Yet on her drive back to the art gallery, alone in the dark, she admitted fibbing to herself.

She might not have touched Garrett, but she’d thought about it.

She might not have taken his personal comments seriously, but her heartbeat had been galloping like a young girl’s.

She might not have done anything wrong, but her disloyalty to Reed was still real. And wrong.

Most of the time she lived at her parents’ house, where she had a private suite of rooms on the second floor. Often enough, though, she worked late at the gallery and then just stayed in town. Tonight it was already too late to drive home, so she let herself in the back door of Color and slipped off her shoes.

Several years before, she’d converted a small anteroom off the first floor into a home away from home. She kept books, cosmetics, several changes of clothes there, but the room had slowly been filling up with the oddest assortment of treasures. A two-centuries-old Chinese desk, candles wrapped in a necklace of amethysts, a white fur rug by the bed, a narrow Louis XIV mirror…She shook her head at the wild assortment often enough. They were things she loved, but they certainly didn’t represent any standard decorating style. The silliest of all was a framed sign-Shall We Dance in the Kitchen?-that meant nothing at all, except that sometimes she wished she were that whimsical and romantic. Or that she could be.

Plunking down on the bed, she kicked off her shoes and phoned her parents to let them know she’d be staying in town, then got ready for bed and switched off the light. She was beat, yet somehow she lay there for hours, staring at the film of white curtains whispering in the window. Garrett refused to leave her mind.

It made no sense. He was the wrong man. Reed was the right man, the man she was supposed to be marrying. So why couldn’t she stop Garrett from haunting every corner of her thoughts?