He nodded. “Would you mind if I took the casket back and asked Ted and Jaden to take a look at it and see if they can find out anything about it in their reference materials?”

“No. I don’t mind at all,” she said.

He sat back. She smiled at him. “Liam, the more I’m in it, the more I love the house.”

He nodded uneasily. “It’s a great house,” he said flatly.

She seemed more at ease. “So, why don’t we talk about you for a while? It’s not a surprise that you’re a cop, you know. You always wanted to solve every riddle. So…what have you been doing all these years? Did you graduate, go right into the police force?”

He shook his head, wishing that his tension would ease. “I went to the U of M. I went into criminal studies, spent some time in Miami, took special classes that were offered up in Quantico, thought about the FBI and came back to Key West. I loved Washington, D.C. It was a great place to live, but I missed the water. Yes, it’s on the Potomac. I miss the kind of water you can go in every day.”

She laughed. “That was an easy roundup of a lot of years!” she told him.

Their main courses arrived. She talked about her drawing, and about her partner, Avery. He was a whiz with animation, and they worked well together. She loved being her own boss. “Which, of course, is why I’m able to spend time down here now,” she said. “But you’re kind of the boss now, aren’t you? I heard about the shake-up in the police department—and about David coming home to vindicate himself from any suspicion,” she said.

“The chief is a great guy. I’m under him,” Liam said. “But since I’m known to work all hours and all days, I can take time when I need it, which I did recently, when I went off with David, Katie, Sean, Vanessa and others on the film shoot, trailing the recent massacre on Haunt Island.”

She set a hand on his. “That’s the problem, Liam. You’ve been so busy with really horrific events. Please—you’re worrying about me too much. I’m fine.”

When she touched him, he felt as if time and place whirled around them. Her fingertips created an instant tension in his muscles, ignited a fire in his blood and caused dangerous things to happen to his state of arousal.

He drew his hand back. “I just want you to be careful, Kelsey, that’s all.”

She seemed troubled that he had drawn away. He didn’t want to explain.

Soon after, they finished and walked out on the docks. They could almost see the Merlin house from the pier; some of the high-growing pines obscured it, but she had left on lights in the front and back of the house, so a glow could be seen.

“It’s pretty, huh?” Kelsey asked.

“Um…”

“Let’s go back and sit on the beach?” she suggested.

They drove back to the house. When she unlocked the front door, he was tense again. He didn’t know what he expected. That something might have changed?

But nothing appeared to be any different.

Kelsey seemed happy. She suggested they bring drinks and cookies out to the sand, since they had passed on dessert. He agreed. They went out through the family room and down to the small beach area. The wash of the waves against the shore was a pleasant sound. Light glowed from the house and from an almost full moon above. Light clouds could be seen drifting over the water.

“It is really beautiful, isn’t it?” Kelsey asked.

“Just like Eden,” he said dryly.

She smacked his shoulder. “Liam.”

It was arousing to just touch his shoulder!

“Hey! It’s beautiful,” he agreed. He was quiet a minute. “You own an amazing piece of property, with the best view around. It still worries me. I still wish you’d stay with me. Or Katie and David, or Sean and Vanessa, or—”

“I’m not staying with any set of lovers, thank you very much.”

“Jonas runs a B and B,” Liam reminded her.

“That would be silly.”

“He wouldn’t charge you.”

“Then I wouldn’t stay there. And it actually isn’t money. Cutter was solvent, and I’m already on his banking accounts, and, thank you, but my career is actually lucrative!”

“I assumed it was. You said that it would be silly.”

“It would be silly.”

“What about staying with me?”

She was looking out on the water. A slow smile touched her lips, and after a moment she answered softly, “I can’t stay with you.”

“Why not?”

“I’d wind up sleeping with you.”

“How crazy,” he said.

“Oh! Well, I—” Her words faltered; she seemed to think she had received a rejection.

“It’s crazy,” he interrupted quickly, “because I believe we’re going to sleep together anyway, and I believe we would have slept together years ago had you stayed, and not staying with me is not going to prevent what surely seems to me to be just a little bit desperately inevitable.”

The breeze from the ocean whispered by, lifting a strand of her hair, an ebony that seemed to burn with a blue depth in the moonlight. Her lips curled slowly back into a smile. They still weren’t touching; they were just inches apart, seated on the sand, legs stretched out before them while the surf came near enough to brush their toes.

She stared at the night.

“I’ll never understand,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“Time, places, life, the world, people,” she said, and she turned to him at last. “And it is crazy. I’ve been gone so long, I haven’t seen you in forever, and many a day went by when I didn’t even think about you or Key West, or even the water and the way it feels to sit outside and see the endless dark undulation of the water at night….”

“And?”

“And when I came back, the moment I saw you…You’d changed so much, and you hadn’t changed at all, and I felt like I did that last night, that I could still crawl into your arms, and you would be there to comfort me.”

“I wasn’t exactly thinking about comforting you,” he admitted.

She looked at him, and he knew how hard he was trying to play it all cool and rational, and yet…he was melting. Everything in him was melting, burning, and he felt the tension of desire rip through his limbs and his core, and he prayed that the longing to pull her into his arms, rip off her clothes and hold her wasn’t glaringly apparent. There was a glow in her eyes and a breathlessness about her; he thought that he could feel the pounding of her heart.

“I think I’ve been in love with you forever,” she said, and it was barely a whisper, hardly sounding above the breeze. “Oh, no! I’m so sorry, don’t take that as… I mean, I suppose I’ve always been drawn to you. If I hadn’t been quite such a good kid… I think a few of our schoolmates and friends might have been involved, but… I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

“Babble—it’s quite all right,” he managed huskily.

She burst out laughing, and so did he, and he would never be sure if he did reach out and grab her with force or if she actually turned to him, pouncing upon him. He went back flat in the sand, and she was on top of him. She stared at him a moment longer, and then her lips fell down upon his and her body stretched out atop his. For a moment they were locked in a wickedly hot, wet, passionate kiss with their tongues violent in the quest for the most intimate kiss in the world, and then they rolled so that they were side by side in the sand, still in one another’s arms, still melded together in the kiss, and yet freeing themselves to touch and pull closer and closer.

At last, somehow, she was beneath him, and his hands wandered freely over her length. She reached up to touch his face, then pulled him back, her fingertips pressing down the length of his spine. His lips touched hers again, and he felt the tremor of her heart, the rapid rise and fall of her breath, the vibrant movement she made beneath him, arching closer, touching….

He gasped, breaking away from her.

He leaped to his feet and reached down to her. She caught his hand, allowing him to draw her up from the sand. He pulled her against him again, laughing as he whispered, “It’s private, it’s remote. It’s not that private or remote.”

She grinned, turned and kicked up sand as she ran for the house. He bolted after her, following her into the family room. She had already sped through it, on her way to the stairs.

Panting, he forced himself to pause to lock and secure the door.

She had raced up the stairs to her room, and he followed. She had jumped upon the bed in the shadows; the room was lit only by the light escaping from the bathroom. Everything in him seemed to be pulsing to a painful degree as he started toward her.

To his astonishment, she stopped him.

“The door!”

“I locked the door.”

“The bedroom door!”

He had to admit: the biology of his male mind had gone beyond thought. He stood still as she leaped back up, ran to the bedroom door and locked it. But when he would have questioned her, he never got the chance. She made a running leap to him, arms and legs locked around him, knocking him back down to the bed.

And there, breathless, they began a disorganized and frantic removal of clothing, she tearing at his buttons, he lifting the hem of her knit pullover, both of them using their feet to try to remove their shoes. When clothing was cast away at last, they stared at one another, breathing heavily again, and then his hands were on the firmness of her breasts and she was locked around him again, fingers upon his chest, kissing against his throat, his collarbone, his chest. In a tangle they kissed and petted and explored, and at length he found himself straddling her, feverish, his longing to be a good lover waging war with his desperation to be inside her.

She dragged his mouth down to hers and wrapped her legs around his hips. He forced himself to a certain finesse as he slid slowly into her. At first he was aware of nothing at all but the incredible scent of her body, of the amazing movement, of being with her at last, forceful, his urgency matched by her own, the eager vitality and need of their lovemaking akin in an undulating motion like the ocean in a tempest. She writhed against him, increasing his arousal to a maddened frenzy, as if he were an adolescent, as if life and the state of the world rested in her touching him in return, coming to the same state of wild, frenetic ecstasy.