Shirts and jeans litter the asphalt, the empty fabric limbs askew as if they're attempting to escape. Blood smears Sarah's lips as she struggles against the chest of a dirty looking man with a beard. Terror. Terror is the only word my mind can seize on and it forgets what it means. I forget how to think - to move.

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.... In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.' For in this love 'to divide is not to take away.

With a shudder of excitement, and without giving herself a moment to second-guess what she was about to do, she reached up to take his face in her hands and pressed her lips to his. For a frozen moment he didn__ react, and she could feel her heart thudding in her throat, but then he groaned into her mouth and pulled her tightly against him. And God, he was a good kisser. She__ certainly never been kissed with such expertise. Somehow he was making her feel the kiss in places he wasn__ even touching.And then she stopped thinking.

A rush of sensation pulsed through her, lingering long after his touch. The towel quickly fell free. He caught it before it slipped to the ground and slung it over his shoulder. __onsider this your first time,_ he said, his tone low and sultry.Good Lord... Paige could hardly blink. If this was any indication of the doc__ bedside manner, she could only hope for long-term, intensive treatment.

So you__l cheat to win, huh?_____l use any means necessary to win.__er breasts ached at the smoky tone in his voice, like he__ reached out and rolled her nipples between his fingertips.

She hadn__ come for any of that. She came for him. Twenty feet in front of her, leaning back against the waist-high bar, stood the man she__ spent all day tracking down__he infamous Dillon James. The man who would soon have the power to take away everything she held dear.