Their Baby Miracle. Lilian Darcy

inside her whenever she was with him.

      This relationship wasn’t meant to last.

      They both knew that.

      It’s a turning point, that’s all, she thought. A window thrown open in my mind.

      Lucas had already caught three good-size fish, enough to cook and eat outdoors for lunch, over an open fire. In the expectation that he would fish as well as he seemed to do everything else, Reba had packed the pickup truck with the appropriate accompaniments, and soon they would drive the mountain track up to the cabin, where her grandfather had once made the ring of stones that the Grant family had been using as a picnic hearth on summer days for nearly fifty years.

      And she had no doubt as to what she and Lucas would do up there after the meal was over.

      For the last time?

      They ate the fresh fish with bread and butter and salt and lemon, washed down with ice-cold mouthfuls of light beer, and then they didn’t have to say a word, they just doused the fire, opened the door of the cabin and went upstairs.

      In the small, tidy bedroom, Reba wondered if she’d ever be able to come to this place again without thinking of Lucas. Their awareness of each other, and their impatience, seemed to crowd the air and make it sing.

      She knew she’d remember it every time she saw the dappled light dancing through the windows as a breeze moved the tree branches, every time she smelled the scent of lavender, because of the flowers she’d put here and the homemade sachets that scented the cotton sheets.

      Pulling her top over her head, she felt Lucas’s touch sear across her body. His hands curved around her ribs, brushed across her breasts, made her neck tingle. They tried to help each other undress, but just ended up laughing and kissing, fighting their uncooperative clothing.

      “Are we in a hurry, here, or something?” he whispered.

      “So slow down.”

      “Can’t.”

      “Neither can I.”

      They only managed to do that when they got to the really important part—the part where they couldn’t talk anymore, because their breathing was coming too fast and every sense was too overwhelmed. Then he held her and slid into her with a teasing control that had her pulling at him, crying out for more, until they both exploded, with pulses of light behind her closed lids like fireworks, or stars.

      That night, she drove into Biggins, parked her pickup quietly in the far corner of the steakhouse parking lot and slipped across Main Street to Lucas’s motel. He took her into Cheyenne for a long, slow meal and then brought her back again.

      “I’ll need to head out of here pretty early tomorrow to make my flight to New York,” he told her, at the door of his room.