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she said.

      “Well...you had me convinced that I... Anna, it happened really fast.”

      “Not that fast. Believe me, I’ve had faster.”

      “You wanted all of that...? I mean...”

      She laughed. Actually laughed, pushing the door open a little bit wider. “After my emphatic... After all the yes-ing... You can honestly ask whether or not I wanted it?”

      “I have a lot of sex,” he said. “I don’t see any point in beating around the bush there. And women have had a lot of reactions to the sex. But I can honestly say none of them have ever run away crying. So, yeah, I’m feeling a little bit shaky right now.”

      “You’re shaky? I’m the one that’s crying.”

      “And if I was alone in this...if I pushed you further than you wanted to go...I’m going to have to ask Sam to fire up the forge and prepare you a red-hot poker so you can have your way with me in an entirely different manner.”

      “I wanted it, Chase.” Her tone was muted.

      “Then why are you crying?”

      “I’m not very experienced,” she said.

      “Well, I mean, I know you don’t really hook up.”

      “I’ve had sex once. One other time.”

      He was stunned. Stunned enough that he was pretty sure Anna could have put her index finger on his chest, given a light push and knocked him flat on his ass. “Once.”

      “Sure. You remember Corbin. And that whole fiasco. Where I kind of made fun of his...lack of...attributes and staying power in the hall at school. And...basically ensured that no guy would ever touch me ever again.”

      “Right.” He remembered that.

      “Well, I didn’t really get what the fuss was about.”

      “But you... I mean, you’ve had...”

      “Orgasms? Yes. Almost every day of my life. Because I am industrious, and red-blooded, and self-sufficient.”

      He cleared his throat, trying to ignore the shot of heat that image sent straight through his blood. Anna. Touching herself.

      What the hell was happening to him? Well, there was nothing happening. It had damn well happened. On the couch in Anna’s living room.

      He could never look at her again without seeing her there, obeying his orders. Spreading her thighs for him so that he could get a good look at her. Yeah, he could never unsee that. Wasn’t sure if he wanted to. But where the hell did he go from here? Where did they go?

      There were a lot of women he could have sex with, worry-free. Anna wasn’t one of them. She was a rare, precious thing in his life. Someone who knew him. Who knew all about how affected he and Sam had been by the loss of their parents.

      Someone he never had to explain it to because she’d been there.

      He didn’t like explaining all that. So the solution was keep the friends that were there when it happened, and make sure everyone else was temporary.

      Which meant Anna couldn’t be temporary. She was part of him. Part of his life. A load-bearing wall on the structure that was Chase McCormack. Remove her, and he would crumble.

      That was why she had always stayed a friend. Why he had never done anything like this with her before. It wasn’t because of her coveralls, or her don’t-step-on-the-grass demeanor. Or even because she’d neatly neutered the reputation of the guy she’d slept with in high school.

      It was because he needed her friendship, not her body.

      But the problem was now he knew what she looked like naked.

      He couldn’t get that image out of his head. And he didn’t even want to.

      Same with the image of all her self-administered, industrious climaxes.

      Damn his dirty mind.

      “Okay,” he said, taking a step away from the door. “Why don’t you come out?”

      “I’m naked.”

      “So am I.”

      She looked down. “So you are.”

      “We need to talk.”

      “Isn’t it women who are supposed to require conversation after basic things like sex?”

      “I don’t know. Because I never stick around long enough to find out. But this is different. This is you and me, Anna, and I will be damned if I let things get messed up over a couple of orgasms.”

      She chewed her lower lip. She looked...well, she looked young. And she didn’t look too tough. It made him ache. “They were pretty good ones.”

      “Are you all right?”

      “I’m fine. It’s just that all of this is a little bit weird. And I’m not really experienced enough to pretend that it isn’t.”

      “Right.” The whole thing about her having been with only one guy kind of freaked him out. Made him feel like he was responsible for some things. Big things, like what she would think of sex from this day forward. And then there was the bone-deep possessiveness. That he was the first one in all this time... He should hate it. It should scare him. It should not make him feel...triumph.

      He was triumphant, dammit. “Why haven’t you slept with anyone else?”

      She lifted a shoulder. “I told you. I didn’t really think my first experience was that great.”

      “So you just never...”

      “I’m also emotionally dysfunctional, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

      A shocked laugh escaped his lips. “Right. Same goes.”

      “I don’t know. Sex kind of weirds me out. It’s a lot of closeness.”

      “It doesn’t have to be,” he pointed out. It felt like a weird thing to say, though, because what they’d done just now had been the epitome of closeness.

      “It just all feels...raw. And...it was good. But I think that’s kind of why it bothered me.”

      “I don’t want it to bother you.”

      “Well, the other thing is it was you. You and me, like you said. We don’t do things like this. We hang out, we drink beer. We don’t screw.”

      “Turns out we’re pretty compatible when it comes to the screwing.” He wasn’t entirely sure this was the time to make light of what had just happened. But he was at sea here. So he had to figure out some way to talk to her. He figured he would make his best effort to treat her like he always did.

      “Yeah,” she said, finally pushing her way out of the bathroom. “But I’m not really sure there’s much we can do with that.”

      He felt like he was losing his grip on something, something essential, important. Like he was on a rope precariously strung across the canyon, trying to hang on and not fall to his doom. Not fall to their doom, since she was right there with him.

      What she was saying should feel like safety. It didn’t. It felt like the bottom of the damn canyon.

      “I don’t know if that’s the way to handle it.”

      “You don’t?” she asked, blinking.

      Apparently. He hadn’t thought that statement through before it had come out of his mouth. “Yeah. Look, you kissed me yesterday. You gave me...oral pleasure earlier. And now we’ve had sex. Obviously, this isn’t going away. Obviously, there’s some attraction between us that we’ve never really acknowledged before.”

      “Or,” she said, “someone cast a spell on us. Yeah, we drank some kind of sex potion. Makes you horny for

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