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pool still sent out its silent invitation. She knew what Hasty wanted. Was that what she wanted, too?
    Of course it wasn’t. What she wanted was for Tom to be standing there.
    She shook her head. “I can’t. One of our favorite artists is opening a show at a Midtown gallery. I need to see if she has anything we could use.”
    His hands grew still. “You’re a dreadful liar,” he whispered in her left ear. “You aren’t convincing me at all.”
    “I need to go. I do.”
    He began massaging her shoulders again and spoke in rhythm. “Can’t wait and browse the gallery another time? The event will collapse if you don’t show up? Your walls will crumble if they don’t get paintings before tomorrow?”
    She laughed and broke free. “Yep. All of that is absolutely true.”
    He shook his head. “You know darned well that the only important thing about that opening is that it provides you with an excuse not to swim with me.”
    She felt a slow flush rise in her cheeks and silently cursed the genes that had given her auburn hair, white skin, and cheeks that blushed at the slightest provocation. Not that Hasty was such a slight one. He was darned attractive, and Tom was gone far too much.
    She shoved back her hair and held it to her neck. “Sorry. If you had called to check, I could have saved you a trip.”
    He wiggled his eyebrows in his hopeless version of a leer. “Which might be why I didn’t call. How about if I go home to change, then take you to dinner and the opening?”
    She considered it for at least three seconds. She had to eat, and dinner and a gallery opening sounded harmless enough.
    Nothing was harmless where Hasty was concerned. Not right now, when she was so tired and vulnerable.
    “Not tonight, thanks. I’ll see you out.”
    As they passed her study, he stepped into the room and peered down at her computer again. “You want us to hook this up right now?”
    She was tempted, but that would just prolong his stay. “No, it will get done eventually. Everything will get done eventually.”
    “If you live so long.” He turned at the front door. “ Au revoir, hasta luego , and auf wiedersehen . All of which imply that you will be seeing me again. How about a swim tomorrow?”
    “I told you—I’m going to the beach tomorrow.”
    “Which one?”
    She remembered just in time that Hasty used to have a habit of showing up during her family’s vacations on Marathon Key. Back then she had been thrilled. She didn’t want that kind of complication now. “Just down to the coast, with a friend.” In Atlanta, that could mean the Atlantic coast or the Gulf coast. They were pretty equidistant.
    She stepped back into the house. “See you when I get back.”
    “When will that be?”
    “Thursday afternoon, maybe.”
    He sketched a wave and headed to his Jeep.
    She watched while he backed down the drive, and then she stood for a few minutes longer, enjoying the golden glow of the sun and picturing what might have happened if she had said yes. She saw herself pulling on her new yellow bathing suit, leading the way to the pool, slipping into the water beside him…
    “It’s a darned good thing I’m going to the beach,” she told a mockingbird perched on a tea olive near her door. The mockingbird bobbed its head in agreement.
    Still, every pore rebelled against returning to the vast, disheveled house behind her. The evening she had planned loomed in a stretch of utter boredom, while her alternative was to stay and work on equally unexciting projects such as hanging pictures or making decisions about upholstery fabric.
    She took three deep cleansing breaths. They did have one benefit: they kept you from running screaming through the streets.

Chapter 5

    Tuesday, Katherine woke with tears snailing in slimy tracks down her cheeks. One by one she replayed the tattered scenes lingering in her head. The crunch of somebody grinding her Dresden ballerina underfoot. Splinters of light as the Waterford vase Posey