‘Well, if I’m right,’ he said with a big smile at Mare, ‘it means I can stop tramping across this town like a door-to-door salesman.’

‘Then move on, Willie Loman,’ Mare said and tried to shut the door.

The guy stuck his foot in her way. ‘If you’ll just listen…’

Deed listen, all right. She’d nestle against his neck and trill in his ear. She might be the oldest virgin in North America, but she wasn’t a dead virgin. And she could swear she knew what every inch of him looked like without those clothes.

‘Good heavens,’ Lizzie whispered from behind her. ‘You’re preening.’

Good heavens, she was. Fluffing her feathers and twitching her tail and tucking her head, as if the guy standing in the door was a big barn owl.

‘Did you know you have a screech owl on your table?’ he asked Mare.

‘No,’ Mare said. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

‘Close the door, Mare,’ Dee begged.

It came out as a descending carillon of chirps. The guy on the other side of the door lifted amazed eyebrows at her. ‘And I think she likes me.’

Leave it to her to turn into an owl in front of an ornithologist. Who else would recognize the mating call of the Eastern screech owl?

‘You think wrong,’ Mare said to him, trying to close the door. And good-bye.’

‘Good,’ Dee said, panting. ‘Get him out of here.’

It wasn’t often a man got under her skin like this. She didn’t allow it; it was too dangerous. She’d tried a few times, letting herself believe that the arousal from hormones would affect her differently than the agitation of anger or fear. She’d been wrong. She’d ended up sending two guys into therapy and another to an ashram in India. She could still hear him screaming as he ran into the night, her bra dangling from his hand after she’d shifted right there in the back seat of his Jeep. And not into anything as cute as an owl. No, she’d shifted into his mother. Just like she had with the other two guys. And she hadn’t even liked their mothers.