She raised her hand to cup the back of her neck and arched her back, as though to ease tired muscles. She’d arched her back that way when she’d climaxed that night in his bed, her body tightening around him and spurring him on to his own release. He felt a surge of blood to his groin and decided he’d better make his presence known before his imagination produced a result that would be hard to ignore and damned near impossible to hide from Devon.
He closed the door behind him with enough force that she looked up in alarm, clutching the picture books to her chest. “Miguel! Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“I didn’t sneak up on you. I moved into an unknown situation with due caution. No telling what kind of suspicious character might be hanging around in here.”
“I’m the only one here,” she said, and he could tell she was trying hard not to respond to his teasing.
“That’s what I mean. Suspicious character.” He crossed the tile floor and dropped to his haunches beside her. “Stealing books from the kiddies? I might have to cuff you and haul you down to the station for that.”
A tiny frown wrinkled her forehead. “I’m not stealing. I…I thought I’d sort through a few of the worn ones and get some replacements the next time I’m in Taos.” She still clutched the books to her chest as though she thought he might take them away from her.
He tossed his hat onto a nearby chair, then levered himself into a sitting position, with one knee drawn up for his forearm to rest on and the other leg stretched out alongside her. “Can’t the books wait for another day?” He waggled his index finger at the overflowing bookcase. “There are more books than a dozen kids could read in a week on those shelves.”
She wouldn’t quite meet his eyes. “People bring them in. They donate them. There are duplicates.” She did look tired. Faint circles were smudged under her eyes, and lines bracketed the corners of her mouth. She’d been at the center since five in the morning. He’d heard her truck go by as he was getting in the shower. It was after seven at night now. He should quit teasing her. He changed the subject. “I got your message on my voice mail. What’s up?”
She brightened immediately and her smile slammed into his heart. If he hadn’t already been sitting on the floor, he would have had to find a chair. “Kim’s found her foster parents. Or at least Nolan has.”
“That’s great. Nolan told me a couple of months ago he was going to try and contact them, but he didn’t have much to go on. He said Kim hadn’t heard from them for at least fifteen years.”
“She asked if she could invite them to the rehearsal dinner. Of course, I said she could. I hope you don’t mind that I did it without consulting you.”
“Did you find out if they want the chicken or the fish?”
“Miguel.” She slapped playfully at his hand. It was the first time she’d touched him since the night they’d spent in his bed, and he found that it challenged his self-control as much as or more than her beautiful smile.
“Actually, I did ask her which they might prefer. It was a stupid question, because she hasn’t seen them or spoken to them since she was a little girl.”
“But I bet she had an opinion, anyway.”
She grinned. “Yes, she did. She thought we should play it safe and go with the chicken.”
“Two more chicken dinners, it is.”
“You don’t mind that I okayed their coming without consulting you?”
“I think I’ve just been insulted.”
Her eyes widened and her grin vanished. “I didn’t mean—”
He had to be careful how much he teased her. She was still very touchy about her growing relationship with her cousin. “This is Kim and Nolan’s party. I’m happy she’s found the couple that meant so much to her after her mother died. You did exactly what I would have done.” He leaned forward and was saddened that she drew back, even if it was only a fraction of an inch. “Surely you know me better than that after all these years, don’t you, Devon?” He hadn’t meant to take the conversation into personal territory, but the words had refused to stay unspoken.
“I don’t know you at all,” she whispered, and pulled her lower lip between her teeth as though she, too, wished the words unspoken. She put a hand on the floor to push herself to her feet.
He stopped her by wrapping his fingers around her forearm, holding her beside him. “Devon, have you given any thought to why you ended up in my bed that night?”
She drew in her breath sharply, then said, “Shock. Confusion. Sleep deprivation. I was a little out of my mind, I think.”
“Maybe,” he agreed with a small smile. Part of him had wanted her to say it was because she was still madly, passionately in love with him. “I think we both were.”
“I didn’t know if my grandmother was going to live or die. I needed comfort. You offered me that.”
“Devon, it went past the comfort stage five minutes after we left the hospital.” The words came out as a kind of growl and her eyes widened a little.
“I told you, it was an aberration. We were both a little crazy that night.”
Devon had been out of his life for a decade. But the moment she’d walked back into it, he was the same moonstruck teenager he’d been a dozen years before. There was something he had to know. Something he wasn’t sure she herself knew yet. “Are you planning on staying in Enchantment?”
“I haven’t made up my mind. Lydia and I have such differing styles, there are days when we can’t say two words to each other without getting into an argument.” She dropped her head and began tracing circles on the cover of one of the picture books. “My practice and my life are in Albuquerque.”
“Does that life include a man?”
Her head came up. “Do you think I would have slept with you if there was?”
“You might have if you were as frightened and lonely as you said you were.” The question had been nagging at him over the past weeks. He didn’t want to think about another man making love to her. She was his. She had been since she was sixteen and she had let him make love to her for the first time—the first time for both of them, although he’d never told her that, either. Damn, he was losing his mind. He didn’t have a single claim on her. He’d never told her he loved her. Instead, sore in heart and soul when he returned from the mess in Somalia, he’d pushed her away so hard she’d never come back.
Maybe if he’d been older, more mature, he could have handled it better. But he’d been almost as young and green as she was, idealistic and filled with foolish notions of romance and happily-ever-after. He’d expected her to know, without his saying a word, how troubled and disillusioned he was. How the things he’d done or couldn’t do had tarnished his soul. He’d counted on her, and the love he felt for her but had never been able to express, to somehow magically heal him. Of course it hadn’t. So he’d pushed her away and curled into himself in misery. And broken her heart.
He should tell her now about the hurt and horror of that godawful place and what it had done to the naive, gung-ho kid he’d been, how it had torn him up inside for more years than he wanted to remember. Maybe then they could get past it, move on to the beginning of a future together. But it didn’t seem right to talk of death and destruction in this place of hope and beginnings.
She waited so long to respond to his comment that he thought she wasn’t going to. At last she said, “There was someone, but we broke up months ago. At Christmastime.”
She had been in Enchantment for Christmas. It had been the first he’d seen of her in a long time when, decked out in his dress blues, he come by to retrieve the carton of toys the center was donating to Toys for Tots. She’d said hello, that it was good to see him. And her smile had