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looked into my eyes and told me my nutrition is bad.”
    “He what?” Christine’s hopes dropped like stones. “Didn’t you talk about your problems?”
    “I don’t have any problems. He said my irises were muddy, which means my bowels are blocked.”
    “Just great.”
    “He gave me some breathing exercises to clear my heart chakra.” He demonstrated, huffing while patting his stomach. “Then we talked about the Phoenix Coyotes. He likes hockey.”
    Dammit, Aurora. Dr. Mike was no more capable of counseling David than he was of doing Aurora’s heart surgery.
    “You’re not going back there.”
    “Why not? It’ll get the principal off your back.”
    “More roughage is not going to help us here. We’ll have to find someone in Preston.” Which meant a two-hour round-trip.
    “Come on. He said he’d hypnotize me next time.” David was clearly loving this. Christine shook her head. Now what?

    “N OT THAT PLATTER, the swirled glaze one,” Aurora ordered Christine, whose only wish was to keep the couscous as moist as her own skin in this boiling-hot kitchen.
    She and Marcus had kitchen duty, instructed by Bogie and Aurora, who were supposedly resting, though Bogie had been up and down seasoning things and Aurora had been barking commands.
    “If you’d keep the trays in the same place, it would be easier,” Christine said, forcing herself not to snap at her mother. She was dying to say, Go lie down, for Pete’s sake.
    “Here you go.” Marcus handed Christine the tray. It was one of her mother’s surreal creations in green, blue and turquoise. “And the serving utensil and leftover pita she’s about to tell you about.” He winked. “Saving you time.”
    “Thanks,” she said, vividly aware of how close he stood.
    After a week of seeing Marcus, mostly at meals, Christine could no longer deny how attracted she was. Whenever he was near, she felt a low electric hum start up inside. It was delicious. She wasn’t going to do anything about it, it was just…fun.
    She rarely dated, but when she did she kept it casual and mostly physical. She had David and engrossing work, of course. Plus she’d been burned the few times she’d gotten serious by charmers who let her down—like David’s father, Skip—or pursued her relentlessly until she fell for them, then disappeared or went cold on her.
    Not good. Her judgment when it came to relationships plain reeked. Short-term hookups were fine for now. Maybe some day, when she got smarter, less emotional or developed better mating instincts, she’d go for more, the whole picket-fence deal.
    Marcus felt the attraction, too, she could tell. It was thrilling to get a man as restrained as Marcus all charged up. She liked making him laugh, too. And talking to him. She realized she didn’t spend much relaxed social time with men, so this was a nice change.
    It was all good fun. She enjoyed the tease and retreat and he seemed to, too. She had too much on her hands with David, her mother and her work to even think about sex. Well, she could think about it. But that was it.
    Marcus seemed equally reluctant, pulling back from any accidental contact, when they brushed hips in the entry to the dining room or tangled fingers over the dishes they washed.
    Marcus had the goulash pot in both hands and gestured for her to pass in front of him. She did, then glanced over her shoulder to catch him watching her backside.
    She got that roller-coaster dip in her stomach. “Watch your step,” she said, nodding at the bump in the floorboard, but she was grinning and he cleared his throat.
    This was such a kick.
    At the entrance to the dining room, Christine paused to admire the rough-wood table holding the ceramic plates in her mother’s singular style, the pewter flatware and Mason jar water glasses. Bogie had let David choose the cuttings for the bouquet of fragrant herbs, river bamboo and exotic amaryllis in the center of the table. There were ten people at the table