“Yes?”

Somehow he had to buy some time. He was more than willing to let her have her way. But first he wanted to understand what had motivated all these sudden wicked tactics of hers-not that he wasn’t enjoying them. Just that he figured a few minutes of distracting conversation was a good idea. “I was thinking how crazy it was that we’ve been together every day, yet I never asked you what you did. I mean, I know you moved here after a divorce and set up your herb business. But what kind of work did you do before that?”

“Work?” The question obviously startled her, because momentarily she forgot the sultry-smile, big-eye thing.

“Yeah. I mean, for a living. Were you into some kind of different career before this?”

There went the last of the provocative smile and the hip sashaying. It wasn’t as if she didn’t still look sexy as hell, and then some, but as if she stopped planning it.

She handed him dishes, one after the other, and he carted them to the table. Within minutes they were eating. A half hour later they were on the last bites and their second glass of wine.

“I was a physical therapist,” she told him. “I didn’t have any kind of formal specialty or anything fancy like that. But I mostly worked with kids. Kids who’d been in accidents, lost a limb or use of a limb. Tough road, to get a little one physically and emotionally prepared for life again, after going through a trauma to that extent.”

Cameron shook his head, no longer stalling or playing games. He was fascinated by everything she’d been telling him. “Wow. I can’t believe you never mentioned this before.”

“There was no reason to. I’m not doing it now.”

He hesitated. He could see in her face there was more here. He sensed Violet kept the “more” to herself for reasons he couldn’t fathom. So he pressed. “You quit because you burned out on it?”

“No. Not exactly. Kids tend to hate physical therapy. Actually, adults do, too. It’s not fun. It hurts and it’s hard work. And especially for children who’ve been through a life-changing event, they feel confused and angry about what’s happened to them. Anger, fear, frustration. I can’t explain this, but that’s exactly why I loved the work-at the time. Have some more wings, Cam.”

“I couldn’t eat another bite. So you really liked working with children, huh?”

She snapped her fingers and jumped up. “I’ll bet I can coax you into eating one more thing. How about a little dish of vanilla-bean ice cream? With a little drizzle of raspberry rum sauce over it?”

“Whatever you can handle, I can handle,” he said.

She shot him a look. By then the sun was skating down the horizon, turning the treetops a velvet green and the sky a silky azure. One cat opened her eye at the word ice cream but otherwise the herd was snoozing at a distance, too lazy to even beg.

“Well then, hon, I’ll just dish you up a big dollop of trouble,” Vi promised him.

As if she hadn’t done that from the second he met her. Right then, though, Cameron wasn’t willing to be completely diverted from the bone he was determined to pick. “So…why aren’t you still doing the physical therapist thing?”

He saw a sudden flash in her eyes, the slightest stiffening in her shoulders. “Because when I came home, I started the Herb Haven.”

Which didn’t answer his question in the slightest. “And that’s obviously gone great for you,” he said smoothly, “but you weren’t inclined to find work as a physical therapist in White Hills? Or weren’t there any PT jobs here?”

“No. There’s probably work. There’s a good-size clinic in White Hills. I just-”

“You just what?” He smiled at her as he poured her another glass of wine.

“I just decided that maybe I should stop working with children for a while. Do something else. Everyone doesn’t stay in the same job forever.”

“No, they don’t. In fact, I never got it, why people felt obligated to find one career and stick to it. What’s so wrong about liking change? Wanting to do new things, see new horizons?”

“Exactly. People don’t have just one dream,” she said defensively.

“They sure don’t.” Yet he was almost sure that Vi still did have that one dream about working with kids. Not because he had extrasensory perception. But because there seemed a haunted unhappiness in her eyes, a tension.

“Change is fun,” she agreed. “What’s not to love about new challenges? Doesn’t everybody need to stretch their minds? Not fall into a rut?”

“That’s really true…but, damn, I have the hardest time imagining you falling into any kind of rut. You bring a sense of fun and adventure into everything you do. Other people get bored. You seem to find a spirit of fun in everything.”

She glowed for a second, then jumped up on him again, all flustered. “All right. That’s enough being nice to me. About time we talked about you. In fact, I’ve been wondering-”

“No,” he said mildly, not responding to her words but to her actions. He suspected that she was about to make a deliberately catastrophic amount of noise, banging around the kitchen-an effective way to cut off any further serious conversation. “Let’s leave the dishes for now. How about if we take the ice cream out on the porch swing and see if we can scout up a breeze?”

Typically, she was willing to do anything to get out of dishes so she agreed. She bought out the ice-cream dishes, not little dishes, like she’d claimed, but major masterpieces with her fancy sauce. The smell of rum was wildly sweet and strong, adding to the other nectar smells of the evening. He exclaimed over the dessert. She laughed. Yet it was Violet who spooned one bite and then put her dish on the ground.

Before he could ask another personal question-and, for damn sure, before he could get her to talk about her work with children again-she suddenly stole his dish, too. Set it on the ground in the sun, next to hers. And plopped in his lap.

A guy always hoped to win the lottery, but he didn’t expect it. Her fanny nestled in his lap, as if seeking the exact weight and pressure that would drive him crazy. She found it easily. Before he could even breathe, her arms had swooped around his neck. For all that sudden impulsiveness, though, she leaned closer and only offered him a whisper of a kiss. The graze of her mouth against his was soft, light, silky.

“Hey,” he whispered. “What’s happening here?”

“You don’t want me to kiss you?”

“Oh, yeah, I do.” And all his control buttons snapped. The power outage of ’03 had nothing on this moment. He’d waited and waited and waited to taste her again, and here she was, warm and willing and almost bare, obviously intent on inviting him to take what he’d been craving for the past two weeks.

So he let her test him with that teasing little kiss of hers and then came back, pirate fast, with another kind of kiss entirely. He didn’t want her lips; he wanted her whole mouth, her tongue. He didn’t want a sweet sample; he wanted saliva and combustible heat. He wanted her heart pounding. He wanted her eyes to open wide with awareness and worry-not bad worry, but he was definitely tired to hell of her thinking she was safe around him. He wanted her to know that she wasn’t safe. And neither was he.

He got everything he wanted and then some. When her lashes shuttered open, she looked dazed and more than a little shook up. “Well,” she said faintly, on the gust of a pale breath. “I guess you did want to kiss me.”

But he couldn’t come up with any more easy smiles. “You really thought I didn’t?”

“You didn’t seem to have any problem walking into your own room all these nights. You didn’t even try to-”

“Seduce you?”

“I don’t need to be seduced, Lachlan. I’m a grown woman. But I just didn’t understand what the deal was.”

“Neither did I, chére.” He pushed back a strand of hair that had sneaked free from all those clips holding it back. “I knew I wanted you. I knew you were willing to make love with me. But I kept having the bad, bad feeling that you were going to regret it.”

That startled her. “Why did you think I’d regret sleeping with you? I never said-”

“I know you ‘never said’ anything specific. But you only said you were willing to make love when you pegged me as the kind of man who wouldn’t give a damn about you, wouldn’t stick around.” When she tried squirming and doing her flutter-the-hands thing, he gently cuffed her wrist. “The fact is, I do care. I do give a damn. And nothing I understand about you, sensed about you, made me believe you were being truthful. If you want a short fling, trust me, Vi, I’d be happy to give you one. But I can’t buy it. That you’re going to be okay to just hit the sheets and then go our different ways the next morning. Or the next week.”

She took a hard breath. Then pushed off his lap and stood. So did he. As if the porch had suddenly become unbearably claustrophobic, she suddenly vaulted down the porch steps and started walking. So did he. Restless or not, it was still tepid hot, still too humid to breathe. She didn’t run any farther than the deep shade of the maple, and then she turned on him.

“You want to know the deal, Lachlan? It’s that I have skinny tubes. That’s the deal. The whole deal. The chance of my ever having kids is mighty unlikely.”

Aw, hell. The minute she blurted that out, Cameron wanted to slug himself. God knew how he’d missed it, because immediately he realized she’d given him a ton of clues. Her reproducing plants so wildly. Her endless herd of cats. Her not going back to a profession with children. The way she mothered the two girls who worked for her. He even remembered-now, too damn late-the funny look on her face when she’d first said she didn’t need birth control. “That’s about as unfair as it gets, chére,” he said softly.

“More than unfair. I never wanted fancy things. Forget the riches and jewels and all that. I just wanted a house and kids and a man to love.” Her head shot up, her eyes jewel bright. “And you’re wondering what that has to do with our making love.”