Here was fire and fantasy.

The woman in his arms trembled as she impaled herself fully on his rigid flesh, sheathing him in silken wet heat. At the exquisite sensation, his hands shifted restlessly upward, his fingers tightening in her glorious hair, burying in the curling golden strands. Yet when he tried to draw her closer—to kiss her lips, to see her face—she held back.

“Slowly, my love…” she whispered, her voice as liquid as the moonlight. “We have forever…”

Forever. The husky word breathed a promise into his soul.

Sinuously she took over riding him, heightening the coiling tension burgeoning in his body, fanning the flames with every soft surge of her hips. His teeth clenching, he strained to keep his explosive need in check, to withstand her tender, sensual assault. He wanted to plunge wildly inside her, wanted to take her with savage lust, to pound into her….

Blindly, helplessly, he raised his hips and thrust deep.

Her back arched and she moaned sharply, shuddering. Her writhing movement excited him beyond bearing. His body shook, and he felt desire, fierce and desperate, spiral through his groin in a sweet agony of pleasure—

With a violent start, Sloan came awake, a rough cry of passion echoing in his mind.

Heart pounding, loins throbbing, he scanned the darkened room. His bedchamber. His ranch house. His bed. Alone.

Moonlight filtered through the chintz curtains, reflecting brightly off the snow-blanketed landscape outside.

“A dream,” he whispered hoarsely. She was only a dream.

The wrong dream.

It had been too vivid, too seductive. A fine sheen of sweat covered his skin in the wintry night air; his manhood still strained in hot, unrelieved arousal.

Freeing an arm from the tangled covers, Sloan ran his hand raggedly down his face, trying to shake off his dark, fevered imaginings, to forget the way her naked skin had burned against his. Yet he could still feel her lithe, lush body, still feel the treacherous heat of desire.

Dammit to blazes, it was wrong. She was wrong. His dream lover had been blonde, not raven-haired like his Cheyenne wife. Pale, not dark-skinned. Voluptuous, not spare and sinewy.

Not like his dead wife.

A dark fist of pain gripped his heart. More than a year had passed since Sleeping Doe had been murdered, another innocent victim of a bloody range war. Haunting memories, dark and bitter, swept over Sloan, clashing with the sensual remnants of his dream. Normally his tormented dreams were of his wife and her final gasping moments in his arms … her blood on his hands as he’d sobbed harshly and railed at the heavens and vowed vengeance for her death.

Trying urgently now to forget, he focused instead on the throbbing of his groin. His eyes shutting, Sloan closed his fingers around his rigid flesh and with rough, quick strokes, brought himself physical relief.