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the cool cloth, an ache began to spread, slow and warm, from the center of her body outward. He was stroking her thighs now, where the sharp edge of a shard had nicked the flesh. Ana closed her hand into a fist, the twin of which clenched in her stomach.
    She needed him to stop. She wanted him to go on. And on.
    “It took all of that day,” Boone continued in that rich, mesmerizing storyteller’s voice. “And the heat mixed sweat with the blood, but he didn’t give up. Couldn’t give up, because he knew, as he’d never known anything before, that his heart’s desire, his future and his destiny, lay on the other side. So, with his hands raw and bleeding, he used those thorny vines and dragged himself to the top. Exhausted, filled with pain, he stumbled and fell down and down, to the thick, soft grass that flowed from the wall to the enchanted castle.
    “The moon was up when he awoke, dazed and disoriented. With the last of his strength, he limped across the lawn, over the drawbridge and into the great hall of the castle that had haunted his dreams since childhood. When he crossed the threshold, the lights of a thousand torches flared. In that same instant, all his cuts and scrapes and bruises vanished. In that circle of flame that cast shadow and light up the white marble walls stood the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her hair was like sunlight, and her eyes like smoke. Even before she spoke, even before her lovely mouth curved in a welcoming smile, he knew that it was she he had risked his life to find. She stepped forward, offered her hand to him and said only, ‘I have been waiting for you.’”
    As he spoke the last words, Boone lifted his gaze to Ana’s. He was as dazed and disoriented as the man in the story he had conjured up. When had his heart begun to pound like this? he wondered. How could he think when the blood was swimming in his head and throbbing in his loins? While he struggled for balance, he stared at her.
    Hair like sunlight. Eyes like smoke.
    And he realized he was kneeling between her legs, one hand resting intimately high on her thigh, and the other on the verge of reaching out to touch that sunlight hair.
    Boone rose so quickly that he nearly overbalanced the table. “I beg your pardon,” he said, for lack ofanything better. When she only continued to stare at him, the pulse in her throat beating visibly, he tried again. “I got carried away when I saw you were bleeding. I’ve never been able to take Jessie’s cuts and scrapes in stride.” Struggling not to babble, he thrust the cloth at her. “I imagine you’d rather handle it yourself.”
    She accepted the cloth. She needed a moment before she dared speak. How was it possible that a man could stir her so desperately with doctoring and a fairy tale, then leave her fighting to find a slippery hold on her composure when he apologized?
    Her own fault, Ana thought as she scrubbed—with more force than was really necessary—at the scrape on her arm. It was her gift and her curse that she would feel too much.
    “You look like you should be the one sitting down,” she told him briskly, then rose to go to the cupboard for one of her own medications. “Would you like something cold to drink?”
    “No … Yes, actually.” Though he doubted that a gallon of ice water would dampen the fire in his gut. “Blood always makes me panic.”
    “Panicked or not, you were certainly efficient.” She poured him a glass of lemonade from the fat pitcher she fetched from the refrigerator. “And it was a very nice story.” She was smiling now, more at ease.
    “A story usually serves to calm both Jessie and me during a session with iodine and bandages.”
    “Iodine stings.” She expertly dabbed a tobacco brown liquid from a small apothecary jar onto her cleaned cuts. “I can give you something that won’t, if you like. For your next emergency.”
    “What is it?” Suspicious, he sniffed at the jar. “Smells like flowers.” And so did