Adding all this together, after drink four, when he’d leaned into me and asked in his deep voice, “You wanna get outta here?” I said yes.

I didn’t hesitate.

I nodded and verbalized my agreement with a shy, somewhat breathy but still definite, “Yes.”

That earned me another smile.

I would find it only got better after that.

It started with the fact that he opened the door to his truck for me.

And after I was in, he closed it behind me.

Then, as he started us on our way and it hit me it might not be the smartest thing to do, to get in a strange man’s car and go to his house, I looked at his profile in the dashboard lights, the timidity hit me along with some panic, which made me blurt, “Am I . . . uh, going home tonight?”

He didn’t ask my opinion on the subject. He also didn’t hesitate.

He just said, “No.”

At that point, after I experienced a pleasant trill down my spine, I pulled my phone out of my purse and told him haltingly, “I just . . . need to text my friend. I have dogs. Cats too. And some, uh . . . other animals. She lives close to me. I want to ask her to pop around in the morning to feed them, let the dogs out.”

“First, I think it’s cool you’ve got a mind to your pets, and second, I’d think you were stupid if you didn’t have a mind to yourself and let a girlfriend know where you were and who you were with.”

That was his response. He knew why I was calling Deanna, and that reason wasn’t only because I wanted someone to have a mind to my pets. And like getting me a glass of water between drinks, it showed that he, too, had a mind to me.

So yes, definitely yes, he started out great and kept getting better.

I texted Deanna with this information, and although the anxiety sheared away at his earlier comment, it came back because we went out of town. I lived out of town in the opposite direction on three acres with my house, my small stable, my two dogs, three cats, two birds and two horses, but I didn’t live as far out as he did.

Deanna might have my text but she wouldn’t know who he was, where he was taking me, and as he turned into a dirt road that was surrounded entirely by woods I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.

Serial killers, I was sure, lived on dirt roads in wooded areas.

And maniacs that forced you into underground bunkers and kept you captive while forcing you to make babies so they could build armies (or whatever) also surely all lived on dirt roads in wooded areas.

When his headlights finally fell into a clearing that had a two-story building made of stones in varying shades of mellow cream, tan and brown (the water wheel was on the other side so I hadn’t seen it), flanked by a large creek, I felt nothing but the panic because we were in the woods, nothing around us, and I had a long way to run to get to anything if I had to run away.

And he was tall and fit, he had very long legs, so I had the distinct feeling if I had to run, he’d catch me.

He got out, came around and opened my door (mostly because I was frozen in my seat).

He also took my hand, and when I turned my head, I could feel through the dark that he was looking into my eyes.

It was then he said softly, “Izzy, baby, there’s a good possibility I’m gonna bite you. But just to say, trust me, you’ll wanna get outta my truck, because I can guarantee you’re gonna like it.”

A tingle drifted between my legs that must have been a lot more powerful than it felt, because it forced those legs to the side.

Johnny got out of my way as I got out of his truck. He guided me to some wooden, open-slat steps at the side of the building, and he stopped me halfway up to kiss me.

The rest was a haze of nothing but goodness.

During that goodness, on more than one occasion, he had bitten me.

And he’d been true to his word.

I’d liked it.

And after three times of having sex (but four orgasms for me), I fell asleep naked in his arms.

Now there I was, still naked in his bed, and he was deep in contemplation of the creek and woods that surrounded his home, cocooning it in nature, looking a part of it with his bearded-man-because-he-was-a-man-who-wore-a-beard, sweats-wearing, coffee-drinking casualness in his space.

I looked away and spied my panties tangled with my jeans on the floor by his bed, and not far away from them was the T-shirt he wore last night.

I scooched to the edge of the bed, holding the sheet to my chest, and kept scooching, and reaching, as I extended out a leg as far as I could stretch, toes pointed, to drag his T-shirt my way.

I managed this, leaned over, grabbed it and pulled it over my head.

Only then did I get up.

I was tall. He was taller but I was tall. He had very broad shoulders, so the shirt bagged at mine and down my chest, but it barely covered my rump.

That wasn’t the only reason I bent and nabbed my panties.

I slid them on, surreptitiously looking out the windows only to see Johnny had moved, but only to be in the act of lifting his coffee mug to his lips. His eyes were still trained to the distance, his back partially twisted toward me.

Thus I took in the room, which was one big room (huge actually) with kitchen, dining area, lounging area, a reading area, and bed. But there was a mouth to a hall to the right of the kitchen.

I headed that way seeing three doors down the hall, two to the right, one to the left.

The first to the right was open. I glanced in and saw a big long room that had a lot of stuff. This stuff was a furnace, water heater and a Wi-Fi setup, but also a bunch of man things. Jackets and fleeces on hooks. Boots and running shoes in an untidy pile on the floor. A gun rack with four places for rifles, only two of them taken. What appeared to be a bound up tent and some folded camp chairs in the corner. A camp stove. Camp lanterns. Fishing nets. Fishing poles. A big backpack.

I walked a couple of steps down the hall and looked into the room at the left.

The bathroom.

I entered and was astonished.

The front room I hadn’t fully taken in. The ceilings, however, were wood. The walls, stone. It was a room you would expect in this building made of cream, tan and brown stone that had a water wheel.

The bathroom had been completely redone, and even to my inexpert eye I could see it was recently.

And it didn’t look like it belonged in this building.

All white.

Everything.

Shiny white, subway tile walls. A large shower (actually mammoth, with five sprays, two slanted in at the top sides, one at the ceiling, and two more coming from the walls). A white with gray veins marble-topped double sink with illuminated mirror. A toilet behind a half partition that hid it mostly from view. And a big (actually huge) corner tub with a narrow platform built around it where it met the wall, where a woman would put candles, plants, decorative jars with bath salts.

The last I knew because there was that there. The only thing on that narrow platform. A decorative glass jar with a handsome chrome top half-filled with blue bath salts.

This was not Johnny’s.

This was someone else’s.

Right just then I didn’t want to think of the possibility of “someone else.”

I looked away from the bath salts and the fabulousness of this huge, clean, gleaming, gorgeous bathroom that was any woman’s fantasy and so incongruous to the furnace/water heater room that was a mess of men stuff and outdoor gear, and I used the facilities. I washed my hands. I opened Johnny’s drawers until I found some toothpaste and used my finger as a brush. I rinsed and stared at the mirror into eyes that really needed the makeup removed, and in a further quick and as noninvasive as I could make it perusal, I searched for facial care products that might go with the bath salts.