“You’re thinking too much again,” Tyler said. “So this is your bedroom. I’ve wondered which one was yours. I should have guessed it was the turret room.” He walked around, and she had to force herself to stay where she was, not to run to him and take the photo he’d lifted from the bureau, not to tell him to leave the books stacked by the window seat alone, that she had a particular order to them. She’d been about to share her body with this man, and she couldn’t even share her room? Maybe with some preparation, time to shove her shoes under the bed, to take the stained coffee cup off the nightstand.

“Isn’t Rachel waiting for you?” she asked anxiously when he peered into her open closet.

He turned to face her. She was across the room, in the corner where she’d last kicked her slippers. “Rachel is just a friend.”

“You have history.”

“We used to be a couple, when I first moved to Florida to teach. It lasted about a year. We didn’t work out as lovers, but we remained friends.”

“How is that possible? After all you’ve been through?”

“I don’t know. It just is.” He walked toward her. She could have sworn chairs and rugs moved out of his way to make his path easier. “Did you want to talk? Did you want to ask me to dinner or a movie?”

She was literally backed into a corner. He came up close to her, doing that not-quite-touching thing he was so good at, like she was able to feel him without actually feeling him, like she was imagining him somehow. “If I have to say it, I will die,” she whispered. “Right here. I’ll fall to the floor, dead from embarrassment.”

“The garden?”

She nodded.

His hands went to her shoulders, and his fingers snaked in under the collar. “Not so easy to forget, is it?”

“No.”

The robe slid off her shoulders and would have fallen off completely had she not still had a hold of the lapels. “Your skin is hot,” he whispered. “You could have blown me over with a whistle when I felt how hot you were at my house.”

He kissed her and pulled her away from the corner. He then backed her toward her bed, devouring her. Take one man, one foolish woman, put them in a bowl and stir. Her head was spinning, her thoughts dizzy. She felt like she was falling, then she actually was. The back of her knees hit the bed and she fell back. Her robe opened and Tyler was there, breaking the kiss only long enough to take off his shirt so that their bare chests touched.

He knew. He remembered how she needed that kind of body-to-body touch, how she needed someone to absorb what she had too much of.