“What about you?” Yes, and it reminded her of something, that quietness, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

“Bronco’s a good man.”

“No, I mean, where were you that night? I seem to have met your whole family. Except you. Imagine, Doc, if we’d met five years ago…”

He picked up his water glass and held it, almost like a shield between them, it seemed to her. “Five years ago I was a med student-overworked and stressed out in L.A. I doubt I’d have been much fun.” Over the top of the glass his eyes watched her…dark, quiet, wary.

Yes, that was what he reminded her of. A stag, hiding in the underbrush, watching the hunter. He was on his guard now, fortified against her. Time to back off a little, she thought, enjoying the game. Give him some breathing room.

She laughed, her husky trademark chuckle. “No offense, Doc, but you’re not exactly a barrel of laughs now.”

And as she’d thought he would, he smiled. It was a wry and self-deprecating smile, and it banished the wariness from his eyes. As she’d thought it would. But what came in its stead was something she didn’t want to see. Something bleak and sad…like dark pools reflecting back the face of tragedy.

“Sorry,” he said softly, “I didn’t think this was a particularly funny situation.”

She caught her breath and looked away, and Ethan didn’t know whether the lurch he felt in his chest was triumph, or regret. In the strange verbal fencing match they were engaged in, he knew he’d just scored a touché. He felt no sense of victory, and yet…he wasn’t sorry for it, either.

“We have-” The sports watch on his wrist emitted a tiny electronic beep. “I have to get back to the clinic,” he said with an exhalation, without glancing at his wrist. He was conscious of conflicting feelings, now-both relief and regret. “Can we-”

Phoenix nodded and signaled to the waiter with a platinum American Express credit card. Out of the corner of his eye Ethan saw Tom Applegate fold his napkin and push back his chair.

“What I was going to say,” said Ethan, “was, can we get together again to talk about this?” He hadn’t wanted the job, dammit. But since he’d been designated spokesman for the residents of The Gardens, he supposed the responsibility for protecting their interests was his, like it or not. He told himself that was his only reason for wanting to see this woman again. He told himself that beyond that they had nothing in common, that she would complicate his life in unimaginable ways. A woman like this could easily make a man lose his sense of direction, make him forget his principles, his purpose.

I need to get away from her, he thought. I need to get my bearings.

“Listen,” he said, “you don’t have to leave if you’re not-”

“I’m done here.” She kept her face averted as she scrawled a signature across the check the waiter had brought in its leather folder, as brisk and efficient as any executive or attorney concluding a power lunch. Try as he would without seeming too obvious about it, Ethan couldn’t make out the signature or the name on the card. She snapped the folder shut and shoved the credit card carelessly into the pocket of her dove-gray suit and rose. “Shall we go?”

“Sure.” Her face was somber, Ethan noted. So still and set…the way it had been just before she’d walked out of the conference room. He wondered if it was just her way, to run when confronted with something she didn’t want to deal with.

He followed her out of the restaurant, pausing at the entrance, as he’d learned to do, to let Tom Applegate go ahead of him. He waited for Tom’s nod, then pushed through the door and found Phoenix waiting for him on the sidewalk, watching the interaction between him and his bodyguard and smiling a little half smile.

“Tom,” Ethan said, “I’d like you to meet Phoenix.”

The Secret Service agent nodded, deadpan, and said, “Nice meeting you, ma’am,” like the well brought-up Southerner he was. He allowed himself to glance only briefly at the world-famous rock star before his eyes moved on, looking all around, up and down the street, watching the sidewalk…watching everything. Everyone.

In a voice rich with amusement, Phoenix said, “Nice meeting you, too, Tom.” Then she linked her arm through Ethan’s and murmured out the side of her mouth as they moved together down the sidewalk, “Can’t be easy keeping a low profile when you’ve got six and a half feet of bodyguard following you everywhere.”

He gave a huff of laughter but didn’t reply. He didn’t-because her scent was inside his head and her heat was inside him, and all his nerves and senses were converging on the source of that heat like moths to a candle flame. He tried to remind himself that this was Phoenix. Phoenix-world-class performer and master of disguise. Nothing about this woman is real. Trouble was, his body didn’t believe it. Not for a minute. His body knew only that she was a woman, vibrant and alive and unbelievably beautiful.

“Do you need a ride back to your clinic?” she asked as they approached the dark maw of the parking garage. “I can have Patrick send a car-”

“That’s okay, Tom’s got it covered.” Smiling a half smile of his own, Ethan nodded toward the Secret Service agent, who was muttering into his wrist. Moments later an anonymous dark sedan with tinted windows rolled silently up the garage’s exit ramp and stopped beside them.

“Wow, just like Dick Tracy,” Phoenix murmured. “I’m impressed.”

“Your tax dollars at work,” said Ethan dryly. Tom had opened the back door of the sedan and was waiting for him. The car’s engine idled, pumping out visible waves of heat. “About that meeting…”

“Sure. How about tomorrow? Come by the studio. After you get off work…before-doesn’t really matter, I’ll be there, working. You can meet the band.”

“The band…uh, sure.” He felt steeped in heat, his brain fuzzy. He frowned. “Working, you said?”

“That’s what I said.” Her smile was tilted, her voice rusty and sardonic. “What did you think? All us rock stars spend our days just layin’ around smokin’ pot and doin’ drugs and partyin’, right? Like I told you, I’m pretty much just a working girl. I have schedules to keep, deadlines to meet, people depending on me.”

Ethan looked at her for a long moment, seeing the perfect oval of her face sleekly framed in raven-black, and for some reason remembering the way she’d looked when he’d first seen her that morning, with all that hair rippling down her back and slapping against the back pockets of her jeans. He had a suddenly and visceral sense of what it would feel like…cool and silky against his skin. He heard himself say, “I guess there’s a lot I don’t know about you.”

“That there is, Doc.” In the murky light of the garage her eyes seemed shadowed, even sad. “A whole helluva lot.”

You idiot, this is Phoenix!

Yes, but her eyes were a woman’s eyes, and her mouth a woman’s mouth, and his mind kept asking him why he didn’t just lean over and kiss it. His mind already knew how it would taste…how it would grow moist and soft under his…and nothing else mattered much, did it?

But it did. Half-suffocated by her heat, with the sedan’s well-tuned engine pulsing inside his head, he said in a voice he couldn’t hear, “There’s a lot I’d like to know about you.” And then, “Starting with your name.”

How long did she stare at him in that thumping, suffocating silence, and him feeling trapped, imprisoned, helpless as a fly in molasses? He didn’t know, but when she finally spoke her words thrilled him beyond his imagining, lifted his heart higher than any words she’d ever uttered, stirred his soul more deeply than any song she’d ever sung.

“It’s Joanna,” she said. “Joanna Dunn.”

And he stood and watched her walk away down the exit ramp, her high heels click-click-clicking on the concrete.

He was barely aware of Tom’s hand on his elbow, a polite reminder. He scarcely remembered getting into the car, hearing the door slam behind him, shutting out the heat. He did know that he spoke to Carl Friedenburg as Tom got into the front seat beside him, but he had no idea what it was he’d said. And his only thought, as the sedan rolled out of the garage and joined the flow of traffic in the stifling street, like the words of a great new song playing over and over inside his head: her name is Joanna. Joanna Dunn.


As he’d expected, Ruthie, Father Frank and Mrs. Schmidt were waiting for him when he got back to the clinic, lounging around the reception counter in a way that reminded Ethan of the cats in his aunt Lucy’s barn back in Iowa, the way they’d lie with bodies at ease, eyes alert, springing to life instantly at his entrance to come running, tails aloft, meowing and twining around his legs, begging.

“How did it go?”

“What did you find out?”

“What was she like?”

He laughed out loud at his vision of the barn cats, surprising them, but he didn’t try to explain. “It went fine,” he said. What did I find out? I found out her name is Joanna…Joanna Dunn. But for some reason he kept that to himself, like a hard-rock prospector hugging to his heart the single gold nugget he’d found.

“What’s she like, Phoenix?” Ruthie asked again, her dark eyes shy.

Ethan drew in a breath and exhaled it in a rush. “Not like anybody you or I’ve ever met before,” he said on bumps of dry laughter. Everyone nodded, then shook their heads; it was the answer they seemed to have expected. He paused, then added almost guiltily, “We went out for lunch.”

Ruthie gave an excited gasp. “You had lunch with Phoenix?”

“Wow,” said Mrs. Schmidt, “were you mobbed?”

Ethan coughed and ran a hand through his hair-a gesture he realized he’d inherited from his father, and made a mental note to stop. “I was recognized-she wasn’t. Believe it or not. She has a way of…just sort of blending in. Practically becomes invisible when she wants to be.”