“Okay, babe, let’s practice our fireman’s carry,” Johnny said to her, scooting out from under the branches and offering her his hand.

“What? You’re quitting?” she said, really starting to shiver now. “You wimp. I was just getting warmed up.”

She took his hand, and just by leaning down, he was able to swing her up onto his back.

“You were just starting to get really cold, sweetheart,” he said, starting down the trail to the house. “It’s hot tub time.”

“And steak. You promised me a steak.”

An hour later, soaking in a steaming hot tub with the rain turning to snow and drifting down around them under a night full of stars, Esme finally pushed her plate away.

“I’m stuffed.”

“You’re gorgeous. Come here,” he said, taking her hand and pulling her over onto his lap.

She straddled him, and his mouth came down on hers in an instantly drugging kiss.

“I love you, Esme,” he said against her lips, pulling back from the kiss just enough to speak.

“I know.” And she did. She felt his love with every call, every e-mail, every letter and gift that arrived in her mailbox. She felt it with every text message that blinked onto her phone, and she felt it every time they made love, but she wanted more.

He was already so hot and hard, and with the warm water lapping against their skin, he held her close and pushed up inside her.

“Johnny…” She melted against him, his name feeling like a benediction, his body feeling like heaven.

He moved inside her, and she leaned back so she could see his face. He was so beautiful, his hair much longer than it had been last summer, dark and silky. She ran her fingers through it, and his eyes came open, his gaze holding hers. She loved watching the pleasure in his eyes, how every move she made on him was reflected in their depths. Sliding down on him, she leaned forward again and took his mouth with hers, her kiss so hot.

His hands moved to her hips, and he held her to him, guiding her in the rhythm of their joining.

She leaned back again, watching him. He was so hard everywhere, his body like a slab of granite to the touch. She dreamed about him at night. Every time she lay down to sleep, her thoughts drifted to this, to him being inside her, rocking into her, and some nights she thought it would drive her crazy not to have him.

“Ironheart,” she whispered, sliding her hand over the tattoo on his chest. He was the angel Nikki had painted, the dark angel, the warrior angel with the bloody knife in his hand. He never talked about his work, but Dax knew, because he’d done it, and Dax talked to her, telling her things without ever telling her too much.

This warrior code, it ran so deep, and it ran deep in her lover.

She bent over him again, taking him in another kiss as he slid in and out of her. This bond ran deep, too, this lover bond. He was such a part of her.

She had to tell him she wanted more.

He kissed her, and he teased her, and he made sweet, hot love to her, until the fire lit deep inside her, and when she came, her soft cries of pleasure in his ear, his arms locked around her, he pushed into her one last, hard, deep time, and came undone with her.

Sex in hot tubs, right, that could kill a guy, if he wasn’t careful, and yet Johnny had never seen that in any of his training manuals. Of course, other guys weren’t having sex with Easy Alex, and she was just so freaking hot. He’d never had a woman like her, and he never had her enough. Some changes needed to be made. Five months of hit-and-miss hot sex, and missing her way too damn much, just wasn’t cutting it.

He needed her close more, needed to taste her more, smell her more, be with her more. She was such a safe harbor for him, and God, sometimes he needed a safe harbor, especially when he was home.

She’d gone to Cheyenne with him last August and helped him deliver that letter, and it had been so good to have her there, good for Lori Heath. The other girl had been harder to face, Cassie McAllister. When a guy was injured so badly that he turned away from people he loved, it was a hard thing to explain, even to himself. What had happened to John Paul Cooperman, Johnny’s best friend through three tours of combat, could happen to any soldier-the debilitating injury, the deeply scarring wounds-and Johnny hadn’t had any words of solace for the young woman going it alone out on the Wyoming prairie. He’d check on her again, though, and let Cooperman know how she was doing. He’d promised.

He had managed to keep his name out of the paper, with Lieutenant Loretta’s deep understanding and help, and what he’d learned over the last five months was that no matter how long he’d lived at Steele Street and the Commerce City Garage, no matter how much he’d thought he’d known about Special Defense Force, being on the inside was far, far different than being on the outside. The missions took everything he had and then some. Hell, keeping up with Creed was damn near impossible, and the guy had years on Johnny. Years. He hadn’t even worked with Red Dog and Travis yet, and quite frankly, he knew he wasn’t ready. Skeeter and he made a good team, because they’d spent ten years in each other’s faces. They could almost literally communicate telepathically. Hawkins and Dylan still intimidated the hell out of him, trying to meet their standards, but the two of them hadn’t been around much since he’d come on board, so a lot of his training had been supervised by Kid, and a lot of his missions had been with C. Smith Rydell. Johnny literally loved working with the guy. Rydell was like a wall of titanium, sixteen feet long, eight feet high, twelve inches thick. It didn’t matter how you washed up against him, he was so fucking solid, the experience was always the same. Not even Hawkins had that going for him. And because it was always the same, because Rydell was more consistent than an atomic clock, Johnny learned, and everything he learned from Rydell, he learned right, and every time he did something, he did it right, and that’s what made Rydell happy, and if Rydell was happy, a guy’s chances of surviving were damn good.

But this thing with Esme, this had to change. This was fluid, and growing, and becoming so important to him. She was his, and he wanted to make those ties that bound even closer.

“Baby?”

“Hmmm,” she sighed in his ear, her warm, wet body so soft and lovely in his arms.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said, reaching behind him into one of the cargo pockets on his BDUs.

She lifted her head from his shoulder, curious as he rummaged around in the pocket until he found what he wanted.

It always looked so sappy when guys did this on some reality television show, and it always sounded so sappy when some guy was talking about doing it, and it looked sappy when some guy put his big moment up on YouTube.

But when a guy was doing it himself, it felt, and looked, and sounded so profound, so different from what a guy had imagined. For one thing, he’d never imagined he’d be proposing to a naked woman in a hot tub unless there had been quite a bit of tequila involved.

Go figure. Here he was, stone cold sober, and she was as beautifully naked as a woman could get, which in his book was pretty well summed up by the word “completely.”

He pulled the small jeweler’s box out of the pocket and showed it to her, and his mind went blank. Just like that. Completely blank.

No, he thought, no, this couldn’t be right. He’d had it all worked out. He’d sweated over it, practiced it, memorized it, just the right words. Something about… about love, and life, and forever-sure, something about all that, except better, with a part about how wonderful he thought she was, more wonderful than anything else, and a small part about kids, maybe? What had that part been like?

“Honey? You look confused,” she said, and when he shifted his attention back to her, she was grinning at him.