Fanta C

Chapter 9

They looked innocent enough when Matt and Megan stumbled sleepy-eyed into the kitchen and found them sitting together at the table and staring into each other's forgotten cups of coffee.

"Did Thad spend the night here?"

For all their subterfuge, that was the first thing Matt said. To the children's puzzlement, Thad and their mother burst out laughing.

"No, I didn't spend the night," he said. "It just looks that way to you. Your Mom invited me for breakfast."

"Funny, I thought you invited yourself," Elizabeth said to him out of the corner of her mouth as she rose to pour the children their ritual glasses of orange juice. He swatted her on the fanny, something that the kids thought was hilarious.

"Did Thad tell you about Baby's bath?" Megan asked. Elizabeth shook her head no. "He let us give her a bath. Cats don't like water, did you know that, Mom? But we bathed her anyway. She got real clean and fluffy, but we kinda made a mess.

"Only, Thad helped us clean it up or — What is it, Thad? Like in the army?"

"Police the area," Thad supplied.

"Yeah, we policed the area. Didn't he tell you, Mom?"

"No, he failed to mention that." She cast the man, who looked wonderfully good and right sitting at her breakfast table, a sidelong glance.

"As I recall, we had better things to talk about." He looked at her meaningfully and she grew warm beneath his gaze.

"And he let us order a pizza over the phone from the man who brings it to your house."

"Yeah, we told Thad that you said that kind of pizza was junk."

"But he said that you weren't here and so he was in charge and he liked that kind of pizza."

"Can we call the pizza man again, Mom? It wasn't junk, honest."

Placing her hands on her hips, Elizabeth faced Thad. "Thanks a lot. In a few hours you undid years of nutritional indoctrination."

He seemed supremely concerned. "What's for breakfast?"

"Curds and whey," she replied flippantly.

The children shrieked with laughter. To help calm them down, Thad supervised them setting the table while Elizabeth cooked the food.

"Hey, everybody here has to pull KP," Thad called to the children as they headed for the television set in the den as soon as they had finished eating. They didn't give him the argument they usually gave Elizabeth. She watched, her mouth agape, as they obediently returned to the table and cleared their own place settings, carrying the dirty dishes to the sink.

"How'd you do that?" she asked.

"Bribes." He took two packs of chewing gum out of his shirt pocket. "Sugar-free," he told Elizabeth before handing a package of gum to each child. They dutifully said thank you, which endeared them to their mother.

"And what does the cook get?"

"The cook gets a kiss."

Megan and Matt came to an abrupt halt on their way to the door and, as one, turned around in time to see Thad encircling their mother's waist with his arms. He angled his head to one side and kissed her on the mouth.

"Thad's kissing Mom!" Megan exclaimed.

"Ooh, gross!" That from Matt.

As soon as Thad and Elizabeth drew apart, the children started circling them like the attacking Indians around a wagon train. They whooped and hollered and flailed their arms wildly. Relieved and pleased that the two children were so enthusiastic about this sudden turn of events, Thad and Elizabeth started laughing at their antics, which only egged them on.

As usual, Matt's excitement got out of control. The harder Thad and his mother laughed, the more animated he became until on one unbalanced pivot, he crashed into the china cabinet. All the dishes rattled. A wooden bowl of fruit was overturned. Apples and oranges rolled in every direction. A tomato splattered onto the tile floor. Several sheets of notebook paper went flying about like chicken feathers before drifting down one by one.

Matt froze and glanced up at his mother apprehensively. "I didn't mean to."

"You're such a dork," Megan said, now acting much older and much more superior.

Matt dropped to his knees. He avoided the globs of tomato, but collected the scattered sheets of paper and carried them like a peace offering to Elizabeth. "Here, Mom. Your papers didn't get dirty. We didn't get pizza juice on them either. Thad moved them off the table and put them on the cabinet so they wouldn't get messed up. He said they might be important."

Elizabeth accepted the handwritten sheets from her son, who began crawling around on the floor, picking up the pieces of fruit.

"Just leave them, Matt." Elizabeth's voice was as thin and tight as a rubber band that had been stretched to its limit. "I'll clean up later. You and Megan please go upstairs and make your beds."

With the keen perception of children, they sensed that the mood in the room had drastically shifted and it wasn't because of Matt's accident. Something beyond their understanding had happened; it had made their mother's face go from rosy and smiling to pale and haggard. Her laughing lips were now drawn into a narrow line that barely moved when she spoke. Together, they left by way of the swinging door, making as little commotion as possible. They feared that something hung precariously in the balance and they didn't want to be the ones to upset it.

Elizabeth meticulously straightened and put the sheets of paper in numerical order before blinking the written words into focus. She knew what they were, of course. She'd written them while soaking in a bubble bath. Every phrase was familiar.

There was her pirate, tall and dangerous. There was his captive, shivering before him, wearing nothing but a thin nightgown. She rifled through the pages. Yes, there was the part where he ripped her nightgown and kissed her breast. And there, in that paragraph, the captive, overpowered by his masculine charm, began to submit and respond.

She tossed the pages onto the kitchen table and turned her back quickly. Folding her arms over her middle, she rubbed her forearms, though the kitchen was sufficiently warm for an autumn morning.

"You read it, didn't you?"

"Listen, Elizabeth, I — "

She spun around. "Didn't you?"

Thad's chest rose and fell with a heavy sigh. "Yes."

Tears filled her eyes. One instant the hot, salty products of humiliation weren't there, the next instant, her vision was blurred with them. She covered her chalky lips with a cold, trembling hand and turned away from him again. She couldn't bear to look him in the face, because of her embarrassment because of his deceit. She didn't know which caused her the most pain.

In a quiet, soothing voice, the kind doctors use to break the bad news to the family, he said, "I didn't realize what it was at first; I thought you had left an unfinished letter lying around. But then a few words just leaped off the pages at me."

She faced him, her expression scornful. "'Leaped off the pages'? Can't you do any better than that?"

He had the grace to look chagrined. "Haven't you ever thumbed through a novel in a bookstore, and when a certain word catches your eye, you stop and read a few paragraphs. And if it's a sensual passage, you keep on reading. Before you know it, you've devoured five or six pages standing there in the aisle. If that's never happened to you, you aren't normal."

"We're not talking about me. We're talking about an underhanded manipulator who used me in the lowest, meanest, most disgusting way possible. How could you?"

"I didn't do anything you didn't want me to."

She clenched her fists and squeezed her eyes shut. "I knew something dreadful would come of this. I never should have listened to Lilah, never let her talk me into this."

He looked confused. "Lilah talked you into dreaming up the story?"

"Into writing it down. She's submitting my fantasies to a publisher."

"Then why are you so ashamed of it? I read it and thought it was damn good."

She opened her eyes and glared at him. Anger had deepened the color of her eyes almost to the piercing hue of his. "Yes, you read it and turned it to your advantage. Why didn't I realize what was going on when you tore my nightgown? It was so out of character for you. You're not like that."

"How do you know?" he challenged. "We'd never made love before. And I was jealous enough and mad enough and drunk enough to get a little rough." He stepped forward and lowered his voice to a sexy growl. "And you liked it."

She backed away from him in revulsion. "Last night you told me that you thought I deserved better than just — " She couldn't bring herself to say the words.

"Apparently after reading my fantasy you changed your mind. I became fair game. After reading that," she said, gesturing down at the manuscript, "you must have thought I was pining for a flesh-and-blood lover. Or did you imagine that I must have a lot of them? Didn't the fantasy convert you from Good Neighbor Sam to Jean Lafitte because you thought that's what I wanted?"

"No. That's not what happened at all. Everybody has an alter ego, Elizabeth. Probably several of them. Yours surfaces in your fantasies. Mine surfaced last night. I wasn't even thinking about the damn fantasy when I came into your bedroom."

"Oh, please." She groaned with sarcastic disbelief. "You acted it out word for word!"

"Subconsciously maybe. I was an angry, jealous man responding to the woman I wanted like hell to take to bed. Reading your fantasy turned me on, yes. But it also made me crazy. I saw Cavanaugh in the pirate's role. Everything you described in such arousing detail, I imagined you doing with him."

"Well, I didn't. Because he's not a sneak and a liar and — " Another horrible thought occurred to her. "Is this the only one you've read?" He looked at her with a bewilderment too profound not to be phony. "It isn't, is it? You read the one about the pilot and the fain girl, didn't you? That's why when I came in and found you sick — "

She clapped her hands to her burning cheeks, just now fully realizing the implications. His interest in her coincided with when she first started writing down her fantasies. She always discarded her first drafts. "What have you been doing, scavenging the trash can every morning like an alley cat, looking for fresh material?"

How many handwritten drafts had she thrown away? How many had he enjoyed, snickering as he read each sensuous paragraph? "I'm amazed that you came up with the idea of the hammock on your own. I hadn't written a fantasy about that yet."

He propped his hands on his hips and assumed that arrogant, aggravated male stance. Elizabeth despised it because it strongly suggested that she was being incredibly stupid and unreasonable.

"I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about," he said. "What's that about a pilot? And my being sick? Do you think I faked a fever of one hundred point four?"

"I wouldn't put anything past you." She summoned all the animosity she felt for him and placed it behind her next words. "Leave my house."

He shook his head no. "I'm not leaving while you're angry. Not until we get this settled."

"It's settled. I don't want to see you, ever again. I'm not sure I can even tolerate your living in the house behind me."

"Just like that?" He snapped his fingers.

"Just like that."

"After last night?"

"Nothing that happened was real."

"Oh, it was real," he said with a short laugh. "And you've got the marks on your body to prove it."

She blushed, remembering the faint bruises she had discovered on her breasts and thighs while she was showering. An hour ago, she had gloried in them, equating them to an artist's signature on his masterpiece. Now she was ashamed to think of how his mouth had put them there.

"Look, Elizabeth," he said with diminishing patience, "I don't blame you for being angry. I don't even blame you for jumping to the wrong conclusion. I read something I shouldn't have. It was personal and private. I violated your privacy by reading it. But" — he paused for emphasis — "the only way it changed my opinion of you was to make you more fascinating."

She aimed a straight finger down at the sheets of paper on the table. "I'm not the kidnapped girl, any more than you're the pirate. She's a figment of my imagination. She's nobody. She's make-believe."

He disputed her words with a slow, negative shake of his head. "She is you. She's what you secretly think, how you feel about sexuality, how you feel about love, what you want in bed but would never ask for. Just like the moon, we all have a dark side, a part of us that the world doesn't see. It's in our makeup and is nothing to be ashamed of."

He had backed her into the counter. She shook her head adamantly, fearfully. "I'm not like that."

"Not on the outside. On the outside, you're every inch a lady. Don't you realize that's what makes you so attractive, so damned fascinating?" His tone became softer, more cajoling. "Elizabeth, why do you think I wanted to sleep with you last night?"

His words about falling in love with a woman he liked waking up with came back to cruelly mock her now. She wouldn't believe him. She wouldn't be made a fool of again.

"So you could keep on using me until I finally caught on."

His brows drew together in an impatient frown. He braced his hands on either side of her hips and leaned over her, forcing her head back. "You're not angry because I read what you wrote. You wrote it to be read. You're upset because I'm not a stranger. You're not anonymous. Now I know your secret. Now I know that under your cool, prim exterior, you burn hot."

The words popped and hissed like drops of water on a hot skillet. Elizabeth's hand cracked across his cheek.

Neither could believe she'd slapped him. His eyes narrowed dangerously as he gradually pushed himself away from her and straightened up. She had spanked her children only on the rarest occasions, then cried harder than they afterward. The aggressive child in the family had been Lilah, never her older sister, who always gave in to avoid any chance of a physical altercation. But now she had slapped a man who easily outweighed her by seventy-five pounds and who towered over her.

The shock over striking him didn't alleviate her rage, however. She would never forgive him for the despicable way he'd manipulated her into making love with him. It made her sick to think that everything he'd said and done to her had come, not from his heart, but from a licentious curiosity.

She said nothing to detain him when he turned and angrily strode toward the door, nearly ripping it from its hinges when he opened it. What have you got to be so angry about? she wanted to shout at him. He'd gotten better than he deserved!

But she said nothing. Her voice box wouldn't function. It was too congested with emotion. She sank into the nearest chair, laid her head on the kitchen table, and submitted to the luxury of heart-rending sobs.

Things didn't improve with time.

For the next several days, her mood was funeral. She was so short-tempered with her children that they counterattacked by behaving their worst. One afternoon she caught them playing on Thad's hammock with the puppies, and yelled for them to come in right that minute. They set up a howl, asking her why they had to come in. She could provide no plausible answer. They sulked for the rest of the evening. When Megan told her she wished they lived with somebody fun like Thad, Elizabeth banished her to her room.

Lilah called to ask her about her date with Adam Cavanaugh. Elizabeth was barely civil, unfairly blaming her sister for all her recent misfortunes.

"Gee," Lilah had said after several attempts to draw Elizabeth out, "you're a barrel of laughs. I'll call back when you're acting human."

Her foul disposition had successfully alienated her from everyone in her life. For a while that was fine. She didn't feel like talking to anybody. She nursed her misery like a witch did her brew, adding particles of resentment to it daily, stirring it, watching it simmer.

But gradually she disliked her solitude even more than she did other peoples' company. She was even glad to see Adam Cavanaugh when he came breezing through the door of her shop late one morning.

After calling her name twice, he laughed at her startled expression. "I always seem to catch you lost in thought. Where do you go when you leave the rest of us behind?"

She tried to recover quickly. She hadn't seen him since he'd walked her to her door and given her a discreet kiss on the forehead. He didn't take advantage of women the way some men did. And Thad had accused Adam of being a playboy!

"Daydreaming is a bad habit I picked up in childhood," she told him. "I'm a professional wool-gatherer. My sister torments me about it."

At the mention of her sister, he frowned. "How is that disrespectful sister of yours?"

"Disrespectful," Elizabeth replied, thinking that it was time for her to mend her fences with Lilah. It wasn't Lilah's fault that Thad Randolph had turned out to be a rat.

"Lunch?" Adam asked, snapping her out of her thoughts.

"Lunch? Uh, no, thank you, Adam. I don't have anyone to mind the shop if I go out. I usually brown-bag it here."

"Close for an hour. Please. I've been giving our evening together a lot of thought." His voice took on a mysterious pitch and his brown eyes danced with secrecy. "There's something very important I want to discuss with you."

Half an hour later, Elizabeth was picking at a salad she had built from the Garden Room's noon buffet. Adam and she were sitting at a corner table where two glass walls intersected to provide a great view of the city's skyline.

"Well?"

"I don't know, Adam. You've taken me completely off guard."

"You can't be too surprised by my proposal."

"But I am." She lifted troubled china-blue eyes to his inquiring ones. "I've never considered opening another Fantasy. This one takes so much time and energy."

"I can appreciate that," he said, after taking a sip of his iced water. "I took your situation into consideration. I realize that being a widow with two children isn't exactly conducive to owning and operating businesses in several cities at the same time. But I'm confident you can handle it."

Though the idea of opening several more Fantasy shops had come as a complete surprise, she was flattered. In spite of her myriad reservations, the idea had piqued an ambitious streak she hadn't known she had.

Leaning forward in his chair, Adam stressed his point. "Fantasy is the biggest money-maker, percentage-wise, of any of our lessees. That impresses me. You impress me. I can't find a single fault with you. Other than a little daydreaming," he teased. "You've tapped into a unique market. You buy intuitively. People will pay a quality price for a quality product. And the demographics show that the people who stay at my hotels are accustomed to doing everything first class."

"But I — "

He held up both hands to forestall her. "I'm saving a space for you in the lobby of the new Hotel Cavanaugh Chicago. Soon, I want to install your shops in other cities."

He went on to outline the feasibility of the proposal until Elizabeth developed a headache and begged him to stop and give her time to think.

"I deliberate for hours over whether to have tacos or pork chops for dinner," she told him, laughing. "I hope you don't expect an answer today."

"Of course not. Tomorrow will be soon enough."

Her face went blank with shock, but relaxed when she saw that he was joking. "No, I don't expect an immediate answer. Time's on my side. The longer you think about it, the better you're going to like the idea," he said confidently.

At the door of Fantasy, he told her, "I'll send down a typewritten proposal. Look it over. Study the figures. I'll call for your answer in a week or so. In the meantime, don't hesitate to call me if you have any questions." He flipped a business card from his suit coat pocket. "The number on here is a direct, private line. Use it."

As usual, Adam left her feeling out of breath and drained of energy. She envied him his self-confidence and the purpose with which he moved through life. He seemed to know exactly what he wanted and didn't let anything stand in his way. She wished she could be that decisive. Did she want to remain a small-scale operation or expand?

Lord, what did she, a widow with two children and a broken heart, know about big business?

A broken heart?

Her thoughts came to a standstill. Like most times when someone stumbles over something, he goes back to see what had tripped him up. A broken heart. Yep, there they were. Those three words had gotten in the path of her thoughts and impeded them.

Her heart was broken. She was in love with Thad Randolph. He was in lust with her, just like all those other women he'd bedded.

How could she possibly think about expanding her business or what to cook for dinner or anything else when she couldn't sort out her feelings for him? There should be no sorting to do. The categories of her feelings should be black and white instead of this infernal gray. She couldn't even pinpoint the moment her anger had turned to anguish, her fury to despair.

She took an aspirin for her pounding headache.

Her mood was slightly lifted when she returned home to discover Lilah's car parked in her driveway. She entered her house and found her sister scooping ice cream into bowls for Matt and Megan.

"Mrs Alder left and Aunt Lilah said we could have ice cream," Matt reported importantly. He was also sitting on his knees in his chair. Another no-no.

"Before dinner?" Elizabeth asked, vexed.

"You know, I always wondered why Mom made that such a cardinal rule," Lilah said, wagging the ice-cream scoop at her sister. "What difference does it make if you eat your dessert before or after the meal?"

"You're hopeless." Elizabeth moved toward her sister, who was licking ice cream off the scoop, a nasty habit she'd tried to break her children of.

"Does that vague smile mean that I'm forgiven for whatever sin I committed?"

Elizabeth embraced her. She'd never been able to stay mad at Lilah for long. "You're forgiven."

"Thank God! I'd already invited the kids out to dinner. It would have been an interminably long one if you weren't speaking to me. What'd I do, anyway?"

"You didn't do anything. What prompted this invitation to dinner?"

"That."

Lilah nodded down at an envelope which Elizabeth hadn't yet noticed. She recognized the logo on the letterhead. "That's… that's… They didn't!"

"They did. Enclosed in that envelope, which I took the liberty of opening, is a letter of acceptance for two of your stories to be published in their book and a check for five hundred dollars. Is that wonderful or what?"

"That's wonderful!" Elizabeth cried. "Now the kids can have new coats and boots and we won't have to eat tuna all winter. Is there any ice cream left for me?"

"Now I know I'm forgiven," Lilah said, and laughed.

When the children finished their ice cream, they were sent upstairs to change their clothes. "We'll have a 'grownups only' celebration tonight after the kids go to bed," Lilah said. "There's a bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge."

"Sounds great."

Lilah looked at her sister closely. According to Elizabeth's expression, nothing was "great." "Are you going to tell me about it, or do I have to wait until we go to summer camp? That's when you imparted the big secret that you'd started your period."

"Tell you about what?"

"Whatever it is that took the gilt off getting published. Whatever it is that has your chin dragging. Whatever it is that has your eyes rimmed with dark circles."

"I didn't know I looked that bad."

"Like Count Dracula's mother after the blood bank ran dry. What's the matter with you? This is supposed to be a celebration."

Elizabeth told Lilah about her lunch with Adam Cavanaugh and his notion to have a Fantasy in the lobby of each of his hotels.

"That sounds terrific, Lizzie! What's the problem? Other than the fact that you'd have to deal with him."

"The problems are too many to list, Lilah. I can't pack a suitcase and go city-hopping at the drop of a hat. I've got too many responsibilities here."

"Your kids would probably be better off if you left them now and then."

"And what about the money? I don't know anything about high finance. Do you realize the investment I'd have to make?"

"You said Cavanaugh offered to make you a business loan. Don't think of the investment, think of the profits, "Lilah said, her eyes twinkling. "I'm surprised you're not grabbing this opportunity with both hands."

Elizabeth rubbed her forehead. The aspirin hadn't helped much. "I don't know, Lilah."

Lilah took Elizabeth's hand and lowered it to the table. "Does your indecision have anything to do with a certain neighbor of yours?"

Elizabeth's eyes swung up to her sister's. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Lizzie," Lilah said, her tone softly reproachful, "the kids told me about Matt's accident. The fruit bowl. The 'papers of Mom's that flew everywhere.'"

"Oh."

"They also said you got 'real mad' that Thad had read them." Lilah softened her voice even more. "Now even I have enough imagination to figure out what was on those pages that he read. One of your fantasies, right?"

"Right," Elizabeth said dismally.

"And you were embarrassed."

"Mortified."

"So you're avoiding him."

"Like the plague. I can't face him, Lilah."

"Just because he read one of your fantasies? That's ridiculous." Lilah saw the guilt spread over her sister's face like indelible ink. Elizabeth never could hide her feelings. "Uh-oh, not just because he read one. He read one and applied it to real life. Is that it?"

"Well, sort of," Elizabeth confessed.

"Lucky you."

Elizabeth was flabbergasted. "Lucky? Lilah, I was humiliated."

Lilah's eyes rounded and she whispered, "He's into bondage?"

"Oh, for crying out loud. No! He's not into — Can't you understand? He acted out my fantasy because he thought that's what I wanted."

"I'm dying to know all the salacious details, of course, but I realize you wouldn't tell me in a million years, even if we went back to summer camp. All I can say is that if I ever fall in love — and yes, I think you're in love with him — I'll buy all the sex manuals that are on the market.

"I'll underline all the good parts and earmark the illustrations that appeal to me and pass them to this fictitious guy and say, 'Hey, Charlie, I'm too shy to discuss with you my most secret desires, but I'd welcome you doing to me anything on these marked pages.' If Thad put to good use his knowledge of your heart and mind and libido, I would say he's worth his weight in gold. And if this is any consolation, I've never seen a guy more smitten."

Elizabeth looked up, begging to be convinced. "How do you know?"

"Easy. He stank to high heaven with jealousy of Cavanaugh. It was obvious to me and I don't even know the guy. Look," she said, standing up, "I'm gonna run upstairs and check on the kids. You sit here and think about what you really want to do with the rest of your life. Cavanaugh's proposal sounds like a dream come true, a real fantasy. On the other hand, Mr Randolph is pretty fantastic himself. And he's closer to home."

Elizabeth sat alone at her kitchen table and asked herself what she wanted. If she could have her choice of anything at that very minute, what would it be?

The answer was unqualified. She wanted Thad. She'd been more embarrassed than angry to discover he'd read her fantasy. She could admit that now. And she really hadn't suspected him of combing through her garbage can looking for discarded pages of manuscript. He was too straightforward to do something like that. Sure, he'd read that one fantasy on the sly, but as he'd pointed out, it was easy for him to do. After spotting several key words, no one could have resisted the temptation.

Yes, he had turned his knowledge to his advantage, but was that so bad? Lilah didn't think so. She thought he was a treasure for having put it to good use.

Come to think of it, how many men would care enough about a woman to cater to her fantasies? Men that sensitive were rare, while those who held a degree in slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am were legion. He'd held back, patiently waiting for her to climax before letting himself. And hadn't he actually enjoyed the wait? She should have thanked him for being such a considerate lover. Instead she had slapped his face.

On her way upstairs, she met Lilah and the children trooping down. "We're ready, but you're headed in the wrong direction."

Breathlessly Elizabeth said, "Lilah, would you mind too terribly much if I skipped dinner with you tonight?"

"Aw, Mom."

"We want to go with Aunt Lilah. She asked us to — "

"You can go," Elizabeth hastily reassured her children. "If Aunt Lilah doesn't mind taking you by herself."

"Not if it's for a very good cause." Analytically, Lilah peered into her sister's eyes. They were several watts brighter than they'd been fifteen minutes earlier.

"It is."

Lilah grinned. "No, I don't mind taking them out alone. Come on, kids." They raced past her and out the front door, afraid that plans might be changed again.

"Lilah, I don't think I'll be writing any more fantasies, so please don't ask me to."

"Why not?"

"They're self-indulgent and self-centered. It's time I stopped dreaming about someone making love to me, and… and made love to someone. There's a big difference, you know."

"No, I don't. But I know you believe that."

"Someday, you'll know it too."

Lilah looked doubtful, then smiled softly. "Be happy with him, Lizzie. You deserve it." She lifted up the overnight bags she was holding. "I'm an optimist. I invited the kids to spend the night with me and they're already packed." Then, laughing all the way, she followed the children out.

Elizabeth waited until the front door clicked shut, then ran for the bathroom and reached for the taps in the tub. While it was filling with water and making a mountain of bubbles out of the scented gel she'd squeezed into it, she opened her closet and gave the contents careful consideration.

Twenty minutes later, she was ready. On her way through the kitchen, she took Lilah's bottle of champagne out of the fridge and left by the back door.

He was watching television on his enclosed porch. She knocked and saw his expression of glad surprise. He carefully masked that momentary reaction and, with an annoying lack of speed, came ambling toward the door. Unlike that other time, he rudely left the television volume up. He pushed open the door, but said nothing.

"May I come in?" she asked. He stepped aside. The porch was warm. The air smelled like him, like the wool sweater he was wearing over his jeans, like his cologne. Facing him, she moistened her lips.

"I'm sorry I slapped you. I was tremendously provoked or I never could have done such a thing." She paused to draw a tremulous breath. Unlike her sister, she wasn't impulsive. Didn't know how to be. What if this didn't work?

"I… I've thought about it for several days now and have realized that my accusations were ridiculous. I know you didn't sift through my garbage or anything like — "

"Elizabeth, what are you doing here?" he interrupted coldly. "Have you had a change of heart? Do you want me to fulfill another of your fantasies?"

She deserved that, she supposed. So she let him get by with it. This time. Instead of taking umbrage, she lifted her eyes to his. Her smile was as seductive as her whisper.

"No, I want to fulfill yours."