He was nuzzling his way down my body.  He paused when he found one soft nipple.  He rubbed his lush lips back and forth, once, twice, until it puckered for him.  With a groan, he sucked it into his hot mouth.

My hands stroked over his hair as his rough hands pushed my breasts together, and he let go of one sensitized nipple and kissed his way to the other.

“What is it you think we want?” I asked him, a needy quaver in my voice.

With a gasping sigh, he pulled himself out of me, took his lips away, and just lay on me, low on my body, his cheek pillowed on a soft breast.  He was so heavy that his flat abs, pushed high between my thighs, were pressed flush against my sex.

I kept stroking his hair.  I was struggling to breath under his great weight, but not wanting him to move so much as an inch from this very spot.

His body was trembling on top of me.  “I want you and you want me.  It’s that simple.  Every time I get to be with you, I’m better for it.  Every single time.”

For Heath, a man of few words, this was as good as a declaration.

With the way he was laying, ear to my chest, I knew he could hear how my heart rate went wild at those words.

“Just when I think I’ve given up on you completely, you say something sweet like that,” I whispered, kissing the top of his head.

“Like I’ve said before, I’m not sweet, not even close, so if I said something that was, you should take it to heart.”

I did.  Once again, I took it all to heart.

And then he ruined it.

“This is the last time I’ll be here to see you,” he told me.  “It has to be.”

“Why so final?” I kept my voice surprisingly even.

“I have to leave.  Have to go somewhere far from here, and I can’t say when I’ll be back.  Too long to ask you to wait for me, certainly.”

Something in his voice was asking me to anyway.  Like he knew it wasn’t fair, knew he couldn’t ask it, but some part of him couldn’t help but try.

“Days, months . . . years?  Can you tell me that at least?”

“I can’t.”  At least he sounded like he regretted that.

But still, regret was not enough.  I needed more.  I deserved more.

Just give me some information, I wanted to say to him.

Give me an excuse, any sort of explanation, and I can work with you, I almost told him.

Tell me you’ll be back someday, just make me that paper thin promise, and I’ll wait for you, I almost said.

So many things were on the tip of my tongue to say to him, but they never quite came out.

And so we both had regrets.

I wasn’t bitter about any of it, I swear.

Not then at least.  Later, I’d find my bitter (with some help), but it was not my first inclination.

I went through stages after he left.  Which was surely bizarre when I thought about what a short time we’d actually been together.

I mean, what did we have, really?  We’d spent mere days together, mere hours.  And it was a fact that most of that time we were in bed, and some part of him was inside some part of me.

That did not a love story make.

But no matter what I told myself, he’d made an impact, left an imprint, on every part of me he’d touched.  When I took inventory of just what that meant, there was very little he’d left of me unscathed.

Even so, I found myself trying, more than anything, to just make peace with his leaving.

I was good at making peace with things I couldn’t control or change.  I always had been.  It was what made me a great photographer, and hell, even a good dental patient.  I could hold still, without complaint, as long as it took until the job was done.

I had a bit of a temper, but it usually burned out fast, and in its wake, I always found peace.  Heath had been right.  I was an inherently peaceful woman.

The peaceful stage didn’t last long, but then, it had help in its exit as it was forcibly removed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

It was ten p.m. when my doorbell rang.

Of course I assumed it was Heath.  I wasn’t expecting anyone else, and though he’d said he wouldn’t be back, it was a strange hour for a random drop in from someone who was not my mysterious lover.

I guess it was excitement that had me not so much as glancing in the peephole or bothering to put on more than the thin tank and tiny panties I’d been about to wear to bed.

I’d had what felt like endless hours after to regret the things I hadn’t said to him, hadn’t tried to get him to say to me, and so even if this was just another goodbye from him, I wanted it, if only to get a few things off my chest.

I flung my front door open without a thought toward caution.

I was just so sure it was him.

It was not.

It was a woman, a stranger.  She was very young and staring at me with wintry eyes and a bitter twist to her mouth.

I was about to learn that that bitter was contagious.

She had short, dark hair, and a lean muscular build that was apparent under her tight navy shirt and tighter jeans.

She was very pretty, but I doubted she was called that often.  There were too many other things about her that stood out.  The pretty was far from one of her dominant features.

She looked hard.  Not in an unflattering way.  Not hard as in brittle, but hard as in carved stone.  Soft just wasn’t an option for this woman.  I knew that at once.

“Hello, Lourdes,” she said.  She had a husky voice, the kind of raspy tone men talked about.