He loved the way she woke up with a smile. “Not just good. Amazing.”

“I know I am,” she said with a teasing grin as she rested her chin on her hand and gazed down at him from where she was perched over his chest. “Now tell me, is it my sparkling personality, my wicked hot moves in the sack, or my deft hand with pig feed that’s got you in raptures this morning?”

He knew he should just grin back, continue her teasing. But he hadn’t awakened with a woman in his bed in three years—especially not one this beautiful, this giving—and he couldn’t think of one thing he’d done to deserve it now.

“How can you forgive me again and again for what I’ve said to you? For the way I’ve acted?” In his experience, forgiveness was the hardest thing of all.

Her hand immediately moved to stroke his cheek, her eyes softening as she looked down at him. “My brothers and sister and I fought a lot when we were kids. Most of them were stupid fights about dolls or the last brownie or who won the race. But sometimes, we went too far and really hurt each other. Not just with bruises and black eyes, but with words that we didn’t know how to take back.” She smiled, thinking about her family. “When my mother’d had enough, she’d take us by the scruff of our necks like we were unruly cats, and then she’d lock us in a room together.”

His eyebrows went up. “Wasn’t she worried you’d keep pounding each other?”

“Oh, we definitely did that. But even that got old after a while. Eventually we would both realize we were stuck in a room with the one person we hated.” She laughed out loud at the memory of those lock-ins. “With eight kids to keep in line, my mother had to have plenty of tricks up her sleeve. And her genius was in knowing that no matter what we said or did, no matter how deep the arrows had gone, nothing had actually changed. We still loved each other and always would. It was just that, for a little while there, it was easier to lash out and be nasty than it was to actually work through whatever was really making us feel bad. By the time she came to let us out, we were usually too busy playing some silly game we’d made up to want to leave the room. And we’d forgiven each other without ever needing to say the words, because we’d never meant to hurt each other in the first place.”

She grinned at him, the sunlight streaming in over her head giving her a temporary halo. “Just in case you haven’t already figured it out, my mother is amazing.”

“No wonder.”

She cocked her head. “No wonder what?”

“No wonder...you.”

“That’s another reason I forgive you,” she said as she lifted his hand to her lips and pressed a kiss to it. “No one has ever said anything so sweet to me before.” She gave him another soft kiss. “You didn’t mean to hurt me with anything you said or did, Grayson. You didn’t even know me when I came here. You were just doing whatever you needed to do to keep me from finding out too much, or from having to revisit the pain from your past.” She wiggled her eyebrows as she added, “But if you think it would still do both of us good for you to lock yourself in a room with me—naked, of course—there’s a little game I just thought of that we could play.”

* * *

It was a big deal for Lori to wake up in Grayson’s bed. She’d always been sexy and fun and had believed it was up to her to keep her lovers “on their toes” so that they’d stay interested in being with her. But after she’d fallen asleep in his bed—on top of him, no less—instead of keeping things light and easy this morning, he’d gone deep right away. Now, with her teasing comments about playing a game together, she thought she was giving him another chance at an out he surely had to want, from emotional back to sexy. And when he got up off the bed and locked the door, all of the sensitive spots on her body immediately heated up.

But instead of getting back into bed with her, he knelt beside it. “That day in the cabin when you told me why you were here, I not only didn’t listen, I did something terrible by turning around the fact that your family has always been there for you and making it sound like a weakness.” She could read the regret on his beautiful face as clearly as she could hear it in every word. “You told me that you’d been in a relationship for the past two years, and that the guy was scum, right?”

“Total scum. But I kept thinking he’d change, that one of those times when he swore he loved me, he’d actually mean it. Long after my family begged me to dump him, I finally realized he never would when I found him in bed with the lead dancer in the show we were putting on in Chicago.” The pain of realizing what a fool she’d been came over her again as she said, “He didn’t even respect me enough to cheat on me with a stranger. It was like he did it that way on purpose to rub it in my face, to prove to me just how much power he had over not only me, but the entire cast and show, too.” Grayson’s expression was fierce, his hands tight fists beside her on the bed as she laid hers over them. “But I knew I had just as much power. The power to leave. The power to start over. And the power to make him matter just as little to me as he really should.”

“It sounds to me like you made the mistake of forgiving him one too many times, too.”

“No,” she said in a firm voice, “you and Victor are nothing like each other, so you can give up trying to make the situations seem at all the same. And even if it’s stupid and gets me in trouble sometimes, I won’t apologize for not being cynical and hard and holding a grudge.”

“Never apologize to anyone for who you are, Lori.”

“What about when I break something? Or if I accidentally let another pig out? Or,” she said as her lips curved upward at the corners, “what if it turns out that I used the wrong paint on the back side of the barn by accident?”

His eyes narrowed at her little admission before he broke out into laughter. It was a sound so sweet that she could hardly believe she was finally hearing it. Maybe the rest of the world wouldn’t think that making Grayson laugh was as big an accomplishment as performing in the shows and on the stages she’d been gunning for her whole career...but Lori knew it was at least a thousand times more important.

Because it meant that she’d helped him, at least a little bit, to reclaim a part of his soul.

“Well, maybe that might warrant an apology,” he teased, before claiming her mouth as he climbed back onto the bed. “Or at least keeping the door locked until you make it up to me.”