to slosh around them.
“I think about you in your yellow dress, in your running clothes, even in those striped gumboots.” He pressed his forehead to hers and closed his eyes. “I also think about you like this.”
“Naked?”
He heard the smile in her voice and smiled back, keeping his eyes shut still.
“Yeah. Guess I can’t stop thinking about you, period.”
“That’s mutual.” She wrapped around his body like waterweed, grinding her softness against him. “So let me show you some things mermaids can’t do.”
Chapter 12
A week after their impromptu skinny dip at the river, Glen alternately felt as if he’d won the lottery, and then as if he’d had his ass handed to him after a brutal fencing session.
Living with Savannah would never be easy, but it sure was fun. She challenged him on everything. Sav offered a unique perspective on social, environmental, and spiritual issues that he’d never considered. She lit up the room just hanging out with him and Tom, and he’d never been so, damn, happy.
But the thing that blew his mind? He’d never found it so easy to get thousands of words onto the page every day. It was as if she’d neutered his SEAL-Ninja and taken its place as his muse. Except he figured he probably wasn’t meant to dream about making crazy-hot love to his muse at every opportunity.
He was completely, utterly, hooked on the woman.
Case in point. Glen shut down his laptop and decided to check out what Savannah and the kids were up to in the barn. He’d kept a low profile the two times Lauren arrived this week with a car-load of five-to-twelve-year-olds ready to be Tom’s audience for a few hours. Tom’s groupies, as Sav teased him. Only somehow the sessions turned into an informal confidence-building lesson for all the kids—with Sav as the teacher.
Drew, of course, came with his mum as the youngest. Glen also spotted eight-year-old Sophie, Lauren’s niece, and Sophie’s nine-year-old cousin, Riki. The other gap-toothed, flip-flop wearing, excitable bunch…? He had no clue. The hell of it was, going by Sav’s flushed cheeks and bright eyes at the end of each session, she was having as much fun as the children.
Glen followed the path down to the open barn doors. He paused at the entrance, opposite Nate lounging on a wooden plank placed on two concrete blocks. Glen had been forced to move the bench, so the kids had somewhere to sit with their juice boxes instead of wandering around his deck and waving at him through the window.
He sat next to Nate and slanted him a glance, before turning his gaze inside the barn. The group of ten kids sat in a semi-circle on the floor around Savannah. She stood, a queen resplendent in front of her subjects, her voice spilling rich and pure into the silence. Not one child moved while she spoke, caught up, as he soon was, in the emotion of her words. Most of them were too young to understand Shakespeare’s tale of two star-crossed lovers, but each of them understood Juliet’s grief and yearning.
She finished her monologue and swept her arms wide in a curtsying bow. Applause exploded from her little audience, as did whoops and whistles.
Savannah rose from her curtsy and cupped a hand behind her ear. “And how should we finish up?”
“Dance party!” shouted the kids.
“And what’s the best way to kick our nerves to the curb?” She cocked her finger at Tom. “Tom’ll answer this one, guys.”
Tom grimaced like Savannah had jabbed him with a fork, but his eyes shone with the same adoration as the other kids. “Dance party.”
“Hit it, Sophie.”
The beaming, dark-eyed Sophie ran to the workbench and cranked up the music. A thumping beat blasted out of the speakers. Glen couldn’t have named the song if his life depended on it, but Savannah captivated him. The kids crowded around her in a mini mosh-pit, jumping, yelling, laughing up at her with pure joy. Even Tom’s normal, teenage self-consciousness at being seriously uncool had disappeared, and he bounced in the thick of it, waving his arms around.
And Savannah…hair flying, hips shaking, and spinning the shyer kids in a twirl. She lit up the barn like a super-nova.
Nate nudged Glen’s arm. “She’s good with them, isn’t she?”
Glen still couldn’t drag his gaze from Savannah, who’d scooped up Drew and pretended to Tango with him across the floor.
“She is. The kids’ll never forget this.”
“No.” A thoughtful pause from beside him. “Neither will you, I suspect. Does she know you’re