And then she bit her lower lip, in the exact spot where he had lightly nipped her during that first sweet night. As if she was remembering. As if she was wanting it again. Fire rocketed through him, and his body responded so swiftly and fiercely it nearly put him on his knees.

“Can we forget about it, just for a few minutes?” she asked in a whisper that was so husky, so wanting that it blasted all his hesitation to bits.

“A few minutes,” he said, his own voice nearly hoarse, “isn’t going to be nearly enough.”

Mandy was fairly certain she had screamed this time. She was certain she’d clawed at him as her body had clenched so fiercely she simply had to pull him as close as she could get him. She knew, somewhere down deep, that she would never, ever get enough of the feel of him, driving into her, stroking her to that incredible explosion unlike anything she’d ever felt. Only with him had she become fully aware of the glory of this, and it made her shiver inside to think of how close she’d come to never knowing.

She drew in a deep breath before saying, slowly, “Sometimes I wonder if I might have...let go of my anger sooner if I hadn’t chosen to do what I do.”

Adam propped himself up on one elbow to look at her. He had slid to her right side after collapsing atop her—with a shout of her name that seemed ripped from deep within him and made her own pleasure peak again—so it was his left elbow. The one that worked properly. She didn’t look at the other, now resting against his rib cage. She didn’t need to. That road map of scars, many of them the straighter lines of surgery amid the twisting ones of the original injury, was all too emblazoned in her memory.

“I thought...you liked your work.”

“I do,” she said. “And it’s...necessary, sadly. It’s hard enough to wend your way through the system without trying to do it when your world has been shattered. People need somebody who knows the way it works.”

“Obviously, Foxworth agrees.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to do this without their help and funding,” she said. “But still, it’s hard to be in the middle of it all the time, and remembering why...” She let out a long sigh. “Maybe I should have taken that job Ms. Harris offered me.”

Adam’s brow furrowed. “What?”

“She offered me a job on her staff, after it happened.”

“Katrina Harris?” he asked. “On the city council?”

“Is there another one by that name?” she said teasingly.

“But...why?” She raised an eyebrow at him. He shook his head. “I mean I know how smart you are, and that you’d be a great addition anywhere, you’re so good with people, but—”