Lover Beware

barely breathe, let alone think.
    She wanted Rider. It wasn’t rational, and it wasn’t right.
    His dark gaze caught hers. His mouth dipped again, barely touching hers, and her body reacted, her hips sliding against his, and for a split second, she didn’t care, she just wanted.
    He lifted his head and pressed her face into his shoulder, and for endless seconds she clung to him, memorizing his scent, soaking in his warmth.
    His breath stirred in her hair. “I’ve got to go.”
    “I know.”
    He eased back. “It’s okay. Like I said, I didn’t mean to”—his thumb swept across her lips—“do this, but I’m glad I did, because I’m going away and I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
    “Or if I’ll be back” hung in the air, and as it turned out, that time he almost hadn’t come back.
    Jane didn’t see him for more than eighteen months. Eventually, she’d heard secondhand in town that he’d been wounded on some overseas operation. The next time she’d been in Winslow, she’d gone to the library and searched back in the newspaper files, and finally found a small mention of the incident, where “a soldier” had been knifed and evacuated to a military hospital in Germany, his condition serious.
    Worry had eaten at her, and her weight had plummeted, until she’d taken herself in hand and forced herself to eat. One day, months later, she’d turned around in the supermarket and seen him, larger than life and drop-dead gorgeous, loading groceries into a trolley. She couldn’t remember what she’d gone to the supermarket to buy, she’d simply turned on her heel, walked back to her car, and driven home. She’d gotten through the rest of the day, she’d managed to function, but that moment in the supermarket had stunned her.
    She’d had visions of him in intensive care, close to death. She’d even worried that he had died, and she simply hadn’t heard. In the supermarket, he hadn’t looked as if he’d suffered anything as traumatic as a life-threatening wound. If anything, he’d seemed even bigger, more muscular—more of everything.
    Jane stared at the note in her hand, brought back to the soft scent of the night air, the whine of mosquitoes on the prowl. “What did you want to tell him?” she muttered to herself. “That you were head over heels in love with a man you barely knew?”
    Because the fact was, falling in lust with a man had never happened to her before. She wasn’t promiscuous, and she hadn’t had that many relationships. Sexually, she’d always been as dead as a doornail unless she was emotionally involved. Crazy as it seemed, somehow she had become emotionally involved with Michael Rider; she had fallen in love.
    Jess lolloped inside, her claws clicking on the hall floor. Automatically, Jane picked up her groceries, readjusted the strap of her purse on her shoulder, closed the door, and locked it. She was tired and she was hungry, and her feet were aching. She’d spent hours driving around Winslow, tramping the streets trying to buy a security alarm—without any luck. Apparently, they’d sold out within a day of the news breaking about the home invasion in Tayler’s Creek. Security firms and appliance stores had more alarm systems on order, but it would take a couple of days for them to be shipped, and then there was a waiting list. If Jane wanted an alarm, she would have to stand in line like everyone else.
    After stowing the groceries, she walked slowly upstairs, flicking light switches as she went, the note crumpled in her hand. When she got to her room, she stowed her bag and dropped the note on her dressing table, and walked over to the dormer window and looked in the direction of the Rider place. The faint glimmer of lights shone through the trees.
    Her gaze shifted, caught by her own reflection in the glass, and for the first time in months she took the time to examine herself. She was medium height and slim, her breasts a respectable size and shape, her hips narrow enough that she had difficulty buying pants that fit and often had to shop for teenagers’ sizes. She’d lost weight—enough that most of her clothes were loose on her now—but with Patrick dwindling away, her appetite had faded and she hadn’t wanted to eat.
    Her hair was long, and dark enough to be mistaken for black, her eyes a light amber and faintly slanted, and her skin was tanned a honey colour from spending so much time outside.
    She lifted a hand to her lips. She hadn’t worn