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“That’s not a sexy one.”

“All of them are.”

She turns pink from her collarbone up. I watch it climb. Same color as the carnations in her front case.

Her impatient fingers tug at my T-shirt, and my stomach goes tight under her knuckles. I take it off, and she puts both hands flat on my chest and moves them, like she’s checking where everything is. Her right hand goes up my left arm. Over the scar. Wrist to shoulder, every rope of it.

She doesn’t stop there. Never does.

“You’re doing it again,” I tell her.

“Doing what?”

“Touching it like it’s just arm.”

“It is just arm, babe.” She kisses the top of my shoulder, where it ends. “It’s your arm. I like your arm.”

My hands go to the back of her bra and fumble the hook, and she laughs against my mouth.

“Ranger.”

“Shut up.”

“Two things at once,” she says.

On the third try the thing comes open and I drop it on the floor. Then I’m quiet for a while, because she’s in front of me in the lamplight with nothing on above her jeans. I need a minute.

“Six,” I say, with my mouth on her breast. “Seven.”

Her fingers dig into my hair. “Oh, God. Okay. You can count.”

I turn her and walk her back onto the bed. The old springs complain. She giggles and says her grandma’s going to haunt us.

“Tell Grandma North she can get in line behind Heidi Stokes.”

We laugh together.

Off come her jeans. Mine follow. My wallet comes out of my back pocket and goes on the nightstand.

Her voice is raspy now. “I’ve been dying for this since you said ‘every inch of me’ in front of Heidi.”

“Eight,” I say, and kiss the inside of her knee.

She stops talking.

I like that because I like knowing exactly what does it. Lindsey North, who talks to every customer and every bucket of tulips, stops talking when I go slowly.

So I keep the pace right there. Her knee. The soft inside of her thigh. The crease of her hip, where she’s ticklish, and she squirms and grabs the quilt.

“Nine. Ten.”

“Travis.”

“Eleven.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

I hook my fingers in the side of her lacy little panties and look up at her. “Yeah?”