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then? He’d lied through his teeth when he’d said it was only lust on his part. What a great joke that was!
    Now, lying in bed, he folded his hands behind his head on the pillow and stared up at the dark ceiling of his quiet bedroom a quarter mile from the house where he’d grown up, where Chloe now slept. Crickets chirped outside the open window. Cicadas sang in the trees. But insect noises weren’t what kept him awake.
    It was Chloe.
    Seeing her again was harder than he expected. Touching her again. Protecting her again. He should step away, protect his heart.
    But he couldn’t pull away.
    It didn’t matter that she’d left him, chosen the city instead of him. She was still little Chloe, the girl he’d loved forever. Being near her again showed him he still craved her touch, her smell. He had to remind himself a dozen times she was leaving again in a few days, returning to her idyllic city life, without him. But while she was still here…
    He rubbed his hands over his eyes and flipped to his side. A single shaft of light from the moon shone in the window. A soft breeze ruffling the drapes at the window soon raced across his body, cutting some of the heat from the humid July night.
    After she’d left, Chloe wrote him countless letters. Being stubborn and angry, he never opened any of them. What could they have said that he wanted to hear? They’d worked well as kindling for the fireplace on the long, lonely nights where a good book was his only entertainment. That, and the sporadic signal from WPLT , the radio station out of North Platte.
    Today, he’d asked her about other men. He slammed his eyes shut, frustrated at his weakness. She hadn’t answered his question. Was there a man waiting for her in Lincoln? She’d known about Isabelle somehow. He’d been honest when he said the woman wouldn’t let him touch her, but only because he’d never asked. He just didn’t look at Isabelle that way, or feel that way about her.
    Damn it! What does it matter anyway? Too much time had passed. Plus, he and Isabelle were together now. He’d marry her after harvest. If she agreed. But seeing Chloe again, feeling for her again, made what he felt for Isabelle seem so shallow, so fake. It made him empty inside.
    With a quick punch to his pillow, he rolled onto his back. Could he ask Chloe to stay? Maybe life wasn’t as grand as she thought it would be when she’d left him. How could he ask her without looking like a fool? Could he handle being left behind again? Shouldn’t he at least try?
    He sighed. Pride sure made for cold company, even on a humid July evening.
    A noise in the distance filtered through the upstairs window. It sounded like footsteps on his porch and then his back door closing. He got up and looked out the window, wondering if he was imagining things. There wasn’t an auto or horse in sight. He grabbed the shotgun he had resting against the wall near to the bed and held his breath, waiting to hear more noises.
    Sure enough, light footsteps came up the stairs and then down the hall toward his room. His heart was thumping. Was someone breaking in? In the back of his mind, he was hopeful Chloe was the source, that she’d taken him up on his offer of loving and had made the trek across the pasture to come to him.
    “Reese?”
    It was her. He set down the shotgun and lit the oil lamp next to his bed before pushing open the door farther and welcoming her inside.
    “You came,” he said on sigh.
    “I need to know something.” She walked farther into his room and stopped right in front of him.
    “What’s that?” His voice was thick, his body responding to her closeness.
    “Did you mean to call me a whore earlier when you offered to share your bed with me again?” She poked him in the chest with her finger. “Because that’s what I felt like when you left. I felt cheap and dirty, as if the love we shared was just nothing more than…what did you call it? Scratching an itch?”
    Her voice wavered as