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could cloak in gentle colors the heart and spirit of a wild thing. She had forgotten his question, and when a shout reached them from Noah’s balcony, relief swept over her.
    “Alex!” one of the painters yelled. “We need you up here!”
    She stroked quickly to the ladder and pulled herself up, mumbling something that might have been “Excuse me” as she reached for her lavender cotton coverup and donned it without bothering to towel off.
    Noah watched her disappear through her sliding glass doors, then pulled himself from the water and sank down on a recently purchased loungechair to stare broodingly into the sparkling water of the pool.
    Since he had taken a few weeks’ vacation to settle into his new home and set up his studio, there had been far too much time for thinking. Noah would have preferred to be busy, devoting only part of his time to coming to terms with the fascination he felt for Alex. She was a puzzle, and he had always enjoyed delving to the heart of any mystery.
    He had watched her unobtrusively these last days, his photographer’s eye catching unguarded moments when he had yearned for a camera in his hand. Like the moment when she had stood in a group of large, coveralled painters, dwarfed by their size yet curiously dominant because all heads had been bent attentively to hers. And the moment coming down the stairs from his loft when she had suddenly thrown a leg across the railing and slid gleefully downward, the green sprites in her eyes laughing up at him.
    And other moments. Pensive moments, humorousmoments. Moments of frowning concentration and moments of odd, elusive wistfulness.
    She seemed a dozen women in a single lovely skin, and she haunted more than his dreams. After her deliberate warning Noah had carefully backed off and settled down to wait, something in him certain that the time would be well spent.
    Yet she had looked at him just now with a startling intensity, as if she had rounded a corner to face a threat looming in front of her. He had forgotten his own question as he’d gazed into green eyes flaring with turbulent emotion and felt something in himself stir to wakefulness.
    Now he was restless, on edge. What had he said to provoke that reaction in her? He’d asked about Caliban. Just that. In fleeting moments during the past days he had wondered idly about Alex’s pet, still faintly bothered by the name. Then he had traced the memory to Shakespeare, and had still been only mildly curious.
    After her reaction to his question, he was determined to find out what was going on.
    It was sometime later that Noah moved slightlyin his lounge chair, only half conscious of the itching tingle between his shoulder blades. He wanted suddenly to turn and look behind him, feeling just as he had after he’d heard the eerie moan in the night.
    Then he heard the sound again, this time in broad daylight.
    His scalp tingled a primitive warning, and muscles bunched in the instinctive reaction to a threat more sensed than seen. Slowly, carefully, Noah turned his head—and then froze.
    The animal standing only a foot away was a yellowish-gray in color, and was somewhere around nine feet long. It weighed every ounce of four hundred pounds—all of it clearly muscle. Shaggy hair a shade darker than the rest framed a large square head in which yellow eyes surveyed Noah with interest. And a long tail with a tuft of black hair on the tip waved gently.
    Noah knew a moment of incredibly clear thought—sharpened by fear, he decided later—and realized that this was Caliban. And there wasindeed something special Alex had neglected to mention about her pet.
    She hadn’t mentioned he was a lion.
    Logic told him that she would hardly make a pet of a savage creature, but logic instantly amended the thought. What would Alex, an animal trainer for four years, consider a savage creature?
    Then Caliban yawned mightily, and Noah suddenly relaxed.
    Where sharp teeth should have been was only the clean pink line