fall of her tears as she kissed the pallid scars of too many surgeries on his knee. The catch in her breathing as he drew her from her exploration, cradling her breasts in his palms, cherishing nipples furled like new rosebuds with his lips and tongue.
In his drowsy, waking dream, he remembered the play of light and darkness veiling her in tantalizing mystery as her long legs twined about him. He would remember forever the thrust of her body accepting him, enfolding him, taking him deep inside her.
He remembered the clasping heat, the sweet caressing strokes soothing him, comforting him. Maria driving him mad with delight, with ecstasy. And as he’d dreamed she would one day, with love.
“Jericho?” The whispered word and the brush of fingertips skimming over his hair brought him back.
Lifting his head, his gaze collided with Maria’s. Neither spoke. As her questing fingers grew still, neither moved.
After a moment, she smiled a contented smile. “Jericho.”
Dropping a kiss on her knuckles, he said, “Good morning, Maria Elena.”
Tracing the line of his lips, her smile softened. “Maria Elena. Only you call me that. To the rest of the world I’m simply Maria, and sometimes, Ms. Delacroix.”
“What would you have me call you?”
“I like how you say my name.” A wandering caress trailed from his face to the hands that encircled hers. Her smile wavered. “I thought I dreamed you.”
“I’m real, my love.”
“In a world of arrogant pretense, you were always my anchor, always my courage. My only reality.”
“You left me.” His voice was tender and accusing.
“It was for the best, Jericho. If I’d stayed, what would I have become? What would you?” Taking her hand from his, clutching the sheet, she sat up. Bracing against the bed, she looked around, remembering more than seeing the bold masculinity of the room. The neutral decor in ever-darkening tones, the perfect refuge for the quiet times of this worldly man who had been the boy she’d loved.
“You were a Rivers. With all the confidence the name commands, you knew who you were, and understood what you could be. I was a Delacroix. Until I left Belle Terre, I never understood I could be more than the outcast’s brat. More than a girl with courtesan’s blood in her veins. No better than a courtesan herself, in the eyes of Belle Terre’s very proper society.
“Loving you was an impossible fairy tale that ended the night I was attacked. When the boys finished teaching me my place, one threatened rape. He was, as he saw it, only hurrying along the inevitable. Making clear to me what I could expect, what I would be, if I stayed in Belle Terre.”
“Masked cowards,” Jericho snarled. “They hurt you, and they took something precious from us. They didn’t succeed in the rest, but their purpose was served.” His face turned grim with the memory of the night he found her on a darkened street, fighting for her life. A young girl, his girl, clothes torn half away, a gang of boys, with stocking caps hiding their faces, circling her like a pack of wolves. “In the end, you believed them. Not in me.”
“You were barely eighteen, Jericho. No matter what weight the Rivers name carried, no matter how strong and brave and honorable you were, you couldn’t change the prejudices of an aristocratic Southern town.” Maria stroked tangled sable locks from his forehead. “Darling, you still can’t.”
“That means you’re leaving again.”
“The story’s finished. There’s no more to be done here.”
“What about this?” Catching her wrist, he drew her hand from his hair. “What does it mean?” A bangle threaded through a tiny gold band, then soldered into an unbroken circle, hugged her wrist. He hadn’t spoken of it at the gala, or in the passion of the night. Now, as it glinted against the sheet, it took his breath away.
“A tribute.” Maria answered. “To a memory I’ll treasure forever.” A slight twist of her wrist and the matching band he wore lay as inexorably between them as the bangle. “Something beautiful that can only be a memory for both of us.”
“If you should fall in love again? What happens then, Maria Elena Rivers?”
The name she’d carried in her heart for years brought tears to her eyes. Blinking them away, she shook her head. “I won’t.”
He wouldn’t let it go at that. “And if I should?”
Pain clotted her throat. But because he deserved the life and love she couldn’t offer, she gave him the only answer she could. “When that time comes, I won’t stand in your way.”
Jericho Rivers laughed. But only a fool would hear humor in the sound. “In half a lifetime our paths have crossed twice, with the same culmination. One wonders if that should tell us something.”
“It does tell us something. We’re star-crossed lovers, destined to love forever yet never meant to be. Belle Terre was the wrong place, our teen years were the wrong time.”
“Do you ever wonder what might have happened if…?” Jericho’s voice drifted into silence, leaving the rest unsaid.
As if she could wish the past away, she nodded. “If my father hadn’t been that rare male of the Delacroix family? If he hadn’t loved Belle Terre too much to leave it despite its archaic prejudices? If he’d never fallen in love with my mother, and she with him? If neither of them had ever picked up a liquor bottle? But most of all, if we’d met in college as strangers. Or in another life? Yes,” she whispered softly. “I wonder. But—”
“But we didn’t,” he interrupted gently. “Instead we entered into a marriage that never began, yet never ends.”
“Never began, never ends, but offers rare days like this.”
Jericho smiled a real smile then, willing to leave the conundrum for another time. “So what do we do about it?”
“Well.” Maria pretended to consider the possibilities. “The day is hardly born, my bags are packed and my plane doesn’t leave until long after six. All that’s left to do is pick up the rental car from the museum parking lot.”
“It’s also Sunday,” Jericho contributed to the list of enticements. “My day off.” A glance at a bedside clock told the time. “That leaves us more than twelve precious hours. Any idea how we could spend it, Mrs. Rivers?”
“One.” Folding back the robe he wore, she slipped it from his shoulders and down his arms. “One very good idea, Sheriff Rivers.” As silk fell away with his impatient shrug, she drew him to the bed, asking wickedly, “What else would star-crossed lovers do with such rare and wondrous hours as these?”
“Twelve hours? Sweetheart,” Jericho groaned softly against her throat. “I don’t think I have the stamina.”
“Ah, my only love, you’ll never know until you try.”
His reply was a laugh and a kiss, as he began again a sweet, languid seduction. With tender restraint he caressed her, touching her face, stroking her hair, tracing the fan of her lashes as they
