“You’re right. Why did you bring me out here, away from town?”

“It’s quiet. Nice view. Moe likes it. There’s the slim chance I can get you naked on this blanket—”

“Try slim to none.”

“Slim’s enough to keep me going.” He dipped a plastic fork into the fast-food potato salad. “And I wanted to see if Brad’s moving in yet.” He looked across the ribbon of water to the rambling two-story frame house on the opposite bank. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“You miss him.”

“You got that right.”

She plucked a blade of grass, ran it idly through her fingers. “I have some friends from college. We were so close, and I guess we all thought we’d be close forever. Now we’re all scattered and hardly see each other. Once or twice a year if we can all manage it. We talk on the phone or through E-mail now and then, but it’s not the same. I miss them. I miss who we were when we were friends, and that telepathy you develop so that you know what the other’s thinking, or what she’d do in some situation. Is it that way for you?”

“Pretty much.” He reached over, toyed with the ends of her hair in the same absent way she toyed with the blade of grass. “But we go back to being kids together. None of us are big on phone calls. Maybe because Brad and I end up on the phone through most of our workday. E-mail does the job. Jordan, he’s the E-mail king.”

“I met him for about ninety seconds at a book signing, in Pittsburgh, about four years ago. All dark and handsome, with a dangerous gleam in his eye.”

“You want dangerous?”

It made her laugh. He was sitting on a ratty blanket eating bucket chicken while his big, silly dog barked at a squirrel that was ten feet up a tree.

Then she was flat on her back, his body pressed to hers, and the laugh died in her throat.

His mouth was dangerous. Foolish of her to have forgotten that. However affable and easy he appeared on the surface, there were storms inside him. Hot, whippy storms that could crash over the unwary before they could think about taking shelter.

So she didn’t think at all, but let it rage. And let that secret part of herself, that part she’d never risked exposing, slide out. And take, even as it was taken.

“How’s this working for you?” he murmured as he fixed that amazing mouth on her throat.

“So far, so good.”

He lifted his head, looked down at her. And his heart shuddered in his chest. “Something here. Some big something here.”

“I don’t think—”

“Yes, you do.” Impatience, potent and unexpected, snapped out. “You may not want to think—I’m not real keen on it myself, but you do. I really hate using the obvious metaphor, but this is like turning a key in a lock. I can hear the goddamn click.”