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baggy pink cotton sweater, a long, loose skirt, mudsplattered highheeled shoes. He liked her better in the terry robe. He’d like her even better in nothing at all. “Let’s just say I’m enjoying being a voyeur,” he said.
    â€œEthan…”
    â€œDon’t worry about it. She’ll be safe from my evil designs. In a week, she’ll be back in Chicago, safe and sound.”
    â€œA week. You’re planning to keep her here that long? We might run into trouble when the workmen arrive on Monday.”
    â€œThe house is big enough. Don’t worry so much, Sally. For now, I feel like playing with fire. I don’t even mind if I get burned.”
    Salvatore shook his head, knowing the gesture was unseen in the darkened room where his old friend stared at the woman on the television monitor. “I’m not worried about singed fingers, Ethan. I’m worried about the place burning down around us.”
    â€œYou worry too much. I promise you I won’t hurt her. I probably won’t even scare her as much as you have. I just need a little distraction. It’s been a long time since Ruth.”
    â€œEthan…”
    â€œBring her to me at midnight, Sally. Who knows, she might even be able to convince me to let her go.” She turned from the window, pushing her hair back from her face, and he watched the nervous parting of her lips, the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the baggy sweater. “Maybe,” he murmured.
    Â 
    I T HAD TAKEN ALL HER willpower to resist the tray Salvatore brought her. True to his word, he was a good cook, if she could judge by the devastating smells coming from the tray. Roast chicken and rice with baby peas, and something that looked and smelled like lemon cheesecake. He’d even brought her a glass of wine, something she would have killed for in her current strung-out state of mind.
    She sat in the baronial-style chair and stared at the tray with mute antipathy. It made no sense, her refusal to accept food from their hands. It wasn’t as if she suspected them of trying to poison her. After all, why should they? Drugged wine she wouldn’t put past them, but that, too, was unlikely.
    No, it wasn’t from any fear of the ambrosial smells that had issued from the contents of the heavy silver tray before they cooled. It was an absurd fancy based on some Greek legend she’d read. Someone—was it Persephone?—had been kidnapped by the Lord of Darkness and stolen down to hell. She would have been just fine and dandy if she hadn’t succumbed and eaten six pomegranate seeds. When someone finally showed up to rescue her, she’d already sealed her fate. For each pomegranate seed, she had to spend one month a year in the dark kingdom.
    Of course, there were those who said the eating of pomegranate seeds was merely a sexual allusion. Persephone had given in to the powerful sexual lure of the Prince of Darkness, not her desire for pomegranates.
    As for Meg Carey, she wasn’t interested in either food or sex. Not that she envisaged the mysterious Ethan Winslowe as even remotely a sexual creature. Nevertheless, she was determined to keep her distance, to accept nothing from him she wasn’t forced to accept, such as a bed for the night.
    She fell asleep in her clothes as the night drew closer around her. She’d finished her book, then discovered that the only books the room held were Stephen King novels. She was already spooked enough—the last thing she needed was to read horror novels before she tried to sleep.
    Even so, her dreams were bizarre, erotic and frightening. X’n*d, the lizard-blob hero of the book she’d finished, was a dead ringer for Ethan Winslowe. He was sitting in the middle of a muddy green pool, tubes and wires hooked up to him, keeping him alive, and he was beckoning to her. Sort of like Jabba the Hutt in one of those Star Wars movies, something huge and soft and evil that