How did he answer what he didn’t know? How did he answer what he was hesitant to ask himself? Framing her face, he brought his lips to hers. Long, lingering and very, very new. “I see something in you,” Hunter murmured, holding her face still so that he could study it. “I want something from you. I don’t know what either one is yet, and maybe I never will. Is that answer enough?”

She put her hands on his wrists and felt his life pump through them. It was almost possible to believe hers pumped through them, too. “It has to be.”

Chapter 9

Standing high on the bluff, Lee could see down the canyon, over the peaks and pinnacles, beyond the rich red buttes to the sheer-faced walls. There were pictures in them. People, creatures, stories. They pleased her all the more because she hadn’t realized she could find them.

She hadn’t known land could be so demanding, or so compelling. Not knowing that, how could she have known she would feel at home so far away from the world she knew or the life she’d made?

Perhaps it was the mystery, the awesomeness—the centuries of work nature had done to form beauty out of rock, the centuries it had yet to work. Weather had landscaped, carved and created without pampering. It might have been the quiet she’d learned to listen to, the quiet she’d learned to hear more than she’d ever heard sound before. Or it might have been the man she’d discovered in the canyon, who was slowly, inevitably dominating every aspect of her life in much the same way wind, water and sun dominated the shape of everything around her. He wouldn’t pamper, either.

They’d been lovers only a matter of days, yet he seemed to know just where her strengths lay, and her weaknesses. She learned about him, step by gradual step, always amazed that each new discovery came so naturally, as though she’d always known. Perhaps the intensity came from the briefness. Lee could almost accept that theory, but for the timelessness of the hours they spent together.

In two days, she’d leave the canyon, and the man, and go back to being the Lee Radcliffe she’d molded herself into over the years. She’d step back into the rhythm, write her article and go on to the next stage of her career.