This time we both laugh, knowing beneath the laughter that we were damned lucky to get out of New Orleans without getting hurt—or worse.

“You think she’ll talk to the FBI?” Serenity asks, all seriousness again.

“Maybe. The problem—from my point of view—is that while Dolores can almost certainly put Snake Knox on death row, she can’t do anything to help my father get acquitted for murdering Viola.”

“I was thinking about that during the flight back.” Serenity stands and walks toward me. “Penn, all you can do is what you can do. You know? I had to learn that in the army. It’s a tough lesson. And hey, putting Snake Knox on death row is more than the FBI ever managed to do.”

“I know. But . . .”

She gives me a chiding look. “I want you to kiss me,” she says quietly.

The heat in her eyes stuns me more than her words. “You do?”

“Don’t you know that?”

“But I thought you and Carl—”

A faint smile spreads her lips. “Are you that blind, boy?”

Holy shit. “I guess I am.”

She closes the distance between us, then rises up on tiptoe and presses her mouth against mine. Gently at first, then harder. Her hands slip around my waist, her fingers digging into my back, and then her mouth opens.

I hear an almost feline sound deep in her throat.

My fingers slide into the damp hair at the base of her neck, and my right hand flattens against the small of her back, pulling her against me. As we kiss, I feel a flexed thigh and calf mold themselves around my left leg. In seconds she’s panting against my mouth.

We break apart suddenly, as though prompted by the same impulse, still holding each other at the waist but looking feverishly into each other’s eyes.

“What’s the matter?” she asks.

“Nothing. I just—”

“I know.”

“I guess it’s everything we’ve been through?”

“Doesn’t matter what it is.”

She laughs, a sharp sound of release. But then her eyes darken. “Oh, wow,” she breathes. “Oh shit. Do you believe this? Do you see who we are?”

It takes me about three seconds. “My father?”

She nods twice, then shakes her head. “And my mother. Or Viola. Same difference. Christ, you see how easily it must have happened for them? With the strain they were under back then?”

For the first time I have some inkling of how powerfully my father must have been pulled into Viola Turner’s arms. As Serenity and I process this realization, our hands fall away from each other. Self-consciousness is anathema to spontaneous sex.

She raises her right hand and runs it through her hair where I was holding her. “I really want you,” she says. “I mean, I want to sit on you right now.”