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advice. By setting a limit on her time in one place, she didn’t have to worry. She had no intention of falling in love, not for a very long time. She’d seen what could happen to a woman who fell in love with the wrong man.
    Max Sorrenson was certainly the first man she’d met who was different. And he was the last man in the world she could allow herself to fall in love with—if she was interested in falling in love, which she wasn’t. There might not be any such thing as a class system anymore, but he still lived in the penthouse and she lived in the maintenance wing.
    Kate didn’t know why she was allowing such thoughts to cross her mind. This adventure wasn’t even scheduled to run her allotted three months. By the end of the week, she’d be able to buy a new water pump for the car. After the next week, she’d be mobile again. Still, the Carnival Strip was nice, and she would have a full two months left on her schedule. She might not be too quick to move on. She’d take a good look around the area first, she decided.
    Kate took a sip of the coffee, which was cold now and milky brown in the cup she held absently in her hand. She heard someone headed in the direction of her hiding place and she slipped back further into the alcove.
    The pounding sound of footsteps on the path told her that it was a jogger long before Max Sorrenson moved lazily past her toward the empty beach. Thank goodness he’d covered up that bathing suit with a silvery jogging suit, she thought. He stopped at the edge of a clump of palm trees and dropped his gym pants. “Oh no!” Kate muttered. He was wearing a pair of indecently fitted maroon running shorts that were even more suggestive than the bathing suit.
    His jacket quickly followed his pants, and Kate was treated to the sight of his powerful chest. He draped a matching maroon towel around his neck, slipped a gray sweat band around his head and, catching the ends of the towel in his hands, started off down the beach.
    “Whatever you’re thinking, Kate Weston, forget it,” she said out loud. She wasn’t in the same league with a man like Max. She was simply working her way across the country, looking for her own place in the sun. She wasn’t brilliant. She’dnever been to college. The closest she’d come to culture was a dumb music appreciation course she’d started her adult education classes with—before she’d learned that pounding a hammer was more therapeutic than Mozart.
    The truth was, she didn’t know who she was. Maybe she didn’t really want to. By not staying in one place too long she didn’t have to explain anything to anybody. She could be anyone she chose to be. She could even have a grand affair, as long as she set up boundaries and time limits.
    Affair? What was she thinking of? Max Sorrenson wasn’t the kind of man who dallied with the hired help. He swam alone. He jogged alone. He worked alone. Kate wasn’t sure whether Max would know how to dally, if the occasion presented itself. She grinned. Maybe Max needed a grand adventure. What if—what if she shared hers with him?
    The powerful figure of Max Sorrenson was growing smaller in the distance. She was wrong. He wasn’t a young Cesar Romero or an old Lorenzo Lamas. She’d been watching too many old movies and too much television. Max Sorrenson wasn’t some cardboard character on a screen. He was a real man, who was about a million light years away from somebody like her. Too bad, she thought. Getting to know him might have been the ultimate kind of hands-on, how-to class.
    Kate reluctantly turned back to the hotel. She had work to do, work that would help her gain perspective by taking her mind off the man in the penthouse suite.
    Down the beach, Max was carrying on a conversation with himself as he ran, something he never did. He always felt that if a thing was importantenough to do, it deserved his full attention. But today his running was automatic, and his conversation was turning into an