Taeyeon found me sitting on the cottage porch an hour later, rubbing my fingers through Dog’s white coat and scratching behind his speckled ears. Dog never moved, but his warm body suggested he was still alive. Barely. Maybe.

He disappeared during the day, but by the time the sun went down, Dog was back on the porch and dead once again, at least to the world.

“Taming the savage beast?” Taeyeon asked as he sat next to me.

I grinned, but my heart wasn’t in it. “He’s blowing his image. Aren’t country dogs supposed to be hunters? He might as well be mounted on the wall.”

“Nah, the possums are big enough around here that we use them as coon dogs.” Taeyeon paused for a thoughtful minute. “I figured you’d be asleep by now. Having trouble winding down?”

I shook my head. “No, I needed some male action.” Taeyeon raised one eyebrow. “Not that kind,” I said. “There’s a spider the size of a small horse in there. I wanted you to kill it. You know how I am about spiders.”

A muscle twitched in his strong, angular jaw. I think he wanted to laugh, but refrained from it. Then his eyes turned to me, his face becoming more serious. “Jessica, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say…”

“It’s okay, Taeyeon. No need to apologize. I know it wasn’t what you meant. Besides, there’s some validity to what you said.”

“But I shouldn’t have brought up your parents. It wasn’t right.”

At the mention of them, tears stung my eyes, but I refused to let them fall. I hung from a cliff by my fingertips, and the emotional weight pulled at my feet. I managed to push back the sadness and smiled crookedly. His eyes locked on my trembling mouth. I nervously glanced away, gathered my hair at the nape of my neck, and braided it together.

“Floss told me she mentioned the funeral,” Taeyeon added. “She didn’t know I hadn’t said anything to you about it.”

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t—”

“My parents died last year. At the same time, on the same day. It nearly killed me. It’s part of the reason I haven’t been back here.” He swallowed hard, struggling with his speech. “They died because of me.”

Minutes crept by silently. I didn’t want to ask him to share anything he wasn’t willing to. We stared up at the glass dome of stars while Taeyeon marinated in his guilt.

Sometimes in life, you need to be able to throw something out into the universe, a rhetorical statement warranting no judgment from others. It’s what I wanted to give to Taeyeon because it’s what I wished someone would’ve given to me when I thought the same thing about my own parents. They died because of me.

His dark hair was slightly disheveled, and his gray eyes drooped with weariness. The manual labor he performed under the sun had taken a physical toll, but the mental strain of his parents’ death still weighed heavily on him. I understood that feeling well.

“Tired?” I asked, unsure how he managed to stay awake.

“I’m beat,” Taeyeon replied. “I’ll go take care of your spider problem so we can go to bed.”

My temperature rose slightly, thinking about snuggling into his warm, hard body. And he must’ve noticed the little smile gathering at the corner of my mouth.

“Jessica, I don’t think either of us got much sleep last night with the…uh…tension in the room. Unless you want a repeat, we’re going to have to pretend there’s a crossing guard between us tonight.”

“A ménage à trois?” I said with a teasing laugh. “Might be interesting.”

Taeyeon paused. “.”

…

It took me forever to fall asleep, but I must’ve finally dozed off, because when I opened my eyes, Taeyeon was asleep next to me. Actually, he was under me. I had draped myself across his chest, capturing his body heat. It was like cuddling with a high-temperature furnace. As cold as it was in the room, the cottage could’ve been easily mistaken for a cabin in Alaska.

It was five o’clock when the stupid rooster started crowing relentlessly, robbing me of my sleep. The sun hadn’t even risen yet. bird should be on Prozac.

I shifted slightly against Taeyeon to get more comfortable. His body tensed as his muscled forearms tightened their grip around my back, pulling me further in to him. A knee slid up between my thighs. His warm breath quickened, blowing against my neck. Suddenly, the room changed from cold to hot, like Taeyeon was a sunray burning into my skin. Flustered, I considered cranking down the air conditioner in the room before I melted.

When something hard pressed heavily into my pelvis, I knew Taeyeon was awake. I leaned my mouth closer to his, brushing my lips lightly over his. “Taeyeon…”

“We can’t,” he whispered, sounding painfully unsure of himself. “Stop before this goes any further.”

“I don’t want to stop,” I said softly, letting my tongue flicker across his briefly. “I want to feel you inside me.”

A definite pause on his part. Then he dumped me back onto my own side of the bed. “Jesus Christ, Jessica. I’m a man. You can’t say that sort of thing to a man and expect him to maintain any sense of self-control.”

I narrowed my eyes and pursed my lips, stopping myself from saying, Duh. That’s the point, dip! “You don’t have any problems with self-control. In fact, you’re good at pushing me away. Must be all the practice you’re getting.”

“Don’t give me a hard time.”

“I’m not. What I want is for you to give me a hard time.”

He sighed wearily, throwing his head back onto his pillow. “Once the trial is over we’ll be able to—”

“The trial could be months or even a year away. You’re crazy if you think I’ll wait that long for something that’s not a sure thing.” Okay, so it was a lie. I’d wait for him if I had to, but I wasn’t stupid enough to tell him that. At least not yet.

“Oh, it’s a sure thing,” he said with a sardonic laugh. “When I do finally get inside you, you’re going to wish you hadn’t teased me the way you have.” Then he raised his eyebrows and lifted the corner of his mouth in a smirk.

I wanted to respond, but the words caught in my throat. After a moment, all I could say was, “God, I hate you sometimes.” Then I rolled to my side, facing away from him, and went to sleep with hard s.

And he thinks I’m a tease?

…

Two days went by, and I was bored out of my mind.

Hank found me sitting in the backyard on an old, rickety bench overlooking an aboveground pool filled with cloudy, urine-colored well water, littered with bug corpses and dead leaves. At least I think it was a pool. It looked more like the horses’ watering trough.

“You okay, honey?”

I nodded. “I don’t have anything to do, so I’m watching the squirrels.”

“I hate those damn things,” Hank said, scowling up at the tree. “They get up in the attic, build nests in the insulation, and shred everything up. I’ve been battling them ever since Floss planted a pecan tree and it produced nuts.”

“How do you get rid of them?”

“Shoot ‘em.”

I gasped. “Hank, that’s mean!”

He grinned with amusement at my reaction. “Last squirrel I shot had its nuts still in its mouth when it went down.”

That made me laugh. “Didn’t want to let go, huh?”

“Came down to a choice—its nuts or its life. Damn squirrel chose to keep its nuts.” Hank nodded toward Taeyeon, walking toward us from across the yard. “I reckon most men would do the same.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but somewhere in his words there was bound to be a pearl of wisdom. I had a few choice comments, but I didn’t say anything, figuring Taeyeon would get mad at me again.

“I’m burning the last of the brush pile from the back of the property,” Taeyeon said to Hank. “What do you want me to do now?”

“Take a break,” Hank demanded.

“I’m fine,” Taeyeon said. “I’ll rest after the work’s done. I’m trying to keep you off your bumknee as long as I can, old man.”

“I’ll make you think old man, you piss ant.” Hank glared at Taeyeon, but the taunting smile on his face led me to believe he wasn’t serious. “If you want something to do, why don’t you take the culled birds down to the pond? Take Jessica with you. She’s bored. It’ll give her something to do.”

Taeyeon started to argue but decided against it. “Come on, Jessica.”

We strolled to the barn, where Taeyeon picked up a bucket covered with a lid and continued toward the pond. Almost there, we heard the sound of a truck rumbling down the driveway. Taeyeon tensed for a moment and reached for my arm but relaxed as three young men and a pretty blond woman slid out of the tan Ford. All four of them waved at Hank, then walked in our direction.

“Can’t say I’m surprised to see them,” Taeyeon said, undeterred from his mission.

I stumbled after him but curiously glanced back at the new arrivals in the distance. “Who are they?”

“Friends of mine,” Taeyeon said, stopping next to a moss-covered tree and removing the lid on the bucket.

The pond sat closer to the back of the property, surrounded by red oak and cypress trees. A green scummy film of algae floated on the surface around the lilies, and small turtles rested on a log within the cattails at the water’s edge. Between the thick, stinky black mud on the shoreline and the green climbing vines and weeds, the pond resembled a cross between a jungle and a swamp.

I leaned over to check out the contents of the bucket and saw nothing but dead birds. “Oh, gross! Why are there dead birds in there?”

Taeyeon picked one up and threw it in the pond. “Got to get rid of them somehow.”

“How’d they die?”

“Disease or sometimes gnats. Most of these were already dead,” Taeyeon explained, picking up another. “Well, except for this little guy right here. He was on his deathbed. Hank pulled his head off this morning.”

My God! First squirrels and now his own birds? If Dog wasn’t already dead, I’d worry about his safety.

“This is disgusting,” I said, openly disapproving of Hank’s methods. “I’m not going to stand out here in the weeds, watching you throw dead birds into a smelly