Free Zach's Law by Kay Hooper

loosely. And she said good night in a quiet voice when the battery-powered lamp was turned off.
    It was some time later that Zach learnedthere were things more dangerous to chinks than downpours.
    There were tears.
    He had allowed his own breathing to deepen and become even but remained awake, staring up at the blackness of the raftered ceiling. He had gotten no sleep the night before and he was tired, but the power of his desire for her tormented him and made sleep impossible. The small room seemed to close in on him, reducing the few feet between his bed and Teddy’s until he felt as if he were standing over her and listening to the faint sounds of her breathing.
    And they were faint sounds; even in the silence of the cabin, average ears would have heard nothing. But Zach had trained his ears in jungles, and he heard.
    He heard the soft, steady breathing, and his mind tortured him with images of her breasts rising and falling. The images taunted him: creamy mounds that just filled his palms, tipped with coral and heavy with desire. Heclosed his eyes, fighting himself, remembering why he had to.
    Because once, he hadn’t. Because once, he had believed eyes looking at him in excited wonder, believed his own tangle of emotions. Desire, as heated and primitive as the jungles it was born in, had deceived him, just as it had deceived her. And deception had not cushioned those final blows. They might not have loved, but the stiffness in her, the fear in her eyes when she looked at him in her father’s elegant house, had hurt. And the knowledge that she—
    He didn’t want to think about that. Didn’t want to think about what it had done to him to find that out.
    That was why he had to fight himself. Because he couldn’t allow anything like that to happen again. What Teddy felt, she believed to be real, and he knew that. But he also knew far better than she could ever know how circumstances and surroundings could deceive the mind, color the emotions.
    And he knew he wouldn’t be able to bear itshappening again. Not with Teddy. Even if there were no consequences of the act, if they became lovers and she afterward looked at him in fear, in the uneasy recognition that he didn’t belong in her world, in the real world, he thought it would probably tear him apart.
    Odd that he knew that. Odd that he felt so certain—
    Zach stiffened suddenly, and something deep inside him lurched with a painful movement. She was crying.
    There wasn’t a sound to betray her. No sobs or sniffles. Just a break in the even sound of her breathing, a catch that was almost silent. But he knew. As if he were indeed standing over her and watching a silver trail of tears, he knew.
    Zach had done many difficult things in his life, from the physically exhausting to the mentally and emotionally draining. But he had never done anything harder than lying there, muscles taut, body aching, listening without moving to the heart-wrenching sounds of Teddy’s quiet tears.

    She had fallen asleep around an hour later, but it was much longer before Zach followed suit. And he slept heavily, waking with a start just after dawn to find that she was already up and dressed—and he hadn’t heard.
    How had he not heard, or at least sensed, movements all around him? Did
he
trust to the point of feeling completely unthreatened in her presence? To the point of allowing the ever-vigilant senses born in the jungle to sleep when they had never before slept with someone nearby?
    It was a jarring shock to realize that he did trust her that much.
    With its windows covered and door tightly fitted, almost no light could find its way into the cabin. Teddy had turned on the battery lamp, and she dropped to one knee beside his sleeping bag before his eyes could no more than begin to open.
    Through his lashes he saw only part of her.He saw her hand, braced on her thigh. He saw it lift, reach toward his shoulder, then hesitate, withdraw as a tremor shook the slender fingers. He saw