“I think you’re beautiful,” he said. It was what any healthy man on the verge of a seduction would say, Shay supposed, but coming from Mitch Prescott it sounded sincere. A tremulous, electric need was surging through her, starting where his hands touched her face so gently, settling into sweet chaos in her breasts and deep within her middle. She couldn’t think.

“Hold me,” she said.

Mitch held her and she knew that the line had been irrevocably crossed. He kissed her, just a tentative, nibbling kiss, and the turmoil within her grew fierce. This facet of Shay’s womanhood, denied for six years and largely unfulfilled before that, was now beyond the realm of good judgment: it was a thing of instinct.

But Mitch drew back, his hands on Shay’s shoulders now, his expression somber in the shadowy half light of that enormous, empty room. “Remember what I said earlier, Shay? About both of us being ready?”

Shay couldn’t speak; her throat was twisted into a raw knot. She managed to nod.

The low timbre of Mitch’s voice resounded with misgivings. “I don’t want this to be something you regret later, Shay, something that drives a wedge between us. Being close to you is too important to me.”

Shay swallowed hard and was able to get out a soft, broken “I need you.”

“I know,” came the unhurried answer, “and I feel the same way. But for you this house is full of ghosts, Shay. What you need from me may be something entirely different than what I need from you.” As if to test his theory, he held her, his hands strong on her back, comforting her but making no demands.

She rested her forehead against his shoulder, breathing deeply, trying to get control of herself. “You’re wrong,” she said after a long, careful silence. “I’m not Rosamond Dallas’s little girl, haunting this house. I’m—I’m a woman, Mitch.”

He chuckled, his breath moving warm in her hair, his hands still kneading the tautness of her back. “You are definitely a woman,” he agreed. “No problems there.”

Shay moved her hands, sliding them boldly beneath his sweater so that she could caress his chest, and her touch brought an involuntary groan from him, along with a muttered swearword.

Shay laughed and fell to the down-filled softness of the sleeping bag, and Mitch descended with her, one of his hands coming to rest on her thigh with a reluctant buoyancy that made it bounce away and then return again, albeit unwillingly.

“We’re both going to regret this,” he grumbled, but his hand was beneath her sweater now, caressing the inward curve of her waist.

That remark made sense to Shay, but she was beyond caring. There was only the needing now. “It was inevitable.…”

Mitch was kissing the pulsing length of her neck, the outline of her jaw. “That it was,” he agreed, and then his mouth reached hers, claiming it gently.

Shay shuddered with delicious sensations as his hand roamed up her rib cage to claim one lace-covered breast. With a practiced motion that would have been disturbing if it hadn’t felt so wonderful; he displaced her bra and took her full into his hand, stroking the nipple with the side of his thumb.