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I’d recently learned that she had a weakness for a particular brand of body mists that were lighter than typical perfumes or cologne. She always smelled like some kind of fruit or flowers.

For some reason, those scents did it for me more than any expensive women’s perfumes I’d ever inhaled.

Maybe because those scents suited Reese so well, and I never knew what fresh scent she was going to be wearing on any particular day.

I’d already decided I was going to find out where I could buy them and get her every scent that existed so she could try them all.

It was a stormy night, and we had a line of severe thunderstorms that were rolling through.

I was used to Montana storms, but even I winced a little at a large crack of thunder that sounded right over the house.

“Devon?” Reese’s nervous voice called from my bedroom door.

I sat up immediately. “What’s wrong?”

“That was loud. Do you think the horses are okay?”

The horses were fine.

I’d checked on them all and made sure they were comfortably in their stalls in the barn because I knew the storms were due to hit.

But I had to wonder if Reese was okay.

That thunder had almost sounded like a loud explosion, and I knew she didn’t like that kind of noise.

“They’re fine. They’re used to the storms around here,” I assured her. “Are you okay?”

“Honestly, I hate the explosive thunder. I used to love thunderstorms. Now I hate them. Can I stay with you for a few minutes?”

I only had the light from a small reading light on my nightstand, but I didn’t have to see her clearly to know that she was uneasy. I could hear it in her voice.

“Come here,” I said as I held my arms open for her.

She sprinted to the bed, climbed under the covers, and leapt into my arms.

Fuck!It felt good to have her come to me and to trust me to protect her.

“I’ll just stay until the storm passes,” she assured me in a relieved voice as she wrapped her arms around my neck tightly.

I flopped back onto my pillow and pulled her with me until she was half laying on my chest.

I had her in my bed.

I certainly wasn’t about to complain.

She could stay as long as she liked.

I stroked my hand over her hair soothingly as the storm raged outside. “What did you do during other thunderstorms?”

“I’ve never been through one quite this bad since I got here,” she said. “I just sucked it up.”

That was probably true. Our thunderstorms could get pretty ugly at this time of year, but she hadn’t been here at this time last year. Our storms had been fairly mild at the end of the summer and fall of last year.

We hadn’t had a thunderstorm directly over the town that was this fierce in quite some time.

Her body was trembling a little as another loud crack of thunder shook the house.

“I hate this,” she said angrily. “I hate being afraid of something that I never was before. I used to love a good thunderstorm rolling in.”