Treasures Lost, Treasures Found

to make didn’t seem important any longer. “No, but I might like staying in bed after all, even without the crossword puzzles.”
    “You’ll relax.” He said it softly, but the command was unmistakable. She might have argued, but the kiss was long and lingering, leaving her slow and helplessly yielding.
    “I don’t have a choice,” she murmured. “Between the medication and you.”
    “That’s the idea.” He’d love her, Ky thought, but so gently she’d have nothing to do but feel. Then she’d sleep. “There are things I want from you.” He lifted his head until their eyes met. “Things I need from you.”
    “You never tell me what they are.”
    “Maybe not.” He laid his forehead on hers. Maybe he just didn’t know how to tell her. Or how to ask. “For now, what I want is to see you well.” Again he lifted his head, and his eyes focused on hers. “I’m not an unselfish man, Kate. I want that just as much for myself as I want it for you. I fully intended to have you back in my bed, but I didn’t want it for you. I fully intended to have you back in my bed, but I didn’t care to have you unconscious here first.”
    “Whatever you intended, I make my own choices.” Her hands slid up his shoulders to touch his face. “I choseto make love with you then. I choose to make love with you now.”
    He laughed and pressed her palm to his lips. “Professor, you think I’d have given you a choice? Maybe we don’t know each other as well as we should at this point, but you should know that much.”
    Thoughtfully, she ran her thumb down his cheekbone. It was hard, elegantly defined. Somehow it suited him in the same way the unshaven face suited him. But did she? Kate wondered. Were they, despite all their differences, right for each other?
    It seemed when they were like this, there was no question of suitability, no question of what was right or wrong. Each completed the other. Yet there had to be more. No matter how much each of them denied it on the surface, there had to be more. And ultimately, there had to be a choice.
    “When you take what isn’t offered freely, you have nothing.” She felt the rough scrape of his unshaven face on her palm and the thrill went through her system. “If I give, you have whatever you need without asking.”
    “Do I?” he murmured before he touched his lips to hers again. “And you? What do you have?”
    She closed her eyes as her body drifted on a calm, quiet plane of pleasure. “What I need.” For how long? The question ran through his mind, prodding against his contentment. But he didn’t ask. There’d be a time, he knew, for more questions, for the hundredsof demands he wanted to make. For ultimatums. Now she was sleepy, relaxed in the way he wanted her to be.
    With no more words he let her body drift, stroking gently, letting her system steep in the pleasure he could give. With no one else could he remember asking so little for himself and receiving so much. She was the hinge that could open or close the door on the better part of him.
    He listened to her sigh as he touched her. The second was a kind of pure contentment that mirrored his own feelings. It seemed neither of them required any more.
    Kate knew it shouldn’t be so simple. It had never been simple with anyone else, so that in the end she’d never given herself to anyone else. Only with Ky had she ever known that full excitement that left her free. Only with Ky had she ever known the pure ease that felt so right.
    They’d been apart four years, yet if it had been forty, she would have recognized his touch in an instant. That touch was all she needed to make her want him.
    She remembered the demands and fire that had always been threaded through their lovemaking before. It had been the excitement she’d craved even while it had baffled her. Now there was patience touched with a consideration she didn’t know he was capable of.
    Perhaps if she hadn’t loved him already, she would have fallen in love at that moment when the sun filtered through the windows and his hands were on her skin. She wanted to give him the fire, but his hands kept it banked. She wanted to meet any demands, but he made none. Instead, she floated on the clouds he brought to her.
    Though the heat smoldered inside him, she kept him sane. Just by her pliancy. Though passion began to take over, she kept him calm. Just by her serenity. He’d never looked for serenity in his life. It had simply come to him, as Kate