“But what?” he asked, taking his arm away from my shoulder and leaning against the wall. “Do you want to be with that man?”

“Duncan?” I shuddered. “No, I don’t. But it’s complicated. There’s history between us that I can’t completely ignore.”

“Oh, I see. Complicated. Too complicated for the likes of me, I guess. It seems pretty simple to me. That man hurt you.” He reached out and touched my face. His blunt calloused fingertips felt like balm on my bruised skin, like a warm breeze. While Duncan’s touch had chilled me, Bill’s warmed me. Where Duncan had felt wrong, Bill just felt right. He started to take his hand away, but I grabbed it and held it to my face.

“You’re right,” I said. “It is simple. I want you, not Duncan Laird. Would you …? Could you …?”

Bill didn’t wait for me to figure out the words to ask him for what I wanted. He already knew. He pulled me into his arms and pressed me hard against his chest and bent my head back. He kissed the bruises on my face gently, and then sank his mouth down to mine not so gently. He pressed me up against the door until I felt the hard length of him pushing between my legs. I moaned and went weak in the knees. He scooped me up and started for the stairs, but I wrapped my legs around his waist and bit his ear.

“No. Here.”

He lowered me onto the polished oak floor of the foyer and crouched over me. Keeping my eyes on his face, I slid out of my skirt, half afraid that if I didn’t keep my eyes on him he’d vanish. The rain lashing against the windows cast speckled shadows across the foyer, painting Bill’s body with a dappled tattoo. When I reached for him my own arms dipped into the rain shadows as though into a waterfall. For a moment we were both caught in the same current and I thought, Good, if he vanishes so will I and then he pressed the length of his body against mine and the strength of him anchored me. His skin against mine awoke a heat deep within – another coil of the wards that had bound me unwound as I pulled him inside me. As we moved together, our eyes locked onto each other, I felt it coil around us, wrapping us in an endless spiral of desire.

“I could do this forever,” I whispered in his ear.

“We have done this forever,” he answered.

At some point, we made it up to the bedroom. We made love again and then slept. I awoke in the middle of the night to a room filled with moonlight. My head pillowed on Bill’s chest, I saw the profile of his face etched against the silver light.

“It’s stopped raining,” I said.