to make it as a singer. I didn’t leave you, Harlan Patrick. I went after the dream of what I could be, what I needed to be to make the fears go away.”
He reached for her then, gathered her into his arms. “Oh, baby, why didn’t you ever tell me this before?”
“I did. At least, I thought I had. I thought you knew everything there was to know about me. It wasn’t until today that I realized that it wasn’t a fair assumption.”
“I should have known,” he agreed softly with her head tucked against his shoulder. “I should have been able to see into your heart.”
“Maybe neither one of us understood that even between the closest of friends, sometimes you have to say the words and not leave anything to chance.” She reached up and touched his face, tracing the familiar angles and planes. “I love you, Harlan Patrick. Please, don’t ever doubt that. I loved you then and I love you now.”
As she spoke, she felt the splash of a teardrop against her fingers and realized that her brave, fiercely strong cowboy was crying. “Oh, Harlan Patrick,” she whispered brokenly. “Don’t. Please, don’t cry over me.”
“Darlin’, I never cry,” he said, his voice husky.
Smiling at the predictable denial, she rose to her knees and knelt facing him. She cupped his cheeks in her hands, then brushed her lips across the salty dampness on his skin. When she claimed his mouth, he moaned softly, then dragged her against him, his hands swift and sure as they roved intimately over her.
Like a summer brushfire, need exploded between them. Memories that needed refreshing responded to each caress as if it were new. His touch was impatient, inflaming her with its urgency. With her breath already coming in ragged gasps and her blood racing, she clasped his hands and held them tightly.
“Wait,” she pleaded.
He stilled at once, but there was torment in his eyes as they clashed with hers. “Wait?”
“Slow down. That’s all. Just slow down. It’s been a long time, Harlan Patrick. I want to savor every second.”
He grinned and reached for her again. “Couldn’t we hurry now and savor later?”
“Oh, no,” she said, slapping away his hands, then reaching for the buttons on his shirt. “You just sit still and leave this to me.”
That drew a spark of interest. “Leave it to you, huh? Sounds fascinating.” He locked his hands behind his neck and relaxed back against the tree. “Do your worst, woman.”
She chuckled. “Oh, I promise you, it will be very clever and it will be my best, not my worst.” The first button on his shirt popped free, exposing a V of bare flesh with just a hint of wiry dark hair. She pressed a kiss to the spot, noticing that his skin was feverishly hot already. The pulse at the base of his neck leaped.
“Promising,” she assessed, grinning at him.
The next button opened and then the next, exposing more and more of that wide, sexy chest for her increasingly inventive kisses. Oh, how she had missed this. She had missed the tenderness, the laughter and intimacy, the sensual games that only two people who loved and trusted could play.
When she reached the last button above his belt buckle, she tugged the remainder of the shirt free, then dropped a daring kiss on the bared skin where dark hair arrowed down toward the evidence of his arousal. He jolted at that and clasped her shoulders tightly.
“Careful, sweetheart. You’re starting to take risks.”
“I thought you were a man who liked to live on the edge.”
“Not me. I’m just a stay-at-home, old-fashioned kind of guy.”
With her fingers already at work on his buckle, she hesitated at the description. It cut a little too close to reality, when she was trying to recapture the fantasy.
“Need some help with that?” he asked, obviously unaware of the alarms his words had set off.
She drew in a deep breath, then shook her head. “Nope. I’ve done this before, you see.”
“Not with anyone else, I trust,” he said lightly.
She lifted her gaze to meet his and realized that despite the joking tone, the question was dead serious. “Never with anyone else,” she said softly. “Only with you, Harlan Patrick.”
There were plenty of men in her new world, record-company executives, fans, actors. She had thought about some of them, wished she could fall in love with one of them, wished she could want them as she wanted the man she’d left behind in Texas, but Harlan Patrick