It was a lazy kind of Saturday afternoon. Stix roused himself long enough to take a wrench to her leaky faucet, then settled in front of the TV set to watch a football game while she got out a dust cloth. The next time she looked, he’d been joined by Sandra, a teenager from across the street who claimed she would have been forced to clean the garage with her family if she hadn’t escaped.

Kay threw them both out before dinner, to allow herself time to get ready for her date. Just a movie and drink afterward, with Tim, a teacher at the high school. They had a reasonably good time, and she was home, kissed at the door and in bed by midnight.

The entire day she’d had Mitch on her mind. He wasn’t an obsession, but he was there, like a dream one couldn’t forget when one woke up, like the lingering taste of champagne after the glass was long empty.

She kept remembering his gentleness with Peter, so much in contrast to the hard lines of his face. She kept remembering his aloofness when she’d tried to talk to him, so much in contrast with the blazing warmth of his eyes when he looked at her. His simple announcement out of the blue that he was going to kiss her-but his kiss hadn’t been at all simple…

Impatiently, she switched the light back on, fluffed the pillow under her head and reached for a book. The old torch song “Stormy Weather” kept crooning in the back of her mind, nostalgic and moody and…disgustingly romantic. She flipped impatiently through her newest book on trivia.

The weather had been stormy, all right. So why had she had this warm glow inside her ever since Mitch had kissed her in the parking lot?

Chapter Three

“Don’t give me that. Every guy knows that half the time when a girl says no, she means yes,” Jeff said disgustedly. “If a guy didn’t push it a little once in a while, he’d never get anywhere.”