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achingly sweet that she moaned. Her breasts were tender, heavy, and the nipples, still wet from his mouth, tightened impossibly more.
    “Caleb…” she breathed.
    His gaze was on her face as he continued moving into her. “You feel so good. So wet and hot, sticky and sweet, like honey.”
    She slid her knee farther up his flank, allowing him further entry. He kept coming inside, heavy and so thick it stung just a little, and the shuddering pleasure of it made an ache of tears start behind her eyes.
    When he was seated inside he did the same maddening, wonderful thing he’d done the night before…he didn’t move for long, long moments. She felt full and possessed and needy and desperate and her fingers clutched at his shoulders. She wanted to urge him to move, to insist he start rocking inside her, but this was so good, too, as if they were two interlocking pieces of one whole.
    “So right,” she whispered.
    And then Caleb smiled, as if she’d uttered the words he’d been waiting to hear. His hips began to move in time with the pulse of the ocean. Meg gasped, the ebb and release a rhythm that she’d been born hearing, that she’d absorbed to her marrow during the first two-thirds of her life. Now she moved, too, the counterpoint second nature to her, as they stared into each other’s eyes and rode each wave toward final bliss.
    When it was over, they lay together, still tangled. Caleb stroked her hair, then her cheek. “You said it feels so right.”
    Meg felt tension infuse her lax muscles. “I—”
    “No.” He put his fingers over her mouth. “It feels right to me, too. You feel right.”
    “Caleb, I can’t—”
    “I know. Just don’t run on me again, okay?”
    “You don’t understand. I thought something was right before.” Panic robbed her lungs of air. “‘Right’ doesn’t always lead to a good place.”
    “I understand why you’d think that.” He brushed another soothing hand over her hair. “It’s because you lost something. You lost what belongs right here.” His fingertips touched the center of her chest.
    She couldn’t say he was wrong.
    “Give me a chance to get it back for you,” he said. “I have two more full days at the cove. Let me spend them with you.”
    And Meg, who had woken up that morning with a one-night stand behind her, couldn’t make any promises…but she didn’t refuse Caleb, either.

Chapter Four
    M eg told herself it wasn’t because she was superstitious. After all, she’d learned a decade before not to believe in irrational ideas like fated mates and forever-afters. Still, that didn’t stop her from hedging her bets and steering clear of Beach House No. 9 while Caleb continued as a cove visitor—just in case there was a kernel of truth to the idea it was some sort of architectural love potion.
    No sense in risking infection.
    It was bad enough, she realized, just spending time with him at his rental or at her family home, or anywhere for that matter…even in the car on the twenty-minute ride to the nearest grocery store—by SoCal standards, a near-epic distance—because everywhere they went he slipped in mentions of the future. “I’ve got to take you to this great fish market I found in Tiburon,” he said, as they perused the butcher section and the packaged selections offered there.
    When they peeked into the small gallery at the cove, he insisted on buying her a pair of earrings, tiers of tiny shells strung on multicolored silk thread, that she adored so much she swallowed her third round of protests. “Have you ever poked around the jewelry stalls along Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco?” he asked as he watched her don his gift. Without even waiting for a response, he tacked on a “We’ll have to do that this summer.”
    Meg found it exasperating and bewildering at the same time. He seemed like an intelligent human being, and one with adequate hearing, too, but each time she demurred or even flat-out ignored his comments, it didn’t