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“That’s not a very attractive picture.” But painfully close to the truth, she secretly admitted. “If you truly believe I’m so judgmental, I can’t imagine why you’d want anything to do with me.”

“That’s easy. You’ve got a great ass and the best legs I’ve ever seen on a female. And you taste pretty good, too.”

Despite her discomfort with the topic, Raine smiled at that, just, as she suspected, he’d meant her to. “You realize, of course, that my mother would not be pleased to hear you compare her to a dog. Especially a mongrel.”

“You’re right. So, we’ll just have to let that be our little secret.” He pulled her closer. Then lowered his head, until his mouth was a whisper away from hers. “If you don’t want this to happen, Raine, tell me now. Because while we’re sharing secrets, I gotta tell you, sweetheart, I’m dying here.”

His voice was rough. Pained. Thrilling. “Me, too,” Raine whispered.

“Thank God.” Jack’s words exploded on a rush of air as he covered her lips with his and lowered her down to the blanket.

H
e wanted her. Really wanted her. The idea was as terrifying as it was thrilling. What if she couldn’t satisfy him? Raine worried. What if she did something wrong and disappointed both of them? What if…

“Jack…” Her mind fogged, her voice drifted off and her body arched instinctively as he skimmed a hot kiss down her neck. “I think this is…Oh, God,” she murmured when he touched the hollow of her throat with the tip of his tongue and sent her pulse hammering. “I have to tell you…” She could barely speak. Barely breathe. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done this.”

“Don’t worry.” He began unbuttoning her blouse while kissing his way back up to her mouth. “It’s like riding a bicycle. It’ll come back to you.”

Her body arched when his hand closed over her breast. “It already has.” Waves of pleasures flowed through her, as warm and liquid as a tropical sea. “More than I…Oh!” Raine gasped, then shuddered as he nipped at an erogenous zone on her neck she’d never even known she possessed. “More than I ever thought possible,” she said on a quick rush of tangled breath. “But I’m not on the pill, and I don’t have anything….”

Her voice trailed as another wave, this time of embarrassment, threatened to engulf her. What was she thinking? To go so far without having given any thought to the consequences? She was behaving no more intelligently than poor, needy, lovesick Gwen had behaved with the faithless Randy. And look how that had turned out.

“Don’t worry. I do.” He lifted his hips just enough to dig into a pocket and pull out a handful of condoms.

From somewhere, a sense of humor she thought the intense world of corporate litigation had burned out of her years ago rose to ease what had proven to be an embarrassing moment. “Are you sure you brought enough?”

“For starters.” As his mouth returned to hers, Raine could feel his smile against her lips.

She looked up at him, positive he was joking. “You’re very sure of yourself, Sheriff.” With good reason, she suspected as she watched the sexy glint flash in his midnight dark eyes.

“Nah. I’m just pretty damn sure of us, Counselor.”

Her heart hitched. Then tumbled dangerously. She could lose it to this man, she realized in a blinding flash of realization. So easily. If she was smart, if she knew what was good for her, she’d back away now, even if she would go through life knowing she’d earned one of the most unflattering words used to describe a woman.

“May I ask one more question?”

His laugh was rough. “Could I stop you?”

Raine couldn’t decide whether his gritty humor was directed at her, himself, or their situation. She knew she was talking too much, which could undoubtedly be blamed on nerves. But there was one more thing she needed to know.

“Did you ever bring…” she couldn’t quite bring herself to say Jack’s wife’s name. Not when she was about to make love with him. Have sex, she corrected. “Bring anyone else here?”

His teasing grin faded and his expression was as sober as she’d ever seen it. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever brought here, Raine. In fact, I’d forgotten it even existed. Until sometime in the middle of last night, when I was trying to think of a place I could get you alone and do this.”

One hand tangled her hair as his mouth captured her tingling lips again, his kisses growing deeper. More drugging. The other was doing glorious things to her breasts that sent a sweet pleasure humming through her veins even as the caressing touch made her want more.

“And this.” He pushed the cotton blouse aside and lightly bit her shoulder, then soothed the flesh with his tongue. Her breathing quickened as he unfastened her bra with a quick flick of the wrist and began torturing her unfettered breast with first his hands, then his mouth. Raine shivered as his teeth tugged on a taut nipple, causing sparks that shot straight down to that warm, moist place between her legs. Her head spun, her body craved. Desire rose so high and so hot it stunned.

“Please, Jack.” Her fingers turned unusually clumsy as she fumbled with the metal button on his jeans. “I need you.” It was not an easy admission. Raine had never been one to give up control. She’d never wanted to surrender power. Until now. Until Jack.

“And I need you, too, sweetheart.” He captured her hand and pulled it away, lifting it to his lips. When he began sucking on her fingers, one at a time, she felt a strong, corresponding pull deep inside her. “But it’s been a while for me.” His free hand opened her jeans, as she’d been planning to do to him, but with a great deal more finesse. “I don’t want things to go too fast.”

When he trailed a lazy fingertip down her stomach, through the nest of soft curls into the aching, dark warmth below, Raine heard a whimper and realized that it had come from between her own ravished lips.

“Fast would be okay,” she managed as she bucked against his intimate touch.
Need
was too weak a word. She craved him. With every burning atom in her body. “In fact, fast would be fine.”

He laughed at that, a deep, rich sound that rumbled through her. “Next time,” he promised. “But I’ve been waiting too long for this not to at least try to make it last.”

“Not that long.” Desperate to touch, she pulled her hand free, ripped open his shirt and pressed first her palms, then her lips against the hard wall of his chest. His heart was pounding like a jackhammer, vivid proof that she was not the only one so harshly affected. His skin was hot and moist, and as she touched her tongue to it, Raine tasted a faint tang of salt. “I’ve only been home a few days.”

“Ah, but I’ve been waiting for you longer than that.” When he grabbed hold of her wrists and held her hands above her head, an edgy excitement crackled along her skin like flashfire.

“You couldn’t have been,” she managed to argue on a gasp as he touched his open mouth to that surprisingly sensitive spot at the base of her throat. “There was no way you’d know I’d be coming back to town.”

“True enough.” He continued his tender torture, skimming a trail of wet kisses down her rib cage. When he got to the waist of her jeans, he released her hands and slid them slowly down her legs, then followed the denim with his mouth in a slow, erotic journey that had her writhing on the blanket. “I didn’t know you’d be coming. Hell, I didn’t even know that I was waiting for you to come back. Until you showed up one rainy night and triggered something inside me I’d thought had died.”

Lilith might endorse New Age beliefs, but Raine had never been one to accept the idea of fate. Or destiny. She’d never given credence to the idea of the Easter Bunny or the tooth fairy, and had stopped believing in Santa Claus when she was three years old and had gotten up on Christmas morning to discover that he hadn’t shown up.

A week later, she was back at her grandmother’s house, unwrapping gifts Ida assured her that Santa had delivered to Coldwater Cove by mistake. But Raine had known the truth. And that was the year trust had died.

But now, as she surrendered to Jack’s murmured words, his tender touches, his devastating kisses, Raine wondered, through the rosy haze clouding her mind, if perhaps she’d been waiting for him, too. Without knowing she’d been waiting. Wanting him, without knowing she’d been wanting.

The idea was as thrilling as it was terrifying.

A sound that was half gasp, half sob was ripped from her throat as he licked his way back up her legs again, creating a sizzling pleasure-pain at the inside of her thighs. “Please,” she moaned again. She’d never begged for anything in her life. But she was willing to now if that’s what it took to end this exquisite torture.

“Not yet.” He lifted his fingers to his mouth, touched his tongue to them, then slipped the wet tips beneath the elastic leg band of her panties. “Not nearly.”

Hot, heavy moisture had soaked the cotton crotch. Raine tossed her head back and forth as he stripped the panties off and eased one of those treacherous fingers deep inside her. When his thumb parted the sensitive pink folds, she was certain she could feel her bones melt. When the rough pad of his seeking thumb stroked a swathe across the nub that was aching for his touch, sensation after sensation tore through her. Then, before she could catch her breath, he was lifting her to his mouth, feasting on her, claiming her, ravishing her.

Raine’s eyes, which had been squeezed shut against the devastating assault on her senses flew open, wide with shock as she felt her body explode into a fireball, like a new sun being born.

She was boneless. Limp. Helpless. The entire forest could suddenly follow her up in flame and she wouldn’t be able to move a muscle to save herself.

“That was,” she gasped on a labored breath as he held her in his arms while she tumbled back to earth. “Amazing.”

“No.” He touched his mouth to hers in a kiss that was surprisingly tender compared to his earlier hunger. “It’s just the beginning.”

As the afternoon lengthened and silver-edged clouds swept by overhead, Jack proved to be a man of his word as he drew out their lovemaking, treating her to a pleasure so sublime it nearly made her weep and a renewed passion so intense she feared it would make her shatter.

And when he finally took her over that final peak, Raine’s last coherent thought was she felt as if she’d dived off the towering cliff above Neah Bay into a storm-tossed sea. Then risen from the waves again, exactly where she was fated to be. In his arms.

A light fog was skimming along the ground, like little gray ghosts as they drove in thoughtful silence back to town. He’d been afraid of this. While Jack had no idea what was going through Raine’s mind at the moment, his own was rerunning every minute from that fateful moment he’d first seen her, wet and furious and sexy as hell. He hadn’t lied when he’d told her that he’d wanted her from the beginning. Since he was, after all, human, he wasn’t going to apologize for an all too human craving. The only problem was that he’d miscalculated.

He’d tried to tell himself that his only problem was he’d been celibate too long. And, although he wasn’t the type of man to hop into the sack with the first available woman, he’d also tried assuring himself that Raine Cantrell wasn’t the only attractive, intelligent, desirable woman in Coldwater Cove. Unfortunately, she was the only one he’d wanted.

Since they were, after all, both single, unattached adults, he’d decided there was no reason to deny themselves what they both wanted. He’d hoped that once he made love to Raine, once he satisfied the hunger that had tormented his daytime hours and haunted his sleep, he’d be satisfied. Ready to move on. Ready to let her move on.

But there had been a moment there, when he’d been deep inside her, just before his own climax, that his head had begun to swim and all the air seemed to have been sucked out of his lungs. It had felt as if he were drowning; and the crazy thing about it was that he couldn’t even care.

This was ridiculous. Nothing could come of it; any relationship between them was a dead-end street. She lived in the fast lane a continent away; the life he’d made for himself and his daughter in Coldwater Cove was so laid back the lady lawyer would probably get more excitement from watching paint dry. She was rich—not Manhattan megamogul rich, but she sure as hell brought in a bigger paycheck than a civil servant. Jack figured she probably earned about three times what he did. That idea didn’t really bother him, but it might her, since it could prove a bit difficult to explain to high-living friends that she’d married a small-town Western sheriff.

Marry? The idea hit with the force of a sledgehammer at the back of his head. Christ, talk about getting carried away just because of a couple hours of good sex. Okay, make that
great
sex. But it was still important to keep it in perspective. Raine may have spent a great deal of her childhood in Coldwater Cove, but she’d moved on. She was city; he was country. She was Chateaubriand; he was ground chuck.

“Tomato, tomahto.” He murmured the old song lyric as the fog lights cut through the mist rising from the damp pavement. A light sprinkle dotted the windshield, causing him to turn on the wipers.

She glanced over at him. “What did you say?”

He shrugged. “It’s not important. I was just talking to myself.”

“Oh.”

Her voice invited elaboration he wasn’t yet prepared to share. “I was thinking that it was too bad you had to run off so quick.”

“I was thinking the same thing.” she murmured. Since he’d already determined that Raine Cantrell was not a woman who was comfortable with touching, the foolishly romantic part of him that Jack thought had died was encouraged when she placed her hand gently, almost casually, on his thigh. “Talk about your rotten timing.”

He covered her slender hand with his. “Hey, at least we’ll always have Coldwater Cove.”

Her laugh was light and warm and made him want to pull over to the side of the road and take her again in the back of the Suburban. “That’s the difference between us. I’m always looking for the catch while you manage to find a bright side to everything.”

“You make optimism sound like a flaw.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.” Turning her hand beneath his, she linked their fingers together. “To tell the truth, I rather envy you your positive outlook on life. Especially after…” Her voice drifted off.

“Peg’s death,” he finished for her.

“It must have been difficult.”

“It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park.”

“I imagine not.” She paused again, as if choosing her words carefully. For a time the only sound was the intermittent
swish swish
of the windshield wipers. “If you don’t want to talk about it—”