From the Heart

murmured.
    “He was my anchor when I was growing up. And my kite.” She smiled and plucked at a blade of grass. “He’s a caring, intelligent man who can argue three viewpoints at once and believe all of them. He knows me, accepts me for what I amand loves me anyway.” She brought her knees up and again rested her forehead on them. “He’s seventy, and I haven’t been home in nearly a year. In three weeks it’ll be Christmas. There’ll be snow, and someone will give him a tree in lieu of payment. His patients will be flooding into the house all day, bringing him everything from home-baked bread to homebrewed whiskey.”
    She’s thinking of leaving, he realized and felt a quick, unexpected panic. He watched the sun filter through the leaves and fall on her hair. Not yet, he thought. Not yet. “Kasey.” He touched her hair. “I’ve no right to ask you to stay. Stay anyway.”
    She gave a rippling sigh. For how much longer? she wondered. I should go home until I recover from this, from him. Kasey lifted her head, prepared to say what she felt had to be said.
    Jordan’s eyes were on her. They were clear and seeking. He wouldn’t ask her again; he wouldn’t insist. Kasey realized he didn’t have to. His silence—his eyes—were doing it for him.
    “Hold me,” she murmured and held her arms out to him.
    There would be no leaving him, she thought as she pressed against him. Not until she no longer had a choice. She had opened herself to him, offered. She couldn’t take herself back now.
    Then he was kissing her softly, without demand. He’d not been this gentle before, holding her as if she were something fragile. No, there would be no leaving him now. Kasey’s heart had more power over her life than her intellect. Where she loved, she was vulnerable, and where she was vulnerable, her mind had no sway. She pulled him closer.
    The kiss grew deep, still tender, but intimate and weakening. His hand went to her cheek to stroke her skin. It was soft, so soft, and had needs hammering inside him. He murmured her name and traced his lips down to her throat. There was warmth there and a taste he had grown to crave.
    How was it she could give him so much and ask for nothing? But there was something he could give her, give both of them. “Kasey, I have to go to New York this weekend. Some business with my publisher.” He didn’t add that he had been putting the trip off for weeks. “Come with me.”
    “New York?” Her brows came together. “You haven’t said anything before.”
    “No. It depended on the progress of the book. Kasey.” He kissed her again. He didn’t want her to ask questions. “Come with me. I want some time with you, alone. I want more than a few hours at night. I want to sleep with you. I want to wake up with you.”
    She wanted it too. To be with him, away from the house. To be able to spend the night with him in complete freedom. Kasey could feel some of the weight beginning to lift. “What about Alison?”
    “As it happens, she asked me just this afternoon if she could spend the weekend with a school friend.” Jordan smiled and brushed a curl from Kasey’s cheek. “Let’s consider it fate, Kasey, and take advantage of it.”
    “Fate.” Her lips curved into a smile, and Jordan watched as it finally reached her eyes. “I’m a very strong believer in fate.”

8
    N ew York. The plane had landed in a miserable sleeting rain that was rapidly turning to snow. The streets were a sloshy, slippery mess, packed tight with cars. The sidewalks were crowded with people hurrying. Nothing could have delighted Kasey more. New Yorkers, she mused, were always hurrying. She loved them for it. And there wasn’t a city she knew that appreciated the Christmas season more. Everywhere she looked there were decorations—trees, lights and glittering tinsel. And there were Santa Clauses everywhere.
    She had tried to draw it all in on the cab ride from the airport to the hotel. Now, in the bedroom of the suite she would share with Jordan, she pressed her nose to the window glass and continued to look. There were lights and people and the muffled hum of traffic. It struck her how completely she had been starved for the sights and smells of humanity. She had needed the noise and the motion.
    Jordan hadn’t expected her to have this sort of enthusiasm for the city. From what she had told him of her childhood, he had thought she would prefer a rural setting. But she hadn’t been able to see