He’d made love to her on the kitchen floor like a frantic teenager in the first spin of desire. By the time a man of experience had reached his thirties, he should be able to show a bit more control, use a bit more finesse. Yet he’d had neither both times he’d made love with her. Cliff wasn’t certain that would change if he’d loved her a hundred times. She had some power over him that went deep and triggered frenzy rather than style. And yet … Because she was asleep and unaware, he brushed the hair from her cheek so that he could see more of her face. Looking at her was becoming a habit he wasn’t sure could be easily broken. Yet when they lay quiet like this, he was overwhelmed by a sense of protective tenderness. As far as he could remember, no other woman had elicited either response from him before. The knowledge wasn’t comfortable.

Perhaps it was because when she slept as she did now, she looked frail, defenseless, small. He’d never been able to resist fragility. When she was in his arms, she was all fire and flare, with a power so potent she seemed indestructible. Challenges were something else he’d never been able to resist.

Just who was Maggie Fitzgerald? Cliff wondered while he traced the shape of her mouth with a fingertip. He wouldn’t have said she was beautiful, yet her face had the power to both stun and haunt a man. He hadn’t expected her to be kind or compassionate, yet he’d seen the qualities in her. He hadn’t expected her to be self-sufficient, yet she was proving to be just that under an uneasy set of circumstances.

He frowned and unconsciously drew her closer. Maggie murmured but slept on. Though he’d told her that she had no connection with what had happened there ten years before, Cliff didn’t like knowing she was alone in the big, remote house. Knowing Morganville was a quiet, settled town didn’t change that. Even the quiet, the settled, had undercurrents. That had been made plain in the past two weeks.

Whoever had killed William Morgan had gone unpunished for a decade. Whoever had murdered him had probably walked the streets of town, chatted outside the bank, cheered at Little League games. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Nor was it pleasant to conclude that whoever had killed once might do anything necessary to go on living a quiet, settled life in a town where everyone knew your name and your history. It might be a cliché about the murderer returning to the scene of the crime, but—