“The lady is in command tonight, I take it.”

“The lady,” she said and nipped my shoulder, not very lightly, “is so horny she might have to be hosed down.”

“Again,” I said, “the gentleman is happy to oblige.”

She stepped back and stared at me as she pulled off her jacket and tossed it somewhere into my living room. Grace wasn’t a big neat freak. Then she kissed my mouth roughly and spun on her heel and started walking down my hallway.

“Where you going?” My voice was a tad hoarse.

“To your shower.”

She peeled off her T-shirt as she reached the door to the bathroom. A small shaft of streetlight cut through the bedroom into the hall and slanted across the hard muscles in her back. She hung the T-shirt on the doorknob and turned to look at me, her arms crossed over her bare breasts. “You’re not moving,” she said.

“I’m enjoying the view,” I said.

She uncrossed her arms and ran both hands through her hair, arching her back, her ribcage pressing against her skin. She met my eyes again as she kicked off her tennis shoes, then peeled off her socks. She ran her hands over her abdomen and pulled the drawstring on her scrub pants. They fell to her ankles and she stepped out of them.

“Coming out of your stupor yet?” she said.

“Oh, yeah.”

She leaned against the doorjamb, hooked her thumbs in the elastic band of her black panties. She raised an eyebrow as I walked toward her, her smile a wicked thing.

“Oh, would you like to help me remove these, Detective?”

I helped. I helped a lot. I’m swell at helping.

It occurred to me as Grace and I made love in my shower that whenever I think of her, I think of water. We met during the wettest week of a cold and drizzly summer, and her green eyes were so pale they reminded me of winter rain, and the first time we made love, it was in the sea with the night rain bathing our bodies.

After the shower, we lay in bed, still damp, her auburn hair dark against my chest, the sounds of our lovemaking still echoing in my ears.

She had a scar the size of a thumbtack on her collarbone, the price she had paid for playing in her uncle’s barn near exposed nails when she was a kid. I leaned over and kissed it.

“Mmm,” she said. “Do that again.”

I ran my tongue over the scar.

She hooked her leg over mine, ran the edge of her foot against my ankle. “Can a scar be erogenous?”

“I think anything can be erogenous.”

Her warm palm found my abdomen, ran over the hard rubber scar tissue in the shape of a jellyfish. “What about this one?”

“Nothing erogenous about that, Grace.”

“You keep evading me about it. It’s obviously a burn of some sort.”

“What’re you—a doctor?”

She chuckled. “Allegedly.” She ran her palm up between my thighs. “Tell me where it hurts, Detective.”