Less than a heartbeat later, she was rolling over for the slow, sweet lovemaking they hadn't been able to get to in the shower. As they kissed and ran their hands over each other, as he wrapped his arms around her and she wrapped her legs around him, as he slid into her on a groan and she sighed with pleasure while lifting her hips into his to take him deeper still, Lori couldn't remember ever feeling so safe. So incredibly good.

Grayson gathered her even closer to bury his face in the damp crook of her neck, and after the force of his climax triggered yet one more beautiful release for her, too, he rolled her over so that her head lay on his chest and her legs were entwined with his.

The last thing she was aware of before she fell asleep was the soft press of his mouth against her forehead as he kissed her good night.

Chapter Nineteen.

It was the first time in three years that Grayson had slept past sunrise.

Sunlight was streaming in his bedroom window as Lori slept in the circle of his arms. Actually, it was more that she was sprawled completely over him so that he was both her mattress and pillow. But even though he'd always preferred to have plenty of s.p.a.ce to himself in bed, he found he didn't mind the way she'd unconsciously claimed his entire bed-and his body-as her own.

Lori Sullivan wasn't just Naughty, she was a force of nature.

He'd tried like h.e.l.l to push her away a dozen times this past week, but she was still here. Even last night, when he'd asked her for so much more than he deserved, she'd not only given it to him without reserve, she'd made love to him with a wide-open heart, too.

"You're an awesome bed," she said as she slowly flexed and stretched her limbs one at a time over him, which brought every inch of his body completely awake. "I make a pretty good blanket, don't I?"

He loved the way she woke up with a smile. "Not just good. Amazing."

"I know I am," she said with a teasing grin as she rested her chin on her hand and gazed down at him from where she was perched over his chest. "Now tell me, is it my sparkling personality, my wicked hot moves in the sack, or my deft hand with pig feed that's got you in raptures this morning?"

He knew he should just grin back, continue her teasing. But he hadn't awakened with a woman in his bed in three years-especially not one this beautiful, this giving-and he couldn't think of one thing he'd done to deserve it now.

"How can you forgive me again and again for what I've said to you? For the way I've acted?" In his experience, forgiveness was the hardest thing of all.

Her hand immediately moved to stroke his cheek, her eyes softening as she looked down at him. "My brothers and sister and I fought a lot when we were kids. Most of them were stupid fights about dolls or the last brownie or who won the race. But sometimes, we went too far and really hurt each other. Not just with bruises and black eyes, but with words that we didn't know how to take back." She smiled, thinking about her family. "When my mother'd had enough, she'd take us by the scruff of our necks like we were unruly cats, and then she'd lock us in a room together."

His eyebrows went up. "Wasn't she worried you'd keep pounding each other?"

"Oh, we definitely did that. But even that got old after a while. Eventually we would both realize we were stuck in a room with the one person we hated." She laughed out loud at the memory of those lock-ins. "With eight kids to keep in line, my mother had to have plenty of tricks up her sleeve. And her genius was in knowing that no matter what we said or did, no matter how deep the arrows had gone, nothing had actually changed. We still loved each other and always would. It was just that, for a little while there, it was easier to lash out and be nasty than it was to actually work through whatever was really making us feel bad. By the time she came to let us out, we were usually too busy playing some silly game we'd made up to want to leave the room. And we'd forgiven each other without ever needing to say the words, because we'd never meant to hurt each other in the first place."

She grinned at him, the sunlight streaming in over her head giving her a temporary halo. "Just in case you haven't already figured it out, my mother is amazing."

"No wonder."

She c.o.c.ked her head. "No wonder what?"

"No wonder...you."

"That's another reason I forgive you," she said as she lifted his hand to her lips and pressed a kiss to it. "No one has ever said anything so sweet to me before." She gave him another soft kiss. "You didn't mean to hurt me with anything you said or did, Grayson. You didn't even know me when I came here. You were just doing whatever you needed to do to keep me from finding out too much, or from having to revisit the pain from your past." She wiggled her eyebrows as she added, "But if you think it would still do both of us good for you to lock yourself in a room with me-naked, of course-there's a little game I just thought of that we could play."

It was a big deal for Lori to wake up in Grayson's bed. She'd always been s.e.xy and fun and had believed it was up to her to keep her lovers "on their toes" so that they'd stay interested in being with her. But after she'd fallen asleep in his bed-on top of him, no less-instead of keeping things light and easy this morning, he'd gone deep right away. Now, with her teasing comments about playing a game together, she thought she was giving him another chance at an out he surely had to want, from emotional back to s.e.xy. And when he got up off the bed and locked the door, all of the sensitive spots on her body immediately heated up.

But instead of getting back into bed with her, he knelt beside it. "That day in the cabin when you told me why you were here, I not only didn't listen, I did something terrible by turning around the fact that your family has always been there for you and making it sound like a weakness." She could read the regret on his beautiful face as clearly as she could hear it in every word. "You told me that you'd been in a relationship for the past two years, and that the guy was sc.u.m, right?"

"Total sc.u.m. But I kept thinking he'd change, that one of those times when he swore he loved me, he'd actually mean it. Long after my family begged me to dump him, I finally realized he never would when I found him in bed with the lead dancer in the show we were putting on in Chicago." The pain of realizing what a fool she'd been came over her again as she said, "He didn't even respect me enough to cheat on me with a stranger. It was like he did it that way on purpose to rub it in my face, to prove to me just how much power he had over not only me, but the entire cast and show, too." Grayson's expression was fierce, his hands tight fists beside her on the bed as she laid hers over them. "But I knew I had just as much power. The power to leave. The power to start over. And the power to make him matter just as little to me as he really should."

"It sounds to me like you made the mistake of forgiving him one too many times, too."

"No," she said in a firm voice, "you and Victor are nothing like each other, so you can give up trying to make the situations seem at all the same. And even if it's stupid and gets me in trouble sometimes, I won't apologize for not being cynical and hard and holding a grudge."

"Never apologize to anyone for who you are, Lori."

"What about when I break something? Or if I accidentally let another pig out? Or," she said as her lips curved upward at the corners, "what if it turns out that I used the wrong paint on the back side of the barn by accident?"

His eyes narrowed at her little admission before he broke out into laughter. It was a sound so sweet that she could hardly believe she was finally hearing it. Maybe the rest of the world wouldn't think that making Grayson laugh was as big an accomplishment as performing in the shows and on the stages she'd been gunning for her whole career...but Lori knew it was at least a thousand times more important.

Because it meant that she'd helped him, at least a little bit, to reclaim a part of his soul.

"Well, maybe that might warrant an apology," he teased, before claiming her mouth as he climbed back onto the bed. "Or at least keeping the door locked until you make it up to me."

"Mmmm," she murmured against his lips, "maybe you should convince me not to make the same mistake again."

She felt the proof of how much he liked that idea as she rubbed over him, and was glad that she could take them both to a fun, playful place for a little while, at least. Grayson had lived too seriously for too long, and even though she knew there was more he wanted to say to her this morning-things he'd kept inside for far too long-she also recognized from her years of dance training when it was time to take a little break to relax or laugh or just wiggle around and be silly before putting in more hard work.

Fortunately for Grayson, she was a master of silly. And of laughter. Not to mention, she thought with a grin as she quickly got up and repositioned herself so that she was lying face down across his lap, a master of fun, dirty s.e.x.

His pupils were dilated and his breath was coming faster by the time she looked up at him, bit her lip, and whispered, "I'm ready to be convinced now," in a breathy voice. She wiggled her behind for effect, but instead of playfully spanking her, when his hand made contact with her bottom it was to stroke over her skin with such heat, and such obvious desire, that it held even more impact than it would have if he'd touched her any other way.

He teased her like that for so long that she was about to start begging when he finally moved his hand from her hips to the slick flesh between her legs. She immediately spread her thighs for the sweet slide of his fingers into her. With his other hand, he caressed her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and when he rolled one nipple between his thumb and forefinger at the exact moment that he slid the pad of his thumb over her c.l.i.toris, Lori shuddered and came so hard everything went black for a split second.

She was still trying to get her bearings when he lifted her off him so that she was on her hands and knees on the bed and one of his arms was wrapped so tightly around her waist that she didn't need to support her own weight.

Grayson's breath was warm on her ear as he teasingly said, "Have you learned your lesson yet about picking the right paint colors?"

The word, "No," was barely out of her mouth when he bucked his hips into hers. He felt so good thrusting inside of her in what was one of her favorite s.e.xual positions that she couldn't help but loudly cry out her pleasure. He didn't still his movements to make sure she was okay, didn't mistake the sound for anything other than the pure joy that it was as he took her so hard again and again that he ended up having to cover her head with one hand so that she didn't hit it on the headboard.

And with every stroke of his body inside hers, Lori felt a little more of Grayson's pain leave to make room for pleasure. Pleasure he obviously hadn't thought he deserved for three long years.

"Your wife was beautiful, wasn't she?"

Grayson's first thought, as he lay warm and loose in a tangle of Lori's arms and legs a while later, was that only she would think to ask that question about his wife first, when anyone else would have gone straight for the morbid, the sad.

His second thought was that, with the birds chirping and the leaves rustling outside his bedroom window, it did, finally, seem the right time to answer her questions about his past.

Lori had just given him so much: wonder, pleasure, laughter.

The very least he could do was give her the truth.

"She was." He was surprised to find himself picturing Leslie as she had been at nineteen rather than as the unhappy thirty-two-year-old woman he'd had in his head since the day she died. "Very beautiful."

"Who fell first?" Lori scooted up so that she could fully see his face while still touching him along the length of his body. "You or her?"

There was no jealousy, no pity in Lori's question, so it was surprisingly easy for him to reply, "We were in college, and she said no the first time I asked her out. Definitely me."

Lori looked delighted by the tidbit. "Oooh, you had to chase her?"

Even though their bodies were already touching from shoulder to toe, he had to reach out to brush the hair out of her eyes, and stroke his hand off her face as he said, "I wouldn't take no for an answer."

"Which I'm sure she found as s.e.xy as I do, by the way," she said, and then, "Tell me more about her, about the two of you."

Amazed to realize that Lori's questions were actually helping him remember and honor his wife in a way he had never been able to since her death, he said, "We got married right after graduation. I went to work in the city for my father's investment firm, and she got a job working for an interior designer. When we bought our first house out in the country, she left her job to focus on decorating the house and working on charity events and the family we planned to have." This time Lori was silent as she waited for him to continue. "We had trouble getting pregnant."

Lori took his hand in hers. She didn't squeeze it, just held on to him. "That must have been hard."

He took a breath, one he couldn't seem to inhale all the way. "Our marriage hadn't been what either of us had thought it would be. The country house had been our first try at making it better. A child was supposed to be our second. When neither of those worked-"

Grayson stopped, knew he didn't have to say anything more, that he'd already given away enough. He'd never talked to anyone about this before, not even his parents or Leslie's.

But, suddenly, being the only one who knew what had really happened seemed like too big a burden to keep bearing all alone.

"Somewhere along the way, she started drinking. But I never knew about what she'd been doing until she crashed into a tree and they told me she was way over the legal blood-alcohol limit. That was when I went home and saw all the signs I'd missed, every last one of the hints she'd been leaving me, just hoping I'd see her. Hoping that I'd be there for her the way I'd once promised when we were young and the world was going to be ours and I refused to have it any other way."

For a long while, Lori didn't say a word. She simply put her arms around him and held on tight.

Until, finally, she lifted her head from his chest and said, "Last night, when you took me to that barn dance and pushed me out onto the dance floor, you gave me back my heart, Grayson." Her mouth was barely a breath from his as she whispered, "And I can't see how a man who could do something that good could possibly be bad."

The birds were still chirping, the leaves were still rustling. The chickens still needed their eggs collected, the pigs their stalls mucked. The crops needed weeding and the CSA boxes needed to be a.s.sembled. But as Lori kissed him, and he kissed her back before making love to her yet one more time, Grayson knew that everything had changed.

Because he finally knew what it felt like to hold sunshine in his hands...and when Lori left, it was going to feel like winter all year round, even on the hottest days of summer.

Chapter Twenty.

The next few days pa.s.sed in a blur of back-breaking hard work as Lori helped Grayson lay in the boards and beams for the new roof of his cottage while keeping up with all of the usual farm ch.o.r.es. And, of course, there was the wonderful s.e.x they had every night when the animals were finally taken care of and the only thing the two of them needed to focus on until sunrise was each other.

The s.e.x was so good, in fact, that Lori sometimes wondered if she was dreaming. But each morning when Grayson dragged her out of bed at sunrise so that she could make them both breakfast, she knew she wasn't. A dream would never be so heartless, or make her muscles ache quite so much with his incredibly long lists of work to be done on the farm.

She was taking a ten-second break, dreaming of a tropical beach and a fruity drink, when Grayson rode up on his horse and said, "I need your help with something on the back forty." He pulled her up onto his horse without so much as a "please."

"You know," she said as he wrapped his arms tightly around her waist and rode off with her, "I'm sure I could learn to ride if you could spare a few precious minutes to show me how."

"Of course you could," he agreed. "You'd be a natural on horseback. But I want you here with me."

With his surprisingly lovely words echoing all through her heart, she snuggled deeper against him. "I'd rather be here with you, too." She honestly couldn't think of anywhere she'd rather be than out in this beautiful green pasture with Grayson. "So, what are you going to do to work me to the bone now?"

"Are you sure you want to know?"

He sounded way too happy with himself and she groaned while stewing in all the possibilities of the torturous work he had planned for her, like digging a ditch or hauling heavy rocks. But when the gra.s.s started to turn to sand and he didn't stop the horse, her suspicions suddenly shifted in another direction.

"Do you own the beach out here, too?"

"Technically, no," he answered as he finally tied up his horse to a nearby tree and helped her down, his big hands warm on her waist as he stole a kiss. "But since the only way to get to this part of the sh.o.r.e by land is through my property, we're not going to have to worry about anyone seeing you here naked."

"Naked?" Her body heated up even as her eyes narrowed. "Are you saying you brought me to the beach to seduce me?"

He pulled a large foil wrapper and a Thermos out of one saddlebag. "I brought lunch, too. For later."

She loved seeing him like this. Smiling. Playful. Happy. It was how he deserved to be.

Lori wanted so badly to heal Grayson. He obviously blamed himself for what had happened with his wife. And she hated that he did. She wanted to clear away his pain and fill up the empty s.p.a.ces with love.

But life, she knew, wasn't always that easy. And sometimes having some fun despite the pain was all you could do.

She looked down at the picnic he'd packed, and teased, "Well, if you've got lunch, then I suppose you could have me as an appetizer first."

The next thing she knew, he was throwing her up over his shoulder, pulling a thick blanket out of the other saddlebag, and carrying her down to the beach. She could easily have gotten back down on her feet, but what was the point of pretending she didn't love this?

Just as she was going to let herself pretend, at least for the next few days, that this was a life she could stay and live forever.

They'd barely spread the blanket out on the sand before they were both reaching for each other.

"I don't know how you do it," he murmured as they stripped off each other's clothes and he sat on the blanket and pulled her over him. "All I know is that I can't stop wanting you."

"I'll show you how," she said as she wrapped her arms around his neck and straddled his naked body. She loved the feel of the hard and fast beat of his heart against her own bare chest, proof that she affected him as much as he affected her.

She found his mouth with hers and kissed him softly, the salt spray from the ocean already on his lips. She knew she'd never forget this-making love to Grayson on his beach, his arms tight and warm around her. She could feel how much he wanted her, but he didn't rush her, didn't roll them over on the blanket and thrust into her, even though both of them would surely enjoy that, too.

He'd given her so much pleasure while also giving her back her confidence in herself as a beautiful, desirable woman-and now she wanted to give him back just as much. Lori knew she couldn't fully heal Grayson, that she couldn't change his past. But she could give him a few moments of sweet perfection in her arms.

Moments just like this.

She licked out against his tongue and he groaned his pleasure into her mouth as his tongue licked back. He made her smile, her rough and gruff farmer, even as she rocked her pelvis into his, his erection thick and throbbing against her slick skin.

But there was so much more of him she wanted to taste, to run her tongue, her lips, over. She rained kisses across his jaw, his five o'clock shadow scratching her lips in the most delicious way, then down beneath his jaw into the hollow of his neck where she had licked the rain from his skin just a week before.

The storm hadn't only been brewing outside, it had hit both of them just as hard, just as suddenly. He said she made him forget, but he made her forget, too. Because one kiss, one caress at a time, Grayson had taken the place of every other man she'd ever been with-all of them nothing more than a prelude to the real thing.

To love.

She'd planned to run her hands over his broad shoulders, to kiss every inch of him, but the intensity of their pa.s.sion for each other ran too deep for her to do anything but grab the condom he'd dropped onto the blanket, tear it open, and lift her hips up so that she could slide it onto his absolutely gorgeous erection.

Grayson's entire body stiffened while her fingertips grazed his hard flesh, and she understood how hard he was working to keep himself in control for another few seconds-because she was doing the same thing herself.