My pulse was suddenly in my throat and it wasn’t because I was afraid. Mary had said she’d take a long lunch, and that suddenly didn’t seem like a bad idea. I frowned, and tried to think a little better than that.

Nathaniel leaned in and whispered against my face, breath so warm, “Too much?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

“I don’t think this is going to make her laugh,” Micah said.

I shook my head.

Nathaniel backed up enough so he wasn’t breathing his words directly on my skin. “I’m not jealous of you and Micah, because you still react as if me touching you is new.”

I turned and looked at him, frowning at little. “Are you insinuating that other people have gotten tired of you touching them?”

“Now you’ve gone and made her think,” Jason said. “Thinking will not make her smile.”

I gave him an unfriendly look.

He held his hands up, as if to say, Don’t shoot the messenger. “You know I’m right.”

Nathaniel said, “I’m saying that other people have wanted me for a night, or a few days a week, or a month, but you never seem to grow tired of me.”

I just looked at him. “They were crazy.”

He smiled, not the sexy smile, but the big, bright, happy smile. The one I hadn’t even known he had in him until we’d been together for months. It made him look even younger than twenty-one, and I had the feeling that maybe that smile was what he might have been if he hadn’t lost his family and been on the streets before age ten.

Jason leaned around Nathaniel and said, “I’m remembering why I don’t go to lunch with all of you.”

“Why?” I asked.