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  Ben laughed with her, then pulled her into his arms, thankful when she came willingly, naturally, as if she belonged there. And for him, she did. He simply held her close, already aware of just how much she had come to mean to him.

  “Thanks for sharing your traditions with me, too,” she said quietly, the words muffled against his shirt. “I love hearing about you and your parents. You’re very lucky.”

  She pulled back enough to look up at him and as he gazed down into those glassy depths, he could feel his heart fill right up. He wanted to share more than traditions with her. She made him want to start new traditions. For this woman who carried all of her memories with her, forever and always, he found himself wanting to make sure she had more of the purely loving, positive ones, like Chey and Vivi and Hannah were giving her now. Traditions that also included him.

  “Thank you for asking about them,” he told her, then smiled. “I know I got lucky with the parent lottery. I’ve always been grateful for how they handled things.” His expression sobered as he brushed a tear away from the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry your path was more challenging.”

  “I loved my parents,” she told him. “So very much. They were brilliant and very well respected. They just had no idea what to do with me. That would have been the case with any baby coming along and bringing chaos into their neat and orderly lives.”

  “Then add in the speedy brain and an eidetic memory,” he said.

  The corner of her mouth lifted in that dry little twist he was already coming to love. “Good times,” she said, and he laughed. “I think that particular gift, the accelerated ability to learn and retain new information, was the one thing they felt comfortable with. Studying, expanding one’s mind, higher education, all of those things were in their wheelhouse. They just kind of took it to a bit of an extreme with me. Even when I was really young, I already knew they meant well. They wanted me to be the best I could be. Honestly, they’d never expected to have children. It was one of the reasons they married; they were both thrilled to have found someone who enjoyed the quiet, academic, contemplative life. I’m not even sure how it happened—”

  Ben chuckled. “Just how sheltered were you?”

  She nudged him playfully. “What I meant was, after all those years of successfully not getting pregnant, I don’t know what happened. My mother was definitely not one who was comfortable discussing such things. She turned fifty the same year she had me and she was not a young fifty, if you know what I mean. Not socially, at any rate.” Avery smiled then. “As to the birds and bees, I learned a lot from reading.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “And I was very precocious.”

  He laughed at that, even as his body responded to the thought of just what it was she’d learned. And if she might want to put that education to good use.

  “Actually, to be honest,” she went on, eyes dancing now, “the more I learned about how babies were made, the happier I was to leave my mother out of that conversation.” She made a face. “Some things you really don’t need to know or think about your parents doing.”

  They both snickered at that as Ben shook his head. “Agreed. I love my folks, and they’ll talk about anything under the sun with me, but yeah. Bad images, bad images.”

  “Right?” she said, then snorted.

  The two of them ended up laughing so hard, it took them a moment or two to recover. She was still in his arms, and with one glance, they were set off all over again. “I can say,” she told him, when she regained her breath, “that this is the most fun I’ve had thinking about the subject in quite some time.”

  “I’m happy to hear it.” Still grinning, he tipped her chin up to his. “If you ever need a study partner, to put into practice all those things you learned…” He trailed off and searched her eyes. When he spoke again his voice had gotten quieter, grown a little deeper, the words less teasing, more sincere. “I’d be happy to do a little research with you,” he said, his gaze dropping to her mouth. Her lips parted on a soft gasp and he was already lowering his head because it was the most natural thing in the world to do. “Replace the bad images with some much, much better ones,” he murmured against her lips, then took them with his own.

  “Yes, please,” she whispered back.

  Chapter 8

  Deny it though she had, over the years since her one disastrous attempt, Avery might have given more than a little thought to what it would be like the next time she tried sex. Not a single one of her potential scenarios had involved her all but dragging the man in question directly to her bed.

  Questioning nothing. Wanting everything.

  In fact, she was not really thinking at all. Except for wanting to get naked with Ben Campbell as fast as was humanly possible. It was a blissful state to be in, quite frankly. Feeling everything and not thinking about anything. She planned to do a lot more of that in the future. Hopefully just like this, and always just with him.

  “Chey wasn’t kidding,” Ben said, holding her wrapped around him as the two of them banged and bumped their way into her apartment. They might have knocked a few things off the counter on their way through the kitchen. “You really do have a full-on lab set up in here.”

  She had her legs wrapped around his waist and was kissing the side of his neck as he carried her sideways through the crowded space, angling them between the long stainless steel table filled with microscopes, stacks of books, a Bunsen burner or three on one side, and a whole wall filled with the industrial sized pressure-cooker-like contraptions she’d designed for high volume extraction of essential oils from the lavender they grew.

  “Can I show that to you later?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Please.” He caught her mouth with his and they paused when he pushed her back against the first doorframe he came to. “Which way,” he said against her lips, and she could feel, quite intimately, that he was wanting the same thing she was wanting, and with apparent alacrity if the size of it was any indication. She was a huge fan of alacrity at the moment.

  She flung a hand in the general direction of her bedroom. “Second door,” she said, gasping as she arched into him, tipping her head back while he kissed his way down the side of her neck. “Left.”

  Avery had read books with very graphic, detailed scenes of steamy, demanding sex, where both partners had been reduced to their most primal needs and gloried in it. She’d seen such things in movies. She’d just assumed it was fictional license, a hyper-realized overdramatization. She’d never been so thrilled to be wrong about something in her entire life.

  She half-expected to find herself tossed on the bed, followed by all of him on top of all of her a moment later, and was thrilled by that prospect, too. There was some time spent with her back up against the doorframe to her bedroom as well, and she thought maybe right there would also be perfectly fine. If he would just please, please hurry up and get all their clothes off.

  Then he carried her into her bedroom and stopped, letting her legs slide from around his waist, until her toes touched the floor again. They were standing beside her bed and everything paused for one, long heartbeat of time. Her instinct was to grab his arms and yank him down to the bed with her, not wanting any words or thoughts to intrude on this moment, not wanting to give anything a chance to end this perfect mutual explosion of mindless want and need.

  Only, of course, it wasn’t mindless. She knew exactly what she was doing, and whom she was doing it with. She just didn’t want to give either of them a chance to say something that might change his mind, or hers.

  Then he cupped her hip with one hand, nudging her closer until her body was right up against him, while his other hand cupped her face, his fingers sliding to the nape of her neck as he tilted her head back so their eyes met directly. What she saw there made everything that was already damp and trembling, tremble harder, and grow damper still.

  “Avery,” he said, and she couldn’t find it within hers
elf to stop him from talking, from risking everything. When he looked at her the way he was right then, and said her name the way he had, making it sound like a prayer and a promise all at the same time, she was helpless to do anything but stare back into those eyes. They were the deepest, darkest green she’d seen them yet as they searched hers, and she prayed what he found there was the same thing she saw in his.

  “This is…important,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said, the word barely more than a whisper.

  “No,” he said. “I mean this is important. To me.” His gaze traveled down between them, then to the bed, then back to her eyes.

  Now she trembled for an entirely different reason, but she didn’t say anything, allowing him to finish.

  “I don’t start anything if I don’t mean to continue. Not even in the heat of the moment. Where it goes, or how far it takes us…I know life offers no guarantees.” He brushed his thumb over her lips, which parted on a soft moan of their own volition. “This wouldn’t just be a one off for me. It would be a beginning.” He smiled, but his gaze remained serious and probing. “I feel like we already have begun, you and I. I just—if, knowing that, you’d rather wait, or rather not—”

  She reached up then, and pressed a shaky finger to his lips, deeply gratified when she heard the resulting rumble somewhere deep in his throat, and witnessed the flash of desire so swift and fierce that it might as well have pinned her to the bed all by itself. “I won’t—wouldn’t—do this if I didn’t want more,” she said, her voice some rougher version of itself that she’d never heard before. “Hope for more.”

  His eyes flared then, and what had been hot want inside of her went straight to molten.

  “I don’t want to disappoint you,” he said roughly as he lowered his mouth to hers. “I know you—”

  “Yes,” she said against his lips. “You do know me. You won’t disappoint me,” she said, kissing him, slowly, softly. “You couldn’t. This is already perfect.”

  He proved there was still room for improvement by immediately scooping her up and tossing her directly on to the bed, exactly as she’d imagined he would, making her squeal with breathless laughter. “Okay, okay,” she said, when he followed her down, pressing her deep into the mattress as he settled on top of her. Her legs wrapped around him as naturally as if he’d been there a hundred times before, a lifetime of times before. She smiled up into his eyes as she wrapped her arms around his neck. “Now it’s perfect.” Then she pulled him down and took him.

  Chapter 9

  The sun was still a good way from making its ascent when Ben opened his eyes and blinked against the darkness. Then he registered that the weight sprawled across his body was not the layers of quilts and fleece he’d piled on his narrow bed out in the barn studio to help stave off the chill that no space heater seemed to be able to overcome. This weight was also keeping him quite warm, but in a very different way.

  He smiled as he stroked his hand up along Avery’s side, or maybe that was her leg. It was true they’d been a little…rambunctious, but it was also true that Avery Kent was a bed hog. How a shorter-than-average woman who was barely a slip of a thing could extend her limbs to all four corners of her rather spacious bed was a puzzle he didn’t care to solve. As long as part of her was draped across part of him, he was content.

  She roused slightly, made a sound that might have been a word, but he couldn’t have said which one. She smoothed one hand over his chest and arm, then once she figured out what she was touching, immediately started sliding it downward.

  Grinning, he covered her wrist as her hand skated over his navel. “Hold on. Slow down there, slugger.”

  She lifted her head, which was somewhere off to the side of his right hip, and propped herself up one elbow, sliding her hand free to drag her hair from her face. “Not a morning person then?” she said, a little groggy.

  “It’s not morning yet.”

  “Point to the party-pooper,” she said, then let her head loll back to the cool surface of the linen covered mattress.

  He chuckled at that, something the two of them had done often throughout the night. He liked that about them. They’d been pretty vocal and his voice was a bit hoarse. Partly from laughter, also from the growling and the occasional guttural groaning she’d elicited from him with her exuberant desire to make up for all the time she’d lost. All in one night. She was nothing if not a fast study and an inexhaustible researcher.

  Each time she’d determined something she did gave him pleasure, she’d laser in on it, figure out how to maximize the move, motion, or caress, then make sure she brought him right to the brink with it if possible.

  He’d felt it only fair to reciprocate. He was no slacker. Her voice sounded a little rough, too. He took that as a badge of honor.

  He shifted, and helped to shift her as well, until they were lying side by side, feet dangling off the side of the bed. “I seem to recall, at some point you mentioned something about having a most excellent spa tub. Or am I dreaming that?”

  “I’d say I’m not a reliable source, as I keep expecting to wake up any moment only to realize I’ve fantasized this entire thing. Only, one, I live here, and so I happen to know that, yes, I do have a most excellent spa tub, and two, my imagination is definitely not good enough to dream up anything close to this.” She rolled over and folded her arms on his chest, propping her chin on her wrists. His eyes had adjusted to the dim light well enough to catch the flash of her teeth. “Henceforth, I have to surmise that this is actually real.”

  “I concur with your findings,” he said, and pulled her up so he could press a kiss to her forehead. “I hope this doesn’t mean you’ve completed your research.”

  “Oh no,” she said, her throaty voice a perfect match for the wicked look he was close enough now to see in her eyes. “This is going to be a long-term project, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah. Well, then, I will clear my schedule.” He ran his hands down her back and cupped her bare cheeks. “In the name of science, of course.”

  “Selfless,” she said with a dramatic sigh.

  “I’m a giver.”

  She giggled at that. “Seeing as you’re such a willing subject, why don’t I go rustle us up something to eat while you take a soak. Assuming that’s why you asked about the tub.” She started to slide off him, but he sat up and carried her right with him, scooping her up as he rose off the bed.

  “Soak first, eat later.” He started toward the bathroom.

  “But—”

  “I’m big. You’re…not. And both of us have been indulging parts of ourselves we haven’t in a good, long while. I think a soak would do us both good.”

  She’d wrapped her arms around his neck and rested her head on his shoulder, but that made her lift up so she could look at him. “You’re sore?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because I was too busy coming like a thundering herd of elephants? I don’t know.”

  She spluttered a laugh at that. “You realize that I now have to research elephants so as to present a solid, scientific basis for your claim.”

  He chuckled then, too. “I’ve read a lot of academic papers in my life, but this might be the first one to hit a bestseller list.”

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” she said, murmuring now as she was kissing her way down the side of his neck. “This is a private study.” She nibbled at his earlobe. She knew what that did to him. “Purely for my own edification.”

  He let her feet slip to the floor once they were on the fluffy bathmat beside a rather impressively sized spa tub. “This looks big enough for multiple guests.”

  She frowned. “I’m not interested in tangential studies.”

  He reached down and turned on the faucets, adjusting them until steam began to rise from the gathering water. “Good thing,” he s
aid, then added, “I don’t think I could keep up and I’d hate to be replaced.”

  He felt a light pinch on his own posterior and grinned. Avery handed him some bath salts. “Epsom, ginger, and clay,” she said. “You’ll thank me later.”

  He added a liberal amount, inhaling and liking the rich scent, while she took a few short, fat, oddly shaped candles from the cupboard by the twin sinks. “My first efforts from last year,” she told him, setting them on a flat glass tray and positioning it in the space between the twin sinks. “We almost burned down the kitchen. They don’t look so great, but they work just fine.”

  She turned to him, then, and with the soft glow of the candles flickering behind her, steam starting to billow in the chilled air, her hair sticking out at impossible angles from all sides of her head, and very little in the way of any curves filling out her boyish frame…his breath caught and held. She was utterly beautiful to him, and always would be.

  He held out his hand. “Come here.”

  She didn’t have any artifice. When they’d first undressed, she’d told him quite matter-of-factly there was no point in pretending she was something she was not, then assured him that lack of abundance notwithstanding, everything worked just the same. He’d barked out a laugh at that, and she’d struck a pose that he supposed was her attempt at looking vampish. She didn’t. But he knew right then that she did look exactly like the woman he was falling in love with.

  When she’d undressed him, she’d told him it was a good thing he’d gotten her naked first and that he should be ashamed of himself for hogging all the good genes. He’d actually blushed. Then she’d looked at him like she wanted to devour him whole, and the rest of him had flamed right up, too.

  He stepped in the tub first, sighed at the feel of the hot water against his skin. He held out his hand and helped her in with him. He sat first and leaned back against the curved end of the tub, then let her sit in front of him, between his legs, her back against his chest. The top of her head fit perfectly under his chin. He also had a quite wonderful vantage point, in terms of the view.