I unpacked my bag in the saddest motel in the world. It looked like someone spackled the 80’s over the 70’s and did a half-assed job. It looked like a place someone hunkered down to die. Whoever thought this particular shade of yellow and orange matched must have been high during the design process.

My mind strayed to Murphy and his unanswer as I rocked the wood drawer so it would slide back in place. The piece of furniture had been warped before I’d even been born, so I shoved it as far as it would and turned around to survey the rest of the room. Even the air felt sad.

Or could this be before Mara in her—my hometown? I’d developed the bad habit of calling the before Mara her. She didn’t feel like me. Or rather I didn’t know her—me. That had been the point of this trip, right? The doctors told me not to get my hopes up. They didn’t know hope and I hadn’t been anywhere near each other in years.

And back around to Murphy. It surprised me how my heart kicked up when I spotted him. I hadn’t even known it was him for sure because most of the images he sent me in email were more anatomical than faces. And five years can change people.

When he’d attacked the door and started cursing, it had felt like jumper cables to the sternum. My brain didn’t know him, but my body sure did.

His answer to my question was something he and I would swing around on. One way or another, the answer lived in this town. If Murphy wouldn’t tell me, then someone else would.

When I woke up in the hospital, they told me all they could from my enlistment documents. Then email and journals filled in some of the blanks. One gaping hole remained, one surrounding my mother’s death, which my journal told me had been my fault. The old Mara thought so at least. I needed to find out the truth to that question as much as I wanted to see Murphy.

Most of my questions and answers lived here and would tell me more about myself than I could find in some scribbles on paper.

The emails we shared. My blood heated simply thinking about them. Some of them were sweet and innocent. Jokes and games. Others were intimate and scorching hot. The man could write a sexual fantasy to rival bestselling romance writers.

I checked the clock on the wall and then my cell phone. He’d asked me to meet him later. The clock read 48 minutes slower than the actual time. What OCD I’d learned I possessed couldn’t let it stay there incorrect and taunting me. I climbed up on the rickety dresser and adjusted the dial on the back to the correct time and rehung it on the nail. I evenly aligned it in the white circle outline created by age and dirt on the rest of the wall.

I began to climb back down, and a wave of vertigo punched me between the eyes. It had been months since I blacked out. Of course, it would start again now. The world spun around me like a carnival ride, and I fell torso on the bed, legs on the floor. Then I slid down onto the carpet in a heap.

I awoke to pounding and darkness, both in my head and at the motel room door, accompanied by unintelligible shouting. I scrambled up and lunged for the knob, turning it as I made it fully upright.

Murphy stood there, shivering and huffing warm heat into the air. He didn’t wear a coat despite the deep winter chill. “It’s about damn time. You were supposed to meet me an hour ago. I got worried.”

Staring up at him like this felt...familiar. But only the shadow of recognition. Like watching something unfold behind a backlit curtain at the theater. “I uh...fell asleep.” It wasn’t a total lie.

His eyes narrowed, and he entered the room, forcing me to back up. Then he slammed the door and flipped the light switch. “That’s bullshit. One of your pupils is blown, and your bed hasn’t been touched.” He didn’t yell, but his tone broached no argument. It turned me on to see this side of him. Like I could finally merge the Murphy I remembered as a teenager to this Murphy, my Murphy.

I turned around so he couldn’t see my face or the stupid smile plastered there. “Fine, Sherlock. I fell off the dresser and blacked out. I’m okay.”

He grabbed my upper arms and spun me around to face him. Then he started inspecting my head softly, despite the way he ground his teeth together. “Everything feels fine,” he said after a minute and released me.

“Thanks for the update, Doc,” I grumbled.

I stared up into his eyes which dropped to my lips. He wet his, and for a second, I thought he might kiss me. A heartbeat passed, and then he stepped away, pushing me in the opposite direction at the same time.

“Why were you on the dresser anyway. Shouldn’t you be taking it easy?”

I snorted. “I was injured years ago. I’m as recovered as I’ll ever be. I’m a little beyond some ibuprofen and rest.”

“Oh, I didn’t think...”

“Something I’m noticing is a pattern with you.”

He blinked and took another step back. Something passed across his face and then cleared to indifference. A perfectly neutral look men wore like a uniform for uncomfortable situations. Situations like mom asking after your sex life. Situations like meeting your sister’s boyfriend. Situations like doctor’s telling you the odds of recovering your memory were none to none.

I hated that look. It lied without using words.

“You being hurt might be old news for you, but it’s not for me. Cut me some slack, please.” A little of the neutrality softened, and I spied the pain beneath.

Me returning had turned something over inside him. It hurt him. I hadn’t thought about it when I decided to come here. I’d spent hours thinking about how he could be married or have kids by now. Hell, he could have been dead.

I stepped toward him, and he ambled equal distance backward. I repeated the step, and he bumped into a side table between the door and an old, worn armchair.

I couldn’t help but laugh. “What’s your problem?”

His turn not to meet my eyes. “Nothing.”

“That’s why you’re retreating—oh so smoothly—with every step forward I take?”

He sighed and ruffled his hair with his fingers. “I’m fucking nervous.”

“Why?”

“I haven’t seen you for years Mara, and...”

“And?” I prompted, my lungs suddenly squeezing out air at a faster clip.

“And I still...”

I waited this time for him to finish, all the while inching closer and closer.

“Want you,” he finished. “I don’t know what this means,” he added in a rush.

He stared down at me now, like he could see into me, searching for the answer.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” I said.

His forehead scrunched up, and he dropped his gaze from mine. I closed the distance between us and pressed him down into the chair near the table he almost toppled. Once he sat, I climbed up on his lap. Doubtful the chair would hold both our weight for long, but for now, it would do.

The bunch up of his forehead stayed, and lines appeared around his mouth. But every line softened when I captured his cheeks between my palms.

“None of this means anything. I’m not the same woman you knew, and I don’t even know who you are. But this could be a second chance. I don’t know anything about you,” I whispered, slowly lowering my mouth to his.

He swallowed loudly, and his Adam’s apple danced in his throat. I could feel the heavy pound of his heart so near my own.

I didn’t kiss him but stopped centimeters away. “However, my whole body knows you, Murphy Wilcox. My brain is at a loss, but I can almost feel the ghost of your fingers digging into my hips.”

At the word hips, he shifted, his erection already pressing up into me.

“And it seems your body remembers mine.”

He slid his palms up the outside of my denim-clad thighs until he clutched my ass. Then dragged me forward into him, and he took my lips hard and fast.

A lightning strike of a kiss. Then he tried to pull away. I held his face harder and pressed into his lips with more force. I needed him to know this wasn’t an experiment to me. Seeing him, touching him, feeling him wasn’t a game to me.

He stopped fighting me and began kneading my ass with his fingers as I slid my tongue between his lips. This kiss, even my bones ached from how turned on he made me. As our tongues slid across each other, he started pulling my hips forward into his in short jerks, his cock aligning right with my clit through my jeans.

I didn’t have a touchstone for this kind of heat. I’d read books, watched porn, seen people having sex, and none of it had ratcheted me to humping like a teenager in a crappy motel. As if my clothes hurt my skin, I wanted them off so badly.

I released him with a gasp and began pulling my tank top off. His eyes tracked over my flesh as I revealed it. They didn’t miss the bullet hole scar at my shoulder, but thankfully, he didn’t say anything.

I sat on his lap in my bra and suddenly felt foolish as he sat there and looked at me, holding my ass in his hands. He didn’t make a move to remove his own clothes. I’d already flung away my tank top, no rewinding that move, so I tilted his face up to look at me.

“I’m sorry. If you aren’t into this...”

He lifted his hips up, and I gasped aloud as sensation exploded inside me.

“Does that say anything like I’m not into this?”

I shook my head, willing the feeling to stay, but it slowly dissipated. “You’re not undressing. You’re just sitting there.”

The corner of his mouth twitched like he might smile. “Call me crazy, but I want to savor this. I’ve waited years to have you. I don’t want to go fast. We did that last time. I plan to take all night and then the morning too.”

“Don’t you have to work?”

“I’ll take care of it,” he whispered, leaning back now, staring down the curve of my breasts to my flat belly and then to the button of my jeans. He released the silver fastening and then slid his arms up my warmed skin exploring, touching, breathing me in. It was an erotic experience in itself to be studied by him.

“Take your shirt off,” I grumbled. “Or I will do it for you.”

He did smile this time, and damn, how had he stayed single so long? A part of my brain told me he waited for me. I shook the line of thought away while he twisted out of his shirt and tossed it on top of mine.

His skin had warmed, and I ran my fingers through the tuft of chest hair right in the middle of his pecs. His chest was strong and muscled, as were his shoulders and the line of abs down to his jeans. Holy hell. The pictures in the email had definitely been real.

“Am I the first man you’ve kissed since...?” His gaze flashed to the scar on my head and down to my eyes again.

“Maybe,” I hedged. He was, but I’d picked up enough about male ego not to tell him so.

“What if I wanted to be the last?”