Page 4 of York

Everything snapped into painfully sharp focus.

Because I did know that voice.

But I remembered it even more husky, tight, and breathy with desire, lips near my ear, her soft body under mine, everything tightening as she came, as she cried my name.

Velle, as if sensing my presence just a few feet behind him, stepped back, taking the door with him.

Then there she was.

Tall, lean, wearing baggy jeans and a loose, tucked-in, well-worn T-shirt for Yosemite National Park. Her long hair was half up, wavy, and tousled in a way that was less designed that way and more from pure forgetfulness to run a brush through it.

It’d been a few years, but, damn, that face was as pretty as ever—rounded features, plush lips, the lightest smattering of freckles over her cheekbones and nose, and dark, almost black, eyes.

“Runa,” I said.

I glanced from her to the backseat of the car.

Where a little girl was hugging a stuffed animal to her chest.

Not just any stuffed animal.

Oh, no.

One from a small-town fair in some backwoods place in New York State.

Where I’d stepped up beside a pretty woman at a shooting game and put down my quarters.

I won.

Gave the pretty woman the stuffed capybara.

Then went to her hotel room with her.

And left before the sun came up in the morning.

“Fuck.”

CHAPTER TWO

Runa

So.

Even with perfect use, condoms are only effective ninety-eight percent of the time. So two in every one hundred people still get knocked up after a night of fun.

Guess which side of the statistic I fell on.

I probably should have known I was at my peak fertility. I’d been so out of my mind with a need for release that I would have climbed a stump if it looked remotely man-shaped.

Then there I was. At a fair. Trying to distract myself by testing my very rusty shooting skills.

And there he was.

Tall. Broad. Bearded. Hot.

One cute capybara, one trip to my hotel room, and one defective condom later, and I was half the country away, trekking a trail in Wyoming, when I started throwing up first thing in the morning. Then when I tried to eat. When I even thought about food.

Pair that with a suspiciously missing period, and I bought myself a test, got my confirmation, and felt my whole life shift off its axis.