt a distinct prickling sensation between her shoulder blades as she continued up the sloping aisle to the cockpit, an awareness of eyes watching her with unfathomable intensity….

From his seat Cory could see clearly through the open cockpit door. He watched as she ran through her preflight checklist, and try as he would to deny it, felt a little burr of admiration, even pride, begin to hum beneath his breastbone. He’d never flown with Sam at the controls before.

The baseball cap had been replaced by a bulky set of white headphones that left her sun-streaked hair in the kind of sweaty disarray he’d always found particularly sexy. Sexy even now, cut short like this, shorter than he’d ever seen her wear it. Her strong hands and long-boned fingers moved nimbly over the complicated array of dials and switches in a way that brought back vividly the no-nonsense, straight-ahead way she’d always had about her, even when they’d made love. The way she’d had of touching him that was uniquely hers, without shyness or hesitation, with a certain bold edge and a hint…just a hint of wickedness.

And it was that more than anything, he thought, that had ignited the fires in his blood back then. Maybe that part of her had connected with the secret danger-lover and thrill-seeker within him, like two live wires touching….

Come off it, Pearse. It’s over. It was over long ago.

One after the other, the twin engines fired with a deep-pitched growling sound that hummed in his bones and put him in mind of old black-and-white war movies, or something he’d watch on the History Channel. The plane sat vibrating in place while the engine rpm’s climbed and the growling changed in pitch and intensity. Then it slowly began to move forward.

Cory felt his own pulse pick up speed as he watched the hands that had once stroked him to feverish arousal skillfully manipulate the throttles while she steered the plane in a tight right turn onto the runway, then tight left to straighten out. He saw her reach down with one hand to lock the tail wheel in place. The growling sound continued to grow in volume and intensity and he could feel the vibrating now in his belly as the plane began to accelerate down the runway.

Tearing his eyes away from the open cockpit door, he glanced over at Tony, who looked back at him and hummed the first few bars of “Off We Go, into the Wild Blue Yonder,” grinning like a madman. He felt his stomach drop and his body press heavy into his seat, and he jerked his gaze to the window in time to watch the scorched grass and palm trees and tin-roofed buildings drop away under him.

“Hot damn,” said Tony with a gleeful chortle.

Cory didn’t reply. He leaned forward to stare through the window as Davao City came into view, slowly spreading out below him, with the glittering blue of the water beyond. His stomach dropped and the earth tilted as the plane banked sharply, and when it slowly rotated back into position, he could see Mount Apo draped in haze on the horizon.

And still the plane climbed steadily, the deep growling of its powerful twin engines creeping into his bones and invading his brain until he almost felt as if he were a part of the plane himself, as if he were the one laboring skyward with the sun in his face and the wind solid beneath his wings. He felt a soaring, lifting inside himself, too, to think of the woman he’d held soft and naked and trembling in his arms, in control of such awesome power.

He found the notion damned exciting…a pure turn-on, in fact. Which surprised and unnerved him more than a little.

When he felt the plane level out and the engine growl ease off to a steady purr, Cory unbuckled his seat belt. He got a look from Tony when he got up and stepped into the aisle, but something Tony saw in Cory’s face must have warned him, because whatever it was he’d been about to say never got said.

Sam glanced back at him as he stepped through the radio operator’s compartment, lips curving in a smug little Sammi June smile he remembered well. He couldn’t see her eyes because of her sunglasses. He wished he could have seen them, though he wasn’t sure why. Was he remembering the way they’d once lit up at the sight of him, wondering if the glasses were hiding that same glow now?

Wishful thinking, he told himself.

She tilted her head toward the right-hand seat. “Hey, Pearse—have a seat.”

He eased past the controls and settled himself gingerly, his fascinated gaze sliding over the bewildering array of gauges and levers and dials to the view through the wide rectangular windshield. “Wow,” he said.

Sam said lightly, “I guess this is a first.” She threw him a smile. “You’ve never flown with me before.”

“With you at the controls, you mean. No,” he said, gazing once more at the hazy horizon, remembering other times when she’d seemed unknowingly to echo his thoughts. “I guess not.”

There was a pause before she asked, with a slight edge of impatience, “Well, what do you think?”

He hedged, naturally, since there wasn’t any way he could have told her the truth. Which was that he’d lost the ability to think the moment he’d set eyes on her, standing there beside the old World War Two airplane, wearing the arrogance that had always captivated him so, that was like her very own signature perfume.

In that first moment, the years since he’d last seen her had evaporated and it was as if she’d never been gone from his life or his mind, not for an instant. It was all there, in total recall—her face, her body, her voice, her laugh…the way her skin felt, its texture and heat…its softness and its tiny imperfections…the freckles, the way she smelled, the way her hands felt touching him…the way she tasted.

“Of the airplane,” he dryly asked, “or you?”

She laughed, that husky chortle he’d always liked. “The plane, of course.” Once again her smile quirked sideways. “Me being a pilot isn’t exactly news.”

“I never had a problem with you being a pilot. You know that.”

“Yeah, right.”

He shifted in his seat and changed the timbre of his voice, the way driving a car he might have shifted gears to gain traction through a muddy patch. “Somehow I never would have pictured you flying World War Two prop planes for a dumpy little back-water charter outfit in the Philippines, though. The last I heard, you were crewing on passenger jets to China. How in the hell did you wind up here?” He let go of an incredulous huff of laughter. “I’m still trying to get my mind around the coincidence of that.”

She shrugged and said lightly, “Long story,” as she reached to tap some dials and gauges, an activity that, as far as Cory could tell, produced no changes whatsoever in the plane’s behavior.

“We’ve got time.”

Sam felt herself tensing up; she couldn’t help it. It was the calm, almost gentle way he said it that got to her—hadn’t it always?

As the old resentment flared, she fought the urge to glare at him, kept her eyes fixed on the horizon and said sweetly, “I don’t know, I guess it must have been my ‘childish lust for adventure.’ Isn’t that what you called it?”

And she couldn’t help the little glow of satisfaction she got from the silence that followed, even though voices were hissing and moaning in dismay in the back of her mind. Ooh, what did you wanna go and say that for, Samantha June? You don’t wanna dredge up all that old stuff again. That’s water under the bridge, honey-child…you should just leave it be.

She could feel his eyes on her again, that quiet, steady gaze that made her squirm because it seemed it must see right inside her.

“You could have warned me,” he said mildly.

Now she looked at him, her lips curving in an evil grin. “Deprive myself of the look on your face when you saw who your pilot was? No way.”

He chuckled and shook his head, and his eyes found hers even through the shielding lenses of her sunglasses. “Same old Sammi June. Always got to be on top.”

Something thumped hard in her belly. She kept the smile, but it no longer felt like part of her face. More like the clay mask again. “You used to like that about me.”

He held her eyes for a long, intense, awful moment, then eased his shoulders back in the copilot’s seat and exhaled, sounding weary. “I used to like a lot of things about you, Sam.”

Damn you, Pearse. Damn Will, too, for requesting me for this assignment. And damn me for being stupid—no, arrogant—enough to think I could handle it. What was I thinking?

What were you thinking, Sam? How about that you’re a highly trained professional, with the skills and guts it takes to do this job?

So, do it already. Focus, Sam. Do your job. So you had an affair with the man once upon a time. Forget it.

An affair. She cringed at the word. It made the whole thing with Cory sound…frivolous. Fleeting. Bittersweet and nostalgic—rather old-fashioned, really. Like something you’d read about in an old diary.

But it wasn’t just an “affair,” dammit. I loved you, Cory Pearson. You were the love of my life. And you broke my heart. No—you tore out my heart, tore it into itty-bitty pieces and stomped them in the dirt! God, how I hate you for that.

She did—oh, she did. But most of all she hated that she’d never known if she’d succeeded in hurting him back. She’d tried—you’d better believe she’d tried—but if she had managed to hurt him, he’d never let her see it. Not once.

And for that, more than anything, I swear I am never gonna forgive you.

She cleared her throat, took a deep breath. “Look, Pearse…I know this is probably awkward for you—”

“Awkward?” She heard the smile in his voice, and irony that was gentle, not bitter. “Like…hell is awkward, you mean?”

So, he thinks seeing me again after two solid years is hell? Well, good. I’m glad.

She was glad. So why did she feel a need to grit her teeth and swallow hard before she could answer him?

“Yeah, well…I’m gonna need to know if you’re okay with it. If you’re not, just say the word. When we get to Zamboanga—”

“Of course I can handle it,” he said softly.

Of course he can handle it, she thought, sarcastically. He’d handle it the way he handled everything. Like a journalist, clear-eyed and objective, but careful to keep himself one step removed from the messy stuff. Stuff like…emotional turmoil. And pain. It was the way he’d handled Iraq and its aftermath, wasn’t it? And probably all sorts of stuff that had happened to him in his distant past he’d never been willing to talk about to anyone, not even her.

Seconds ticked by in silence, while the farmlands and forests of Mindanao unfolded slowly below them.

“So, tell me,” Sam said in a falsely bright, conversational voice, shaking off the strangling sense of futility that had coiled around her, “how’s Karen these days?”

She heard his sharp hiss of exasperation and felt her cheeks heat with a weird mixture of triumph and shame. What was it that made her want to needle him? The forlorn hope he might lose his cool? That was never going to happen. And even if it did, what would that accomplish?

At least I’d know he cared. That I’d hurt him, maybe a fraction as badly as he hurt me.

Okay, the devil made me do it….

“For God’s sake, Samantha,” he said in a weary voice.

“What?” She threw him a wounded look. “She was your wife for…what was it, a whole year? Knowing you, I’m sure the divorce was amicable. You probably keep in touch, exchange Christmas cards…all that stuff, right?” She lifted a shoulder and turned her eyes back to the horizon. “I was just wondering how she was doing. She looked like a nice person. I wish her well.” Sure you do. You wish her in hell, is what you mean.

“How do you know what she looks like?” Cory’s voice sounded idly curious, remote and far away.

“I saw the wedding pictures you guys sent Mom and Dad. She looked…happy. So did you.” She looked over at him, chin lifted in defense against the suffocating pain in her throat and chest. “So, what happened, anyway?”

He was maneuvering himself carefully around the controls and out of the copilot’s seat and didn’t reply.

“Hey,” she said in mock dismay, “we’re still a half hour out. You don’t have to go back to your seat yet.”

“Yeah, I do,” he said flatly. “If you think I’m going to discuss my failed marriage with you, you’re crazy.” With one hand on the back of the right-hand seat, the other on hers, he paused as if listening to a replay of what he’d said inside his own head. Then he added in a softer tone, “Not now, anyway. I guess we are going to have to talk, but this isn’t the time or the place.”

It wasn’t until he’d left the cockpit and was on his way back to his seat that Sam realized her heart was pounding. And that she felt shivery inside—a purely feminine kind of weakness she hadn’t felt in…oh, years and years. Well, two, to be exact. Which happened to be the last time she’d spoken face-to-face with Cory Pearson.

Feminine weaknesses—or any other kind, for that matter—she surely did not need. Lord help her, especially not now.

Well, hellfire and damnation—as Great-Grannie Calhoun might have said—what was she supposed to do? She hadn’t expected to feel so much, not after all this time.

Tony’s stare followed Cory down the aisle and into his seat.

“Don’t even think about asking,” Cory warned in a hard, flat voice that carried over the loud click of his seat belt.

Tony promptly closed his mouth. A moment later, though, he opened it again to say, jabbing a finger at Cory for emphasis, “Okay, but just so you know, the minute we get to Zamboanga, it’s the brews first, then the buzz. I mean it, man. The whole story. Or you can find yourself another cameraman. Swear to God.”

Cory put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

He wasn’t worried about losing his photographer. In addition to being a close personal friend, Tony’d have to be comatose and chained to a bunker before he’d miss this assignment. But he was right—the three of them were going to be depending on each other for a lot during the next week or so, including, possibly, their lives. They were a team, for better or worse. Tony deserved to know about his history with the third member of the team—some of it, anyway.

Definitely not everything.

God, how it all came back to him, the way things had been with Sam and him. Every laugh, every tear, every heart-thumping, gut-twisting, sweaty detail. The chemistry—the fireworks—had been there from the first moment for both of them, although he’d done a pretty good job—heroic, he thought, considering what he was up against—of holding it at bay for as long as he had.

There’d been the age thing, of course, but Sam hadn’t wanted to hear about that. Far as she was concerned she was a grown-up woman of legal consenting age, and that was that. Didn’t help matters, either, that her mother had been the same age when she’d met and fallen in love with her dad.

Then there’d been Cory’s friendship with Tristan, forged during those hellish days spent together in an Iraqi prison. Tris hadn’t been happy when his baby girl, the daughter he still remembered as a ponytailed tomboy, had declared her intention of dating a thirty-two-year-old friend of her father’s. Cory had been fighting a strong sense of guilt about that the weekend he’d gone to visit Tris, Jessie and Sam at the lake house. Memorial Day weekend, it had been. Lord, how well he remembered that terrible day….

It’s been a beautiful day. Last night’s thunderstorms have moved on, and the skies have cleared to a typically hot, hazy, sun-shiny summer afternoon. The lake is crowded with boats of all kinds, shapes and sizes: pontoons loaded with partying lake-dwellers waving to neighbors on their docks, flat-bottomed bass boats with solitary fishermen stoically riding out the chop in quiet coves, lots of other ski-boats, and of course the Wave Runners and Jet Skis, zipping illegally in and out amongst them all.

In the midst of all the chaos, Sam is determined to teach me to water-ski. I’ve never considered myself particularly talented when it comes to sports, but she’s patient—or stubborn—and it seems as if I might be getting the hang of it, finally. I’ve gotten up—again—and this time it feels like I might stay here awhile. Tris is driving the boat, while Jess sits watching me from the spotter’s seat in the rear, and Sam rides beside me on her knee board. Above the hiss of the water’s spray I can hear her shouting encouragement and praise.

He remembered the feel of the goofy grin on his face, the breathless exhilaration when he successfully jumped the wake.

He remembered the two kids on the Jet Ski, a boy and a girl riding tandem, cutting in close…too close.

I hit the water with that stinging thump that’s become all too familiar to me this day, and I hear Sam’s yell and Jessie’s whoop, and the sound of the boat’s motor throttling down, then circling slowly back to me. Jess leans over the back of the boat, calling to me, asking if I’m ready to call it quits.

That’s when it happens.

I don’t see the accident, none of us do, except maybe Tristan. But we all hear it—that terrible grinding crunch. I hear Tris shout as he guns the boat, and then he’s heading away from me toward the mouth of a nearby cove. Far off across the roiling surface of the water I can see the teenagers’ Jet Ski floating at a crazy angle next to a capsized bass boat.

Then I’m swimming, swimming toward the wreck, swimming as hard as I’ve ever swum in my life before, and my heart feels like it’s on fire in my chest.

I hear Jessie screaming at Tris, and the sound of a splash as Tris hits the water. And after what seems an eternity, I see Tris’s head reappear, and next to it that of the unconscious fisherman. I feel an awful jolt of adrenaline shoot through me a moment later when I see both Tris and the fisherman slowly sink back beneath the surface of that muddy water.

A thought flashes through my mind: No! No way he survived eight years in an Iraqi prison to die in this godforsaken pond. No way!

That’s when I haul in air and dive.

Things become confused…I’m operating on instinct.

I’m underwater, I feel something…I grab hold of it. It’s Tris, and I grab hold of him and try to fight my way back to the surface. And I realize I’m fighting a losing battle because Tris still has a death grip on the bass fisherman and isn’t about to let go.

I think, God help us, we’re all going to drown.

And then…my head’s above water, and I see Sam, plowing toward us through the water on her knee board, digging hard with both arms and yelling and cussing like a maniac, and she’s shoving life preservers at me, and her strong hands are everywhere, helping me, lifting Tris, pulling them both up out of the water.

There’s a lot of yelling and thrashing around, and everything is gasping, coughing, choking, sobbing pandemonium….

In spite of the confusion, some images stayed clear in his mind: Sam treading water while breathing into the fisherman’s mouth. Jess doing the same for the teenaged boy in the bottom of the boat while she sobbed and swore furiously at Tris between breaths. Tris clinging to the side of the boat, gasping for breath and glancing over at Cory with haunted eyes.

Later that evening, after paramedics had flown the three accident victims off to the hospital in a medevac chopper, after Tris and Jess, Sam and Cory had all showered and eaten and calm had been restored, Sam and Cory took the boat and went out again onto the now-serene and all but deserted lake. To watch the sunset, Sam said, but Cory had known her real reason for wanting to get out of the house was to give her mom and dad some privacy. They’d been having a rough time of it since Tris’s return from the dead, Cory knew. It was Jess’s concern about her husband that had led her to call Cory, to ask for help from the one person she felt might understand what Tris was going through.

How well he remembered that night, too, and what a strange contradiction there seemed to be between the peace and quiet of tranquil water reflecting sunset clouds…the first and brightest star of evening…and the sense inside himself that something profound had happened to him this day. That being here with this woman, a milestone had been passed in his life, one equal in import and magnitude to his parents’ death and his sojourn in Iraq, one that would change the direction of his life irrevocably.

“Look,” Sam says, “there’s the Wishing Star.”

She tells me, then, how she wished on that star when she was a little girl, and she tells me the poem and we recite it together: “Starlight, star bright, first star I’ve seen tonight…”

“What did you wish for?” I ask her, smiling, thinking how very young she is.

“Uh-uh. You’re not supposed to tell. Otherwise, it won’t come true.” And she smiles and tilts her face up to mine.

It was then, in that moment, that he’d forgotten any thoughts he’d ever had about how young she was. He’d remembered instead her strength and her courage. He’d remembered her intelligence and sensitivity, her stubbornness and arrogance and husky, sexy laughter. And he’d lowered his head and kissed her.

Oh, how he remembered that kiss.

What do I expect—something sweet and innocent and virginal, maybe? Instead…I find myself lost. Lost in a sensual jungle…lush, humid, beautiful, exhilarating…terrifying. I’m afraid I may never escape; I don’t want to, really. But at the same time I’m afraid, as inside me I feel battlements I’ve spent a lifetime erecting begin to shiver and quake.

It takes all my wits and will, but I fight my way free, and I’m thinking, How am I ever going to hold out against this?

And I think, Tristan, my friend, I’m sorry—forgive me—but I’m afraid I’ve fallen in love with your daughter….

He had held out for a lot longer than he’d believed possible, though he hadn’t been able to make Sam understand why, even with her long, silky body warm and soft against his, her strong fingers tracing paths on his skin for her eager mouth to follow, when all her woman’s instincts and the evidence of her senses told her how much he wanted her, he could still refuse to take her to bed.

Sam hadn’t understood, that night on the lake…a night and a kiss so beautiful, so full of sweetness and hope and promise it had made his soul ache. It was only the first of God-knew-how-many times he’d disappointed her.