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In a soft voice, she demanded, “Off.”

I shucked the jeans and my boxers and socks, and then I twisted and caged her between my arms. She backed up the bed until her soft, strawberry waves cascaded over her pillow, and I moved the robe free of her skin with one slow glide of my hand, then splayed it wide over her belly.

She tried again to move my hand and cover her stomach.

“Baby, what is it you’re tryin’ so hard to hide from me?”

“My…” She sighed. “My scar.”

I found the faded, raised line below her navel. “This?”

“Yes,” she said, and she closed her eyes.

The skin around it was soft and a little loose, but I liked it ’cause it moved to the rhythm of my fingers and mouth when I went down on her. “Is that from havin’ your boys?”

“No.”

“Does it hurt?” I asked, trailing my finger softly down the scar. I kissed it, and she shivered.

“No.”

“Tell me.”

“I had… cancer. Three years ago. They took my uterus out.”

Fuck. She’d gone through cancer all alone? The boys had been away at school. I hadn’t noticed she’d closed her shop for any length of time, although, back then I didn’t get to town as much as I did now.

“Aubrey, if I’d known— I’m so sorry you had to go through that. Are you okay? Are you sick?”

Everything would stop if she was. I’d give her anything she needed, take her anywhere her doctors told her to go.

“I’m not sick anymore,” she said, and her eyes opened cautiously. “I survived. I’m a survivor. But does that— Do you see me differently? God, Rye. You’re so young, and I’m… not. And my body’s changin’. How can I be beautiful to you? I don’t get it.”

Thatwas what she’d been worried about?

“I know you said you don’t want kids, but I definitely can’t give them to you if you change your mind. Not that I could at my age, even if I still had all the necessary parts.” Blushing, she shook her head against the pillow. “Not that we… I mean, we’re not—this isn’t arealrelationship.”

“How else can I say it to make you understand? You are, hands down, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. Now. Not just when you were twenty or twenty-five.” Pushing up on my hands, I hovered above her. “Hear me when I tell you, Aubrey, you’re forty-seven, yes,andyou are drop-dead gorgeous. When I look at you, I can hardly breathe.

“And this has been real for me since that day in your store when you said yes. Maybe you can’t see it yet, but everything I want is in my arms at this very moment. I don’t want kids. I don’t need kids.

“I just need you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

RYE

“You don’t carethat I’m a barren woman?” she asked quietly.

“Spitfire,” I said, shaking my head and rubbing my lips back and forth over her scar, “you may not have a uterus, but you’re anything but barren. You’re lush and full and perfect. Everywhere I look when I’m with you grows greener. Youarea survivor. Now, open those lovely legs for me, and lemme show you just how much I don’t care.”

She smiled a smile so bright, I thought the sun had come out at midnight, and she caught her bottom lip between her teeth. She loved my mouth and beard on her pussy, and I was fixing to give her what she wanted, but she slapped her hands on my shoulders before I could descend.

“Wait. Don’t do that. If you do that, I’ll come too fast.”

“And the problem with that is…?”

“I want you slow, and I want you inside me right now.”