She pulled in her lower lip and bit down hard. “Zeke, I wish I knew-”

“I know.” His mouth lowered to hers, his lips brushing hers, soft and so damn sweet, promising nothing but the moment. He smiled into her eyes. “Will you stay?”

She tried to laugh. “Another minute and I’ll be a pile of warm Jell-O.”

The humor returned to his dark eyes. “Not me.”

Zeke had intended to read her the riot act about being reckless and hotheaded and thoroughly Pembroke when they got back to her apartment. He’d intended to tell her to let him do the heavy lifting-which would surely set her off-and go tend her mineral water and mud baths. He would be cool, distant, professional. Then he’d get out of there.

But there was no lecture, no getting her steamed and he didn’t leave.

At least not so far.

“I’d like to take a shower,” she said. “To calm down as much as to get clean. I don’t know when I’ve spent so long on edge.”

“Good idea.”

She looked at him with those big black eyes, and her skin was so pale, her lower lip pulled in a little under her top teeth, and she said, “You want out of here, don’t you? You’re getting-we’re getting-” She stopped, straightening her spine and going high-minded heiress on him. It was as good a defense as any. “Leave whenever you wish. I’ll be fine on my own.”

But in her fierceness he saw not only strength and character, but also vestiges of the little girl who’d had no choice but to be fine on her own. He sensed her pride and toughness and the twenty-five years of battles she’d had with herself not to show the parts of her that weren’t so proud and weren’t so tough. He was from another world, one without trust funds to throw in people’s faces when he got mad or prestigious hundred-year-old parties to skip, but he thought he understood. They’d both loved people who in the end had left them to face the world alone.

“Take your shower,” he said. “I won’t sneak out on you.”

While she was in the bathroom, he contemplated his next move, whether he at least should tell her that her father hadn’t tripped in the woods, something she already seemed to suspect. Should he tell her he’d posted Sam at her father’s hospital room? Those were the kinds of things he could legitimately tell her, if he were in the habit of telling anyone anything. He talked to Sam because they worked together, because they were friends. He didn’t know what he and Dani were.

“I forgot my robe,” she called.

He fetched it from the bedroom and hung it on one finger through a narrow opening in the doorway. It was a thin little scrap of fabric. She’d have had more covering in a good bath towel.

“Does this make me an official white knight?” he asked.

“It does not,” she said, a hint of amusement in her voice as she snatched the robe. “I’m just not used to having someone around when I’m taking a shower.”

He only got a glimpse of her dripping hand. Stifling an image of her parading around her claustrophobic apartment stark naked, Zeke noticed one of hundreds of photographs, postcards and posters on the hall wall, which she used like a giant bulletin board. It was of her and her grandmother in the basket of a hot-air balloon. Dani must have been fourteen or fifteen. Her smile reminded him of her mother. It struck him that Dani was older now than Lilli had been when she disappeared. She wasn’t a kid anymore. Neither was he. They’d both survived loss.

“We’ve been on our own for a long time,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. She’d come up beside him. He could feel the heat and dampness of her skin. The robe, he observed, was as flimsy as he’d expected. “It’s been good for me-I’ve been happy. I don’t want to lose that independence. I don’t want anyone to have to feel responsible for me, to hurt because I hurt.”

“It’s not always possible,” he said carefully, aware Dani Pembroke had just exposed a bit of her soul, which had to be a rarity for her, “to tell people what to feel and what not to feel. Someone can hurt for you not out of a sense of responsibility, but out of love.”

“Kate keeps telling me the only true love is between independent people. She says intimacy isn’t about dependence.”

“A smart woman, your friend Kate.”

The filmy robe matted to the places where her skin was still damp, outlining the soft shape of her breasts. Water dripped from her tangled hair. Zeke told himself to leave. They’d both said too much, revealed too much. But instead he moved closer to her, close enough that he could smell the fresh scent of soap and see the lines at the corners of her dark eyes, sense the desire that stirred inside her. He damn well knew what was stirring in him.

“Don’t leave yet,” she whispered.

In her bedroom they opened the window to the breeze and the flutter of pigeons. The tie on her robe had come loose, dangling to the tops of her bare feet, revealing her small breasts and smooth, flat stomach. Zeke inhaled deeply. He wanted to go to her. He wanted to strip off his clothes and make love to her now, here, anywhere. But he waited. She needed to be certain. There were questions yet to be answered-even asked-about the places where their pasts had intersected. They mattered. But they didn’t, Zeke understood, determine how much he wanted Dani Pembroke, how much this slim, black-eyed woman had come to mean to him.

She stood next to him at the window as he pulled the shade. One side of her robe had fallen off her shoulder and caught in the crook of her elbow. As small and feminine as she was, she was strong for her size, and athletic. And sexy, Zeke thought. He wondered if she knew how sexy.

Hesitating only slightly, she slipped her hands around his lower back. Her touch was light but not tentative, igniting a desire within him so hot it burned his soul. She pressed her breasts against his chest and tilted her head back, dampening her lips with the tip of her tongue, inviting him.

“Don’t hold back,” she said. “Not for my sake, anyway.”

He kissed her then, a long and searching kiss, not an end, he felt, but a beginning. There was much more yet to come between them.

In the midst of it, her robe fell to the floor. He couldn’t have said the precise moment, but became aware that she was naked, that his hands were coursing up her smooth, trim bottom. Their kiss had taken on an urgency and hunger that quickly sensitized and electrified every inch of his body, every fiber of his soul.

He dispensed with his own clothes in a matter of seconds.

While he did, Dani backed up and sat on the edge of the bed, almost primly. Then he saw her black eyes on him-not embarrassed or second-guessing him or herself, but shining with unabashed lust.

“Changed your mind?” he asked, half-serious, half-playful.

She shook her head. There was no hesitation. He went to her, sat beside her, and without touching her anywhere else, ran his palms up her bare arms. He could feel the awareness shooting through her.

Her eyes never leaving him, she smiled and came to him. They fell together onto the cool, soft sheets, with the breeze from the courtyard and a cat yowling. Soon Zeke felt nothing but the passion and the power of the emotions he had for this woman…and heard only the voice inside him-insistent, annoying-warning caution and distance because those were his way.

“Zeke…” Her face was a mask in the shadows as she pulled him deeper into her. “I’ve never felt this way about anyone. It’s a little frightening. I know I shouldn’t fall for you…I can’t…”

“You don’t have to.” He could hear the aching in his own voice. “Just love me a little now.”

Her mouth found his. “I do, now.”

Later she fell asleep with her head against his shoulder. He felt the softness of her still-damp hair on his chin, smelled its freshness. He shut his eyes, letting himself relax in the moment.

Suddenly it was as if Mattie and Nick had met on the Cumberland River all those decades ago not for themselves, but for them, the ex-heiress and security expert, both with too many dead dreams.