After a moment she laughed, her famous chortle. “I can’t get you out of my mind-why do you suppose that is?”

It was a rhetorical question, and he didn’t reply-though he could have told her he was having the same sort of problem himself. But he suspected she already knew that.

After a few more silent steps, she went on in a musing tone. “I told you last night that I’d meant to seduce you-” she gave a little gulp of laughter “-God, what a self-conscious little word that is-but you knew what I meant. You said you did.” She glanced at him. He nodded gravely and she looked away again. “I thought it would be so easy-out of arrogance, at first, maybe, but later because…I felt something…” She left it dangling, while her finger made a jerky waggling motion between his chest and hers.

“It should have been easy.” She halted and turned to him, her voice tense, hushed…angry. “It would be…so easy…for us to be together, Doc. Rock-and-roll legend and First Son, or Leroy and Joanna-take your pick-we’re both consenting adults, without prior commitments-Lord knows, we’ve got the chemistry. Dammit, why can’t we just…be together? Why does this have to be…why does it feel so hard?”

Ethan cleared his throat; he’d never had a conversation like this before, which was perhaps why his voice felt rusty. “Maybe,” he ventured finally, “because we both know it’s not that simple.”

“I know that,” she snapped, brittle and dissatisfied. “What I don’t understand is why.”

He took a deep breath and caught himself just before he drove his hand through his hair-his father’s favorite gesture when emotionally frustrated. Dear God, was he becoming so much like his dad-starched, Phoenix had called him!-uptight and unable to express his feelings? Valiantly, he tried.

“I can’t speak for both of us, but for me, I guess it’s because…just being together-for the sex-isn’t enough.” And even while the words were coming out of his mouth, he knew how priggish they sounded.

So he wasn’t at all surprised when she smiled at him and murmured teasingly, “Oh, come on…you’ve never been with someone ‘just for the sex’? Not ever?”

He felt his skin warming, but he smiled back. “Well…okay. I guess maybe there were times…” He shook his head and the smile faded. “But not…this time.”

“Why is that?” she whispered, looking into his eyes.

He shook his head. The easy answer, I don’t know…hovered on his tongue, but he knew she wanted more, and in a strange sort of way he felt he owed it to her. He drew another hard breath and began slowly, navigating through treacherous shoals of feelings he hadn’t even sorted out for himself yet.

“I think…it’s because I want more from you than that.”

“That’s what scares me, Doc,” she said in a breaking voice, which she instantly halted, and calmed with a breath. And another. Whispering again, she went on. “What I’m afraid of is, maybe you want something from me that I can’t give you.”

He shook his head hard, denying it. “I don’t see why. I’m not that demanding.”

“Then what is it you want from me? Tell me!”

“What do I want from you? Nothing so hard, Joanna, believe me. All I want is-” Your heart? Your soul? But he couldn’t say it. It was too much to ask, and way too soon to ask it. He had no right whatsoever to ask it.

She laughed, then, but without amusement, and gave him a long, appraising look that for some reason left him feeling vaguely ashamed. Then she turned and started walking again, with her arms folded now across her bare middle. “You know, Doc,” she said in her rusty Phoenix voice, “I think you disapprove of me.”

“Disapprove of you?” He repeated it in shocked denial. “I do not.”

“Yeah, you do.” And he could see the edges of her sad, ironic smile. “I think you’d like it if you could peel off my Phoenix clothes-my disguises, you keep calling them-and see if there’s somebody else under here-somebody you might like better.” She glanced at him. “You called me Joanna just now.”

Still shocked, and beginning to feel a little abused, Ethan said testily, “It’s your name.”

She made a disgusted sound and a throwaway gesture. “I haven’t been that person for so long, I don’t even remember what it feels like. Don’t you understand? She’s gone, Doc- Joanna’s gone. And you know what? Good riddance. She was a loser-not a good person.” She gave a high, sharp laugh. “Trust me-if you’re hoping to find somebody inside here you think you might like better than me, you’re out of luck. What you see is pretty much as good as I get.”

She ran lightly from him then, before he could even begin to think what to say in reply. He knew a moment’s heart-stopping dismay, something like what he imagined she might have felt when the wind had taken her dandelion. Then he saw the drinking fountain, and he understood that she was running to, not away.

He followed but stood back a ways, watching her step delicately between puddles in the bare patch of sandy ground around the block of stone-crusted concrete that formed the base of the fountain. Entranced, he watched her search out the mechanism that would turn the water on…experiment cautiously with the trajectory of the stream, looking as fearful and fascinated as a child with a mysterious new toy. His heart jolted into his throat when she bent toward the fountain, then halted suddenly, straightened up and carefully took off her cowboy hat. With the hat cradled against one hip she leaned down and touched her lips to the arching stream, and Ethan felt a powerful urge of his own to swallow…

Was this what it would be like, having her always in his life? he wondered. With even the smallest, most ordinary acts seeming touched with magic, as if he was seeing them for the very first time?

Like a long-abandoned piece of machinery creaking to life, he stepped forward to hold the faucet on for her while she stroked cool water onto her cheeks, throat and chest like lotion. He gazed entranced at the glossy black coil of her hair as she smoothed back the sweat-damp tendrils clinging to her forehead, and thought about her nape, and how sweet and vulnerable it looked. Then she straightened and raised both arms, turning slightly toward him as she settled the cowboy hat into place over the mass of her hair, and his gaze dropped to her lithe and supple torso-how could it not?

“Good God,” he said before he could stop himself, “is that a navel ring?”

She laughed, the coughing sound a surly tiger might make, then said dryly, “Yeah, Doc, that’s what it is.” She waited while he brought his guilty gaze back to her face before she shrugged. “See what I mean? You’re shocked.”

“I’m not shocked…” He shouldn’t have been. As a doctor he’d personally encountered pierced body parts he’d have been embarrassed to tell her about. “Just…I hadn’t noticed it before, that’s all.”

“But you disapprove.” And how was it she could sound both amused and sad?

“No, I don’t,” he said, feeling twitchy and annoyed, suddenly, and very misunderstood. Because the truth was, what he found shocking about the navel ring was the fact that he didn’t disapprove. He felt that he should, that ordinarily he would. But for some reason the fact that it was her navel ring made it not only acceptable, but somehow just one more delightful facet of the incredible and fascinating person she was. It frustrated him that he couldn’t tell her that, and it only added to his frustration when a moment later she voiced his deepest feelings almost exactly in her own words.

“It just goes with who I am,” she said in her soft-scratchy voice as they walked on again, not touching. “It’s Phoenix. It’s me. That’s all.” He could feel her turn her head toward him, but felt too exposed just then to face the sadness and irony in her eyes.

He was glad he hadn’t when a moment later she added, “You know, Doc, funny thing is, I don’t feel that way about you. I happen to like you a lot-just the way you are.”

He’d never felt less likeable in his life. He felt, in fact, like nothing so much as a contrary child, a mass of confusion and contradictions, inadvertently hurting that which he only meant to hold.

He closed his eyes, needing to be away from her just then, needing to go to his quiet place and try to rediscover himself there-or failing that, at least to find his path again. Somewhere, he knew, there were important things he was supposed to do that he’d lost sight of, priorities he’d set for himself that he’d somehow forgotten. Somewhere along the line he’d wandered off the path on a quest of his own, this search for the ellusive and alluring being named Joanna, who for all he knew might exist only in his own mind. He sensed that he was very close to becoming hopelessly lost, and that he desperately needed some sort of compass to bring him back to where he belonged.

It was at just that moment, like an answer to an unspoken prayer, that he heard a childish voice calling, “Hey, Doc! Doc-where you been? Hey, come on, man.”

He opened his eyes and found Phoenix watching him, blue eyes bright and quizzical in the shadows beneath the brim of the cowboy hat. Beyond her, behind the lattice of a chain-link fence, he could see the basketball court’s cracked pavement reflecting heat in sluggish waves. And Michael, standing at the fence, the fingers of one small hand woven through the chain link, impatiently shaking it while holding the basketball precariously balanced on one scrawny hip. A short distance away, Tom Applegate waited under the basket, patiently mopping sweat.

“Better go,” Phoenix said with a small jerk of her head. She glanced upward and added wryly, “You might want to hurry…”

He noticed only then how dark the day had gotten. The air lay on his skin like a hot, wet blanket, and somewhere in the distance thunder rumbled. He felt as surly as the weather, his thoughts humid and unsettled, confusion and frustration tumbling rampant through his insides. He stood and looked at her, part of him craving the peace and quiet only distancing himself from her could bring, part longing to plunge headlong into the emotional tumult, to hold on to her and never let go.