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them.
    Light from the main cabin spilled
across her sleeping eyes. Every fiber in him wanted her.
    Mascara coated her almost colorless
lashes. He picked up a white-blonde tendril from the hair pooling
on the bunk around her face and rubbed it between his fingers. He
hadn’t gotten the color right the first time he painted her when
she was fifteen. In Sleepy Aly , he’d painted to stay sober
after Raine dumped him; the color had been better, but still not
exact. When he painted Aly again, he’d take his time and get it
perfect.
    He propped his head on his hand and
studied her thin brows, exactly proportioned nose. The asymmetrical
quality of her eyes, the left larger than the right, wasn’t
detectable to most people. She’d always hated her “lopsided” eyes
and used makeup to minimize the difference. But Cal loved the
contrast. He’d drawn and painted her enough to know it wasn’t so
much a matter of size, but of one eye appearing wide open and the
other heavy-lidded. He ran the back of his finger against the blush
of her cheek. It would be a challenge, but he knew he could capture
the silkiness of her skin on canvas.
    The shadowed gap between her blouse
and chest teased him. Aly had offered to comfort him with her body
when he’d been reeling from Raine. He’d turned her down, one of the
few good decisions he’d made during that dark time. He’d get that
chance to make it with Aly if he had anything to say about
it.
    That depended on Aly’s answer to his
plea for help. And it didn’t look like he would get a reply in the
next five minutes. He could think of worse ways to wait.
     
     
    Panic jetted through Aly as she gained
consciousness. A heart thumped under her right ear. Male scent
filled her nostrils. She’d woken up in some guy’s arms—something
she promised two years ago she’d never do again. Her tongue ran
across the roof of her mouth and tasted morning breath and
remorse.
    A dog whimpered in his sleep. Van
Gogh. Cal. Her head rested on Cal’s chest. An underwire dug into
her ribs. Fully dressed. Relief filtered through her. Thank God, it
was Cal. Then, she remembered the storm, the feeling of safety in
Cal’s arms. How she always felt with Cal. But the feeling was a
lie. Cal had snapped her heart in two.
    The rain had stopped. The Escape rocked softly, water slapping contentment against the
hull. She closed her eyes to savor the quiet whistle at the end of
Cal’s breaths as he slept—intimate and foreign.
    If they’d been together since she was
fifteen, Cal would have put a ring on her finger a long time ago.
Their firstborn would sleep in the bow berth. And when Aly woke up
at dawn, her hands would explore the map of Cal’s body—one she’d
know as well as her own. It was just this kind of useless
daydreaming that would set her up for a second
heartbreak.
    Cal shifted in his sleep and tightened
his arms around her. A sense of being loved washed over her—did he
know it was her in his sleep?—and subsided.
    Regardless of her vow, if Cal woke up
and wanted her, she didn’t know if she had the strength to say no.
She hadn’t had sex in two years—which probably accounted for the
near-starvation she felt for Cal’s touch. If she gave in, she
couldn’t feel more guilt than she already felt.
    She could see her sister plopping her
hands on her hips and saying, “Don’t do it. You’ll be sorry. You
know you will.” Easy for Kallie to say. She’d held onto her
virginity with a vise grip until her honeymoon.
    Cal and Kallie thought she slept with
guys because she was looking for Daddy’s love. They were probably
right. Kallie had convinced her that just because she responded to
Daddy’s defection differently didn’t mean she was any better than
Aly. But knowing why she slept with her boyfriends didn’t make the
guilt go away. The nuns had always made it perfectly clear that sex
was only permitted in marriage. Her drive to be loved had always
trumped doing the right thing.
    And she