Harpsong and candlelight, a hot-blooded woman twined around him. He let both the passion and the romance pump into his system. Alluring. Arousing.Pleasure took on a fine, sharp edge.

She felt his fingers dig into her hips, heard his breath quicken like a man who’d done a fast sprint up a long hill. When he shifted, turning toward the bed, triumph flashed through her.

She would have him now. Her way. Fast and furious and done. Then this terrible pressure in her chest, her belly, her head, would find release. Her breath caught in a laughing gasp when he spilled her onto the bed, then covered her, pressed her into the mattress, tight body to tight body.

“I’ll have to give you that one.” There was a gleam in her eye that only sharpened when he pulled her hands over her head and cuffed her wrists. “But now it’s my turn. As I recall, the first time I kissed you, your eyes went blurry and blind.” He closed his teeth gently over her jaw. “And you trembled.”

Deliberately she arched her hips, pressed against him. “I’ll bet you can’t do it again.”

A man that aroused, that ready, wouldn’t dawdle. She was sure of it. Still, she braced herself. And still she trembled when his lips skimmed tenderly, tormentingly over hers. Her arms went limp, her mind blank as glass. The pressure that had built to crisis point slid into a glorious aching.

The first hint of the rising moon slipped into the room to shimmer silver against the gold of candle flames.

He cupped her breasts, his fingers tracing the shape of her against her work shirt, before moving to the buttons. She wore a man’s white T-shirt beneath. After he tugged the denim aside, Shawn found himself fascinated at just how sexy her small breasts looked, felt, under that simple white cotton.

“I’ve always liked your hands.” She had her eyes closed now, the better to absorb the little shocks of sensation.“I like them even better now.” But when he lowered again, when his mouth closed over her through the cotton, her eyes flew open. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

He might have chuckled, if he could have found the breath for it. But his lungs were clogged, and his head already starting to reel. Where had this been all his life? This taste, this texture, this shape? How much more had he missed?

She was tugging off his sweater as he dragged her up. Breath ragged, they stared at each other. Whatever shock there was on both sides, she nodded as he did. “Too late,” was all he said and pulled the shirt over her head.

“Thanks be to God.”

They dived at each other.

His hands might have been faster now, and just a bit rough here and there. His mouth might have been hotter, more impatient than it had. But it didn’t stop him from being thorough. He wanted every bit of her, and would remember always, the taste of her flesh, that tender spot just under her breast, the way that angle went to curve from her rib cage to her hip, and the silken feel of it all under his palm and fingertips.