Dan’s eyes opened. “Jess?” he mumbled.

“Here I am,” she said, wiping her cheeks and slipping back beneath the sheets, letting herself be drawn into his arms.

She kissed him, not wanting him to see her face but he must have felt it, that something had shifted, and he drew back and said again, “Jess?”

He studied her face and she knew her eyes were too damp to pretend she’d been doing anything other than crying. “Are you all right?” he asked. “You don’t regret…”

“No.” She shook her head firmly. Their night together was the one beautiful thing in the whole damn mess of war.

He kissed her gently, so gently she almost couldn’t feel it. He continued to kiss her that way, lightly, softly, his lips a breath on the skin of her cheek, her neck. His fingers light too, tormentingly so, following his lips down her body. She could do nothing other than lie back, eyes closed, breath coming faster and faster as he made a slow and reverent path over every inch of her skin, from her toes to her calves, to her knees, to her thighs, then up to her belly. Then her breasts, taking an agonizingly long time over her nipples, then back along her stomach.

He reached her hips and she shivered, unable to stop herself tilting her pelvis toward him. First his hand moved between her legs and then his mouth and the moment she felt him kiss her, she cried out his name, feeling nothing other than the sensation of being, for once, truly adored.

* * *

“We should go out,” she whispered a while later when they had both recovered and were lying wrapped in one another’s arms.

“Or we could just stay here.” Dan grinned lazily at her.

“I have to admit it’s tempting.” Jess smiled too. “But I feel as if I need to see what life is like out there. To find something that says it really will be okay.”

“Where should we go?” he asked.

She hesitated, knowing where she wanted to go but feeling foolish for such a fanciful wish.

“Tell me. Please?” he said.

“I imagine it’s impossible but I’d like to go back to Lieu de Rêves.”

“Nothing’s impossible. You have a jeep.”

“And a balcony full of fuel.”

He laughed. “I forgot about that. Let’s do it. Let’s just do something crazy and not about the war and that might even be fun.”

“Fun?” Jess mock-gasped. “I’d forgotten such a thing existed.”

“You mean last night wasn’t fun?” He shifted his chest over hers, smiling.

She laughed. “It was terrible. We definitely need more practice.”

He leaned down to kiss her expertly, in no need of practice. “So are we practicing or going to a castle?”

“As tempting as it is to stay here, I think we should go. Besides,” she said, sliding out from underneath him and hopping out of bed, “we can practice when we get back. This way, we get to spend the whole day thinking about how much fun we can have tonight.”