Her eyes were glazed and confused, her cheeks flushed and her mouth damp from his kisses. “I didn’t—” Her voice was low and husky. “I wasn’t expecting—I can’t believe you did that. Or that I—I didn’t know it was going to be like that.”

“I did.” Reluctantly, he released her. “I knew it would be exactly like that.”

She stepped back, traced her lower lip with the tip of her tongue as if she couldn’t believe what had just happened, and then sent him a glance that almost had him flattening her back against the wall again.

Her gaze was on his mouth. “Lizzy is upstairs. She could have woken.”

“Cocoa would have barked.”

She bit her lip. “I don’t want her waking up to find me naked with a man. When you’re six, it’s unsettling.”

It had obviously happened to her. Subduing the rush of anger, he focused on the practical. “Could you drop Cocoa back with my grandmother in the morning? She lives in Harbor House. It’s the big white one overlooking the bay.”

“Of course.” She blinked, as if she’d been asleep and woken up on a different planet. “And thank you.”

“For proving that a kiss can be more than nice?”

There was a long, pulsing silence. “For listening. For helping me out with Lizzy. As for the other—” her voice cracked slightly “—we won’t mention it again. That’s the end of it.”

He watched her for a long moment and then strolled toward the door.

“It’s not the end, Emily. It’s the beginning.”

* * *

Agnes Cooper lived a fifteen-minute walk from the harbor and the Ocean Club in a pretty white clapboard house with a shingle roof that pitched steeply at the front. Overlooking the rocks at Puffin Point and the bay beyond that, it had been built on a large plot of land and was protected by mature trees and a well-nurtured garden. Emily was immediately charmed, and the feeling stayed with her as she walked with Lizzy up to the wooden door bracketed by lanterns.

It was the sort of house she’d always pictured when she’d escaped into stories about homesteads and large happy families. The sort of house a child would have drawn, with clean lines and pleasing symmetry.

As she waited for Agnes to answer the door, she smoothed her hair and tried not to think about Ryan. Hours had passed, and yet she could still feel the roughness of his jaw against her cheek, taste the heat of his mouth and remember the delicious explosion of pleasure he’d drawn from her with each skillful, intimate stroke of his clever fingers. Most of all she remembered the way he’d focused on her, as if she were the only thing in his world. The roof could have fallen in on the cottage, and neither of them would have noticed.