“Close the door,” she commanded.

The idea of locking the air in the room went against all logic. It had to be for privacy.

He pushed the door shut with a click.

“Does it lock?”

Larson’s heart responded in his chest. “I don’t think so.”

“Will they come in the house?”

“Not until shift change.”

“What if they need to use the facilities?”

She’d clearly deliberated on the obstacles that faced them.

Larson’s heart continued to race. “No, I seriously doubt it.” The fact was they’d piss into bushes if need be, but he didn’t want to get crude at such a moment. Furthermore, both his men would keep well away from the farmhouse in an effort to not place motion near it, not bring any attention to it.

She unfastened her belt, unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans, leaving them hanging on the width of her sumptuous hips, her purple underwear showing. “I want to take a bath,” she said. “Warm, not hot. To cool off, if that’s possible.”

Standing just inside the shut door, Larson walked toward her.

“I’ve slept in my clothes the past several nights. We all have, haven’t we? I’m sick of sponge baths.”

He took another step closer. “I’m not sure I know where you’re going with this.”

“Oh, I think you do,” she said as she dragged the jeans lower, tugged them over her hips and down her legs. She leaned over to step out of them and her tank top fell away, offering a flash of round, pale skin and the white from her bra. She added, “Am I the only one who’s been thinking about this?”

“No.”

Another step closer.

“There’s something about taking my clothes off, undressing. It’s a moment of extreme… vulnerability. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Hope… I…”

“If you’re ever asked about this, questioned… I know you, Lars. You’d never lie about it. I know you could lose your job, and I know how much it means to you, how good you are at it. All those things. So you see… there’s only one way this can happen. Between us, I mean. I’m usually not the forward type,” she said, pulling off her top and standing now in bra and underwear. “Not at all.” She reached behind her back and deftly unclipped the bra. “This doesn’t come easy for me.” As the back strap came loose it slipped half off her breasts, the shoulder straps sliding lower on her arms. “But it has to be that I seduced you. It has to be all me, all my doing. That I came up with some lame excuse about being afraid to undress in the room alone-it was all I could come up with on short notice,” she said. “That I came on to you in a moment of weakness.”

“It’s supposed to be me protecting you,” he said hoarsely, his throat gone dry, “not the other way around.”

“We’ll look after each other then,” she said. She allowed the bra to fall. Her breasts rode high on her chest, her nipples and areolas far darker than her complexion suggested. She climbed out of the bikini briefs, and he could feel her embarrassed determination to continue. She wore only a thin silver necklace now-something he hadn’t yet told her would have to go before enrollment in the program.

She stepped forward and melted into him, her arms between them, her hands already working on his shirt buttons.

He reached around to embrace her and she chided, “No… No… No…” Looking up at him, she suppressed a grin as she explained, “I want it to be entirely my doing, Lars.” She mocked a response to her being interrogated about this. “He stood there stoically. He was in the room as I undressed. I asked him to be. I can’t explain that, but I couldn’t take off my clothes without someone there and Deputy Larson was the one guarding me that night. And, well…” She continued working his shirt open. She moved on to his belt and khakis. “I suppose I felt vulnerable, or in need of company, safety, security, but I found myself not heading for the bath, as I’d suggested, but instead, one thing led to another and I found myself flirting with him.” In her regular voice, she said, “Flirting’s far too soft a word. Not the right word at all. I’ll have to come up with something better.”

“Hope…”

“You be quiet, Deputy. We need the record clean. We need our story… straight.” With that she had his pants open and him firmly in hand. She brought his fingers up to her chest and whispered, “This once, the first time between us, it has to be all me.”

Her nipple firmed and grew puckered under his touch.

She undressed him, saying, “You’re going to lie down on the bed and do your best to resist me.” Again, Larson reached to embrace her, having had enough of the game, but she held him off, saying, “Please,” and he understood from her tone that she was serious. Perhaps she couldn’t confront true lovemaking. Perhaps it was too soon for her. Perhaps this was more born of a primal urge to dominate after days-weeks-of having her every movement controlled and coordinated by others. And all of them men, always men.

“My turn,” she said, confirming his thoughts.

She lay him back on the bed and climbed atop him, dragging her warm spot against him, drawing something abstract with her soft paintbrush. She climbed over him and lowered a breast and nipple to his lips, and as he kissed her there, as his tongue raced circles, she reached back and touched him and he shuddered head to toe. She alternated breasts to his lips as her fingers explored him.

She pulled her breast free of him and raised up on extended arms and locked elbows, hovering over him on raised toes like doing a push-up, and slowly lowered herself to where it was the heat from her skin he felt first. Then her breasts lit up his skin and she slowly eased her full weight down onto him, melting down into him to where arm matched arm, belly matched belly, and thigh matched thigh. Then she rocked her hips, opened her legs and reached down there, taking hold, sliding lower along his chest, and with this motion joined them with barely any effort.

She lay there quietly, Larson fully inside her now, not a motion between them beside the drumming of their pulses, their conflicting heartbeats. She held him like a clenched fist. He tried to initiate a rhythm and she pinned down his hips and said hotly into his ear, “You’re all mine.”

And he was.

He grew delirious in the heat of the room. He lost track of time but never of her. They melded into this single, humming entity. A lone moth worked along the ceiling, dancing with its shadow. They must have lain absolutely still for ten minutes or more-it was like nothing he’d ever experienced. At the first sense of him losing his erection she moved one full, glorious stroke, lifting herself up to sitting, and driving him back into her, filling her, completing her, before stretching out prone and lowering herself incrementally again in that same dizzying fashion as before. Now she lay fully atop, their bodies meeting together again, both of them murmuring.

“I’ve wanted this for so long,” she whispered into his ear. “I didn’t want to waste it.”

She sat up then, pulled his hands to her breasts, and began her musical rising and falling.

“Look at me,” he said, and she did, and it felt like days later before her eyes rolled back into her head and the world exploded through him and into her in a perfectly timed choreography of contractions and sharp cries of satisfaction.

He awoke to the sound through the wall of her bath running, and might have believed it all a dream had not that paddle fan been grinding its way through the chorus of that same grating song.

Rolling swales of bleached and dying field grass gave way to slate ponds stitched together by meandering streams the color of old steel. A pair of mallards rose and crossed the road, their wings beating so fast they seemed to fly without them, veering away from the Explorer and up into a guncotton sky.

Hope sat stone-faced in the passenger seat, a knot of concern worn on her brow like a birthmark. “How do we know that will work?”