Righting the overturned chair on the patio, Lee sat. She could hear Sarah’s sleepy laughter drift through the open window above her. Hunter’s voice, low and indistinct, followed it. It was an odd way to spend her last hours with Hunter, here in his home, only a few miles from the campsite where they’d become lovers. And yes, she realized as she stared up at the stars, friends. She very much wanted to be his friend.

Now, when she wrote the article, she’d be able to do so with knowledge of both sides of him. It was what she’d come for. Lee closed her eyes because the stars were suddenly too bright. She was going back with much more and, because of it, much less.

“Tired?”

Opening her eyes, she looked up at Hunter. This was how she’d always remember him, cloaked in shadows, coming out of the darkness. “No. Is Sarah asleep?”

He nodded, coming around behind her to put his hands on her shoulders. This was where he wanted her. Here, when night was closing in. “Bonnie, too.”

“You’d work now,” she guessed. “When the house was quiet and the windows dark.”

“Yes, most of the time. I finished my last book on a night like this.” He hadn’t been lonely then, but now … “Let’s walk. The moon’s full.

“Afraid? I’ll give you a talisman.” He slipped his ring off his pinky, sliding it onto her finger.

“I’m not superstitious,” she said loftily, but curled her fingers into her palm to hold the ring in place.

“Of course you are.” He drew her against his side as they walked. “I like the night sounds.”

Lee listened to them—the faintest breeze through the trees, the murmur of water, the singsong of insects. “You’ve lived here a long time.” As the day had passed, it had become less feasible to think of his living anywhere else.

“Yes. I moved here the year Sarah was born.”

“It’s a lovely spot.”

He turned her into his arms. Moonlight spilled over her, silver, jewel-like in her hair, marbling her skin, darkening her eyes. “It suits you,” he murmured. He ran a hand through her hair, then watched it fall back into place. “The princess and the dragon.”

Her heart had already begun to flutter. Like a teenager’s, Lee thought. He made her feel like a girl on her first date. “These days women have to kill their own dragons.”

“These days—” his mouth brushed over hers “—there’s less romance. If these were the Dark Ages, and I came upon you in a moonlit wood, I’d take you because it was my right. I’d woo you because I’d have no choice.” His voice darkened like the shadows in the trees surrounding them. “Let me love you now, Lenore, as if it were the first time.”