“You’re always after me to skinny-dip. Might as well give it a try.”

He picked her up again and carried her out into the water, fully clothed. He watched as the river soaked through her shirt, giving him a tantalizing view of her white lace underwear beneath, and the dark shadow of her nipples.

“I’ve never seen a more beautiful sight than you, Sammy Marshall. And I’ve been looking at you for seventeen years. The greatest gift over the past couple of months has been seeing your beauty in all these different ways. It’s like a miracle. Being so familiar with you and seeing you for the first time. Like a damn miracle.”

He kissed her, out in that water, and the cold didn’t do anything to dampen his arousal. Her hands were slick on his back as they kissed, and she began to shiver, began to shake. Then she slipped from his arms and beneath the surface of the water, swimming away from him, the white fabric she was wearing floating around her, her blond hair a pale cloud. And when she emerged from the water on the other side of the river, she climbed up the rocks and sat on the edge, her knees pulled up to her chest, her blond hair hanging in limp twists around her face. A bedraggled fairy.

He felt like for the first time he might finally be seeing what she was. Without all her enchantment, without all that magic.

And she was still perfect to him.

Even like this. Frightened and sitting on a rock, reduced by that fear.

But he didn’t want her to be afraid.

He swam across the space and climbed up beside her, taking care to avoid the sharp rocks, given that he didn’t have the protection of clothing. She looked up at him, and for a moment he saw all that unmasked fear in her eyes. Confusion.

He felt like he was staring down at her like on that night he found her being beaten by her father. When he had carried her out of that house and looked down at her then.

His heart ached. To think that he had caused her pain that somehow echoed back to that.

He wanted to catch her up and protect her. And when she shivered again, that was exactly what he did. He swept them both up from the rocks, and carried her to a patch of grass that sat in the sun. This part of the ranch was generally unoccupied, as it took crossing the river or driving on the road that encircled the place to get back here. So he had no worries about being caught. There was nothing to do but simply lie in the sun on that soft, sweet patch of grass.

He looked at her body, beautiful and pale, droplets of water sliding over her skin, the sun drying her slowly. He put his hand on her stomach, where their child grew, and then he slid it down to her hip, then between her thighs, stroking her as he lowered his head for a kiss. He kept on doing that until she was sobbing, her breath catching on each small noise.