Steve came to sit close, facing her with his legs bent under him. He was near enough that she could feel the heat radiating from him, smell the faint scent of the soap he’d used earlier and hear the soft rasp of his breathing.

“Ginny,” he said when she tensed, “I only want to be close to you.”

Awkwardly, she sat in stiff silence as he lifted her bare foot in both his hands and pulled it onto his lap. A faint smile crooked his mouth, and she stifled a moan of pure pleasure as he began to massage the aching tendons of her foot.

“A technique I learned from an old Chinaman I knew in San Francisco,” he replied when she dredged up the energy to ask where he had learned such magic.

Blissfully relaxed, Ginny closed her eyes with a sigh as Steve continued to massage her foot in strong, circular strokes. His fingers worked up to her ankle, kneading the calf of her leg with sure efficiency. Then he turned his attention to her other foot.

The fire hissed and popped, and in the distance she heard the low howl of a coyote. The cry trembled on the night air as if suspended, then faded, muffled by the constant drum of falling water.

It had been so long since she’d felt this at peace, with the music of the night around her and Steve’s hands working magic on her tense muscles. All of he fears began to subside, replaced by a growing confidence that he would not hurt her, that he would do as he said and protect her as best he could.

“Um,” she murmured when he asked if she was relaxed, and heard him laugh.

“I’ll assume that means yes.” Deftly, his hands moved up her leg, gently kneading the skin of her calf, then skimmed higher to massage her thigh.

Ginny offered no protest. It was too easy, lying there with Steve, his hands familiar and yet foreign to her now, gentle despite the rough calluses that still marred palms and fingers. Had he gotten those calluses in the mines? It was painful to envision him forced to such brutal labor, agonizing to think that he might have died there.

Oh, she was such a coward, when Steve had survived the ultimate horrors of enslavement and degradation without disintegrating into a weak, sniveling wreck. Never before had she yielded to the kind of fear that had gripped her these last weeks.

The pressure of his thumb against her inner thigh was firm, sliding beneath the loose calzones she wore, rotating with slow stroked that were sweetly tender. She opened her eyes, gazed at his downbent head as he concentrated on what he was doing.

This was a different Steve than she had ever known before. There was only tenderness in his touch, not the arrogant dominance he had always exerted. They had both changed so much….