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shrugged. “My father died. Then I met someone and thought I was going to marry her.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œIt didn’t work out.” He frowned, looked at her. “I don’t usually tell people that.”
    â€œPeople often tell me things they don’t tell anyone else.”
    â€œDo they, now? Well, to make it a little more fair, you should tell me something you don’t ordinarily tell.”
    She smiled, and he loved the teasing light that suddenly appeared in her fey eyes. “I don’t think so. You’re too much already.”
    A bolt of something hot went through him. “Am I?”
    Color brightened her cheekbones, and she looked away, but after a second or two something magnetic, something rich and hot between them, made her raise her head. Wind blew hair away from her face. He was suddenly aware that her toes were bare, her sandals akimbo on the sand, that their arms were within millimeters of touching, that her skirts curled around his knee.
    He told himself he should not do it, but he raised a hand and captured a long skein of hair in his fingers. A curl bent around his knuckles much the same as the skirts shaped themselves to his knee. She didn’t move, only watched him with that stillness, her eyes full of things he couldn’t read.
    The moment stretched like something out of a fairy tale, the soft blue-purple of the clouds behind her, the luminosityof her brow, the line of her collarbone, dusted so appealingly with those freckles. He knew he would remember this, whatever else spun out between them; his mind fastened the sand into place beneath her feet and the scent of water and the taste of possibility in the air.
    He bent in close, caught in the something, in the whatever, in the never-never-ness of her sitting there on the rock like a mermaid. She didn’t move away. Her chin lifted the slightest bit, and he tucked his hand around the back of her skull gently, so gently, and angled his head. Their lips met.
    Soft. Such a rich softness, he thought, plump lips with give and pliancy to them, and he smelled something female on her cheek…and that’s all it was. Pressing and releasing. And then again.
    And one more time.
    This time they both parted their lips just the slightest bit, and it was an opening like a flower, the barest smoothness of inner lip, the lightest suggestion of her tongue, of his, nearly touching, then not. A shiver rushed down his spine—he had not kissed like this in…forever. Ever.
    After a moment she angled herself gently away, and Dylan, slightly dizzy, lifted his head. There was somberness in her eyes. Wariness, too.
    It was as if the air around them sparked. To lighten the strangeness, Dylan winked. “You’re a sly one, trying to get off the hook like that.”
    â€œPardon me?”
    â€œGetting out of answering my questions.”
    â€œOh, that.” She nodded, pulling her skirt off his shin as she stood. “We should go back.”
    â€œYou need to relax a little, Kyra. With the baby, I mean.”
    Her eyes showed terror. “I know! But I don’t know how!”
    â€œLet’s go practice. Stop worrying so much.”
    â€œMaybe,” she said with a catch in her voice, “I’m just not cut out for this. Maybe I have no mothering talent.”
    He smiled gently. “Or you have no practice.”
    â€œPractice,” she said more to herself than to him. She grabbed her shoes and put them on. With squared shoulders, she headed up the hill.
    Dylan let her lead, feeling a sweet and dangerous liquid moving through his limbs. Be careful, he told himself. Be careful.
    Â 
    E MMA WAS IN THE rocking chair when Kyra poked her head around the door. “I’m sorry I panicked,” she said. “Can I try again?”
    â€œYou can’t be running off when you’re on your own, you know.”
    â€œI know.” Kyra folded her hands. “I’m