“What a guy.” When his mouth closed over hers, it hurt, somewhere deep, reminding her just how much she’d wanted to be with him again. “You smell good.”

“Must be these.” He pulled a paper cone filled with roses from behind his back.

Her heart wanted to sigh, but she resisted. “Another bribe?” She couldn’t resist the urge to bury her face in the blooms.

“There was a guy selling them a couple of blocks down. He looked like he could use a couple bucks.”

“Softy.” She handed him her keys so that he could unlock her door and she could continue to sniff the roses.

“Keep it to yourself.”

“It’ll cost you.” After kicking the door closed with her foot, she dumped her briefcase and laid the spray of roses on a table. “Pay up, Muldoon,” she demanded, tossing her arms around him.

There was such joy in it. Heat, yes. And the sweet, sharp ache of need. But the joy was so unexpected, so fast and full, that she laughed against his mouth as he twirled her around.

“I missed you.” He continued to hold her, inches off the floor.

“Oh, yeah?” With her hands linked comfortably around his neck, she smiled. “Maybe I missed you, too. Some. How long are you going to hold me up here?”

“This way I can look right at you. You’re beautiful, Rachel.”

It wasn’t the words so much as the way he said them that brought a lump to her throat. “You don’t have to soften me up.”

“I don’t know how to tell you how beautiful—except that sometimes when I look at you, I remember how the sea looks, right at sunrise, when all that color spills out of the sky, kind of seeps over the horizon and falls into the water. Just for a few minutes, everything’s so vivid, so…I don’t know, special. When I look at you, it’s like that.”

Her eyes had darkened with an emotion she couldn’t begin to analyze. All she could do was rest her cheek against his. “Zack.” His name was a sigh, and she knew she would cry any minute if she didn’t lighten the mood. “Roses and poetry, all in one day. I don’t know what to say to you.”

Enchanted, he buried his face in her hair. “That’s a first.”

“We’re not going to get—”

“Sloppy,” he finished for her, laughing. “Us? Are you kidding?” But when he sat on the couch, he kept her cuddled in his lap. “Let me see that bruise.”

“It’s nothing,” she said, even as he tilted her head for a closer inspection. “The worst of it was that the word got out and I had to deal with all this sympathy and advice. If those cops had kept their mouths shut, I could have said I’d walked into a door.”