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She started to tell him that standing in the rain and looking around as if they were tourists was crazy—until she realized the lieutenant looked nothing like a tourist.

He looked like—like a warrior scoping out new terrain.

She probably wouldn’t have said that aloud—it sounded foolish, even pretentious. But that was the only way to describe what he was doing.

And as strange as it sounded, that tough, hard-lined awareness made her feel…

Safe.

So did the powerful arm holding her close.

The ugly truth was that she hadn’t really felt safe for a long time. Not since the ugly phone calls in Texas and then the so-called hang-ups of a couple of weeks ago. She certainly hadn’t felt safe today when the power went off. And what had gone on at Cuppa Joe’s with Noah…

No. She hadn’t felt terribly safe lately. And that was senseless, when there were logical explanations for everything that had happened.

A patient whose mental illness had taken him over the edge.

Kids fooling around with randomly dialed numbers.

An electrical system that clearly had not been upgraded despite the claim that it had.

A study subject with delusions.

Random happenings, all of them. The scientist in her knew that. Wasn’t that one of the laws of the universe? If anything could happen, it usually did.

But the woman in her said to hell with science. Too many bad things had happened at almost the same time. If it was silly for them to make her feel edgy, well, so be it.

So be it, too, that a man she hardly knew could provide her with the comfort she so pathetically needed, especially since

he wasn’t a knight come to the rescue—he was a guy who was after a replay of what they’d done on a beach three thousand miles away, six long weeks ago…

Except, that was unfair.

Okay. Maybe he hoped to get lucky a second time.

He was male, after all.

But his motives in coming to see her had been honorable. Such an old-fashioned word and yet so appropriate.

And so rare.

She’d been with other men. Not a lot, it was true, but she wasn’t an inexperienced virgin. And though she’d always taken responsibility for herself sexually—she was on the pill—and the few men she’d slept with had been decent guys, she couldn’t imagine one of them spending so much as a minute wondering if he’d accidentally gotten her pregnant.

She couldn’t image having sex with any one of them, either, now that Chay had shown her what sex could be like…

“Okay.”

For one awful moment, she thought she might have said what she’d been thinking, but when she looked up at him, she breathed a sigh of relief.

He had no idea what had been bouncing around in her head and that was how it was going to stay.

He smiled. Dio, why did that smile turn her inside out?

“If we stay out here any longer, we’re gonna grow gills. How about we go dry off?”

“An excellent plan,” Bianca said briskly. “Hot coffee. Stacks of towels. And then you can head to your hotel.”

“Fine,” he said—and she told herself that the twinge of disappointment she felt when he didn’t object was simply the result of exhaustion.