“It’s like megawatts more.”

“Yeah. Like that.” Marissa put down her fork to hide her shaking hands. “From the beginning I have wondered if I loved you or if I loved the way you made me feel.”

“Does the difference matter?”

A helpless smile took over Marissa’s mouth. “Middle of the night I asked myself that same question. Does the difference really matter? I don’t have to run my feelings through seven hundred questions. People can and do fall in love . . . without . . .” Oh dear, Marissa thought. She wasn’t at all sure she should have said that last bit.

“When you look like that I want to kiss you.”

Her reflection, the woman she was becoming, was bright and real in Linda’s eyes. “When I feel like this I want you to kiss me and never stop.” The air in the restaurant was stifling now. “Maybe, just maybe, I love how you make me feel because I’m in love with you. And because I’m in love with you I love the way you make me feel. It’s an infinite loop, a Mobius strip, perpetual reflection. God, I’m blithering again.”

“You are not,” Linda said. One hand, under the table, took hers and squeezed. “You make sense to me, Marissa. You always have.”

“I promise,” Marissa said in a very low voice, “not to call you beautiful, though I think you are.” The heat of Linda’s hand quickly increased the already raging firestorm in other parts of Marissa’s body.

“I would like,” Linda said in a conversational tone, “to pay the check and get out of here.”

“And go where?” Marissa glanced outside and was stunned to see that it was raining. Where were the beach and the unending horizon? She looked back at Linda and goodness, she was getting sappier by the minute, she thought, because they were there, in Linda’s eyes.

“My motel is right across the street.” Linda’s gaze was, for a moment, without any kind of intent, then a grin creased her face. “Okay, I’d like to say that I don’t mean anything by that, but that would be a lie.”

“Why, Ms. Bartok, are you trying to seduce me?”

“God, yes.”

“I want you to. But . . .” Marissa waited until the waitress departed with Linda’s credit card to continue. “Maybe we should take it slow. Maybe we shouldn’t . . .”

“Only when you’re ready. I mean that.” Marissa saw Linda swallow with effort. “But if you think it’s easy not to get down on my knees right now and worship every inch of you, you’re wrong.”

A wave of heat ran up Marissa’s throat and she had to force herself to breathe. They were in Marissa’s car, listening to rain pelt on the roof, before Marissa could find enough breath—and brains— to speak. “Before? When I said we should take it slow?”

A streetlight illuminated Linda’s face but even so, she looked drawn and intense. “Yes?”

Marissa navigated the broad boulevard before answering. “Do you think that maybe we could have a night of wild, abandoned, meaningless sex before we tried that slow thing?”