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She knew he was trying to ease the hot tension between them, but the hoarseness in his voice made her knees weak.

Still, what he’d said was true. They did have to eat. It felt as if they were in a glorious world of their own creation, but they weren’t. Reality was just outside the door. Anything might happen to them at any moment, and you didn’t have to be a military operative to know that full bellies were better than empty ones.

“Go on,” he said gently. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

She did as he’d asked and went to the closet.

Men’s clothing hung to the right, women’s to the left. The women’s section of the rack held a couple of pairs of crisply laundered jeans. A handful of shirts. Sandals, flip-flops and a pair of worn hiking boots stood on the floor.

It wasn’t a lot, but it was more than enough.

There was no underwear, not in the closet or in any of the dresser drawers. She’d have to go commando under the jeans and shirt she chose at random.

A tremor danced through her.

She shut her eyes and imagined Tanner finding out that nothing separated his hands, his mouth, his body from hers except a thin layer of cloth.

The thought excited her.

Every thought about him excited her.

She paused with a shirt and a pair of jeans draped over her arm.

It wasn’t as if she never had sex before. Okay. She hadn’t had a lot of it. And it had never, ever been like this.

Once, during a sort of Girls’ Weekend at El Sueño, the Wilde ranch, the talk had turned to sex. Actually, it had turned to SEX, all caps, and the Wilde sisters, all of them happily married, had agreed that they Wouldn’t Really Talk about Their Husbands and Sex…but, one of them, maybe Emily, had said sex with her man was…

Incredible. Fantastic. Amazing. Wonderful. Indescribable.

All the words applied, depending on which sister you’d listened to.

Bianca, single the same as Alessandra, had taken on that little air of Shrink in Attendance that drove Alessandra crazy, looked at her fingernails and said, yes, of course, sex was one of life’s great pleasures.

“A tiny bit overrated, perhaps, but still something very special.”

Actually, what she’d said was that sex was a bit overrated but transformational nevertheless.

Transformational? Well, why not? Bianca had a habit of talking in Shrinkese.

Everybody had looked at Alessandra. Say something, she’d told herself, and what she’d finally come up with was that sex was nice.

And it was.

You met a man, somebody who wore a serious suit and had a serious job, he took you to serous places. Dinner at a restaurant where it took months to get a reservation unless, of course, you were him A Broadway show where he had orchestra seats, first row center. Or perhaps a by-invitation-only showing at a Soho gallery.

You dated for a while and then you might have sex.

Might was the operative word.

That had been the pattern of her life since she’d been curious enough to lose her virginity to Aldo Vincenzi in the backseat of his father’s Alfa Romeo on her seventeenth birthday.

But what had just happened…

Sex had never been like this. Hot. Exciting. Sex that turned you on just remembering it.

Sex that made you come.

What would her lieutenant say if he knew she’d never come before?