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pressed against an ivory breast.
    "My understudy, for one, and my hairdresser, for another." Her mother had laughed softly. "Why, even my daughter thinks you're quite something."
    "Your daughter?" He said the words as if he couldn't remember Leigh existed. Then he groaned and raised his head. "You can't think I'd ever be interested in her," was the muffled answer. "She's a carbon copy, a dull child who happens to look like you. You're a beautiful, gorgeous original who has no equal."
    Her mother's soft laugh had been husky, satisfied. She had elicited the praise she lived for.  "I've never been with a man who could be eloquent and aroused at the same time. It's quite a novelty." The light gleamed off the golden polish of her mother's long, sleekly manicured fingernails as she threaded them through the dark strands of hair Leigh had thought so attractive. "You are aroused, aren't you, darling?"
    His groan was throaty, disturbed. "Claire. You must know what you're doing to me…"
    Leigh had crept back to her room, sickened and destroyed in a way she hardly understood. It was only years later, when her mother grew older and her fame lessened, that the obsessive need to seduce every male in sight, especially those who cast an eye over Claire's young, attractive daughter, was so evident even Leigh could see it. But that was much later. The first time, young as she was, she had understood only on a subconscious level. Careful after that night not to express admiration for any male in front of her mother, she told Claire that she hated men. Her mother had only laughed, but she had believed Leigh, because she wanted to. "Leigh's little hang-up" Claire labeled it, secretly delighted because it removed Leigh from the competition.
    Leigh played her part well…until Dean. With him, she almost overdid it-and cheated herself out of a friend.
    She and Claire had been driving through the mountains on a rare motor trip, and their car had broken down in Tupper Lake. Dean had fixed it and taken them to dinner. During the meal, Dean had to be told who Claire Foster was. That endeared him to Leigh from the first, but she told her mother she thought he was boring, and for the first time, her mother seemed to agree. But Dean's virile masculinity and his cool self-assurance cast a potent spell over Claire. Their marriage had shocked and angered Leigh, until she discovered that Dean was as determined to accept her as the daughter he had wanted and never had, as she was to push him away.
    For nearly a year she resisted. But in the end, her mother, bored and restless, had left and Leigh stayed. Under a mature man's care for the first time in her life, she began to relax and enjoy the kind of loving protection that Dean's special brand of caring provided. He made it possible for her to achieve a peace within herself, and a life of her own-independent of her mother's.
    Thinking about Dean, remembering the quiet times of sitting around the campfire, roasting marshmallows till they ignited, waving the fire out and pulling the sticky charred remains off the stick to eat with her fingers, she decided she would call him tomorrow.  Her mind relaxed, she fell asleep.

CHAPTER THREE
    It was almost one o'clock when she woke, and by the time she showered, dressed, and cleaned the apartment, it was close to three before she could sit down and relax with a cup of coffee and put that call into Dean.  She got his voicemail.  He must be fishing, the lucky guy.
    She began to look over the mountain of papers she had to have corrected for Monday's classes. She was halfway through the history quiz she had given on Friday when the knock sounded on her door.  She tensed, knowing Hunt would have tapped out his special little clichéd rhythm.  She smoothed suddenly damp palms down the side of her denim pants, tugged her T-shirt down over her hips, and went to the door.
    "Howdy." It was Deke she-couldn't-remember-his-last name, and in his jeans and denim jacket he looked