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  “Thanks,” she said. “I was on the verge of homicide.”

  “Can’t say that I blame you,” he told her. “Can she see me staring down your shirt from here?”

  “She sees everything,” said Elizabeth, with resignation. “She’s like the God of Moses, only not as nice.”

  “Well, there’s no point in trying to be discreet, is there, Cara’s mother?” He grinned. “Does Cara’s mother have a name of her own?”

  “Elizabeth Fairchild.” He really was quite as charming outside the classroom as in. If she hadn’t been brooding over Steve, Cara and Mrs. Ridley, she’d have found him very appealing. “I suppose,” she said, seeking refuge in tradition, “that Cara’s told you all about me.”

  “Yes,” he said. “She certainly has.”

  He inspected her with such an odd mixture of interest and amusement on his face that Elizabeth, with a pang of anxiety, wondered what Cara had told him. Cara’s words echoed in her head. You need sex. Everybody does.

  Oh, no. She surely couldn’t have said that to him. Could she?

  Elizabeth, who never blushed, blushed.

  Cara, who had appeared when Salvini had, quickly attached herself to a passing group of girls and began an animated conversation.

  “Before I tell you whether I’ll go,” Elizabeth demanded, recovering her composure, “suppose you tell me what Cara said about me.”

  Joe Salvini laid his big hand lightly on her arm.

  “Nothing too horrible. Only that she figured you were ready for a new romance, and I was just the kind of man you had in mind.”

  “Oh, God!” groaned Elizabeth, who seldom audibly swore. “How could she?”

  “She meant well,” said Joe kindly. “They’re all so indiscreet at this age.”

  “Cara, I fear, has been indiscreet at every age,” Elizabeth informed him. “She says whatever pops into her head.”

  “Don’t be too hard on her,” he advised. “Personally, I hope she’s right. At least sign up for the field trip. You can listen to my mother and Cara compare matchmaking techniques.”

  Behind her, from across the room, came Steve’s deep chuckle and Merle Chrysler’s sultry laugh. Elizabeth maneuvered so that she could see and felt unaccountably annoyed.

  Merle Chrysler’s head was as red as Vonnie’s. She had on an ice-green dress. She looked spectacular.

  She had more curves and higher heels and fewer inhibitions than Elizabeth. She didn’t dress herself in dull Main Line habiliments like burgundy silk and her grandmother’s pearls. There was no denying Merle appealed to men.

  Melody and Vonnie discoursed amiably beside their parents; no antagonism there. Merle touched her daughter’s curls with two well-manicured fingertips and made a smiling comment. Steve bent his head forward to catch her words. Definitely interested. Damn.

  “While I’ve got you here,” said Joe, “I want to talk to you about the Civil War artifacts Cara said you’d let us use. Is it true?”

  “Be glad to.”

  Merle was certainly a rotten end to the day. She looked thoroughly toothsome. With Steve’s Dracular experience, he was certain to be interested.

  “Think you’d have time to come talk to the class yourself?”

  “Why not?” said Elizabeth, eyeing Merle with malevolence. “Just tell me when.”

  “February, probably,” said Joe.

  He sounded puzzled. She didn’t blame him. He couldn’t see what she saw, and even if he did, it wouldn’t make sense to him. Men were pretty stupid that way. She wished she could think of a way to spike Merle’s cannon or hoist her petard or whatever the term was.

  “You’re new here,” said Elizabeth, with sudden malicious inspiration. “Let me introduce you to some of the other parents.”

  Joe was a very masculine and good-looking man. Perhaps Vonnie had designs on him, herself, on behalf of Merle. Not the nicest thing to do, pushing poor Joe into the web, but on the other hand, he was a grown man. Surely he could take care of himself.

  Joe Salvini glanced once at Merle Chrysler and adjusted his tie.

  Merle watched them approach and smoothed her skirt over her hips with both hands—a clear signal she’d shifted her attention to Joe. Good.

  “I have to go,” Elizabeth announced, after she had effected the introductions. “And I didn’t want to leave poor Mr. Salvini standing over there with no company. He’s new this year.”

  With that, she fluttered her fingers at the little group, collected Cara and started toward the door.

  Behind her, she heard Joe Salvini exclaim, “Riker. Steve Riker. But you’re famous.”

  She stopped in her tracks.

  “Hardly that,” said Steve. A modest disclaimer.

  Merle cooed.

  Elizabeth turned and looked at Steve’s rapt listeners. The surrounding crowd, now fascinated, drifted closer to hear him speak.

  Famous for what? she wondered. Should she drift along with the captivated, or pretend uninterest and take her lone self home?

  She drifted for a second, long enough to hear him say, “Well, I’m a little superstitious. I don’t really like to talk about works in progress. I’ll talk your ear off about the rest of them, though.”

  She had to listen to Cara chatter about Joe Salvini on the way home, when with all of her heart and all of her body, she yearned for Steve Riker.

  * * *

  Elizabeth’s penance for the subterfuge was to spend the next few weeks trying to drive thoughts of Steve out of her head. Not all of him at once; just isolated images which appeared whenever she let her guard down. The steel of his eyes, piercing her own. The width of his shoulders when he’d had his back to her, as she watched him from across the room. His voice. His laugh. And once, God help her, she was nearly overcome and reduced to gibbering by the clean smell of his after-shave wafting from a sample bottle as she passed the cosmetics counter in the drugstore.

  “This is ridiculous,” she muttered, after one particularly trying period when his face kept popping up between her and her computer screen with such persistence that she couldn’t concentrate at all.

  She was acting like a love-struck seventeen-year-old girl mooning over a rock star, instead of a mature, settled, thirty-three-year-old woman who had no intention of succumbing to an imaginary romance.

  She didn’t even know the man; she’d seen him for a total of perhaps twenty minutes a day, counting their initial meeting, Parents’ Night and three weeks of quick, evening and Saturday-morning stops to pick up the girls. That was enough, apparently, to generate thick-coming fancies—if you were completely unbalanced and needed psychiatric care. And the fantasies were even worse on the rare days when Cara and Melody managed to escape detention.

  She needed romance.

  And Cara was right, damn it. She needed sex. It had been six extremely long years. That was the one good thing about Robert: the sex was really great. She had tried for six long years not to think about it. She missed the sex—really missed it—but she wouldn’t touch Robert again with two ten-foot poles tied end to end, even if she knew no man would ever hold her in his arms again.

  That was the really horrible thing about being divorced. No sex. Not that she hadn’t had opportunities—men abounded who were perfectly willing to sleep with her. But mere appetite wasn’t good enough for her. She required mutual caring and commitment. That dismissed the great majority of men who wanted to take her out—caring and commitment weren’t words in their vocabularies. The few who had begun to fall in love with her were gently discouraged. They hadn’t been able to create that answering spark in her own heart and body.

  Until Steve Riker, who hadn’t been impressed enough to call, and who had obviously decided that the daily attraction wasn’t great enough to overcome the flamboyant lure of Merle Chrysler.

  She was still musing over this depressing thought when Cara came in from school. Elizabeth could divine Cara’s mood by the sounds from below. The door slammed. The book bag hit the floor with a s
ullen thud. She skipped the refrigerator—usually her first stop—and came directly up to Elizabeth’s office. Her shoes stomped on every stair.

  “I hate Melody Riker,” Cara announced, without preamble.

  “Is there a reason for this rancor?” Elizabeth asked.

  “She’s a complete glophf.” Cara supported herself against the wall and looked glum.

  “A glophf, huh?” said Elizabeth. That was a new one.

  “She chews with her mouth open like this.” Cara made exaggerated chewing motions. “She does it on purpose to make me sick to my stomach.”

  “You might try being polite, Cara.”

  “I would, if she would,” said Cara. “But she won’t.”

  “You could start first. Think about the Golden Rule.”

  “She’d say I was just trying to get her to be nice to me,” said Cara. “And she’d tell all her friends I was brown-nosing, and they’d all laugh at me, and I won’t.”

  The syntax was a little garbled, but the message was clear.

  Elizabeth, recognizing defeat but unwilling yet to surrender, delivered a last pitiful attack on prejudice. “Once you get to know her, you might like her.”

  Cara gave that idea exactly the attention it deserved. She ignored it.

  “She talks about her dumb stupid dog all the time, Sammy this and Sammy that. And her stupid aunt. My Aunt Lin has a farm. My Aunt Lin has horses,“ Cara said, in a scathing falsetto. “Like anybody wants to know about her stupid Aunt Lin or her stupid dog or her stupid horses. And,” she continued, in a normal voice, “she flirts with boys and everything. It’s so gross.”

  Oh-ho, thought Elizabeth, so that’s the crux of the problem. “How do you know she flirts with boys?”

  “Mom! She’s on my same train every single day!“ Cara slid to the floor with a despairing thump. “She talks about lacrosse with them, just like she knows all about it, and football and everything.”

  “It isn’t necessarily flirting to talk to a boy about lacrosse,” said Elizabeth sympathetically, remembering her own adolescent embarrassment and her envy of girls who could converse easily with the mysterious Opposite Sex. She gave Cara the same useless advice her mother had given her. “You could do that, too, honey. Just act natural and talk about normal things, like you would with a girl. School and sports and things.”

  “You just don’t understand,” said Cara.

  Oh, yes she did. Cara should have witnessed the Parents’ Night conversation with Steve. She’d never ask Elizabeth for advice to the lovelorn again.

  “Cara, she really seems like a nice girl,” said Elizabeth, hearing her own mother’s voice echo in her ears and knowing exactly the reception her words would be given. “She’s new here. You ought to try to make her feel comfortable.”

  “She has more friends than I do,” said Cara gloomily, getting to her feet. She left the office and started down the stairs. Her doleful voice wafted back to Elizabeth’s ears. “You don’t need to worry about stupid Melody Riker. You ought to worry about me.”

  It was just as well that Steve wasn’t interested. The overt animosity of the two girls would derail even a casual friendship, let alone a developing romance. Elizabeth turned back to the financial spreadsheet displayed on her computer screen and worked despondently until it was time to fix supper.

  By nine that night, Cara was tucked up in her room with her friend, Allison, who was sleeping over. The girls had appeared once, to ask if they could have a pizza, then disappeared, giggling, back up the stairs to phone in the order. Elizabeth turned on the porch lights for the pizza delivery and settled back in her chair to stare, unseeing, at the evening news.

  Too bad she couldn’t take her own advice, she thought. Just act natural and talk about normal things. She supposed she was acting naturally—it was surely natural, this sexual desire. And it was natural for the memory of his presence to fire a fantasy so strong that she could almost feel his body under her hands.

  Unfortunately, she could almost feel her body under his hands, too. Could imagine the weight of him covering her, could smell him and feel him and taste him. The unwitting illusion of his presence was bad enough during the day, when she had her work to occupy her mind. But it was unbearable at night, when she was alone in the big bed, half asleep and half dreaming. She dreamed at night of hunger, that she was starving and there was no food to be had, and she woke each morning feeling edgy and tense and incomplete.

  She heard the delivery truck stop. When she opened the door, the truck was driving away and Steve stood on the steps, holding the pizza, with a couple of books balanced on its flat box.

  He had on Saturday-morning jeans—old, soft and formfitting—and a denim work shirt that had two buttons open at the neck. No jewelry but a University of Wyoming class ring. No tacky nouveau-riche gold necklace adorned his ego: there was a military stainless steel chain around his neck, the kind that carried dog tags or medical information.

  “Surprise,” he said.

  She took the pizza from him, and he curved his hand around her small wrist as he let go of the box.

  The sight of him recalled a host of midnight fantasies. She could have dealt with those, could have sternly put them out of her mind, but the touch of his hand kindled in her longing body a physical desire so great that she knew it showed as hunger in her eyes.

  Her lips parted. His grip on her wrist tightened, and he pulled her gently toward him.

  How could she ever have thought he wasn’t interested? His body was as tense as hers; the desire in his eyes was frank—and growing. She had made a nearly unconscious decision to step forward into his arms, when Cara came clattering down the stairs.

  “Is that the pizza?” Cara said. Then she saw him. “What’s he doing here?”

  Elizabeth shifted her attention slowly, like a sleeper disturbed by a hornet’s buzz. She stared at Cara for a long, uncomfortable second.

  “Apologize to Mr. Riker,” she said. Her inflection was perfectly even and brittle as ice.

  Cara, defeated in open aggression, did. The apology was perfect, pronounced in a voice as cold as a February night.

  “Take this pizza,” said Elizabeth, “and go upstairs.”

  There was a swift, silent clash of wills. Cara gave Steve a toxic look, handed Elizabeth the books, took the pizza and stomped back to her room.

  Elizabeth gave a little impatient hiss.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not you. She’s decided that I’m going to date Joe Salvini and doesn’t want me to talk to anyone else with a Y chromosome.”

  “Ah,” said Steve. “Well, I can understand that. I’d just as soon you stayed away from other Y chromosomes, myself.”

  “Please don’t complicate matters,” said Elizabeth. Why was everything so difficult? Cara was difficult. Business was difficult. And romance was difficult at thirty-three, even without Cara, Merle and Melody as complications.

  Life, damn it, was difficult. Her grandmother had told her that, too. And the stout-hearted old lady had been 101 percent right. Elizabeth wanted a good fairy to set everything straight.

  “I hate to echo Cara,” she said, feeling embattled. “But what are you doing here, anyway?”

  Steve smiled down at her. “I finished my book. I came to celebrate. Do you have any wine?”

  “What book?”

  “The one I’ve been working on eighteen hours a day.” He looked at her shrewdly. “That’s why I haven’t called.”

  “Did you think I wondered?” Oh, God. Her face must be as readable as a kindergarten primer.

  “If you haven’t wondered,” he said, “tell me, and I’ll leave. I’m wasting my time.”

  Like he didn’t know already, she thought, trying to keep her expression pleasantly neutral. She’d never been told she had a poker face, but surely age and increasing sophistication could conspire to protect her from the most embarrassing of her thoughts. She held the books to her chest, as a sort of psychic shield.

  Books
... Suddenly she made the connection between his name and his occupation. She’d read a Time book review about a year ago. Skimmed it only superficially, at the time, but her efficient mind had filed the information: seminal fiction, archetypes, new era in science fiction.

  “Books!” she said. “Joe was right. You’re famous.”

  “Oh, so you heard him, then? I was a little disappointed that you didn’t come back to find out what he was talking about.”

  “Had to get home,” she said speciously. “You’ve had two bestsellers in three years. I read about you in Time.“

  “You haven’t actually read the books, themselves, I hope.”

  “Why do you hope?” she asked.

  “Because if you have, and you can’t remember their names, my name or the plots, I am in significant trouble and need to reconsider the way I’m writing.”

  She laughed and relaxed. “But how rude I’m being. These are yours, I take it?” She looked at the covers of the books he’d brought: Fire in the Hole and The Hail Mary Margin.

  “You said you wanted to read one,” he said diffidently.

  “Yes, absolutely, I do. And I honestly mean that. I’m not just being polite,” she said, leading him into the kitchen. “I was about to have some wine. Come and join me. Where’s Melody?”

  “Spending the night at my sister’s.”

  He was close behind her, close enough for her to feel the heat of his body. Just his shadow on her shoulder seemed to have a weight and presence of its own.

  “Aunt Lin,” said Elizabeth. “Horses and a farm.”

  “Seems the girls have been communicating, after all.”

  “In a primitive, unsatisfactory way.” She shoved at a solid door and led him into a vast, elderly kitchen.

  Its one concession to the late twentieth century was an ugly fluorescent light dangling from the high, old ceiling. Steve, seeing the ancient, slate flagstone floor and granite cabinet tops, wasn’t sure that good light was an improvement.

  “Good Lord,” he said.

  “It was last remodeled about 1890,” said Elizabeth, grinning. “Except for the stove and refrigerator, which my grandmother forced herself to buy in 1952.” She got a decanter from the shelf above her and picked up an open wine bottle which sat beside the sink. “I have to pour this off—it’s full of sediment.”