“Gerald, why don’t we just forget this?”

He hesitated for a moment, frowning a little, then went on across the room to the dresser which stood to the left of the bathroom door. His face cleared as he went. She watched him from where she lay on the bed, her arms raised and splayed out, making her look a little like Fay Wray chained up and waiting for the great ape in King Kong. Her wrists had been secured to the mahogany bed-posts with two sets of handcuffs. The chains gave each hand about six inches” worth of movement. Not much.

He put the keys on top of the bureau-two minute clicks, her ears seemed in exceptionally fine working order for a Wednesday afternoon-and then turned back to her. Over his head, sunripples from the lake danced and wavered on the bedroom’s high white ceiling.

“What do you say? This has lost a lot of its charm for me.” Andit never had that much to begin with, she did not add.

He grinned. He had a heavy, pink-skinned face below a narrow widow’s peak of hair as black as a crow’s wing, and that grin of his had always done something to her that she didn’t much care for. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what that something was, but-

Oh, sure you can. It makes him look stupid. You can practically seehis IQ going down ten points for every inch that grin spreads. At itsmaximum width, your killer corporate lawyer of a husband looks like ajanitor on work-release from the local mental institution.

That was cruel, but not entirely inaccurate. But how did you tell your husband of almost twenty years that every time he grinned he looked as if he were suffering from light mental retardation? The answer was simple, of course: you didn’t. His smile was a different matter entirely. He had a lovely smile-she guessed it was that smile, so warm and good-humored, which had persuaded her to go out with him in the first place. It had reminded her of her father’s smile when he told his family amusing things about his day as he sipped a before-dinner gin and tonic.