He did so and smiled. “Jo. Damn. It’s worth opening my eyes just to look at you.”

But she wasn’t buying it. “We’re not teenagers anymore, and you’ve never been one to go backward.”

“I would if I could. Just not to hurt you.” He kissed her nose, her forehead, her cheeks, wanting nothing more than to love her. “Ms. Secret Agent,” he whispered, trailing more feathery kisses along her jaw as her hands slid down to his upper arms and dug into his flesh. “You’re something else.”

“Elijah.”

There was a little catch in her voice that he liked. A tightening of her grip on his arms. He kissed her throat, even as he eased his hands up under her nightshirt along the bare, smooth skin of her thighs. She squirmed beneath him in just the right way.

And he said her name again and again as he had in countless dreams.

How had he let her go?

He felt the quickening of his pulse and hers as he curved his palms up along her hips and stomach to her breasts and caught a nipple between his fingertips. He’d been her first love, remembered her cry of pain and ecstasy as he’d plunged into her, trying to be careful, trying to hold back for fear of really hurting her. But she’d urged him on, tears flowing as she’d promised to love him forever.

A long time ago.

His hands skimmed back down along her sides and over her hips, feeling the last of the airsoft welts. She was strong and fit, and she’d been loved by other men-she’d gone on with her life as he had with his.

He’d left her no other choice.

He felt the tremble in her fingers as she eased them down his arms and over the tops of his hands and held on, raising herself up just a little from the bed. “Elijah. I can’t…wait.” Her turquoise eyes held his with an intensity, a fire he’d long thought he’d never see again. “I’ve been hiking up and down these damn hills for two days. I can’t-Can you please take your clothes off? And get this nightshirt off me while you’re at it?”

He laughed. “With pleasure.”

“Good, because I…” She gave a sexy little shudder. “I need to conserve my energy.”

“I’ll get your nightshirt off first,” he said with a wicked smile.

“I thought you might.”

It was only a matter of whisking the nightshirt over her head and casting it onto the floor. But he couldn’t jump right into disrobing himself. He gazed at her, his throat tight with want and emotion and a need that reached right to his soul.

“Jo,” he whispered, kissing her, soaking in the taste and the feel of her. “You’re beautiful.”

She slid her arms around his neck and drew him onto her, deepening their kiss, writhing erotically under him. But she wouldn’t be distracted. “You’re still clothed,” she said, her voice ragged, her body hot and soft.

“So I am.”

He dealt with that problem in seconds, flinging his clothes onto the floor, floor lamps-wherever-he didn’t care. When he rejoined her, she was breathless, eyes wide open as she took in the sight of him.

“Your scar,” she said. “Are you okay now? A femoral artery injury is dangerous.”

“It didn’t affect anything vital.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Just your blood supply.”

“There was that. But I lived,” he said, pushing back a sudden image of that night. He paused, staring at her, and repeated himself. “I lived.”

He settled himself on top of her, figuring the feel of what mattered would distract her from his scars, and she responded with a small cry of surprise, delight-memory.

“I’m glad you lived,” she said. “Elijah, I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d lost you. You’ve always been out there, indestructible…”

“No one’s indestructible.”

“I love you.” She parted her legs, settled down into the soft bed. “I always have.”

“I know.”

“The rest-”

“Shh.”

“Love me now, Elijah. No more waiting.” She lifted herself up and clutched his shoulders. “You won’t hurt me.”

“Good,” he said, “because…damn, Jo…”

He entered her, slowly at first, trying to savor the feel of being inside her again, but she fell back and wrapped her thighs around him, and pulled him in hard and fast and deep. He responded, driving himself into the depths of her. She cried out and threw her hands behind her head, giving herself up to her own heat and need. He could see the desire in her eyes, and it fueled him. He didn’t relent and let the sweet ache he’d known only with her take him to the edge.

All this time-all these years. There’d only been one Jo.

She clasped his hips and held him inside her, caught her breath as their bodies fused even more tightly together, until finally she wriggled her hips and that was it. He peeled her hands off him and pinned them to her sides as he thrust into her over and over, faster and faster, until he felt her release-and then his own.

When he collapsed next to her, she drew the covers up over them. “The heat here’s better than in my cabin, but it’s not great.” Her voice was ragged, her body still slick and hot from their lovemaking. “I don’t want you to get chilled after you cool off.”

He propped his head up on one arm. “Who says I’ll have a chance to cool off?”

She smiled. “There’s that,” she said, easing in close to him, lifting his arm over her shoulders. “I hear an owl.”

He kissed her hair. “Maybe it’s a son or daughter of the one we heard fifteen years ago.”

“Or a grandchild,” she said, and was quiet for a while before turning to him and touching his right thigh where he’d been shot. “Your father feared for your life, and maybe he had a premonition of the danger you were in. But that’s not why he died.”

“Jo…”

“If he built his own cabin on that old cellar hole, he had shelter. Good shelter. Better than trash bags. He could have survived the storm.” She eased her fingertips gently along Elijah’s scars, as if trying to imagine the pain, the blood, how close he’d come to death. “He didn’t go up the mountain with a storm on the way to die. He knew what he was doing.”

Elijah didn’t speak.

“Someone killed him, Elijah.”

He slid his arms around her and drew her to him. “I know.”

Twenty-Four

Melanie felt exhilarated and nervous at the same time, relished the tension between the two emotions as she pulled the shades in Kyle’s bedroom in the Whittakers’ guesthouse. She was tingly with wanting him. She’d told Thomas she needed air after their flight and the long drive from the airport. He’d worried about the dark, but she’d assured him there was plenty of light from the house-and there was.

But Kyle wasn’t in a good mood.

“It’s a beautiful place, isn’t it?” She sat on the edge of his bed. “Although I’m not sure I’d want a second home in Vermont. It’s too cold here most of the time. Thomas loves it, though.”

“The way things are going, you’ll be lucky your new home’s not a prison cell.”

“Don’t be so pessimistic.” She chided him with a smile-no point in annoying him-but he always saw the downside to the situation, and she always saw the upside.

“The police are looking for the messenger you were worried about,” he said.

“You’re the one who said not to worry.”

“Who do you think called in the tip?”

Her stomach twisted. Thomas. “I have no idea, and I don’t care.”

“The people we work for don’t like screwups. I dealt with one before you came on board. It wasn’t pretty.”

“We’re not screwups.”

“I’m not.”

But he was her partner. He’d recruited her. If their employers were unhappy with her because of Nora Asher and her snooping into Melanie’s background, Kyle would be held responsible, too. He looked concerned, which wasn’t like him, but he got nervous when he had to think on his feet. He wasn’t good at it. She was, and when she wanted something, she put her mind to it and got it.

More than once on her trip up from Washington she’d realized she might end up having to kill him. Let him take the fall for Nora, both with the police and with their employers. Melanie wanted Kyle’s plan to work and Nora to die up on the mountain because of the cold, Devin Shay’s obsession with her, her own out-of-control emotions. Drew Cameron’s death seven months ago would actually work to their advantage and provide more substance, even poignancy, to the deaths of the two teenagers.