“For telling you the truth—yes, I know.” She smiled then, with beautiful, slashing irony. “Zap! A left to the gut, a right to the jaw. Down goes the bad girl.”

Hook tried to explain but she hushed him up. “No more talk, all right? This is my secret place. My place of ritual. And now it’s my time for my sacred bath. You may sit there and watch. Or you may join me if you want. Love is not a requirement.”

Hook did not join her at first. He sat and watched as she pulled off her boots and slipped out of her clothes. And somehow he found her even more desirable now than she had seemed last night, more beautiful here in the wild and the sunshine, in the spangled shade of the sycamores rising beyond the rocks. Her long black hair shone like a net of prisms in the golden light as she moved into the pool, her body hunched against the coldness of the water. And then she went all the way in, sliding down with her teeth bared in a smiling gasp as the mountain water seized her flesh. For a few moments Hook felt almost weak with desire for her, and then the weakness was gone and there was only the desire, his blood rising high in him. And he remembered a summer night the year before Kate had died, a night they had gone to a movie in St. Louis and later had had drinks and dinner on the River Queen paddle-wheeler restaurant and then had driven home in a fine high madness of wine and lust and happiness, with her kissing and fondling and teasing him nearly out of his mind all the way home and both of them half undressed by the time they reached the farm drive, the hill, where he had killed the lights and parked and they had tumbled outside naked and made love in the grass and afterwards had walked by the road and through the woods hand in hand in the night light, a sated and guiltless Adam and Eve. Hook felt there was nothing finer than that, nothing better than love and sex in the woods, in the out-of-doors. Only two of those conditions would apply now, he told himself, but even that was a combination he knew he was not strong enough to pass up. And as he began to undress, as he met her level gaze with its subtle burden of pride and pain and tenderness, he was not so confident that love also did not apply.

Naked, he slipped into the pool, which was not just a depression in the boulder but part of the juncture where it touched the canyon soil, so that while most of the pool was rock, one side was earth, was soft, with grass and weeds growing along the edge. Hook barely noticed the cold of the water. For him there was just her eyes, their gravity and sadness before she closed them, as he took her in his arms and her mouth opened on his and she wrapped her legs around his trunk and lowered herself onto him. As they kissed, as he filled her, she uttered his name softly over and over. And he lifted her up out of the water onto the grassy area and there thought he would die of love for her, was not sure the crash and roar he heard was the creek plunging past or simply his own breathing, his blood beating in his ears.