After what seemed a dazzling eternity to Shay, he took off his clothes and they knelt, facing each other, before the fire. Now, while Mitch’s hands brazenly cupped Shay’s breasts, she used her own to explore him, learning each muscle in his powerful thighs with her fingers, each hollow and plane in his broad back and on his chest. At last she tangled her fingers in his hair and moved astraddle of him, catching his groan of surrender in her mouth as she kissed him and at the same time sheathing him in her warmth.

They moved slowly at first, their mouths still locked in that same kiss, their tongues mimicking the parries and thrusts of their hips.

But finally the need became too great and Shay leaned back in triumphant submission, bracing herself with her hands, her breasts swollen and heaving under the attentions of Mitch’s fingers. She groaned with each slow thrust of his hips, pleaded senselessly at each lingering withdrawal.

He stopped plying her nipples with his fingers to suckle and tongue them instead and Shay was driven to madness. She threw her legs around Mitch and he shouted in a madness of his own, plunging deep.

Shay would not allow him to escape the velvety vengeance that cosseted him, rippled over him, sapped his strength. Her triumph was an elemental thing, and she shouted with the joy of it even as Mitch growled in a release of his own.

Once they’d recovered enough to rise from that rug in front of the fire, where they’d fallen in a tangle of perspiration and breathless laughter, they ate sandwiches and drank wine and then made the sofa out into a bed and made love again.

In the darkest depths of the night Shay awakened and lay listening, in perfect contentment, to the calls of the owls and the cry of some lonely, faraway beast. She felt her spirit, crumpled by the rigors of day-to-day life, unfolding like a soft cloth. She snuggled closer to Mitch and wished that they could stay there in that cabin far longer than just a weekend.

The morning was cold and the sky was a brassy blue, laced with gray clouds. Mitch and Shay consumed a hastily cooked breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast and then went outside.

They found a silver ribbon of a creek, hidden away among the trees and watched a deer dashing up a hillside, white tail bobbing. It was all so beautiful that Shay ached with the effort of trying to draw it all inside herself, to keep.

Early in the afternoon snow began to fall, drifting down in big, lazy flakes that seesawed their way to the ground. Mitch built up the fire and then came to stand behind Shay at the window, kneading her shoulders with his strong hands, his chin propped on the top of her head.

“What are you thinking, princess?”

Shay knew there would be tears in her voice and made no effort to hide them. “That two days isn’t going to be enough.”