And if her smile picked up my spirits, it was nothing compared to what Grace’s did when I pulled up to my three-decker and saw her sitting on the front porch. She was wearing a forest green canvas field jacket that was four or five sizes too big for her over a white T-shirt and blue hospital scrub pants. Usually the bangs of her short auburn hair fanned the edges of her face, but she’d obviously been running her hands through it during the last thirty hours of her shift, and her face was drawn from too little sleep and too many cups of coffee under the harsh light of the emergency room.

And she was still one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.

As I climbed the steps, she stood and watched me with a half-smile playing on her lips and mischief in her pale eyes. When I was three steps from the top, she spread her arms wide and tilted forward like a diver on a high board.

“Catch me.” She closed her eyes and fell forward.

The crush of her body against mine was so sweet it bordered on pain. She kissed me and I braced my legs as her thighs slid over my hips and her ankles crossed against the backs of my legs. I could smell her skin and feel the heat of her flesh and the tidal pull of each one of our organs and muscles and arteries hanging as if suspended beneath our separate skins. Grace’s mouth came away from mine and her lips grazed my ear.

“I missed you,” she whispered.

“I noticed.” I kissed her throat. “How’d you escape?”

She groaned. “It finally slowed down.”

“You been waiting long?”

She shook her head and her teeth nipped my collarbone before her legs unwrapped themselves from my waist and she stood in front of me, our foreheads touching.

“Where’s Mae?” I said.

“Home with Annabeth. Sound asleep.”

Annabeth was Grace’s younger sister and live-in nanny.

“You see her?”

“Just long enough to read her a bedtime story and kiss her good night. Then she was out like a rock.”

“What about you?” I said, running my hand up and down her spine. “You need sleep?”

She groaned again and nodded and her forehead hit mine.

“Ouch.”

She laughed softly. “Sorry.”

“You’re exhausted.”

She looked into my eyes. “Absolutely. More than sleep, though, I need you.” She kissed me. “Deep, deep inside me. You think you can oblige me, Detective?”

“I’m a hell of an obliger, Doctor.”

“I’ve heard that. You going to take me upstairs or are we going to put on a show for the neighbors?”

“Well…”

Her palm found my abdomen. “Tell me where it hurts.”

“A little lower,” I said.

As soon as I closed the apartment door behind me, Grace pinned me against the wall and buried her tongue in my mouth. Her left hand grasped the back of my head tightly, but her right ran over my body like a small, hungry animal. I’m usually on the perpetually hormonal side, but if I hadn’t quit smoking several years ago, Grace would’ve put me in intensive care.