Tony helped her into the truck, wishing she would meet his eyes and knowing he might not like what he saw there if she did.

Amber fiddled with her seat belt. He gave up and walked around the truck. Climbed in and started the engine.

"You know where you're going?" she asked.

"Yeah, I think so. Just let me know if I head the wrong way."

He turned left and drove along the playing fields at the edge of the Camelot College campus.

A too-pretty town, it hardly seemed real to him. Not that Mount Pleasant was a cesspool-it had brick streets downtown, festivals in the summer, and quaint, old-fashioned businesses. But it also had a long commercial strip with one of every chain store, and neighborhoods full of ugly duplexes.

Camelot didn't have any of that. It was a college town, full of liberal professors and spoiled rich kids whose parents could afford to spend more than forty thousand dollars a year educating them.

Tony wondered where Amber fit in all that, growing up at the apartment complex. She'd have gone to elementary school in Camelot, but they bused the Camelot kids into Mount Pleasant for middle school and high school. Then she would have driven into town for her college cla.s.ses at the Naz.

She wasn't quite from either place, maybe. Somewhere in between.

Her fingers kept plucking at the knee of her pants, as if it were vitally important for the wet fabric not to touch her leg.

Spooked again. He wondered if she was half as spooked as he was.

They'd gone their separate ways inside the building, Tony checking out the site while Amber moved through all the rooms and made sure everything had come through the storm okay. Then he'd offered her a ride.

He almost wished he hadn't, though he would have been a total d.i.c.k to leave her there by herself.

It was just that she looked too good in his truck.

He drove almost all the way out to the two-lane state highway that connected Camelot to Mount Pleasant, then hung a right and headed uphill toward the apartment complex. Amber shivered.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I'm fine."

She didn't offer any more conversation, and he wasn't sure what to say. He turned on the heat, angling the vents in her direction. The dashboard clock read six forty-five. Ninety minutes since the tornado siren had sent him into the bas.e.m.e.nt with her.

Ninety minutes since he'd first said more than three words to her. So how had he ended up practically nailing her up against a tree, in public, where anybody could have seen them? What the f.u.c.k was wrong with him?

He was hot for her, sure. That kiss had been off the charts. Her body, her tongue, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s ... just thinking about it made his b.a.l.l.s ache and his d.i.c.k get heavy all over again.

But he'd been reckless, and reckless was no good. Bad things happened when you started thinking the rules didn't apply to you. He and Patrick used to think that, and Patrick had ended up in prison for it. Patrick had ended up destroyed by it.

It could just as easily have been Tony.

Somebody had told her he was trouble. He wished whoever it was had told her the rest of the story. He was starting to think he was going to have to.

At the entrance to the complex, he slowed down.

"Second building on the right," she said.

He pulled into a s.p.a.ce out front and cut the engine. She turned toward him, her eyes deep and liquid dark, full of an emotion he couldn't identify. Something in them made him want to wrap his arm over her shoulder, but he knew where that would lead.

She'd never even had an o.r.g.a.s.m with a man, and he wanted to hand her her first one. Of course he did. He was hard-wired to want that. Spread his seed, perpetuate the species. But what did that leave Amber with? Memories of getting off with some hard-hat-wearing roughneck who tumbled her around for a few hours and then never called her again?

Was he really that big of an a.s.shole?

He didn't want to be.

"You want to come up?" she asked.

She would get the wrong idea, and she'd end up hurt. h.e.l.l, he'd probably already hurt her, out there in the parking lot. She would regret it later on. But it would be worse if he took her up to her apartment and took her to bed the way he wanted to, because she would wake up in the morning thinking they had something that didn't exist.

It couldn't exist. This pull he felt when he looked at her, and the out-of-control way he'd felt under the tree, as if he had to touch her or something would slip away from him, something he needed-that was all an illusion. It took a long time to get to know somebody, to figure out all the stuff about them that was going to drive you nuts over the long haul. Weeks and months to find out how compatible you were in the sack and to get your sense of humor lined up.

This thing with Amber-it was some kind of temporary attachment, the result of spending that time in the dark with her. Probably the result of flipping out in front of her, too. Attraction and fear came with potent chemicals. Surely they could make you think you had something that wasn't really there.

"Go ahead and say no, if you're going to say no," she said. "Don't sit there trying to decide how to break it to me."

She had that snap to her voice again. That don't-bulls.h.i.t-me tone that he liked, even when she was busting his b.a.l.l.s. "That's not what I was trying to decide."

"Sure you were. If you were going to say yes, you'd already have said it."

"You know what happens if I come up."

She glanced at him, then away. "Probably."

"Definitely."

Her chin lifted. "I can fix you something to eat, if I can get the burners to light. The stove's gas. I can't dry your clothes off, though."

"So I strip, you offer me a towel, and then we sit around in the dark with candles lit, and what? Talk about baseball?"

"I like baseball."

"You do, huh?"

"I watch it with my dad."

He reached out to cup her shoulder, knowing his touch would rattle her and wanting it to. "Look, Amber. If I come up, I'm going to have you naked in no time flat. I'm going to f.u.c.k you. Is that what you want?"

She squirmed. "Do you have to say it that way?"

"Say it what way, f.u.c.k'?"

"Yeah."

"What would you call it, honey? Until a couple hours ago, I'd never even had a conversation with you. We do this tonight, it's not gonna be making love. It'll just be s.e.x. And then I go to work Monday, and you unlock the place, and we gotta figure out how to be around each other after. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like a terrible idea."

Her fingers picked at the fabric over her knee. "I don't see why it has to be that way," she said quietly. "After, I mean."

"You don't get why it has to be one night."

"No. I mean, yes, sort of. I guess I don't see why you're so sure you know what's going to happen. It's not like any of this has gone according to some master plan you had."

"I know how I am."

Her face came up, and those eyes found his. Those huge, dark eyes, searching his expression for something they were never going to find. "So if you come up, and we ... then tomorrow, you're not going to like me anymore, is that it?"

He sighed. "I'll still like you. I just won't want to hurt you, any more than I do now. I'm trying to do the right thing here. We already talked about this, right? You want a wedding and a white dress. Even if we made sense as a couple-and we really don't, babe, when you think about it-I'm not going to be able to give you that."

Her expression hardened as he spoke, her mouth flattening out. "That's so insulting."

"What is?"

"You're telling me you don't want to come up because if you have s.e.x with me, I'll fall in love with you, and then I'll want to marry you and you'll break my heart."

He just stared at her, unsure what to say. That was kind of what he was telling her. But when she put it that way, it sounded bad, and he could tell it p.i.s.sed her off.

"Look, Amber-"

She cut him off. "That's so arrogant."

"Honey-"

"Quit honeying' me. I'm not your honey. I'm a person, Tony, and I want to have s.e.x with you. Don't go thinking you're some kind of G.o.d just because you know I like you. You're not going to break my heart by putting your ... your d.i.c.k in me. You might make me so mad I change my mind, though, if you keep talking to me like I'm some kind of delicate flower who's going to wither away and die if you don't handle me just right."

She flung open the door and hopped out of the truck. "I'm going up to my apartment now, and I'm going to take off all my clothes. If you want to be there to see that, get off your tush and follow me."

She slammed the door and stalked toward the building, and Tony tried to remember why he wasn't supposed to follow her.

He tried for what felt like forever, but she was walking fast, and the farther away she got, the more urgently the need pounded through him.

He wanted her. Wanted her way too much to deny himself, even knowing how much he would regret it later.

The truck door slammed behind him. By the time he hit the steps, he was jogging.

Chapter Eight.

Amber dropped her purse on the table by the door.

She discarded her shirt in the middle of the living area and knelt down to take off her shoes in the short hallway that led to the bedroom.

She didn't know if he would come in, but if he did, he was going to get an eyeful.

Was this her, unzipping her pants at the threshold of the bathroom? She felt as though she must be a different Amber Clark from the one who'd hung a cl.u.s.ter of carefully arranged photographs on the wall across from the toilet and bought a bowl of potpourri to sit on top of the tank.

Something had happened to her.

Strange to think that one afternoon could redirect her, reshape her-but maybe all she'd needed was a reason. A desire that made becoming different more important than the safety of being the same.

Someone to reach for.

She heard a soft knock. "Amber?"

"The door's unlocked."

Her khakis dropped to the floor, and she carefully pulled the ponytail elastic out of her wet hair. The strands brushed her back, right above her bra strap. Her nipples hardened with a shiver.

Tony was in her apartment, and she was in her bra and panties.

The floor creaked beneath his feet. "Where are you?"

"In the bathroom."

She pushed aside the shower curtain and turned the spray on hot.

When she twisted around again, he filled the doorway, and he was staring.

He didn't say anything. Not a word. But he looked at her, and she felt it as a flush of heat across her neck, a fullness in her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She felt it on her lips, felt it brushing over her stomach and deep between her legs.

Amber reached behind her back to unhook her bra. "I'm going to take a shower."

Tony braced his hands in the doorway. She couldn't tell whether he was trying to hold himself up or keep himself back.

She let the bra drop.

A muscle jumped in his jaw.

She hooked her thumbs into her panties over each hip bone and looked for something in his eyes. Permission. An invitation.

"Go on." His voice had melted-or maybe it was that it was melting her. That low, deep, rich sound puddling between her legs. "Get yourself warm."

Amber bent over and pushed her panties off, aware of the way her belly folded when she leaned down, the way her b.r.e.a.s.t.s hung. These shapes were all her own shapes, but his now, too. To a man as hard and rough as Tony, she must look so soft and rounded. Rare and beautiful.

He didn't move.

She didn't want him to.

She stepped into the shower but left a gap in the curtain big enough to talk through. Or glimpse through.

As she tipped her head back and let the hot spray pound against her scalp, she gave voice to the sentence that had been tripping around the back of her head for more than an hour. "The first guy I had s.e.x with cried afterward."