Wild in the Moonlight by Jennifer Greene

alive but her and him. Nothing he could smell but her soft skin, the flower scents drifting from her hair, her throat. Nothing he could hear but the pounding of his own heart, in anticipation.
    He didn’t exactly remember how he reached for her, how his hands happened to curve on the swell of her shoulders, slide down, slide around her back to pull her into him. Yet he knew the exact moment, the exact sensation, when her hands reached up to lock behind his neck.
    He could have sworn she’d been sending him keep-off, no-trespassing messages—yet if she didn’t want to be kissed, she sure acted as if she did. Her arms swooped around his neck and she came up on tiptoe.
    There was one more brief millisecond when he remembered all the reasons why this was a bad idea, but once she was that close, all rational bets were off. In a blink his mind turned to mush. Electric, excited mush.
    He hadn’t kissed anyone in a while. He hadn’t kissed a woman this way in years. Hadn’t wanted to. He thought it was long gone from his life, from his heart—that pull, that wonder, that wildness. He didn’t know why it had to be her, didn’t care.
    She tasted like magic. Sweet, soft, alluring. Unforgettable. That pale-blond hair sifted through his fingers. Her head tilted back, accepting his kiss, inviting more than the graze of his mouth. Her lips asked to be taken. He answered.
    One tentative kiss melted into another stronger one, another richer one, and then another that lost all track of time and space. His tongue found hers. Herheartbeat was suddenly racing, chasing, against his. Her arms nested tighter around his neck, and his hands molded down her spine, down to her fanny, pulling her closer to him.
    Silver rain shivered down. Candles flickered. Shadows whispered of loneliness and old hurts and need. She’d been hurt. She’d been lonely. She needed. And maybe those were secrets she never meant to reveal to a stranger, but she didn’t tell him anything. She just kissed him back, wildly, freely, intimately.
    Cameron thought he was a man who took gutsy risks…but she was the brave one, the honest one, revealing so much. Something in her called him. Something in him answered her with a huge, nameless well of feeling that he’d never known he had.
    He raised his head suddenly, feeling shocked and disoriented and unsettled. Her eyes were still closed, lashes lying like kitten whiskers on her cheeks, but when she finally looked at him, her eyes were luminous and her mouth wet and trembly.
    â€œI never meant…” he started to say.
    She gulped in a breath. “It’s all right. I didn’t think you did.”
    â€œIt was the storm.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œIt was the moonlight.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œI need you to know you can trust me. The lastthing in hell I wanted was to make you worried I’d—”
    â€œI’m not worried. I’m thirty-four, Cameron. Too old to trust someone I barely know. But also way too old to make more of a kiss than what it was.”
    â€œYou said it exactly. That was just a kiss.” He added, “Right?”
    â€œRight,” she said firmly. “We’ll just mark this down as a moment’s madness and forget all about it.”

Five
    V iolet’s bedside telephone rang just after five in the morning. She jolted awake like a kicked colt. Mental images of her mom and dad or her sisters in an accident flashed through her mind in a panic as she fumbled for the phone. No one called this early unless there was a dire emergency—or unless someone had the sensitivity of an ox.
    She clapped the receiver to her ear and recognized Simpson’s voice.
    Her pulse climbed back down from the worry stratosphere. Her ex-husband—like PMS and rain—could always be counted on to show up at the most inconvenient time. “Insensitive” should have been his middle name.
    â€œWere you