She put out the cheese and crackers and sliced apples onto a plate while he finished getting the meatloaf ready to go into the oven. After washing his hands, Ian came over to the couch, where she was already curled up under a blanket and the opening credits of the movie had begun.

It felt so good, so easy, so right, when he wrapped his arms around her and she tucked her head against his chest while they watched. The story was simple, about a small-town rock band, the funny guy getting the pretty girl, and good triumphing over evil. And, much to her delight, it turned out that Ian knew all the words from when he was a teenager, especially the part where they went into a long string of “she’s a babe” jokes.

Her stomach growled just as the timer on the oven dinged. Putting the movie on pause, they headed back into the kitchen to eat their simple meal. She’d found a candle and matches on a shelf and placed it, lit, in the center of the small pine table.

“Have you ever thought about being in a movie like that?”

“Casting directors have always seen me more as the dramatic type.”

“You’re great in the dramas,” he said, “but you’d be great in a comedy, too.”

“You really think I could be the slinky guitar-playing heroine?” She vamped a line from the movie, putting on her best sexy attitude.

He blinked, clearly stunned for a minute. “Wow, that was good. So, yeah, you could totally play that part. Though I was thinking more about you killing it as the goofy lead singer with the cable show in the basement.”

She laughed, barely covering her mouthful of meatloaf in time. “You know,” she said a few moments later, “now that you mention it, it would be fun to do a comedy. Although I have a feeling that if I’m going to get one, I’ll have to show those casting directors a thing or two they don’t expect.”

“If anyone can do it, it’s you, Tatiana. You’re extraordinarily good at what you do.”

“Thank you.” She suddenly felt shy. “So are you. Actually, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Of course you do,” he teased her.

For a moment, she hesitated. Neither of them wanted to let the real world intrude on their day any more than it already had in the grocery store, but now that they’d spoken about her career, she had another question for him about his. And since it hadn’t felt weird to bring up her job in the midst of having fun, she hoped it wouldn’t be strange to talk about his, either.

“When Flynn was walking you through his new idea, he talked to you like you were a tech guy, rather than just some guy in a suit.”

“I drive my tech guys crazy,” he admitted with a cute smile. “They’re always telling me to stop breaking their toys.”

“Actually,” she said in a teasing voice as they took their empty plates over to the sink, “I could see you as the geeky guy down in the basement downing Red Bull and pulling a pen out of his pocket protector.”

Laughing, he tugged her back under the blanket on the couch to finish watching the movie. But Tatiana was listening so carefully to every beat of his heart as she lay against his chest that she barely heard another word of dialogue in the film.

She didn’t know who started kissing whom first, but it didn’t matter this time. All that mattered was that it was so good, so sweet. Being with Ian was everything she’d ever wanted, everything she’d ever dreamed of. Soon, they had each other’s clothes off, and she was lying naked on the couch with his wonderfully heavy weight pressing her deeper into the cushions.

She loved the sweetness, the softness, he was giving her, at the same time that wild hunger vibrated between them the way it had from the very first moment she’d kissed him. He’d been slow, gentle, this morning when he’d put his mouth on her and taken her over the edge again and again. She was unabashedly greedy for all of it, for everything she could experience with Ian, for every new sensation.

“More.”

Just one word spoken so softly against his lips, but he immediately stilled, his lips against hers.

“Show me more, Ian.” It was what she’d asked for their first night together, and she remembered what it had done to him...and then what he’d done with her. “I love all the different sides of you. Gentle and sweet. Rough and wild. I don’t want you to hold anything back when you’re with me.”

Since she was the one doing the asking, she should have been prepared for what Ian did next, but he had his hands on her hips to spin her around so fast that she was momentarily disoriented when she realized she was on her knees.

The couch cushions, warm from the heat of their bodies, crumpled in her fisting hands as she tried to ground herself. But how could she do anything but fly wild and free when Ian was running his hands over her, shoulders to hips, breasts to the vee between her legs, with hungry abandon? He wasn’t gentle anymore, was simply taking everything she had offered to him by asking, by begging, for more. She loved it, loved every second of his hands, his mouth, the heat of his naked skin against hers.

Again, he moved fast, giving her no warning as he gripped her hips to plunge into her.

“Oh.” She heard the wonder in her voice, couldn’t have held it in even if she’d wanted to. “Do that again. Please, just like that.”

His answering groan sounded as raw and as desperate as she felt, her name at the center of it. And when he went impossibly deep into her again, his hips slamming into hers, she gasped with pleasure.

So much pleasure that she could hardly believe she’d lived this long without knowing it was there.

“I like it when you do that. I like it so much. So, so much.”

“I do too, sweetheart.” To her ears, his words spoke not just to sex, but to trust, and to a depth of emotion between them she’d never shared with anyone else. “I do, too.”

She trembled, shook, knew she was going to shatter any second. And in the end that was all it took, one more slip, one more slide of his fingers over her breasts, between her legs, for her to completely break apart, with Ian only moments behind her.

With no breath, or brain cells, left for words, all that existed in their little room above the barn was pleasure, and a connection that was twining deeper and deeper with every laugh they shared, every orgasm that exploded between their bodies…and later, when passion had temporarily run its course and he tucked them both into bed, every quiet moment in each other’s arms.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The sound of giggling outside woke Ian up. “Sounds like we have a couple of little visitors outside.”

Tatiana made a sleepy sound of agreement, then pressed a kiss to the arm he had slung over her body and pushed off the covers so that they could both get out of bed to put on jeans and T-shirts. Her hair was a tangle of curls and her eyes were still heavy-lidded with sleep as she walked over to the door and opened it with a smile.

The little black and white dog bounded in first. Two young twins, a boy and girl that Ian figured were probably around four years old, were staring up at her with big eyes. “You’re pretty,” the little girl said.

“So are you,” Tatiana said as she squatted down to come face to face with the children.

“I’m Sadie. This is Jamie. He’s my brother.”

“I’m Tatiana.” She gestured behind her. “That’s Ian.”

The boy held out a basket of eggs. “We are supposed to bring you these.”

“Our chickens made them,” Sadie informed them both.

“Wow.” Tatiana smiled over her shoulder at Ian. “Look at the marvelous gift our new friends just brought us.” She turned back to the kids. “Does your mommy or daddy know you’re here?”

“Mummy is the one who sent us,” Jamie said as if it should have been obvious. “She said not to bother you, though.”

“Oh, that’s the last thing you could ever do. I’m just happy Ian and I will have someone to share all these eggs with. Do you like to eat them raw or do you think I should cook them?”

They both made a face at the first suggestion, then hollered, “You have to cook them!” in unison, though Sadie had to tell her, “Once I saw my uncle put a raw egg in a drink.”

“Did you ever do that, Ian, to pump up those muscles of yours?”

“Rafe dared me to drink a full glass of raw eggs once.” He shook his head, laughing at himself. “It was disgusting, but he did end up doing my chores for a week when I won the bet, so it was worth it.”

While Tatiana went into the kitchen to start cooking up eggs and bacon for all of them, the kids immediately ran over to the cabinet in the corner and pulled out a box filled with Lego pieces.

“I know how to build a car,” Jamie told Ian.

“I can make an airplane,” Sadie one-upped her brother as she sat crossed-legged on the hooked rug on the pine floor and dug her little hands into the Legos to dump a bunch all around her. “Want me to show you how?”

“You bet.” Ian found a spot on the rug between the kids, both of them talking over each other as they tried to show him the best way to put together a moving vehicle out of the scratched-up, worn Legos in the plastic box. Between Ian and his brothers, they’d probably had nearly every set of Legos as kids, and soon he was reaching over the dog on his lap into the box to make a spaceship of his own.

“I can’t get these two pieces apart!” Sadie whined, so he put down his own creation and focused on helping her with hers.

The way the little girl went from zero to sixty, from happy to frustrated in the blink of an eye, reminded him of his sister Mia when she’d been little. They hadn’t played much with Legos, but she’d been a whiz at Chutes and Ladders and, when she was a little older, Battleship. Oh yes, he thought with a grin, she’d loved to sink his ships.

He looked up, then, to find Tatiana smiling as she watched the three of them and the puppy play together on the floor. “I should have known making Lego spaceships would be yet another talent of yours,” she teased him.

Her skin was flushed from the steam rising off the pans on the little stove top, the small hairs around her forehead curling even more wildly than the others. A little Lego truck driving up his arm made him turn away, but not before he read with perfect clarity the emotion in her green eyes.

More than once she’d told him she loved him. More than once he’d told her it was impossible, that love couldn’t come that fast. But when she called out to them that bacon and eggs were ready and the kids dashed over to squeeze around the small table, moving behind her to stroke her hair and press a kiss to the top of her head was the most natural thing in the world.

Being here with Tatiana was so simple—board games and splashing in puddles and laughing at old movies. Life hadn’t been this normal or this fun for him since he was a kid. Being with other women had always meant fancy dinners, grand gestures, glittering jewels. And as he watched her help the kids settle with food and orange juice, he was struck by a sudden vision of having a life like this with Tatiana that stretched out past the storm—a life full of fun, laughter, games. She’d make every second joyful.

But just as quickly as that picture formed, he saw another one—a vision where he was too busy with work to enjoy being with her, with their kids. She’d be busy too, with her films, and tensions would surely rise when they both tried—and failed—to carve out anything extra for each other.

A knock sounded on the door and when he got up to answer it, he found a very apologetic brunette on the other side. “Sadie, Jamie, you were supposed to bring the eggs and then turn right around and come home.”

Around a mouthful of eggs and bacon, Jamie said, “They asked us to stay.”

Sadie pointed at the pile of Legos on the floor. “Ian needed us to show him how to build a spaceship.”