“Are you ever afraid you’ll, well, dry up?”

“Always.”

Interested, she stopped a moment. “Really?” She’d considered him a man without any fear at all. “I’d have thought that the more success you achieved, the more confident you’d become.”

“Success is a deity that’s never satisfied.” She frowned, a bit uncomfortable with his description. “Every time I face that first blank page, I wonder how I’ll ever get through a beginning, middle and end.”

“How do you?”

He began to walk again, so that she had to keep up or be left behind. “I tell the story. It’s as simple and as miserably complex as that.”

So was he, she reflected, that simple, that complex. Lee thought over his words as she felt the temperature gradually change with the decrease in elevation.

It seemed tidier in this section of the canyon. Once she thought she heard the purr of a car’s engine, a sound she hadn’t heard in days. The trees grew thicker, the shade more generous. How strange, she reflected, to have those sheer, unforgiving walls at her back and a cozy little forest in front of her. More unreality? Then, glancing down, she saw a patch of small white flowers. Lee picked three, leaving the rest for someone else. She hadn’t come for them, she remembered as she tucked them in her hair, but she was glad, so very glad, to have found them.

“How’s this?” He turned to see her secure the last flower in her hair. The need for her, the complete her, rose inside him so swiftly it took his breath away. Lenore. He had no trouble understanding why the man in Poe’s verse had mourned the loss of her to the point of madness. “You grow lovelier. Impossible.” Hunter touched a fingertip to her cheek. Would he, too, grow mad from mourning the loss of her?

Her face, lifted to the sun, needed nothing more than the luminescence of her skin to make it exquisite. But how long, he wondered, how long would she be content to shun the polish? How long would it be before she craved the life she’d begun to carve out for herself?

Lee didn’t smile, because his eyes prevented her. He was looking into her again, for something … Something. She wasn’t certain, even if she’d known what it was, that she could give him the answer he wanted. Instead, she did what he’d once done. Placing her hands on his shoulders, she touched her mouth to his. With her eyes squeezed shut, she dropped her head onto his chest.