I awoke in heaven. I was naked, with clouds for sheets, a forest for the sky.

“Want some?”

It was the devil himself—Carter Ray—and he was smiling. He had a plate of bacon extended to me. It was to this clear glass plate that I addressed my, “What? How?”

A bemused grin played on his face.

“You passed right out last night. Luckily, my cabin was nearby, so it wasn’t too hard to carry you here.”

“Here,” I murmured, my gaze rotating around the room.

Here, the paradise with the forest-scaped walls, wooden floors, and blue-sky ceiling. Here, which was Carter’s cabin. He picked up a piece of bacon and extended it to me.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?”

I bit down gladly, giving him a shy smile. I’d lost track of whether I was supposed to be angry or happy with this unpredictable man.

“I’m making eggs too,” Carter said, striding away. “Don’t move.”

And I didn’t. Not that there was much incentive to. The bed was as comfortable and as yielding as a cloud, the sheets even softer. And the view—the panoramic, 360 view of the forest outside—would have been enough to satisfy me for hours.

As I watched a gray squirrel chase a brown one, Carter spoke.

“Today’s a pretty busy day. We can lay around all we like for the morning, but in the afternoon I’m visiting another site, the McArthur one this time. You can come if you’d like.”

While standing over the skillet and cooking eggs, Carter shot me a glance that I returned blankly. I had just had what was undeniably, hands down, the best night of my life. Why wouldn’t I want to continue the experience with the man who’d given it to me?

The answer came as a swirling in my gut. Because, really, I still didn’t know the “why” behind any of this—Carter’s interest in and pampering of me, if he saw me as a simple plaything or something more, if he was really going to follow through with his promise to change his pipeline routes.

“Yes,” I found myself saying.

After all, the best way to tell if he was just lying to me about these pipeline changes would be to accompany him on a site visit, just like the one he’d suggested now. Though, really, as Carter swept toward me with a tray full of bacon and eggs, I knew spending more time with the man proposing the visit might have had something to do with it.

I didn’t know how long we spent there, curled up in bed, eating and kissing and talking and eating some more. At any rate, when Carter finally seized me and tossed me out of bed, the sun was high in the sky.

A quick glance at his watch made Carter swear. “Shit, we’re late.” He cast me a half-irritated, half-affectionate look. “I didn’t expect that I’d be so…”

His voice trailed off as he strode to the opposite end of the room and grabbed a black messenger bag by the couch.

“You didn’t expect that you’d be so what?” I asked, but he only shook his head and swept his hand toward a closet in the corner.

“There’ll be something in there for you to wear. We have to get going; though you don’t have to join me if you don’t want to.”

Without another word, I walked over to the closet and opened it.

There was a hand on my shoulder, then his coaxing voice in my ear. “Though I do want you to. Come, I mean.”

I turned to face him, grinning.

“I’ve already come a lot with you.”

Chuckling, he pressed me to him.

“Oh yeah?”

Kissing his ear, I nodded, murmuring into it. “Many times.”

Slapping my ass, Carter gave me a light push away.

“Get dressed, woman. At this rate, we’ll never get there.”

So, I flitted over to the table where my clothes from last night were and put them on. Then, Carter took my hand and we were off. His helicopter, with the same smiling pilot as last night, was waiting. Carter, however, held up a hand for him to wait and then strode off, his phone to his ear.

When he returned, the phone back in his pocket, Carter was grinning.

“I changed my mind,” he said. “I rescheduled the site visit for tomorrow. I’ve got another surprise for you today.”

As he took my hand and led me into the helicopter, I asked, “Am I allowed to know what the surprise is?”

We sat down side by side. Then, patting my face with a half-smile, Carter said, “Then it wouldn’t be a surprise, now would it?”

The whole flight was encapsulated in those clasped hands of ours. Out the window, the tree-covered land slipped by. Above us, the propeller whirred while Carter traced the palm of my hand with his pointer finger and clasped and unclasped each of my fingers in turn.

I was ready for the flight to go on forever, but the helicopter touched down all too fast. We were in a remote field, the length and breadth of which seemed to stretch endlessly. As Carter got out and helped me out, the pilot waved.

“You two have a fun time!” he said before taking off.

When I turned to Carter, I gave him a playful smirk.

“Fun in a field, huh? I’ll have you know that your pilot gave away exactly what we’re doing.”

Wearing a playful smirk of his own, Carter took my hand and led me in the direction of what looked like more fields.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes. We’re…”

I fell silent as we reached the top of a slight hill and saw, below us, a white house tucked into a field of different flowers. Instead of the indiscriminate mix of tall grasses and burrs, this field was a sea of purple: lavender flowers.

“Carter, it’s…”

Before I could continue, he picked me up and carried me through the stunning swathes of purple at his feet, toward the white cottage. He placed me at the door and gestured to it with a smile.

“Surprise.”

Laughing, I clasped the brass doorknob and turned.

“I still don’t know what’s inside, though.”

Half-expecting an empty room with handcuffs, a whip, or a bed with its purpose obvious, I was rendered speechless by what I found instead.

“Carter,” I murmured, stepping inside.

“Shhh,” he said. “Just look. Just look.”

And I did.

I lost myself in water lilies, in soft pinks, little petals jutting out over the forest green, the circular pads merging and stacking atop each other, all amid a billowing, cloud-reflecting blue with its trails of willow trees and ripples.

I walked up to it until I was in the midst of it, face-first, floating above the most beautiful scene I could ever have imagined. As tears filled my eyes and the beauty blurred, in my ear a wonderfully familiar voice whispered, “Surprise.”

I whirled around to Carter’s lips. Sweet and soft, his hands clasping me like he never wanted to let me go, I knew, then. No matter what he did or said, no matter how he tried to turn away from it, deny it, ruin it, he loved me. Carter loved me.

After a minute, he broke away. Searching my face, he asked, “What do you think? Do you like it?”

I let out a peal of laughter before I caught just how intent his face was.

“Like it? Carter, I love it. How? Why?”

He smiled.

“Got an art store to print them out and attach them up to the walls like this. I’ve had this little property for a while now, never really had a use for it until… I mean, you really like it, you said?”

I nodded, and his smile broadened.

“We could use it sometime, as our studio. If you want.”

As I nodded, I noticed he had never answered my “why.” It hardly mattered; now he was leading me to the next room and I was being swept up in another world. I was one with the red-hatted woman and the flower-hatted little girl on the wall, enjoying our luscious basket of food while the symphony of trees outside welcomed us and rejoiced in us.

Before I knew it, I was in the next room, the next world. I was enveloped in the pink tutus of several ballerinas, like one great cotton candy mass of beauty, while behind me more beautiful periwinkles and lilacs of dancers waited their turn.

This was the room in which, turning to Carter, I asked him, “When do I get to see your art?”

The way his eyes shone, it was as if he’d asked the question himself. Next thing I knew, he was sweeping me up in his arms, pressing me to him, soaring us both outside and down to the ground, to the bed of lavender, where he kissed me some more, where we shed our clothes among the flowers. He kissed me like it was the last time.

We stroked each other all over until we were one body, one trembling, ecstatic, flower-flecked body, and, as we released ourselves into each other, lost ourselves in the building, the orgasm, the falling, one thought kept returning to me, reflected in his loving eyes: If this wasn’t love, then I didn’t know what was.