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is?"
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    WHAT'S COOKING?
    'That he was determined enough to find you that he didn't stop looking after he ran into a dead end with me."
    "That's not interesting. It's annoying," Maggie retorted. He had all but said Ashley had blabbed, hadn't he? Was that another lie? She went over his words carefully and realized that he'd talked about cutting ties with her family, not just her sister.
    "How do you suppose he found you?" Ashley asked, her tone thoughtful. "I suppose if he tracked me down, he could have found Jo."
    She'd obviously seized on the same possibility that had just occurred to Maggie.
    "Jo doesn't even know I'm down here," Maggie said, then sighed. "Or does she?"
    "Of course she does. She's your sister."
    "And Mom and Pop?"
    "I had to tell them something," Ashley said defensively. "They would have worried."
    "I don't suppose you published a notice in the Boston papers, did you?"
    "That's insulting. I'm hanging up now," Ashley replied.
    "Sure. Hang up when the heat's getting a little too hot for you," Maggie said bitterly.
    "Do you really want to belabor the whole issue of who told what to whom?" Ashley asked. "Shouldn't you be concentrating on figuring out what to do now that Rick has found you?"
    "Aside from taking off for parts unknown, I don't have a clue," Maggie admitted. "Any ideas?"
    "Stay put and let this play itself out," her sister suggested. "The man did go to an awful lot of trouble to find you. That must mean something."
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    "He likes a challenge," Maggie guessed.
    "What if it's more than that?"
    "It isn't."
    "How can you know that?" Ashley asked reasonably. "Take a chance. That's my advice."
    "As if I'd take relationship advice from a workaholic who hasn't had a date in two years."
    "I date," Ashley replied indignantly.
    "No, you have meetings with other lawyers who happen to be men. It's not the same thing."
    "I'm saying goodbye now."
    Maggie chuckled. "Goodbye. Love you."
    "You, too, brat."
    After she'd hung up, Maggie stared at the phone and debated calling her folks or her youngest sister to see who was responsible for Rick turning up here. Why bother, though? That particular horse was out of the barn. Rick was here, and now she needed to spend all of her energy devising some scheme to keep him out of her bed.
    And judging from the way her pulse had been scrambling and her willpower had been weakening, it had better be one heck of a scheme.
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    n some level Rick knew he probably should have turned around and driven straight back to Boston. In fact, his well-honed instincts for self-preservation were all but screaming for him to do precisely that. In Boston there were plenty of women who would be eager for his company, rather than one prickly woman who claimed to want nothing to do with him.
    But he didn't want those other women. It seemed he wanted Maggie D'Angelo, in all probability simply because he couldn't have her. That had to be it, he concluded. Every guy wanted what he couldn't have. He was no different from any other man on that score. He loved a challenge, and too few women over the years had offered him one.
    Lying in an antique brass bed on a feather mattress in a waterfront Victorian-style bed-and-breakfast later
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    that night, he indulged in a rare bit of introspection, contemplating the perversity of his decision to stay here and convince Maggie that she wanted him.
    What happened when he pulled it off? And he would pull it off. It wasn't as if he wanted anything permanent. He never had before, and he couldn't think of anything that had changed. He still liked answering to no one. He liked his space. And he really, really liked the fact that no woman ever got close enough to break his heart.
    Did that mean this was nothing more than a game with him? The proverbial thrill of the chase? A tiny little flicker of conscience warned Rick that he shouldn't be playing this game, not with Maggie, not unless he intended to follow through.
    But follow through to what? A