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surrender.
    To his credit, he tried to put a halt to the situation. But when he went to break the kiss, her little whimper of distress scored a direct hit to…
    What? His heart? Impossible! He was thirty-five, for Pete’s sake, not fifteen, and knew better than to buy that kind of codswallop on the strength of a twenty-four-hour acquaintance with a pretty woman. His conscience? Hell, it was nothing more than a dying whisper desperately trying to make itself heard over the caterwauling of rampant lust! Good deed for the day? Fat chance! He’d been telling her the truth when he said he was no Boy Scout.
    “I shouldn’t have done that,” he muttered, dragging his lips away from hers before he made things even more dangerously volatile by bringing his tongue into play. “It was a very bad idea.”
    She didn’t argue, at least not in so many words. She just brought her soft, smooth little hand up to his cheek and touched him as wonderingly as if she’d just discovered her own personal guardian angel.
    “Jenna,” he croaked, afraid that the distant thunder echoing in his blood boded no good for either of them, “you’re pushing your luck.”
    She slid both arms around his waist and leaned her head on his chest. “My luck,” she said dreamily, “hit rock bottom yesterday. But thanks to you, it’s starting to improve.”
    If his survival instincts weren’t all tangled up in hunger for something he had no right wanting, he’d march her back to The Inn, pack her off to bed by herself, in her own room, then hightail it out of her life before he compounded his already manifest sins.
    If he possessed one ounce of decency, he wouldn’t be tracing a path from her chin to her throat and fantasizing about how she’d look without any clothes on.
    If he had a grain of self-respect, he’d back away from her instead of letting her know he was primed for seduction in the most obvious way a man could convey such a message to a woman.
    And if the damned Inn weren’t so fixated on honeymooners, it wouldn’t have made it so easy for a couple to be alone at every turn. There wouldn’t be shadowed spotlights pearling the night, or a lullaby of surf whispering ashore, or the scent of cedar and fir and hemlock sweetening the air.
    “Maybe,” he said, wrestling with vanishing control, “we should figure out what’s happening here before we let things go any further.”
    “Oh, Edmund,” she murmured, her hands wreaking havoc over his rib cage, “I’m so tired of trying to look for answers that aren’t there. Sometimes, things happen without reason or warning. Just this once, can’t we live for the moment and never mind about tomorrow?”
    “So what are you suggesting?” He forced the question past a throat gone dry as sandpaper.
    “That we follow our feelings, whether or not they make sense.”
    And just in case he hadn’t picked up on what she meant, she tilted her hips against him and lifted her mouth to his again.
    He made one last stab at rational argument. “Your feelings are all tied up with another man, Jenna, and I’m not interested in being his stand-in.”
    “Nor am I,” she said, her lips so close that the words brushed his mouth.
    Her skin was smooth and warm to his touch. She smelled of flowers, she tasted of innocence, she trembled with need. Her breathing was almost as ragged as his own. He could feel her pulse racing.
    “Please make love to me,” she whimpered, taking his hand and closing it over her breast. “Please, Edmund, make me feel whole again!”
    “Not here,” he said thickly, urging her back toward The Inn. Whatever else he might be, he wasn’t such a lowlife that he’d risk their being discovered by other guests. If they were going to make love—and he knew that, barring some cataclysmic natural disaster, nothing would stop them now—it would be in private. Not in her room but in his. Removed from anything that might remind her of the man whose place he was taking.
    The lobby lay