“What did you want…before all this happened? What kind of life did you see yourself having?”

Ethan took his time answering. “I saw myself opening up my medical practice in a little town straight out of Norman Rockwell, some little town that really needed a doctor. I’d have a wife and some kids, and I’d spend my life helping other people feel better.”

“And now?” Joanna asked. Why was there an ache in her throat, and a lump the size of Kansas? She looked over at him and saw him shrug.

“That hasn’t changed.” He glanced at her, his eyes quiet and dark. Shaman’s eyes. Joanna’s inner voice mocked her as she realized, Not for me. Me, a wife? A mother? Who am I kidding?

But then her inner voice was back, louder than ever, as it said, Why not me?

Dear Reader,

Valentine’s Day is here this month, and what better way to celebrate the spirit of romance than with six fabulous novels from Silhouette Intimate Moments? Kathleen Creighton’s The Awakening of Dr. Brown is one of those emotional tours de force that will stay in your mind and your heart long after you’ve turned the last page. With talent like this, it’s no wonder Kathleen has won so many awards for her writing. Join Ethan Brown and Joanna Dunn on their journey into the heart. You’ll be glad you did.

A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY continues with Someone To Watch Over Her, a suspenseful and sensuous Caribbean adventure by Margaret Watson. Award winner Marie Ferrarella adds another installment to her CHILDFINDERS, INC. miniseries with A Hero in Her Eyes, a real page-turner of a romance. Meet the second of bestselling author Ruth Langan’s THE SULLIVAN SISTERS in Loving Lizbeth—and look forward to third sister Celeste’s appearance next month. Reader favorite Rebecca Daniels is finally back with Rain Dance, a gripping amnesia story. And finally, check out Renegade Father by RaeAnne Thayne, the stirring tale of an irresistible Native American hero and a lady rancher.

All six of this month’s books are guaranteed to keep you turning pages long into the night, so don’t miss a single one. And be sure to come back next month for more of the best and most exciting romantic reading around—right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

Enjoy!

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

The Awakening of Dr. Brown
Kathleen Creighton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

KATHLEEN CREIGHTON

has roots deep in the California soil but has relocated to South Carolina. As a child, she enjoyed listening to old timers’ tales, and her fascination with the past only deepened as she grew older. Today she says she is interested in everything—art, music, gardening, zoology, anthropology and history—but people are at the top of her list. She also has a lifelong passion for writing, and now combines her two loves in romance novels.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Prologue

The nightmare came as it always did, borne on wings of music. Heavenly music; joyful, happy music. Music that filled her heart with delight and tumbled from her throat in ribbons of song. Music that poured into her feet and made them want to dance.

Then…as it always did, everything changed.

In her dream, one minute she was laughing and dancing, singing for the pure, unbridled joy of it. In the next moment, the music became an undulating wail that replaced joy with terror and her legs with lead.

No longer dancing, now she was running, running, running, while around her the world turned violent shades of fire—orange and red and yellow-white—and the wail grew to a shriek that filled all the spaces inside her head. The air was thick and black with smoke and choked her when she tried to breathe it. She wanted to scream, tried to scream, but there was no air, no breath for screaming.

Still…still she tried, until her throat was raw and the pain inside became too terrible to bear.

Then, as always, she woke up.

Awake, she could still smell smoke, but strangely, now it seemed to comfort rather than terrify. And there were cool fingers stroking the damp hair from her forehead, and a voice steeped in bourbon and cigarettes crooning, “Hush, baby-girl, hush now, don’t you cry. You gonna be fine now. The Doveman’s got you under his wings….”

Little by little the fear and pain subsided. Her throat relaxed, her breathing slowed, and she drifted into sleep on the whiskey-sweet notes of the Doveman’s song:

“Hush little baby, don’t say a word,

Papa’s gonna buy you a mockin’bird…”

Chapter 1

“Who you gonna be this time?” Doveman turned on the piano bench as a final riff of music dropped from his gnarled but still-nimble fingers, effortlessly as raindrops from the sky.

The rock-and-roll legend known as Phoenix pulled her gaze away from the window to look past him, tilting her head slightly as she replayed the music inside her head, then tried it again paired with the lyric Who am I this time? A smile played across her lips and her heart quickened; together in just such a way, she and Rupert Dove had created more hit songs over the years than she could count.

She tossed away the question with a shrug, and the smile grew wry. “Hey—I’m open to suggestion. I’ve done vamp and virgin, waif and glamour queen—”

“Don’t forget punk.” Doveman’s voice was even drier than his usual Black Jack-and-Camels rasp.

“I try to, daily,” Phoenix replied, mimicking both tone and manner.

Doveman’s cackle of laughter was affectionate. “You was young, girl. Cut y’self some slack. You done traveled a long, long road since those days.”

He swiveled back to the keyboard, his fingers finding their way so surely the sounds they produced seemed to come from the air itself rather than human hands. And so clever and intricate was the variation, even Phoenix didn’t recognize for a moment the main theme from “Pretty Mary,” the biggest hit single from her last album, Fire and Ice. The song that had won them both multiple Grammys, the one that had prompted critics to say of the album and the subsequent world tour that “Phoenix has entered a new dimension of sophistication and maturity.”

But that had been four long years ago. An eon measured in pop culture time.

Phoenix turned back to the window, feeling chilled in spite of the heat haze that shrouded the city like fog.

Behind her, Doveman’s voice rode gently on the current of his music. “That one—that Fire and Ice tour, now—that was a good one. Done real good with that one. But the river rolls on, girl, it don’t go back. You got to go on to somethin’ new.”

The river rolls on…. But I have gone back, Phoenix thought, her gaze skipping past the city’s redbrick jumble to the tiny sliver of harbor waters sparkling in the sun like a diamond in a rubbish heap.

Down there, between the newly renovated harbor with its tourist havens and pricey high-rise apartment buildings, and the converted loft on the edge of a newly renovated warehouse district in which she stood, blocks and blocks of dingy, dilapidated row houses straggled like defeated soldiers to the water’s edge. Down there, hopeless people still passed empty days on sagging stoops and street corners and children played and skinned their knees on crumbling sidewalks with broken curbs.

This she knew. Oh, yes, she—and only one other—knew that it was on one of those same streets that multimillionaire rock icon Phoenix had played as a child. But she still had the scars on her knees to prove it.

“The Phoenix shall rise again,” she intoned.

Doveman chuckled, missing—or ignoring—the irony. He nodded without turning. “That’s right. Phoenix is gonna rise up again. Question is, who she gonna be this time? You got to decide, child.”

Who am I? Standing at the window with her back to the old piano man, Phoenix drew a catching breath.

“Here’s an idea for you.” Doveman’s voice had softened. And she realized the melody hidden in the blues variations that tumbled so easily from the piano keys wasn’t “Pretty Mary” any longer, but something slow and sweet and hauntingly familiar.

An indefinable sadness clutched at her throat. In response to it, her voice hardened. “Shoot.”

“How about for this tour, for this album, you just be yourself? Joanna Dunn?”

Doveman’s music faded with his last word, so her laugh gusted into silence. The emotion gripping her now wasn’t sadness, nor was it indefinable. What it was, she knew full well, was fear—raw and unreasoning fear. The fear of a small child abandoned in the darkness.

Jerking around to face him, she said, “Get real!” in a brittle voice that sounded like anger.

Not the least bit perturbed by her fit of temper, Doveman shrugged. “Why not? Girl, it’s who you are. Time you let folks see who Phoenix is.”

She shook her head; a derisive sound puffed softly from her lips. But as she gazed at the coffee-brown face of the man who’d been like a father to her for more than twenty years, she felt her anger drain away. When it did, only the fear remained.

With her voice still hard as stone she said, “Doveman, I haven’t been that person for so long, I wouldn’t even know who she is now.”

Unwillingly, her glance went back to the window, pulled inexorably by its view of row houses, tenements and despair. “Besides—” and now suddenly her voice had gone sharp and bright, pain disguised as laughter “—who in their right mind is going to pay money to listen to somebody named Joanna Dunn?”

She didn’t wait for the answer to that, didn’t expect or want one. She jerked herself away from the window and announced, “I’m going out,” as she snatched up a pair of sunglasses and a New York Yankees baseball cap that were lying on the white leather sofa.

Rupert Dove only said mildly, “If you’re walkin’, better take one of the boys with you. This ain’t exactly a strollin’-around neighborhood.”

And he watched as the rock star’s famous lips curved with a small, sardonic smile. He said nothing more, knowing it would fall on deaf ears; in all except music matters, Phoenix listened to no one but herself.

He watched silently, then, as she twisted her long black hair and stuffed it beneath the baseball cap, as unforgettable silvery eyes vanished behind mirrored sunglasses. “Be careful out there,” he drawled by way of a farewell. She threw him a wave, went out the door and left him shaking his head and chuckling to himself.

He doubted she’d have heard the sadness in his laughter, even if she’d stayed.

Doveman’s heart was heavy with concern for the girl-child he’d raised and loved as his own for more than twenty years. Not for the sake of her physical safety—he knew she was capable of handling anything those mean streets might throw at her. Nor was he afraid she might be recognized, even on the streets of the city of her birth. Phoenix had always been a master of the art of disguise.

It was the part hidden away beneath all the layers of her disguises he worried about, the part only one old black piano man even knew existed. The part named Joanna Dunn.

Swiveling once more to the keyboard, Doveman reached into the bowels of the baby grand and drew out his hidden stash—a crumpled pack of Camels and a half-used up book of matches from the convenience store down on the corner. He preferred matches over a lighter, always had; liked listening to the sound of the matchhead scraping grit, liked the flowering flame, the faint smell of sulfur. Now, touching the flame to the tip of the cigarette, he closed his eyes and drew the forbidden smoke deep into his lungs. His body reacted to the abuse with a violent fit of coughing, which he accepted philosophically. His lungs were shot to hell anyway; the way he saw it, he might as well enjoy what life there was left to him.

But that was another reason why he worried.

“Doctor? I put that otitus media in exam three, when you’re ready.” Ruthie Mendoza, casually dressed in jeans and a pink cotton smock with kitty-cats printed on it, waved a clipboard from the opposite end of the counter.

“Thanks, Ruthie.” Dr. Ethan Brown returned his pen to its customary place in the pocket of his lab coat and tried to sneak a glance at his watch as he laid the chart he’d just completed back on the pile.

Bibi Schmidt, whose mild gray eyes missed little, glanced at him over the tops of her half glasses as she reached for it. “You gonna try and get some shut-eye this afternoon, Doctor? It is your night to ride-along, isn’t it?”

“It is, and I’d hoped to.” The smile Ethan gave the clinic’s volunteer administrator/receptionist was wry. “I don’t know what it is with this sudden epidemic of ear infections. Lord, it’s June—cold and flu season should be over with by now.”

“Swimming,” said Mrs. Schmidt, returning to her paperwork. “School’s out, it’s hot, these poor kids are out there trying to cool off in that filthy river.” Bibi had been a school administrator in a former life, and Ethan didn’t doubt she knew whereof she spoke.

After a moment, the bookkeeper glanced up again. “Who are you going to be riding with tonight?” Her expression was bland, her tone casual but with a particular undertone.

Ethan had come to know that look and that tone well in the six months or so he’d been serving at the South Church Street Free Clinic; behind Mrs. Schmidt’s stern and stony schoolmarm’s demeanor lurked the soul of a schoolboy prankster.

Playing along, he replied in a similarly casual tone, “Oh, I don’t know. Most likely be Kenny.” He slid a sidelong glance toward the other end of the counter, where Ruthie was poring over an upside-down chart and pretending complete disinterest in their conversation.

“Baumgartner?” Behind the half glasses, Mrs. Schmidt’s eyes were now openly twinkling. “Why, that’s that nice Jewish boy, isn’t it? The one that has such a crush on our Ruthie.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a crush,” Ethan mused. Then, following a pause, “More like…the hots.”

“He does not!” That brought a rich, warm color to Ruthie’s cheeks. “And even if he did, so what? I’m not interested.” She dropped the clipboard with a clatter and went flouncing off.

“A good thing she isn’t,” said Mrs. Schmidt in a dry undertone, watching the nurse walk away toward the back of the cavernous room that had once been a fire station’s engine bay. “What kind of a future can there be for those two—a nice Jewish boy in love with a sweet Catholic girl whose twin brother just happens to be a priest?”

For a moment Ethan allowed his own gaze to follow Mrs. Schmidt’s, before he jerked it back to the counter and its pile of charts. Ruthie was a sweet girl and he was fond of her, in a way. But the fact was, there was simply no place in his life for entanglements—not now, and not for the foreseeable future. At least for the next year and a half, while Everett Charlton Brown was still in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his entire family under a constant media microscope and his son’s future in limbo as a consequence.

Ethan didn’t resent the notoriety his father’s choice of careers had forced upon him—he truly didn’t. At least, not anymore. Rhett Brown was a good man and a great president, and he’d done some wonderful things for the country—the world, even. But to be honest, there were times when Ethan thought about his childhood back in Iowa, thought about holidays spent on his aunt Lucy’s farm, or building a tree house in the backyard in Des Moines with his sister Lolly….

He thought about Lauren, and how she’d managed to escape the limelight practically on the eve of their father’s presidency. And yes, he envied her sometimes, with her law practice and her two kids and her Native American lawman husband, living out there on an Apache reservation in the wilds of Arizona, far from the glare of TV cameras.

Back then, while struggling through med school and internship out in California, he’d mostly been too busy to think about his own future…about personal relationships, anyway. A family, a wife, children…it had all seemed too far off to worry about. Lately, though, he had begun to think about it—something to do with being on the verge of turning thirty, he imagined—and whether it would ever be possible for a man in his position to meet someone he could fall in love with. Someone who would love him back, for the right reasons. Ethan didn’t consider himself to be shy—although others might disagree with him, and he supposed he might have been shy, as a child. Now, as far as he was concerned, he was just a very private person. And one thing he knew for certain: if and when he did meet someone, there was no way in hell he was going to risk having his personal life, his emotional affairs turned into public entertainment like some huge Hollywood production!

Another thing. If he ever did decide to brave the media attention over a woman, it was going to have to be something pretty compelling—the real thing, nothing less—which was a long way from the kind of gentle affection he felt for Ruthie. The truth was, he thought of her as…well, a younger sister.

Of course, part of the reason for that attitude may have been the fact that Ruthie’s twin brother, the priest, happened to be Ethan’s former college roommate and best friend.

Also, both the Mendoza twins and Mrs. Schmidt were among the very few in town who were fully aware of Ethan’s identity. Not that he could have kept it a secret, even with the well-trimmed beard and longish hair he’d tried to cultivate in an attempt to disguise his all-too-familiar face, given the presence of the pair of Secret Service agents who passed their days in vigilant boredom upstairs in what had once been the firehouse’s kitchen. Not to mention the news crews that showed up on the clinic’s doorstep from time to time in defiance of the unspoken agreement between the media and the White House that the president’s children were to be strictly off-limits. There’d been more than one occasion when Ruthie, Father Frank or Mrs. Schmidt had been called upon to run interference with a camera crew while their quarry escaped out the back door.

Ethan’s sense of gratitude toward the three was therefore deep and heartfelt, not only for their loyalty and discretion, but for refusing to allow the unfortunate accident of his parentage to stand in the way of genuine friendship. He’d learned the hard way, during the six and a half years his father and stepmother had occupied the White House, how rare and valuable such friendships were.

So it was for that reason he took advantage of every opportunity to promote EMT Kenny Baumgartner’s cause. Tonight’s ride-along, which was part of the arrangement with the city that allowed him to put in his hours at the clinic free of charge, he devoutly hoped would provide him with a few more of those chances.

Ethan gave Mrs. Schmidt a wink and a wave as he picked up the clipboard Ruthie had abandoned, and turned to confront the unhappy patient in the curtained cubicle designated as exam room three.

The patient—a boy about seven or eight years old, dressed in the standard urban uniform of baggy jeans and oversized T-shirt and a baseball cap turned backward—sat slumped on the paper-covered exam table. The boy’s mother had been sitting beside him, but she slid off the table at the doctor’s entrance and now faced him, one nervous and protective hand resting on her son’s knee.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Brown,” said Ethan in a brisk but friendly tone designed to put them both at ease, offering his hand first to the mother, then the boy. He glanced down at the chart in his hand. “And you are…”

“This is Michael,” the boy’s mother offered, and in a fiercely whispered aside to her son, accompanied by a glancing swat on his denim-draped leg, “What you doin’, boy? Get that hat offa your head.”

“Okay, Mike—”

“It’s Michael.” Obeying his mother while at the same time thrusting his chin defiantly upward, the boy slid proud amber eyes toward Ethan. “Like Michael Jordan. Ain’t nobody ever called Michael Jordan Mike.”

“You’re right about that,” Ethan agreed, instantly charmed. He gave the boy’s mother a wink and was gratified to see her relax, if only slightly. “Michael it is, then. So, I understand you’ve been having earaches?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t of brought him for such a little thing,” the boy’s mother said, tense and defensive again. “But, my sister Tamara? A woman where she works told her her boy had earaches, and they was so bad his eardrums busted. Said they had to operate on him, put tubes in his ears. I don’t want my baby to have to have no operation. Don’t want him to have no tubes in his ears. So I thought—”

“No, it’s good you brought him in.” Ear scope at the ready, Ethan leaned toward the child, who, predictably, pulled away with a sharp “Ow!” Ethan eyed him sternly. “Come on, now, you think Michael Jordan would raise a fuss about such a little thing?” Again the amber eyes slid toward him with that look of proud disdain. “Hey, I just want to take a look inside your ears, see what’s going on in there. Okay?”

Michael nodded, but grudgingly. But he sat perfectly still for the duration of Ethan’s exam.

“How is he?” Hugging herself, the boy’s mother hovered at his side, all hunched-up shoulders and worried eyes. Dark eyes, Ethan noticed, rather exotic, tilted, almond shaped and much darker than her son’s. “His eardrums—they ain’t busted, are they? Maybe I shoulda brought him in sooner, but I couldn’t get offa work—”

Ethan assured her the boy’s eardrums were still intact. “Looks pretty red and angry in there, though. We’re going to get him started right away on some antibiotics—”

“Am I gonna hafta get a shot?” Chin cocked, Michael regarded him with his brave golden glare.

Ethan laughed and squeezed the thin shoulder. “Nah—you just get to take some nasty orange medicine. You take it all, though, every time your mama tells you to, no arguing, okay? Otherwise you’re just gonna make those germs that’re causing your earaches good and mad, and then they’ll come back twice as mean next time. You understand?”

Trying not to look relieved, Michael nodded. Ethan scribbled a prescription for the antibiotic and handed it to the mother, explaining in an undertone the procedure for getting it filled free of charge at a nearby pharmacy and securing her promise to bring her son back for a checkup in three days.

Then, remembering what Mrs. Schmidt had told him about the most likely cause of the current rash of ear infections, he turned back to Michael, who had already hopped down from the exam table and was looking much happier now that he no longer felt the need to keep up a macho front worthy of his namesake and hero. “And no swimming, you hear me? Not until those ears are completely cleared up.”

At that, his mother gave a gasp and dusted her son’s shoulder with her glancing swat. “Michael! You been swimming in that filthy river again? After I done told you? Didn’t I tell you stay away from that filthy water? What am I gonna do with you, boy?” She turned eyes glistening with hopelessness to Ethan. “I’m sorry, Doctor, but I got to work, I can’t watch him all the time. My sister Tamara, she supposed to watch him days, but she got the baby… It wasn’t so bad when he was in school, but now, with summer vacation and him home all day…”

Ethan nodded in automatic sympathy as he drew aside the exam room curtain; it was a story he’d heard many times before, one that unfortunately he had no answer for.

Just outside the curtain the woman stopped, turned abruptly and asked, “So, how much I owe you?”

It caught Ethan by surprise; he was already moving on, his mind leaping ahead to other things—the afternoon’s schedule, Ruthie’s lovelife, the evening’s four-to-midnight EMS ride-along. He turned back with a frown, poking absently at his lab coat pocket. “There’s no charge, ma’am, this is a free clinic.”

But the woman—Ethan glanced now at the chart, searching for her name…Louise, that was it, Louise Parker—drew herself up, somehow seeming inches taller. And in the proud lifting of her chin, reminded Ethan suddenly and for the first time of her son.

“Uh-uh—I got me a job, I been offa welfare for a year, now. I ain’t no freeloader. Michael and me, we pay our own way.”

Ethan glanced imploringly at Mrs. Schmidt, who had heard the exchange and was watching with great interest from her cubbyhole behind the reception counter. The woman drew a folded bill from the pocket of her faded jeans and thrust it at him. “Here—it’s all I got right now. If it’s not enough I’ll give you the rest next time I come. Let’s go, Michael.”

Speechless, Ethan watched Louise Parker and her son until the clinic’s front door had closed with a click behind them. Then he unfolded the bill. “My God,” he whispered, showing it to Mrs. Schmidt. “Twenty dollars—I’ll bet that’s a lot of money to her.”

“Probably.” As she went back to her books Mrs. Schmidt added in a musing tone, “That is one lucky little boy, you know that? With a mother like that, he might actually have a chance.”

Across the street from what had once been the South Church Street Fire Station, a thin black woman hurried along the sweltering sidewalk. So preoccupied was she with the scolding she was administering to the small boy dressed in baggy clothes and a backward baseball cap shuffling along beside her that she failed to notice a similarly dressed youth—this one Caucasian and of indeterminable gender—until they had all but collided.

“Michael!” The woman’s sharp whisper accompanied a light swat to the sagging seat of the boy’s trousers. “What you doin’, boy? Mind your manners! Say ‘excuse me.”’

“’Scuse me,” the boy dutifully mumbled, just as the “youth” was muttering, in a voice several tones deeper than her own distinctive contralto, “No, no, that’s okay—my fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

The woman had done a double take and was now regarding the youth with an appraising stare, taking in the pale hue of her skin, the mirrored sunglasses, the New York Yankees logo on her baseball cap. “Hey,” she demanded on a rising note of incredulity, “you lost?”

Safe in her disguise, Phoenix reached out to give the bill of the little boy’s baseball cap a tug—why, she didn’t know, she normally had little use for children. “Nah,” she said with a wry smile, “not exactly. I was just looking for something…a place I used to know.”

“Yeah, well…” Looking extremely doubtful, the woman was edging away from her now, hands protectively on the child’s shoulders. “If I was you, I’d be askin’ Father Frank.”

“Who?”

“You know—the priest? Over there at St Jude’s.” She pointed, then hurried off in the opposite direction, calling back over her shoulder, “He can probably help you.” But she sounded, Joanna thought, as if in her opinion any white person dumb enough to be walking around alone in that neighborhood was most likely beyond help. She wondered if the woman knew St. Jude was the patron saint of lost causes.

Half a block down the street in the direction the woman had indicated squatted the ugly redbrick pile trimmed in white that housed the rectory of St. Jude’s Catholic Church. Next to it on the corner, the church itself—for which the street had been named nearly a century before—was only a slightly more graceful edifice, brightened somewhat by a Victorian abundance of stone trim and stained glass windows. On a tiny patch of grass tucked between the two, a stocky man dressed in black bermuda shorts and a white T-shirt had paused in his task of manhandling an old-fashioned push lawn mower in order to watch the exchange. Now he came toward Joanna, wiping sweat from his face with the sleeve of his T-shirt.

“Can I help you?”

Joanna hesitated. Normally she had no more use for priests than she did for children. But the man’s eyes were kind. “Maybe,” she said grudgingly, and jerked her head toward the street. “Didn’t there used to be a firehouse around here somewhere?”

The priest smiled. “That’s right—that’s it over there, across the street. Used to be the old Church Street station. They moved it a few years ago—three blocks over, on Franklin. Got too small, the street too crowded, I guess. Anyway, they’ve got a big new station over there—police, fire and EMS, all in one building. Go back down a block, then over three—you can’t miss it.” He paused, liquid dark eyes narrowing with concern. “Is everything okay? Anything I can do for you? You need to use the phone—”

Joanna shook her head. Then, for reasons she couldn’t begin to understand, heard herself explain, “I used to live around here—years ago. I was just wondering…” She paused and drew a careful breath, released it in a soft laugh. “I guess things have changed quite a bit.”

“Yes, I guess they have.” The priest’s eyes rested on her now with gentle appraisal. She felt herself tense under their scrutiny, and was instantly annoyed. Priest or not, the man was probably younger than she was; what right had he to make her feel like a truant?

But instead of turning her back and walking away, for some reason she hesitated still, her eyes going once more to the narrow redbrick building across the street. A man was just emerging from the arched front entrance, pausing the way people do when they come from air-conditioning into the heat, as if he’d just missed bumping into something solid. A young man, he appeared to be, with a tall, healthy, well-built body dressed in blue jeans and a short-sleeved shirt with a collar, open at the neck. Sort of preppy looking, in spite of a neatly trimmed beard. Definitely not from this neighborhood. Even from this distance—just something about the way he moved, maybe, the way he carried himself—she could tell he was good-looking, even handsome in a wholesome, blond, shredded wheat sort of way. Nice.

Memories crowded in, filling her chest with a treacherous sadness. Nice voices…kind faces, smudged with soot. Your momma’s gone, honey, you come with me now…it’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be okay…

“It’s a free clinic now,” the priest was saying, and his eyes were friendly and young once again. “Staffed by volunteers, mostly. My sister works there part-time—she’s a nurse over at Community Med. Hey, if you happen to drop in over there, tell Ruthie Mendoza her brother Frankie said hello.”

But the rock icon known as Phoenix barely heard him. She was already moving away down the cracked and dirty sidewalk, walking quickly, one hand going to her mirrored sunglasses as if to reassure herself the disguise was still in place.

Ethan could hear a stereo thumping before he’d even reached the door of the EMS station. Classic light rock—so he’d guessed right about Kenny Baumgartner being his ride-along partner. Kenny was thirty-one, considered ancient for a paramedic, so his tastes in music tended to run pretty close to Ethan’s, which made him a welcome relief from some of the younger EMT’s and their mind-numbing, not to mention ear-deadening preferences. Ethan wondered if it was a sign of advancing middle-age, now that he was approaching thirty himself, to be finding fault with the younger generation’s music.

“Ah…good song,” he said as he walked into the EMT’s lounge to a driving beat, the familiar and haunting chorus of “Pretty Mary.”

“Classic,” Kenny agreed without looking up. The paramedic was sprawled in a chrome and plastic kitchen chair poring over his latest sailing magazine, bobbing his head and whistling tunelessly in time to the beat. “One of the all-time top ten—right up there with the Boss, man. Might even beat out “Born To Run.”

That brought a snort from the lanky and obscenely young EMT who was lounging with one elbow propped against the countertop, waiting for something in the microwave. Any comment the paramedic had intended as a follow-up was preempted by the oven’s prolonged beep, and he uttered instead a satisfied, “Ah!” as he popped open the door. The smells of pepperoni and processed cheese filled the off-duty room.

“Heard she’s got a new CD coming out.” Kenny tossed aside the magazine and tilted his chair back at an alarming angle. “Supposed to be starting a big worldwide tour, is what I heard.”

Concentrating on separating mozzarella from cardboard, the young paramedic glanced up long enough to say, “Who?” just as Ethan was exclaiming, “No kidding?” So then both Ethan and Kenny had to pause to give the kid a look of incredulity.

“Phoenix—who the hell are we talking about?” Kenny said, shaking his head as if in profound disgust at such ignorance, as Ethan set his medical bag on the floor and sank into a chair, wiping sweat with his shirt sleeve.

“Oh, yeah, Phoenix…right.” The EMT—Leon, according to the tag on his uniform pocket—shrugged, licked his fingers, then added, “Isn’t she supposed to be in town?”

Again, both Kenny and Ethan stared at him. And again it was Kenny who asked, “Who? Phoenix? Here?”

Leon placed his pizza on the table and shrugged.

“Where’d you hear that?” Kenny demanded, clearly in disbelief.

“Hey,” said Leon, looking offended, “I read Rolling Stone.” He glanced from Kenny to Ethan and back again. “It’s true. Supposed to be getting ready for some big new gig.”

It was Kenny’s turn to snort in derision. “Nobody kicks off a tour from this town, man. This town is where tours come to die.”

Leon could only shrug, being totally committed to the lava-hot mozzarella he’d just bitten into. Presently he managed to mumble through the mouthful, “Just tellin’ you what they said, man. It was like, she used to be from here or something.”

Once again both Ethan and Kenny were struck momentarily dumb by that news, but the stunned silence lasted only a second or two before it was filled by the raucous blast of the alarm. It was a sound that never failed to send a bolt of electricity through Ethan, kick his heart rate into high and lift up the hairs on his forearms, and in that instant he lost all interest in the likely whereabouts of the rock-and-roll legend called Phoenix.

Kenny righted his chair with a thump. “We’ll take it,” he said to the younger paramedic, who was hunched over his pizza, desperately trying to sever the umbilical cord of cheese that bound him to it. Ethan was already on his feet and reaching for his medical bag. Kenny signaled to him with a jerk of his head. “Time to rock ’n’ roll.” He grinned at his own cleverness, then let the grin slide toward wryness as he added, “Starting in early tonight. Must be the heat.”

Kenny’s words proved prophetic. During the course of Ethan’s four-to-midnight ride-along, he and Kenny had already handled two multi-injury MVAs, a jogger with chest pains, the combatants in a bar brawl, and a portly fellow who’d fallen off a ladder while attempting to install an air conditioner in a second-floor bedroom window. So, when the Klaxon sounded at eleven-forty-five, Leon and his partner, Scott, generously offered to take it.

“’Bout time for ol’ Doc, there, to be headin’ for the barn, anyways,” was the way Leon put it, a blatant reference to Ethan’s age. Which had been the source of a running, and in Ethan’s opinion not very funny, joke among the younger EMTs for quite a while now.

Kenny, who had been listening to the dispatcher, shook his head. His face was grim as he gave Ethan the head-jerk signal to roll. “Balcony collapse over in The Gardens,” he said, referring to one of the worst of the many slum neighborhoods in that part of the city, one well-known to police, fire and rescue squads who’d nicknamed it The Gardens because it was anything but. “Sounds like one for you, Doc. Do you mind?”

Ethan was already a step ahead of him going out the door, adrenaline pumping. “That’s only a few blocks from here,” he pointed out as he signaled to the driver of an anonymous dark sedan parked in the No Parking zone in front of the station. He climbed into the EMS wagon and pulled his safety belt across his shoulder as the wagon rolled down the drive. Watching in the side view mirror, he saw the sedan take up its customary position a couple of car-lengths behind as they sped down the dark street, lights whirling and siren wailing.

High in her converted loft, Phoenix heard sirens and woke from a restless sleep. It was not the first time; the sirens had been busy tonight. As all the times before, she woke with her heart racing and her body slick with sweat, and it was a minute or two before the chill of terror faded and her breathing grew quiet again.

But you’re safe here…safe.

From somewhere a melody came to her and she sang it softly to herself in her mind. Yes, and she remembered now, remembered where she’d heard it most recently. It was the melody Doveman had played that afternoon, segueing from “Pretty Mary,” except that he’d played it in a minor key and with a bluesy rhythm.

The words came to her, and she sang them to herself, too, finding in them a familiar comfort.

Hush little baby, don’t say a word,

Papa’s gonna buy you a mockin’bird…

Often, in times of dire emergency, Ethan’s mind entered a zone of quiet, a place from which it could operate calmly and efficiently, protected from the distractions, the fear, the sights, sounds and smells of crisis that surrounded him. He didn’t know when it had begun; it just seemed that it had always been so, and he was grateful for the gift.

It stood him well now, as the EMS wagon screeched to a halt at a curbside crowded with people, in a shadowy darkness noisy with panic, anger, shock and uncertainty.

“Paramedics—move aside, please, let us through. Step back please….”

From somewhere out beyond his zone of quiet he heard Kenny’s voice, calm but loud, and weighty with authority. He heard sobbing, a woman’s voice, many voices speaking rapidly in tones of panic, shock and fear, speaking all at once, explaining, imploring…praying.

“It was so hot, you know? The air conditioner don’t work. The babies was in bed…she was just gonna sit for a while, out where it’s cool…”

“There was this noise…and then the whole thing came down!”

“Just tore right out the wall!”

“Wasn’t nothin’ I could do…wasn’t nothin’ anybody could do…”

“Oh, Lord Jesus…Oh, God…somebody gotta help her!”

“Somebody…”

With that faraway part of his mind, Ethan felt himself climbing over rubble, kneeling on chunks of bricks and wrought iron that cut his knees even through his jeans. He could feel adrenaline pumping through his body, feel the sweat running in rivers down his face, feel his hands moving swiftly and surely, exploring crushed and mangled flesh. He heard his own voice shouting orders, firing instructions, heard himself calling for the equipment, the fluids, the tubes and lines and wraps that could and so often did salvage lives that seemed beyond saving. With the distant part of his mind he felt and heard those things…even while the quiet, protected part knew it was hopeless.

“Hey, Doc, there was nothing you could do.” Kenny’s gravelly voice came from somewhere behind him, heavy with regret, gentle with acceptance. “The femoral artery was cut clean through. She bled out in a matter of minutes.”

“Yeah,” Ethan muttered, “I know.” Emerging from his quiet place, he now felt shaken, exposed and vulnerable. He tore off a glove and drew the hand across his eyes, and then as his gaze shifted to the face of the body sprawled like a broken doll in the rubble before him, swore with vehement surprise. Dark eyes stared up at him, almond-shaped eyes with a familiar exotic tilt.

“What?” Kenny asked. “You know her?”

Ethan nodded. His stomach clenched, and then his teeth. “She was in the clinic. Just this afternoon. She’s got a kid.”

At that moment, just as if he’d been waiting for his cue, a small boy tore free from the arms that had held him safely away from the circle of tragedy and pushed his way to Ethan’s side.

“Hey, Doc—you gonna fix my momma. She gonna be okay, right?”

Jostled off-balance, Ethan looked up into Michael Parker’s amber eyes. Oh, how he wished he could lie. He desperately wanted to; his mind searched for the comforting words. But instead, he only shook his head.

For one endless moment the boy stared back at him with frightened, angry eyes…bravely lifted chin. Then he pushed at Ethan, struck him hard with both doubled-up fists before he turned. Blindly. Then waiting hands reached for him and pulled him away.

Somewhere, someone was sobbing.

Only when he was sure the boy was safely away did Ethan lift his hand and gently close Louise Parker’s unseeing eyes.

Chapter 2

The day after the tragedy in The Gardens, Ethan was in the rectory of St. Jude’s Catholic Church monitoring the progress of a hastily convened meeting of the Citizens’ Alliance for Community Action from his hiding place in the rectory kitchen. Such skulking and hiding seemed cowardly to him but was actually a compromise of sorts. Father Frank had tried his best to dissuade him from coming at all.

“Bad idea,” the priest had insisted that afternoon on the phone. “The news media’s got their teeth in this in a big way. When word gets out—and it will—that the ride-along doctor on the scene was the president’s son…”

“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” Ethan said heavily. He’d thought about it a lot, during the course of a difficult day and worse night. “Something needs to be done. If we use my name, my dad’s influence—”

“We’ll be sitting in the middle of a three-ring circus. Ethan, my friend—my naive friend—I know you mean well, but do you have any idea what will happen down here—what will happen to these people once the various government agencies and the media get involved in this?”

Ethan’s jaw tightened. “Well, I expect my work at the clinic would be history, but at least something would be done about improving conditions in The Gardens. Those tenements—”

The priest’s snort interrupted him. “The Gardens will become a political football, everybody fighting over what to do and how to pay for it and who gets the credit, and the media will be egging them on, and while the struggle goes back and forth, what do these people who actually live down here do? After an appearance or two on national network television, they go on as before—only with less privacy. No, my friend…” a sigh gusted over the line “…and perhaps it is shortsighted and God forgive me, but I don’t much care about what new legislation gets passed, or what new ordinances, or what new development projects get proposed for sometime in the far-distant future. I care about these people, and what they need is some changes to be made now. Before somebody else dies.”

Before somebody else dies.

Safely out of view of those attending the meeting in the next room, Ethan leaned his forehead against the wall and closed his eyes. In his mind, as in a darkened movie theater, he saw again the body in the rubble, the blood, the blind dead eyes. And another pair of eyes, very much alive. Angry amber eyes. Proud, frightened eyes. He felt again the frustrated blow from a pair of small, clenched fists. He heard poignant echoes of Mrs. Schmidt’s voice: With a mother like that, he has a chance. What will become of Michael Parker, he wondered, now that his mother is dead?

Ethan knew what it was like to be a small boy left suddenly without a mother. Those memories came to him, not as images on a movie screen, but as a cold, sick feeling in his stomach, a yawning emptiness in his heart. Almost a quarter of a century later, oh, how well he remembered it—the fear, the desolation, the terrible sense of abandonment. Back then, part of him had wanted to lash out in anger; part had tried to retreat into the remembered security of babyhood. Every part of him had felt utterly bereft.

But he’d had his sister, Lauren. He didn’t know what he’d have done without Lolly, even though most of the time she’d treated him the way older sisters generally treat younger brothers. Still, she’d been there for him when it counted.

And then…there’d been the miracle. Dixie had come. Dixie, with her gifts of music and laughter and breezy Texas ways. Starved for a mother’s love, six-year-old Ethan had fallen for her immediately, long before his father had made her officially his stepmother. Long before the entire country had fallen in love with her casual, down-home charm and embraced her as its most unconventional First Lady. As his father the president was fond of saying, both in public and in private, God Bless Dixie.

Ethan had been lucky. He’d had Lolly to keep him on his toes and Dixie to love and care for him. Who would Michael Parker have?

Beside him the crack in the kitchen door cautiously widened, and he straightened hurriedly as Ruthie Mendoza slipped through and sidled past him. From the parlor, which also served the church as an informal meeting room, he could hear a rising level of noise and activity. He wondered what he’d missed while his mind had been wandering in his own distant past.

“What’s going on?” he asked Ruthie in a whisper.

“Wrapping up.” Ruthie didn’t bother to lower her voice. Nor did she look at him, but went on making unnecessary adjustments to the platters of oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies that were spread across the kitchen table. From the way she’d been pushing them on him all evening, Ethan suspected she’d made them herself. “I’m just going to take these in…”

She swept toward him with a plate of cookies in each hand and a spot of color in each cheek. All Ethan could do was pull the door open for her and shrink back behind it, well out of the line of sight of anyone in the parlor. As Ruthie sailed out the door, her brother, wearing a short-sleeved black shirt and his clerical collar, for once, sidestepped around her and into the kitchen. Ethan all but pounced on him.

“What happened? What did they decide? Are they going to the mayor? What about—”

“No city, state or federal officials—not yet,” Father Frank said with the contained satisfaction of someone who’s had things go exactly his way. He picked up a cookie and bit into it, glancing down at his rounded shirtfront as he did so; apparently Ruthie had been nagging him again about putting on weight. He shrugged and picked up another cookie. “First thing we have to do is find out who owns that building—or block of buildings. Then we decide where to go from there. Lawsuits, like government agencies, take too long. What we’re hoping is that the threat of bad publicity will be enough to squeeze these slumlords into bringing their buildings up to standard.”

“You want me—”

The priest shook his head. “Mrs. Schmidt’s volunteered to go down to city hall tomorrow morning. She’s got a friend who works in the…I forget what department, the one where they issue permits, fire and safety inspections, things like that. Anyway, she’ll—” He broke off with a muttered, “Oops” as someone bumped the door from the outside. He lunged to block unauthorized entry while Ethan once again flattened himself against the wall.

Through the partly open door he could hear the unmistakeably carrying voice of a television news reporter: “Oh—Father Mendoza—Father, I wonder if you could take just a moment to tell us—” The door closed, cutting off the rest.

After a moment, swearing softly and feeling utterly powerless, Ethan adjusted a Chicago Cubs baseball cap to hide his blond hair and let himself out of the rectory through the side door, where a Secret Service agent waited unobtrusively for him in the shadows.

Mrs. Schmidt arrived at the clinic shortly after noon the next day, four hours late and with Father Frank Mendoza close on her heels. Ethan didn’t have to ask if the trip to city hall had been successful; both looked ready to burst.

Whatever the import of the news they’d brought, it had to wait while Ethan finished suturing a toddler’s badly mangled lip—from falling off the steps, his mother claimed. Ethan devoutly hoped it was true.

He was on his own, since Ruthie wasn’t due in until two o’clock and Clair, the morning nurse, was accompanying a compound fracture to Memorial Hospital for emergency surgery. He did his best to comfort the hysterical child and just barely managed to shove the mother into a nearby wheelchair before she passed out in a heap beside her son’s gurney. Meanwhile, Mrs. Schmidt and Father Frank fidgeted, reminding Ethan of leashed hunting dogs eager to be off after their quarry, whining and quivering and licking their chops.

“You’re never going to believe it,” they both said at once, leaping into the lull after the still-sniffling toddler and his mother had departed. Folding his arms across his barrel chest as if to physically contain himself, the priest yielded the floor to Mrs. Schmidt with a nod.

She took over eagerly, breathless as a girl. “It wasn’t easy. Thank goodness my friend Clair knew what to look for. I don’t think we’d have found it—at least not so quickly—if it hadn’t been for her. Not to mention the computer. Aren’t they just the most amazing things, though? You just punch in—”

Anticipating a major sidetrack, Ethan interrupted. “So, did you find out who owns those buildings?”

Mrs. Schmidt opened her mouth, but Father Frank—self-control apparently exhausted—got there first. “It’s an investments firm. They own all sorts of things, real estate, mostly. That firm in turn is owned by a corporation. The name of the corporation is…Phoenix Enterprises, Inc.” And he and Mrs. Schmidt said the last together then paused, once again looking fit to burst.

Ethan waited. A long five seconds or so ticked by before he made the connection. “Phoenix…what, you don’t mean—”

Mrs. Schmidt and Father Frank both nodded happily. Ethan groped for the wheelchair recently vacated by the toddler’s mother and lowered himself into it.

In an office in a downtown high-rise—situated almost directly across the harbor from the rehearsal studio and temporary living quarters of the rock icon known as Phoenix— Doveman sat on a leather sofa and watched his girl-child pace. Like an angry panther. Some critic had said that, he remembered, talking about the way she’d pace back and forth across the stage—he’d forgotten which concert tour it was, now. Didn’t matter. That critic had been right on. A panther was what she looked like, and right now, angry was what she was.

“How did this happen?” she asked as she about-faced, in a voice like a panther’s snarl. “Explain that to me, Patrick. I want to know how I became the owner of a tenement. A tenement in which somebody died.”

Doveman had often thought Patrick Kaufman resembled a great big rabbit with that overbite and those pale buggy eyes, especially like he was now, sitting upright and alert with his skinny forearms braced on his desktop. Which Doveman knew was a misleading impression; no man as meek and mild as Kaufman appeared to be could have survived twenty or so years as Phoenix’s business manager.

“It was a sound investment,” Patrick said, in the pleasantly deep voice that always seemed a surprise coming out of that Don Knotts body. “Those old row house neighborhoods are right in line with this whole wave of renovation that began back in the eighties with the yuppie invasion—block by block, they’re taking over the city. It’s only a matter of time—”

“A matter of time?” Phoenix’s soft, whiskey voice cracked on the last word, like the crunch of broken glass. Only Doveman heard the pain in it. “There’re people living in those buildings. What did you think they were going to do while you’re waiting around for the yuppies?” She paused, one hand going briefly to her forehead, then suddenly whirled and slapped both hands down on the business manager’s desktop. Knowing what was coming, Doveman winced and closed one eye. “You know what, Patrick?” she snapped, leaning across it, her face barely inches from Kaufman’s. “You’re fired.”

Kaufman merely sighed and shook his head; Phoenix was notorious for firing people. Over the past twenty years, Doveman figured the business manager had probably been fired six or seven times, at least. This time, though, he wasn’t all that sure she didn’t mean it.

“You never told me not to invest in apartment buildings—”

“Tenements, Patrick—tenements. I…am…a slumlord.”

She pushed herself away from the desk and in turning, caught Doveman’s eye. Just for an instant, but that flash of blue cut into his heart like a steely knife. Easy, baby-girl, his old whiskey-burned eyes said back to her, singing the song he’d sung to her for so many years. Doveman knows how you’re hurtin’. Doveman understands.

But she pivoted away from his eyes, body still tense, not ready to hear him yet. “Well. So now somebody’s died.” Her voice was hard, harsh, trying so hard not to show any emotion at all. “What now? Am I being sued?”

Kaufman shook his head. “No, not yet, anyway. This citizens group—apparently they just want you to meet with them, talk about what needs to be done. They said—”

“So do it.” Phoenix waved a regal hand in Patrick’s direction, apparently forgetting already that he was by her own decree no longer hers to command. “Meet with whoever you need to meet with. Find out what they want and give it to them. And no publicity, do you understand? Whatever it takes— What?” Kaufman was slowly but firmly shaking his head.

“I said you. It’s you they want to meet with. They made that very clear. They want you to meet them at the building where—” Now Phoenix’s head was going back and forth like a mechanical doll’s.

“No. No way José. Not even if Hell freezes over.”

“Then there will be publicity,” Kaufman said flatly. “That they’ve promised, and I think you’d be wise to believe them. The media has already been all over this. Be thankful it’s not an election year, or it would probably be worse. As it is, it’s a five-minute wonder—Young Ghetto Mom Seeks Relief From Heatwave, Dies in Balcony Collapse; Slumlord Sought. Film At Eleven! Tomorrow it’ll be old news.” He paused, rocking slightly in his swivel chair. “Unless, of course, somebody gets hold of the juicy little factoid that the slumlord in question is none other than the rock icon known as Phoenix. Who, by the way, currently happens to be in town preparing to launch a career comeback with a new album and world tour….”

“Tell them here,” Phoenix whispered, after a tense and prolonged silence. Perhaps only Doveman could see that she was trembling. “I’ll meet with them here, in this office—that’s it, or nothing. Let them go to the media if they want. Then they can sue me. And see how long it takes before they get one dime out of me!”

With her panther’s stride she crossed the office and was out the door. While Kaufman let go a hiss of breath, Doveman gave a shrug, picked up his stained and crumpled fedora and followed.

In the elevator, Phoenix leaned like an exhausted marathoner against the back wall. She heard Doveman step on just before the door closed, but he didn’t speak and neither did she. Behind her usual pair of mirrored sunglasses, her eyes were shut tight. There was a brassy taste in her mouth, and a sickening lurch in her stomach that had nothing to do with the elevator’s controlled plunge.

Tenements. Dear God, she owned tenements. She— Joanna Dunn—was a slumlord.

Somewhere God—no, not God. Somewhere the Devil must be laughing.

Momma, we’re cold. Can me and Jonathan and Chrissy get in bed with you?

That was what she remembered most—the cold. But it wasn’t cold that had killed this woman…this Louise Parker. It was the heat. All she’d wanted was a little breath of air.

“Doveman,” she said in a raggedy croak, “I didn’t know.”

He replied, his voice husky with more than the lifelong effects of whiskey and cigarettes, “I know, child. I know.”

Father Frank had tried his best once again to convince Ethan to skip the meeting.

“We promised her no publicity,” the priest had argued. “What if somebody spots you and follows you? The cat will be out of the bag for sure, and there goes any hope we have of a quick resolution.”

Ethan promised to keep a low profile. He was confident he could—he’d gotten very good at eluding reporters over the years. Now and then even his Secret Service agents—to their extreme dismay—found themselves guarding an empty nest.

“I know why you want to go so bad,” Father Frank teased him. “You just want a chance to see Phoenix up close and personal. Hey—you think I don’t know? Whose picture do you think was taped inside my locker door all through high school?”

“Sure, I want to see her,” Ethan said, not smiling back. “I want to see her face.”

He couldn’t have said why it shocked him so profoundly to learn that one of his all-time favorite singer-songwriters—the one responsible for the music that had fueled his idealistic fervor all through college—was, in fact, a slumlord and the person responsible for Louise Parker’s death. Or what he hoped to see in her face—the face that had filled his adolescent dreams—as she confronted Louise Parker’s neighbors. Repudiation, maybe? Say it ain’t so, Joe. He only knew that thinking of his favorite Phoenix songs, like “Fire On The Water” and “City Woman”—more poignant and gut-wrenching than “Pretty Mary” as far as he was concerned—now left him with a bitter taste in his throat, and a very personal sense of betrayal and loss.

So, while wild horses couldn’t have prevented Ethan from attending the meeting in Phoenix’s business manager’s high-rise office, in keeping with his promise to Father Frank, he was doing his best to keep from being noticed. Which was proving to be more difficult than he’d anticipated.

He supposed he couldn’t really blame Phoenix for not wanting to confront the delegation of citizens in the intimate confines of her business manager’s office. Instead, she’d chosen to hold the meeting in one of the building’s conference rooms. Designed for corporate business meetings, its furnishings consisted of a huge expanse of polished tabletop surrounded by sumptuous leather-upholstered chairs. At the head of the table, a polished wooden lectern flanked by potted dracaena plants loomed before a screen worthy of a small multiplex. It was a room designed to intimidate corporate vice presidents; it would have taken much less to awe the small group of people that stood shifting their feet on the plush burgundy carpeting.

Having been shown into the room by an aloof secretary and left to their own devices, the delegates—Father Frank and Ruthie Mendoza, Mrs. Schmidt, Kenny Baumgartner from EMS and six residents from The Gardens, eleven in all including Ethan—rather tentatively selected seats around the huge table. No one spoke; the only sounds were some rustlings and scrapings, nervous throat-clearing, a subaudible hum of tension.

A door, cleverly hidden in the design of the paneling to the left of the movie screen, swished silently open. There was a collective intake of breath, followed by a disappointed exhalation as a tall but slightly built, rather stoop-shouldered man came into the room. He moved without hurry, pausing just short of the lectern to make eye contact with those seated around the table and to introduce himself as Phoenix’s business manager, Patrick Kaufman.

“We come to see Phoenix,” one of the tenants, a balding, heavyset black man in his early sixties said in a loud, belligerent voice, which prompted several of the other delegates to nod and mutter in agreement, much like an evangelical congregation murmuring “Amen.”

The business manager held up a long, pale hand. “She’ll be along very shortly. As I’m sure you’re aware, she is currently in the midst of preparations for a new world tour. She has rearranged her schedule in order to meet with you today, so I hope you will be patient—” He broke off as Father Frank rose to his feet on a wave of more rustlings and angry murmurs.

“Yes, and as I’m sure you’re aware, a woman has died.” The priest spoke quietly, but even his customary poise was betrayed by a slight tremor of nervousness. “And many of these people have taken time off from work in order to come here today—time they can ill-afford. I would hope—”

“Hi—I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.” The husky voice, instantly recognized and unmistakable, spoke from the back of the room. And every head in the room snapped toward the sound as if pulled by the same invisible thread.

Later, when he’d had a chance to think about it, Ethan was able to convince himself that she probably hadn’t meant to make such a dramatic entrance. It was just that, with Phoenix, there couldn’t be any other kind. The woman had only to step onto a stage, or walk into a room, he thought, and you could hear the thud of bass guitars and the zap-zap of laser lights, taste the tension, smell the excitement. It seemed as if she carried the spotlight with her wherever she went, like some kind of personal energy field. And yet…and yet… For the life of him, he could not put his finger on the reason why.

It couldn’t have had anything to do with the way she was dressed. In jeans—fashionably low-slung on hips as slender and lithe as a girl’s—and a pale blue knit top with a square-cut neckline that clung to her supple body like a stocking and stopped just where the waistband of the jeans began, she could have passed for one of the delegates seated around the conference table—or one of their children. But for the mirrored sunglasses, of course. And the hair—that famous hair, now the irridescent blue-black of a crow’s wing—that fell from a haphazard center part, rippled down her back and slapped gently against her buttocks when she walked.

“Traffic was murder,” the world famous rock star said as she crossed the room with the same long-legged stride that would carry her the width of a concert stage in a few pounding beats. Her voice was breathless, her smile wry, inviting those seated around the table to commiserate. “They’ve got Fremont all torn up—what are they doing, fixing potholes? Anyway, I got lost in all those one-way streets they’ve got downtown now. Whose idea were those?” Having reached the head of the table, she whirled and addressed those seated around it as if she truly wanted to know.

The delegates shifted uncomfortably, awestruck but unwilling just yet to relinquish the angry baggage they’d come with. Father Frank, apparently only just remembering that he was still on his feet, slowly lowered himself into his chair. Someone—Kenny, maybe—cleared his throat too loudly. Ethan wasn’t surprised to find that his own heart was beating hard and fast. He could hear its echo, like distant drumbeats, inside his own head.

Phoenix stepped behind the lectern and slowly took off her sunglasses. Then, for long, unmeasurable moments she said nothing, while her unshielded eyes—those remarkable, trademark eyes, electric, heart-stopping blue and fringed with sooty-black—traveled around the table, touching each person there in turn.

With his own confrontation with those famous eyes fast approaching and his frequent and futile wish for invisibility strong within him, Ethan was surprised to find himself smiling. Laughing, actually—silently, with a schoolboy’s dry mouth and sweaty palms, deafened by his own heartbeat—laughing with pure chagrin at his own childish vulnerability.

And it happened to be just that moment that the eyes touched his. They slid past the laughter and moved on… Then jerked back suddenly, flared with something he couldn’t fathom, and abruptly lost all expression, as if a curtain had fallen behind them. But in the instant before they moved on, for good this time, Ethan felt a strange jolt of recognition. They reminded him of someone, those eyes. Someone or something he’d seen just recently.

It was a few moments more before it came to him exactly where. With the shutters down, devoid of all life and expression, Phoenix’s eyes—the almond shape, the exotic tilt, not the color—reminded him of Louise Parker’s eyes.

The realization made his throat tighten and his body go chill with the cold wash of memory. And he no longer felt the slightest urge to laugh.

Her eyeball-to-eyeball circuit complete, Phoenix spoke softly, in her trademark rusty croak. “First, I’d like to thank you for agreeing to meet me here.” Her smile was quick—not too much, for this was a somber occasion. “I thought we’d all be more comfortable here, on such a hot day.”

Ethan winced as a low mutter rose from those seated around the table. Could the woman not know how it was, exactly, that Louise Parker had come to die?

“Got no AC in The Gardens,” someone growled.

“Maybe if we did, Louise Parker still be alive.” That was echoed by a rumbling chorus of Amens.

Phoenix waited, her face impassive, until the last grumble had died. It occurred to Ethan then—irrelevently, he thought—that she wasn’t wearing any makeup at all. Or it was so skillfully applied that it appeared as if she wasn’t. The eyes, of course, needed no enhancement, but the matte texture and soft color of her lips could only have been natural, with a slight sheen on the lower one as if she’d recently wet it with her tongue. Her skin showed telltale flaws—a hint of a flush, faint traces of freckles across her cheekbones, thumbprint smudges beneath her eyes. Something about the smudges touched Ethan, before it occurred to him to wonder if she might have deliberately gone without makeup—or even enhanced those shadows—for just that very purpose.

“I want you to know how deeply we regret this terrible accident.” She spoke stiffly now, without her customary charisma, as though she were reading from a prepared statement. “Of course we intend—”

“Accident? Wasn’t no accident killed Louise—it was negligence, pure and simple!”

“Negligent homicide.”

“Murder, that’s what it was!”

“Yeah, out-and-out murder.”

At that outburst, Kenny Baumgartner came alert in his chair and placed a protective arm across the back of Ruthie’s. Mrs. Schmidt shifted and made distressed noises, while Father Frank leaped to his feet, arms upraised to quiet the angry delegates.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please—this isn’t what we came here for. We came here to talk—and listen. Let’s listen to what she has to say.”

Patrick Kaufman, who had moved to his client’s side at the first angry shout, was now urgently whispering in her ear. Phoenix listened, nodded almost imperceptibly, then faced the room once more. This time her eyes stabbed at the seated delegates, cold blue slashes from out of a face so set and pale it seemed frozen.

“Until yesterday,” she said in a tight, harsh voice completely unlike her famous tiger’s purr, “I had no idea I even owned these buildings, much less what condition they were in. Now that the…situation has been brought to my attention, obviously I’m going to see to it that any existing problems are taken care of. If you people will submit a list of needed repairs, Mr. Kaufman will—”

“What’s wrong in The Gardens ain’t no paint and plaster gonna fix,” said the older man who’d first spoken. Once again his neighbors muttered and nodded, apparently approving of the job he was doing as their spokesman. Until he added, “Those buildings shoulda been condemned a long time ago.”

Now the murmurs of approval broke off in a collective double take, followed by a few uncertain little cries of protest. Father Frank and Mrs. Schmidt both turned toward the speaker in alarm. Directly across the table from the outspoken man, a black woman with caramel-colored hair sculpted into a tower of braids and curls half rose and leaned toward him on her hands. “What you talkin’ about, condemned? Then where am I gonna go, huh? You tell me that, Jerome Wilkins! Ain’t nothin’ else around here I can afford.”

Jerome shifted his focus from the head of the table to this new protagonist. “You rather stay and have the place fall down on your head? What’s wrong with you, Neva? You just got done telling me you got chunks falling outa your ceiling, came near to hitting the baby’s bed. Now you’re telling me—”

“Chunks of plaster? That ain’t nothin’. I got rats big as cats climbin’ in bed with my kids. You want to see—”

And suddenly everyone was talking at once, shouting back and forth across the conference table, some even whacking its polished surface with open palms or fists to make their point. Father Frank was on his feet again, pleading for calm to absolutely no effect. Kenny Baumgartner had his body shifted clear around to form a barrier between Ruthie and the other delegates, as if he expected missiles to start flying at any moment. Mrs. Schmidt had her hand over her mouth and her eyes closed and was slowly shaking her head.

So it was that, for a moment at least, no one but Ethan noticed that Phoenix had left the lectern. Only he watched her business manager dither briefly, then step out of her way…watched as she strode the length of the room, back the way she’d come, moving so quickly her passing left a breeze. By the time she reached the door, though, every eye in the room was on her, and the bickering and shouting had died into abashed silence.

Phoenix turned, one hand on the doorknob, and spoke to the shocked assembly in a voice barely above a whisper. “I will not deal with a mob. One person…I’ll talk to one person. You—” and she pointed a finger directly at Ethan “—the quiet one—what’s your name?”

Ethan probably couldn’t have answered if his life had depended on it. Fortunately, Father Frank stepped in and did it for him. “Uh…this is Dr. Brown,” the priest said hoarsely, so flustered he actually stammered. “He’s the doctor that—”

“Fine,” snapped Phoenix. “Doc, I’ll meet with you. Patrick, set it up.”

And she was gone, leaving a room filled with frustrated silence behind her.

Leaving Ethan with an image burned into his mind like a sun-shape branded on his retinas: the image of a set, pale face and a pair of eyes that no longer reminded him even remotely of a dead woman’s…eyes so charged with emotion they left him feeling as though he’d received a jolt of electricity. He felt shocked and confused…and no longer certain the emotion he’d seen in those violent eyes was anger.

Chapter 3

“Why does it have to be me?” Ethan said to Father Frank in a low voice, half grumbling, half honest bewilderment. “You’re the one who should be doing this. You’re the group’s organizer and spokesman. I never said a word. What in the hell made her pick me?”

The two of them were alone in the conference room; the other delegates of Citizens’ Alliance had long since been herded away by the relentlessly frosty secretary, and Patrick Kaufman had gone to consult with his client about arrangements for meeting with her chosen delegate. Father Frank was sitting in one of the conference chairs, leaning back with his arms folded across his belly, looking remarkably at ease and cheery, Ethan thought, for a man who’d just had a meeting of critical importance blow up in his face.

He, on the other hand, found it impossible to sit still. At the same time restless and wary, he paced with the slow and tentative edginess of a cat exploring unfamiliar territory. When he got no immediate answer to his question Ethan threw the priest a glance and found him smiling.

“What?” he demanded with a small uplift of shoulders and hands. For Ethan, who prided himself on his easygoing and unflappable nature, it was a gesture of extreme annoyance.

Father Frank shook his head, in the maddeningly smug way of someone who knows the solution to a particularly vexing riddle. “To answer your first question, simply, it has to be you because you’re who Phoenix picked. She’s calling the shots right now, in case you haven’t noticed. It appears she’s called our bluff. Maybe she knows we don’t want publicity over this any more than she does—that it won’t get us what we’re after, which is action, fast. We’re lucky she’s at least willing to work with us—with you, anyway. As for why you—” He broke off, once more shaking his head, though his smile was more wry, now, than smug. “You really don’t have a clue, do you?”

Ethan did have a clue, actually, but it embarrassed him to say it. He waited, scowling, for his former college roommate to do so instead.

The priest obliged with a sigh. “You’re a guy. As in, young, impressionable, and above all, the opposite gender.”

Ethan snorted in a wholly ineffective attempt to disguise his discomfort. “You’re a guy, Kenny’s a guy, half the tenants are guys.”

“I’m a priest, in case you’ve forgotten. And it’s pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that Kenny’s only got eyes for Ruthie. The tenants are after her blood, so that leaves you. Besides, as I said, you’re young, good-looking—”

“Impressionable. You said impressionable.”

“Yeah, I did.” Father Frank was silent for a moment. “I think it’s pretty safe to say Phoenix is someone who’s accustomed to having her way. She’s used to being the one in control. That’s why she walked out just now. Things had gotten out of hand—she wasn’t in control. She thinks—”

“She thinks that with me, she will be.” Ethan pulled out the chair next to the priest’s and sank into it. After a moment he said in a soft, chagrined growl, half to himself, “I’m not sure she isn’t right. She’s Phoenix, for God’s sake.” He leaned forward earnestly; he and Frank Mendoza went back a long way, and he’d long since gotten over the impulse to apologize for his language lapses. “You think you’re the only one who had a crush on her all through high school? She was…” He lifted his hand and waved it helplessly, unable to find the words.

“She was the classic rebel, the Bad Girl,” Father Frank said, in the gentle tone of reminiscence. “But there was something untouched—and untouchable—about her, too. Every girl wanted to be her, every guy wanted to have her, but nobody ever could. A potent recipe for an icon.”

Ethan nodded. But he didn’t feel comfortable explaining, even to his closest friend, that with him, where Phoenix was concerned it hadn’t ever just been about sex appeal. That had been part of it, of course; he’d been a normal adolescent male. But raging hormones couldn’t have accounted for the way he felt when he listened to her music. The stirrings in his soul that even now he couldn’t give a name to. The hours he’d spent with his guitar and a Walkman portable stereo, softly playing and singing along.

“I gotta tell you,” he said ruefully, leaning toward his friend, the priest, in the classic manner of a confessing sinner, forearms on his knees, hands clasped together between them, “she still has it. You know? When she walked in, I have to tell you, my pulse rate shot up.”

Father Frank laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, more like college roommate than priest to sinner. “Just means you’re alive, my friend. And about the rest—” He broke off momentarily as the conference room door opened to frame the secretary’s patrician form, then continued in a hurried aside as they both rose to follow her. “Don’t underestimate yourself. That woman may not know it yet, but I think this time Phoenix may have bitten off more than she bargained for.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Patrick Kaufman asked in a neutral tone.

Phoenix ignored him while she carefully selected a cheroot from the rosewood humidor on the bookcase shelf behind his desk and lit it with the matching rosewood-and-silver desk lighter that sat beside it. She puffed out a cloud of fragrant smoke before she said with an audible hiss, “Yess.”

Patrick shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He glanced at his watch and murmured, without even a hint of sarcasm, “I suppose you’d like me to leave you two alone?”

That was the great thing about Patrick, Phoenix thought. She could browbeat him all she wanted, even usurp his private office in the middle of a working day, and it never had the slightest effect. She wondered sometimes what went on behind those pale, rabbity eyes, whether a real heart pumped inside that narrow chest.

“Yes, thank you, Patrick,” she said with exaggerated sweetness. “And while you’re at it, tell Miss Freeze to turn on the voice mail machine and get lost, too, would you please?” She let her voice drop an octave to its customary purr. “In situations such as this I find it’s best to work in…privacy.” Around the cigar her lips formed a seductive smile.

Which, naturally, had no effect whatsoever on Patrick. “I’ll suggest to Mrs. Fitzhugh that she take an extended lunch,” he said dryly, punctuating that with the snap of his briefcase lock.

Alone in the lushness of burgundy, brass and mahogany, Phoenix took the cheroot from her lips and gazed at it with satisfaction. She didn’t smoke—had given it up years ago, in fact, with reasonable ease, never having been all that serious about it to begin with. But, she thought, it was amazing what a prop like that did for her self-confidence. Almost like having a microphone in her hands.

Well, hell yes—it is. It’s the same. Just the same… She closed her eyes and concentrated on slowing her breathing. She inhaled the sweet, heavy perfume of cigar smoke…psyching herself…calming herself…preparing. Because it was the same, this moment, waiting here in the plush privacy of Kaufman’s office for that young, gentle-looking doctor to join her. No different from all the moments before, so many of them, waiting in the wings for that moment when she would erupt onto a stage before a stadium filled with thousands of screaming fans. Same butterflies, same pounding heart, same adrenaline rush. Somehow, that made it easier—a familiar and therefore much more manageable fear. Whether of one or fifty thousand, an audience was an audience.

Ethan’s first thought when he smelled cigar smoke was that Patrick Kaufman’s meek and mild exterior hid some unexpected depths. Phoenix appeared to him only as a silhouette, standing behind Kaufman’s big mahogany desk with her back to a bank of windows framing a pale noonday sky, so he didn’t see, at first, that it was she who was responsible for the cigar smoke. Until she stepped forward, gesturing with what appeared to be a twig held between her thumb and forefinger, then lifted it and put it between her lips.

“Hey, Doc.” Her rusty voice was muffled only slightly by the cigar. “Glad you decided to take me up on my offer. Have a seat.”

Ethan nodded by way of a greeting, feeling about as uncomfortable as he’d ever been in his life. After a moment’s hesitation he took the burgundy leather chair she’d indicated and settled himself into it, striving to appear relaxed and knowing he was fooling absolutely no one.

He waited for Phoenix to seat herself, either in the mate to his chair or the big one behind the desk. When she did neither but remained standing with her backside propped casually against the desk behind her, he remembered suddenly what Father Frank had said to him in the conference room. She has to be the one in control. By seating him and standing herself, he realized, she’d put herself in the familiar—and comfortable—position of performer, with him as her audience.

Oddly, he felt himself warming toward her then, actually admiring her cleverness. He almost smiled—before he remembered what her reaction had been the last time he’d done that. So he kept the smile inside and concentrated on keeping his outward demeanor somber.

She made a breathy sound—soft, ironic laughter—and blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Come on, Doc, don’t look so disapproving.”

“Not disapproving,” said Ethan. “Surprised, maybe.”

“Surprised? Why?” Her lips curved, forming a smile around the slender shaft of the cigar. Ethan’s stomach lurched oddly, as if the chair had just dropped out from under him.

He shrugged and leaned forward, elbows on the chair arms, hands clasped across the empty space in front of him. Trying to look—and think—more like a physician and less like a starstruck boy. “Oh, I don’t know—I guess I thought you’d have a little more concern for your health—and your voice.”

She took the cigar from her mouth, frowning critically at the glowing end. “I don’t smoke, actually. Just wanted something to play with.” She slid a sideways glance at him from under her lashes. “Looks kind of neat, though, doesn’t it?”

“I think I saw one in a Clint Eastwood movie.”

“Yeah,” said Phoenix with a hint of a smile, “me too.” She whistled a bar or two of haunting melody. When he recognized it as the theme from a famous spaghetti western, Ethan felt it was safe to return the smile. When he did, the whistling broke up into a husky chortle, the kind that provokes a similar one deep in the listener’s own chest.

“There, you see? Not a bad little icebreaker.” She looked around for an ashtray and seeing none, laid the cigar carefully on the glass desktop. “And now that we have—broken the ice, that is…” her eyes zeroed in on him with a directness that was, in an odd way, more seductive than flirting “…Dr. Brown seems kind of formal, doesn’t it? Don’t you have a first name?”

Ethan hesitated, wishing, not for the first time, that his parents had had the foresight to name him something like…Bobby, or James. As exhilarating as the idea was of being on a first-name basis with Phoenix, the combining of Ethan and Brown was just unusual enough to be recognizable. She hadn’t recognized him yet, and for reasons he couldn’t explain, even to himself, he wanted her to know him just as plain Dr. Brown for a little while longer. As long as possible, anyway. She’d have to know eventually, he supposed, but…not yet.

He cleared his throat and said quietly, “Under the circumstances, I think Dr. Brown is probably more appropriate.” And watched her eyes flare with the same indefinable emotion he’d seen in the conference room, when she’d caught him smiling at her. The one he still wasn’t sure was anger.

“Doc it is, then,” Phoenix said with a smile she didn’t allow to reach her voice or her eyes. Outwardly calm, she felt jittery inside, as if she’d missed a stage mark during a performance, or come in on the wrong beat. Nothing she couldn’t cover, but it rattled her nonetheless. She straightened and moved unhurriedly around the desk, putting it and some distance between herself and the oh-so-arrogant Dr. Brown. Who the hell did he think he was? It astonished her to discover that she was disappointed. That she truly did want to know.

“So, Doctor…Patrick tells me you work at a free clinic down there in the…neighborhood.”

Yes, and when Patrick had told her that, she’d remembered why the doc had seemed so familiar to her, remembered that she’d seen him before, coming out of the clinic that day, the day she’d gone for her little walk down memory lane. She wouldn’t tell him that, though. He would wonder what the likes of Phoenix had been doing in that neighborhood. He would wonder why.

“That’s right,” he was saying, watching her with neither judgment nor speculation in his brown eyes. Just a curious intensity that she found unnerving.

She picked up the cheroot, stared at the still-smoldering tip and then, annoyed with herself, put it back down. How was it that she felt edgy and nervous as a teenager in the principal’s office, while he sat there looking, as Doveman would have said, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth? Transferring her annoyance to him, she said sharply, “Tell me, how is it that you’re all the way over here with a group of concerned citizens during clinic hours, Doc?”

He shrugged, his eyes narrowing just slightly, as if from a sudden and brief flare of light. After a moment he said evenly, “I don’t know, civic duty?”

She gave a soft snort of laughter. “Right. So, who’s minding the store? Or do you just shut it down when you have…a civic duty to attend to?”

His gentle gaze made her feel vaguely ashamed. “I have another doctor covering for me.”

What was it with this guy? Phoenix wondered. Her head was full of a million questions she wanted to ask him, a million things she wanted to know about him. Since when did she give a rip?

And where did he get off, this kid—younger than she was, he had to be—sitting there looking at her with such assurance…like some sort of shaman, as if he knew all the answers to the riddles of the universe? Who the hell did he think he was? Didn’t he know who she was? She was Phoenix, for God’s sake!

“Come on, Doc. Civic duty?” She threw it at him like an accusation. “Patrick told me you were there the night that woman—”

“Louise Parker.”

“What?” He’d spoken so softly she’d barely heard him. Or perhaps didn’t want to hear.

“The woman who died. Her name was Louise Parker. Yeah, I was with her when she died. I couldn’t save her. I tried, but I…couldn’t.”

Well, she for sure didn’t want to hear that—the pain in his voice. Suddenly claustrophobic, she paced to the edge of the desk, stopped with a jerk and turned to face him. Took a deep breath. “Look, I’m truly sorry about what happened. I am. I had no idea I owned those buildings. To tell you the truth, I own a bunch of things I don’t know about. Look—handling my money is Patrick’s job, and I don’t get in his way. I trust his judgment. If he thinks it’s a good investment, he goes ahead with it. That’s the way we’ve always done things, that’s the way I want it. Of course—” she paused, wondering why she felt a need to say it “—when I found out about this I fired him.”

“Of course,” the doctor said dryly, “I can see that.”

“I’m always firing people,” she said, shifting her shoulders as if that could get her out from under the burden of guilt he was dumping on her. Damn him. This doctor was making her feel defensive. And she hadn’t done anything wrong to feel defensive about. She hadn’t. Not this time. What the hell right did he have to make her feel bad? “Ask anybody. Look, I can’t help it if nobody believes me.”

She was utterly mystified when he smiled. Really smiled. A smile of such warmth and blatant sex appeal it made her breath catch. My God, why hadn’t she noticed before how gorgeous this guy was? Good-looking, sure—that had been the whole point, hadn’t it?—but this…this was way beyond basic good looks. She found herself wondering what he’d look like without the beard, and whether he wore it to make himself look older, more doctorish. Lord, the man had the face of an angel—a completely masculine, incredibly sexy and extremely irritating angel. And, she suspected, underneath the casual slacks and short-sleeved shirt, the body of a Chippendale dancer….

Something—a noise, a slight movement—brought her back to her senses. Had he made that faint, embarrassed sound, or had she? How long had she been standing there staring at him? How long had she been smiling this goofy smile? She drew a shaken breath. The claustrophobia wrapped itself around her like a warm, wet blanket.

“Hey, Doc,” she said in the slightly thickened voice that in her case was most often the accompaniment of sexual foreplay or way too many Bloody Marys. “How about if we get out of here—go somewhere and grab some lunch?”

“Lunch?” Ethan repeated the word as if he’d never heard it before. The truth was, food was just about the farthest thing from his mind just then. He was feeling lightheaded and queasy, a little off-balance—symptoms that might be indicative of a fever, perhaps an infection of the inner ear. Except that Dr. Brown knew there was nothing whatsoever wrong with him, nothing physical, anyway. What was “wrong” with him, he suspected, was nothing more complicated than a case of acute sexual desire. Which was not a terribly difficult diagnosis, given that he was sitting a couple of arm’s lengths from one of the world’s most desirable women, and the woman was smiling at him like…as if she—oh, come on, Ethan, say it!—as if she was coming on to him.

Good Lord—seducing him. Which, he reminded himself, according to Father Frank had probably been her intention to begin with. And which, he dimly recalled, he’d expressed concern about his ability to withstand. With good reason, it now appeared.

It occurred to him that no matter how he felt about food at that moment, going out for lunch was probably the best idea he’d heard in a while.

“Fine,” he said, in a voice as viscous as hers. He had to remind himself to sit straight in his chair. He felt as though his body had begun leaning toward her of its own volition, as if she generated a magnetic field of some kind, something impossible to resist, like gravity.

It took a supreme effort of will to tear his eyes from her and focus them on his watch. Nearly one. He’d told the doctor standing in for him at the clinic that he’d be back at two. “I have an hour,” he said. And then, hearing the unaccustomed sharpness in his voice, gruffly added, “If there’s somewhere close by…”

“Perfect. Give me five minutes….” Already making for the door, she paused abruptly the way he’d seen her do so many times during performances, her body an incredible study in the dynamics of energy and motion, changing direction with the heart-stopping suddenness of birds in flight. “Just want to change into something…less comfortable.” And she smiled, lowering her lashes to sultry half-mast, her sexuality cranked up to full wattage, now. It was classic Phoenix—the Phoenix whose music videos had fueled countless millions of erotic fantasies.

Ethan wondered what she would say if he told her that for all her efforts, the heat she was generating in him now was barely a flicker compared to the conflagration he’d experienced a few minutes ago, when she’d allowed him one brief glimpse into what he felt certain was the heart of the real Phoenix.

True to her word, she was back in less than five minutes, although it was a moment before Ethan realized it. For an instant, just a heartbeat, he actually mistook her for Kaufman’s frosty secretary. Already half out of his chair when the double take kicked in, he smiled and self-consciously patted a nonexistant necktie. “Wow. I think I’m under-dressed.”

The “less comfortable” outfit she’d changed into was a formfitting dove-gray business suit, with a skirt that ended a good eight inches above her knees. Serviceable black high heels put her somewhere near Ethan’s own six feet in height, and her glorious long black hair had all but disappeared into a sleek and tidy bun. A pair of tortoiseshell glasses and a black briefcase completed the ensemble.

At the look on his face, Phoenix laughed, a child’s delighted chortle. “Protective coloring,” she said, and pirouetted, showing off her costume as unselfconsciously as a child might. “I can lose myself in any crowd. It’s so easy—you just have to dress like everybody else, walk like everybody else. Nobody looks at faces, don’t you know that? People see what they expect to see. It’s lunch hour in a downtown business district. Trust me—nobody’ll look twice at one more gray flannel suit.” She paused to squint critically at him, one long glance down…then up. “Too bad I don’t have an extra one for you.” But the way she said it, with a little half smile and a certain shimmer in her eyes, took most of the criticism out of it.

“Oh, well—” she shrugged as she turned, for some reason breathless “—just try and keep a low profile, okay?”

Weren’t those almost exactly the same words Father Frank had said to him on the way in? Ethan was silently laughing as he followed Phoenix out of Kaufman’s office.

And for the second time she happened to glance at him just in time to catch him in the act. “What?” she demanded, coming to a dead halt. “What is it with you, anyway? Or maybe I should say, what is it with me that you think is so damn funny?”

“Trust me,” said Ethan quietly, “there’s nothing about you I find even remotely funny.” But all at once he was looking at her—really looking, and seeing not Phoenix the icon, but the woman behind the image. With eyes half-closed, as if through a filter he saw once again the woman—perhaps even the girl—he’d first caught a glimpse of when she’d told him about firing her business manager. Vulnerable and uncertain. “I was laughing at myself, actually. Don’t you ever do that—laugh at yourself?” He reached around her to open the door she seemed to have forgotten.

She threw him a quick, startled look, and except for a breathy sound too subtle to ever be called a snort, didn’t reply.

In the corridor, they almost collided. Ethan had made the turn he thought must take them to the elevators, but Phoenix, unexpectedly, had started in the opposite direction. For one dizzying moment he felt the brush of her body against his arm, an engulfing fireball of heat. Smelled her scent—unique, indescribable, but once encountered never to be forgotten—simply Phoenix.

“Uh-uh—this way,” he heard her say through the ringing in his ears. “I have a secret exit. It’s a service elevator, or something—goes straight down to a loading dock in the parking garage. Patrick got me a key. It’s not fancy, but it saves hassles—you know.”

Ethan did know—very well. What he didn’t know was how he was going to get word to the Secret Service agent stationed in the lobby downstairs, patiently waiting for him to step off one of the building’s three polished brass elevators. He did try to avoid putting his protectors’ jobs and his own safety at risk unnecessarily. As he lengthened his stride to keep up with Phoenix’s brisk pace, he wondered whether there might be a cell phone in that briefcase she was carrying, and what she’d think if he asked to use it. He reminded himself that he was a doctor, after all.

The freight elevator was large, utilitarian and slow, and smelled faintly of chemicals. As the doors rumbled shut behind her, Phoenix punched the button for the lowest parking level, then settled herself against a side wall a polite distance from Ethan, who was already stationed against the back. He angled a long look at her briefcase and thought again about asking for a cell phone. Instead it was she who broke the awkward elevator silence.

“You tell me, Doc—” and her voice seemed loud in that enclosed space “—what do these people want from me?”

The question caught Ethan off-guard. Playing for time, he cleared his throat then shrugged. “I don’t think I should speak for them.”

She laughed, a sharp, rude bark. “You’re their spokesman. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

Ethan shook his head. “Spokesman? That was your idea, not mine.” He studied her, wondering about the faint pink flush that had crept into her cheeks, just below the rims of the tortoiseshell glasses. “I was just here as an interested observer. I don’t consider myself qualified to speak for anyone, much less the people who live in those buildings. I don’t have any idea what their lives are like. I don’t think anyone does.”

“Yeah, well, I guess you’ll have to find out, won’t you,” Phoenix snapped as the elevator bumped to a stop. She pushed through the gap in the opening doors, then halted, one hand on her hip, to look back. The doc was sure taking his sweet time, standing there looking around him with that funny little frown on his face. “I thought you said you were in a hurry.” What was he waiting for, a bus?

“Sorry,” he said as he joined her, looking guilty as sin, “but I really need to make a call. You don’t happen to have a cell phone, do you?”

“What, in here?” Following the direction of his eyes, she glanced down at the briefcase in her hand and was half-surprised to see it there. “God, no—this is just for show.”

Then it occurred to her—she’d all but forgotten he was a doctor, easy to do when he looked so little like one. It was hard to think of him that way even now, hard to imagine him actually saving people’s lives… “I thought all you doctors had your own phones,” she said, but in a friendly tone to show him she’d forgiven him. “Beepers and all that.”

He pulled a hand from his pocket and showed her a small black object. “Just a beeper. No phone.” He smiled wryly. “Maybe when I actually have a salary.”

“Ah.” She shrugged; financial concerns made her uncomfortable, which was why she employed Patrick. “Well, I think there might be one on the next level, next to the pay booth.”

There was. Unaccustomed to waiting for anyone, Phoenix paced and fidgeted while he made his call. It wasn’t that she minded waiting so much—although admittedly it was a whole new experience for her to have to adjust to someone else’s schedule—but much of the success of her protective coloring depended on staying in motion, not giving anyone a chance to look too long or too hard. Standing still made her nervous—another of Doveman’s sayings—as a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.

“Done?” Thank God, she thought when she saw him turn from the pay phone at last. But no, now he had to stop and punch buttons on his beeper, check his watch, punch more buttons. Then…good Lord, now what was he doing, tying his shoe?

“Sorry,” he said when he finally joined her, looking anything but. Looking, in fact, maddeningly serene. “I wasn’t exactly prepared for this.”

“We can skip it if you want to.” She said it offhandedly; it was no big deal to her, was it? She was Phoenix; these people wanted something from her. Why should she bend over backward to accommodate them? But she was surprised to find her heart beating faster as she waited for his answer, astounded to discover that she cared what the answer might be.

“No, that’s okay—I think I’m ready now.” He smiled.

And because she couldn’t control the urge to smile back at him, she turned her head so he wouldn’t see it and rasped a brusque reply. “Well, okay, then—let’s go.”

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