had given her a life with a reassuring sameness to everything that made her feel safe and secure.
Though in this amazing dawn, she saw things in a new and less flattering light. Had she allowed herself to become utterly boring? Apparently. Apparently she had become the kind of woman who you could tell in a single glance was a schoolteacher.
They came to the bridge and stood on it for a moment. The water was flowing underneath it like liquid gold, stained by the rising sun. They stood there in silence, watching morning mist rise off the vineyards all around them.
“Everyone should know how to swim,” he said sternly, as if he was deliberately moving away from the magic of the shared moment, as if he was making sure she was not mistaken about his motivations in asking her to join him.
“Really? Why?”
He frowned at her, as if the question was too silly to deserve an answer.
“Most of the world’s population, including you, lives near some sort of body of water. You could be in a boat that capsizes. You could fall in.”
“I suppose,” she agreed, but looking at him, she recognized what was at his very core. He protected people. It was more than evident that was his vocation and his calling. His shoulders were huge and broad, but broad enough to carry the weight of the whole world?
He broke her gaze, as if he knew she had seen something of him that he did not want her to see. Connor moved off the bridge and found a path worn deep by the feet of hundreds of hot little boys over many, many years.
The path was steep in places, and her footwear—a pair of flimsy sandals, fine for town—was not very good for scrambling over rocks.
“Oh,” she gasped at one point, when she nearly fell.
He turned, took it all in in a breath, and his hands found her waist and encircled it. He lifted her easily over the rough spot and set her down. But his hands remained around her waist for just a hair too long, and then he turned away just a hair too quickly.
Her sensation of being with a man who would protect her with his life, if need be, strengthened.
It made her feel exquisitely feminine to be the one being looked after, for a change. Giorgio had never looked after her. It had always been the other way around.
A touch of guilt rippled along the perfect mirrored surface of the morning. But it evaporated like the mist rising all around them as they arrived at the swimming hole. Her awareness of Connor seemed to fill up every crack and crevice in her, just as sunlight would be filling every crack and crevice as it poured into the town.
The river widened here, gurgling on both sides of a pool that was large and placid. A tree leaned over it, and from a sturdy branch, a tire swung on a frayed rope.
Connor kicked off his shoes and shucked his trousers and his shirt and stood before her much as he had yesterday, totally unself-conscious in bathing trunks that were the same cut and style as his underwear had been, and every bit as sexy. He bent over his bag for a moment and fished out something that he held loosely in his left hand.
He stepped to the water’s edge.
“Is it cold?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said with deep pleasure. He reached back his right hand for her. “It’s a bit slippery.”
Crazy to accept that invitation, but really, it was much too late to stop accepting the crazy invitations now. She kicked out of her sandals and reached out. His hand closed around hers, and he tugged her gently to the water’s edge. She was not sure anything in her entire life had felt as right as accepting the strength of that hand, feeling it close around her own, with a promise of strength and protection.
“The first step to swimming,” he encouraged her.
She stuck a toe in, shrieked and pulled it back out swiftly. She tried to loosen her hand from his, but he just laughed and held tight until she put her toe back in the water.
“Come on,” he said, patiently. “Just try it.”
And so, her hand held firmly in his, she stepped into the icy cold water and felt her eyes go round. The mud on the bottom oozed up between her toes.
It felt wondrous. She didn’t feel the least bit afraid. He tugged her hand and smiled. What could she do? She could say yes to life. Isabella bunched up her skirt in her other hand and lifted it. The morning air on her naked thighs felt exquisite. She saw his eyes move there, to where she had lifted her skirt out of the water, and felt slightly vindicated by the flash of deep masculine heat she saw in them. That was not the look one gave a boring schoolteacher.
He led her deeper into the water—it crept up to her calves and to her knees—and he smiled at her squeal that was part protest and mostly delight. And then she was laughing.
The laughter felt as if it was bubbling up from a hidden stream deep within her; it had been trapped and now it was set free.
Connor was staring at her, and his gaze added to the sense of heightened awareness. She was entering another world, a foreign land of sensation, his hand so warm and strong guiding her, the cold water tugging on her feet and her bare calves, licking at her knees, storming her senses. She was not sure she had ever felt so exquisitely and fully alive.
Something sizzled in the air between them, as real as getting a jolt from a loose wire. Connor Benson was looking at her lips. She allowed herself to look at his.
A knife-edged awareness surged through her. If she took one tiny step toward him, she knew he would kiss her.
Was this what she had given up when she had chosen Giorgio? Was this what her mother had tried to tell her she would miss? The thought was an unexpected dark spot in the brightness of her unleashed spirit.
She felt the laughter dry up within her, and Isabella let go of Connor’s hand and took a step back instead of toward him.
“What?” he asked.
She backed away from his touch, from the exquisite intoxication of his closeness. It was clouding her judgment. It was making her crazy.
Ma sei pazzo, she chided herself inside her own head, backing away from the delicious craziness that beckoned to her.
But he did not allow her to escape. For every step back she took, he took one forward, until she was up against the slippery bank and could not move for fear of falling in the water. He came to her and lifted her chin, looked deeply into her eyes. “What?” he asked again, softly.
She could feel the strength in his hands, the calm in his eyes. She could smell the scents of him and of the morning mingling. She could lean toward all of this...
But she didn’t.
“Nothing,” she said. “I have to go. I can’t—”
Can’t what? she asked herself. Enjoy life? Be open to new experiences? She broke away from his gaze—a gaze that seemed to know all her secrets, to strip her of everything she had regarded as truth before. She gathered her skirt, shoved by him, waded up the river to where it was easy to find the bank and left the water.
“You can use my towel to dry
