aine woke up early the next morning, without benefit of clock or sun. The simple act of rolling over woke her, because every muscle in her body screamed in protest. Her ribs ached, her knee stung, her arms ached every time she moved them; even her butt was sore. She hadn’t had this many aches and pains since the first time she went roller-skating.

Groaning, she eased into a sitting position and inched her legs over the side of the bed. If she felt this bad, she wondered how the old guys felt. They hadn’t been punched, but the fall would have been rougher on them.

Cold was better for sore muscles than heat was, but she didn’t think she was brave enough to face a cold shower. She’d rather tackle a belligerent drunk any time than stand naked under a freezing blast of water. She compromised by showering in tepid water, then gradually turned the hot water completely off. Gradually working up to the cold water didn’t help; she stood it for about two seconds, then climbed out of the shower much faster than she had climbed in.

Shivering, she quickly dried off and stepped into her long, blue, front-zip robe. She seldom bothered with it during the summer, but today it felt good.

Getting up early had one advantage: she got to wake up BooBoo, rather than the other way around.

He didn’t take kindly to having his beauty rest disturbed. The disgruntled cat hissed at her, then stalked off to find a more private place to sleep. Jaine smiled.

She didn’t have to hurry that morning, since she had gotten up too early, which was good, because her sore muscles made it plain hurrying wasn’t on the agenda today. She lingered over her coffee, a rare weekday treat, and instead of making do with cold cereal the way she usually did, she popped a frozen waffle into the toaster and sliced up some strawberries to go on top. After all, a woman who had been in a brawl deserved a little extra treat.

After finishing the waffle, she drank another cup of coffee and pulled up the robe to examine her scraped knee. She had put ice on it as directed, but there was still a nice large bruise, and her entire knee was stiff and sore. She couldn’t loll around all day on a pile of ice packs, so she popped a couple of aspirin and resigned herself to discomfort for a couple of days.

Her first real surprise of the day came when she began dressing and put on a bra. As soon as she fastened the front hook, tightening the band around her sore rib cage, she knew the bra had to go. Standing in front of her closet, naked except for her panties, she faced another dilemma: what did a braless woman wear if she didn’t want anyone to know she was braless?

Even in an air-conditioned office, the weather was too hot for her to keep a jacket on all day. She had some pretty dresses, but her nipples would be plainly outlined beneath the thin fabrics. Hadn’t she read something once about Band-Aids over the nipples? Anything was worth a try. She got two Band-Aids, plastered them over her nipples, then pulled on one of the dresses and examined herself in the mirror. The Band-Aids were clearly outlined.

Okay, that didn’t work. Plain surgical tape might do the trick, but she didn’t have any. Besides, the dress revealed her scraped knee, and it looked gross. She peeled off the Band-Aids and went back to examining the contents of her closet.

In the end she settled on a long hunter green skirt and a white knit top that she covered with a cadet blue silk shirt. She knotted the shirttails at her waist, put on blue and green stretchy bead bracelets, and was rather impressed when she consulted her mirror.

“Not bad,” she said, turning to examine the result. “Not bad at all.”

Luckily her hair was no problem. It was thick and glossy, a nice dark reddish brown, and had plenty of body. Her current style was a sort of modified shag that required no more than brushing, which was good, because raising her arms made her ribs hurt. She made short work of the brushing.

But there was a bruise on her cheekbone. She scowled in the mirror and gingerly touched the small blue spot. It wasn’t sore, but it was definitely blue. She seldom did a full makeup job – why waste it on work? – but today she would have to bring out the big guns.

By the time she sashayed out the door in her chic serendipitous outfit and with full battle paint in place, she thought she looked pretty damn good.

The jerk – Sam – was unlocking his car door when she stepped out. She turned and took her time locking the door behind her, hoping he would simply get into his car and leave, but no such luck.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice right behind her, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. Stifling a shriek, she whirled. Bad move. Her ribs protested; she gave an involuntary groan and dropped her keys.

“Damn it!” she shouted, when she could breathe again. “Stop sneaking up on me like that!”

“It’s the only way I know,” he said, his face expressionless. “If I waited until you turned around, I wouldn’t be sneaking.” He paused. “You cussed.”

As if she needed him to point that out. Fuming, she dug in her purse for a quarter and slapped it in his hand.

He blinked as he looked down at the quarter. “What’s this for?”

“Because I swore. I have to pay a quarter when I’m caught. That’s how I’m motivating myself to stop.”

“Then you owe me a hell of a lot more than a quarter. You said a couple of words last night.”

She curled her lip at him. “You can’t go back into the past and collect. I’d have to empty out my bank account. You have to catch me at the time.”

“Yeah, well, I did. Saturday, when you were mowing your lawn. You didn’t pay me then.”

Silently, her teeth gritted together, she dug out another quarter.

He looked extremely smug as he pocketed his fifty cents.

Any other time she might have laughed, but she was still mad at him for scaring her. Her ribs hurt, and when she tried to stoop down to retrieve her keys, they hurt even more. Not only that, her knee refused to bend. She straightened and gave him a look of such frustrated fury that one corner of his mouth twitched. If he laughs, she thought, I’m going to lock him under the chin. Since she was still standing on her stoop, the angle was perfect.

He didn’t laugh. Cops were probably taught to be cautious. He bent down to pick up her keys. “The knee won’t bend, huh?”

“Neither will the ribs,” she said grumpily, taking the keys and easing down the three steps.

His brows lowered. “What’s wrong with your ribs?”

“He landed a punch.”

He blew out an exasperated breath. “Why didn’t you say something last night?”

“Why? They’re not broken, just bruised.”

“You know this for a fact, huh? You don’t think maybe they could be cracked?”

“They don’t feel cracked.”

“And you have so much experience with cracked ribs you know how they feel.”

She set her jaw. “They’re my ribs, and I say they’re not cracked. End of discussion.”

“Tell me something,” he said conversationally, strolling beside her as she stalked, as best as she was able, to her car. “Is there ever a day when you don’t pick a fight?”

“The days when I don’t see you,” she shot back. “And you started it! I was prepared to be a nice neighbor, but you snarled at me every time you saw me, even though I apologized when BooBoo got on your car. Besides, I thought you were a drunk.”

He stopped, surprise etched on his face. “A drunk?”

“Bloodshot eyes, dirty clothes, getting home in the wee hours of the morning, making a lot of noise, grouchy all the time as if you had a hangover… what else was I to think?”

He rubbed his face. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I should have showered, shaved, and dressed in a suit before I came out to tell you that you were making enough noise to raise the dead.”

“Just grabbing a clean pair of jeans would have sufficed.” She unlocked the Viper and began to consider another problem: how was she going to get into the low-slung little rocket?

“I’m refinishing my kitchen cabinets,” he offered after a short pause. “With the hours I’ve been working lately, I’m having to do it a little at a time, and sometimes I fall asleep with my dirty clothes on.”

“Did you ever think of leaving the cabinets until your off days and getting a little more sleep? It might help your disposition.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my disposition.”

“No, not if it belongs to a rabid skunk.” She opened the car door, stowed her purse inside, and tried to psych herself up for the effort of sliding behind the wheel.

“Hot set of wheels,” he said, looking the Viper over.

“Thanks.” She glanced at his Pontiac and didn’t say anything. Sometimes silence was more charitable than words.

He saw the glance and grinned. She wished he hadn’t done that; the grin made him look almost human. She wished they weren’t standing out in the early morning sun, because she could see how dense his black eyelashes were and the rich brown striations in his dark eyes. Okay, so he wasn’t a bad-looking man, when his eyes weren’t red and he wasn’t snarling.

Suddenly his eyes went cold. He reached out and gently rubbed his thumb along her cheekbone. “You have a bruise there.”

“Da – ” She caught herself before the word slipped out. “Darn it, I thought I had it covered.”

“You did a good job. I didn’t see it until you were standing in the sun.” He crossed his arms and scowled down at her. “Any other injuries?”

“Just sore muscles.” She looked ruefully at the car. “I’ve been dreading having to get in the car.”

He looked at the car, then at her as she gripped the open door and slowly, painfully lifted her right leg and eased it inside. He blew out a breath, as if steeling himself to perform an unpleasant task, and held her arm to steady her as she inched her way under the wheel.

“Thanks,” she said, relieved the task was over.

“Sure.” He crouched down in the open door. “You want to file charges for assault?”

She pursed her lips. “I hit him first.”

She thought he might be fighting another grin. God, she hoped he won; she didn’t want to see another one so soon. She might start thinking he was human.

“There is that,” he agreed. He stood up and started to close the car door for her. “A massage will help the soreness. And a steam bath.”

She gave him an outraged look. “Steam? You mean I had a cold shower this morning for nothing?”

He began laughing, and she really, really wished he hadn’t done that. He had a nice deep laugh and very white teeth.

“Cold is good, too. Try alternating heat and cold to loosen up. And get a massage if you can.”

She didn’t think Hammerstead had a spa hidden anywhere on the premises, but she might call around and book one for this afternoon when she got off work. She nodded. “Good idea. Thanks.”

He nodded and closed the door, stepping back. Lifting one hand in a wave, he walked to his car. Before he even got the door open, Jaine had the Viper purring down the street.

So maybe she could get along with him, she thought, smiling a little. He and his handcuffs had certainly come in handy the night before.

Despite lingering to talk to him, she was still early to work, which gave her time to ease out of the car. Today the sign above the elevator buttons said: failure is not an option; it’s bundled with your software. Somehow she thought management would frown more on that than on the sign from the day before, but all the geeks and nerds on the first two floors probably thought it was hilarious.

The office gradually filled. The conversation that morning was exclusively about the article in the newsletter, split fifty-fifty between the contents and speculation about the identity of the four women. Most were of the opinion the entire article was the brainchild of the author, that the four friends were fictitious, which suited Jaine just fine. She kept her mouth shut and her fingers crossed.

“I scanned the article and sent it to my cousin in Chicago,” she overheard someone say as he walked past in the hallway. She was fairly certain he wasn’t talking about an article in the Detroit News.

Great. It was spreading.

Because she winced at just the thought of having to get into and out of the car several times to go to lunch, she made do with peanut butter crackers and a soft drink in the snack room. She could have asked T.J. or one of the others to bring her back something for lunch, but didn’t feel like going into explanations of why she had problems getting into her car. Saying she tackled a drunk would sound like bragging, when in truth she had simply been too angry to think about what she was doing.

Leah Street entered and took her neatly packed lunch out of the refrigerator. She had a sandwich (turkey breast and lettuce on whole wheat), a cup of vegetable soup (which she heated in the microwave), and an orange. Jaine sighed, torn between hate and envy. How could you like someone who was so organized? People like Leah, she thought, were put on earth to make everyone else look inefficient. If she had thought, she could have packed her own lunch instead of having to make do with peanut butter crackers and a diet soda.

“May I join you?” Leah asked, and Jaine felt a twinge of guilt. Since they were the only two people in the snack room, she should have asked Leah to sit down. Most people at Hammer-stead would simply have sat down, but maybe Leah had been made to feel unwelcome often enough that she felt she had to ask.

“Sure,” Jaine said, trying to infuse some warmth into her voice. “I’d like the company.” If she were Catholic, she’d definitely have to confess that one; it was an even bigger whopper than saying her father didn’t know anything about cars.

Leah got her nutritious, attractive meal arranged and sat down at the table. She took a small bite of the sandwich and chewed daintily, blotted her mouth, then ate an equally small spoonful of soup, after which she blotted her mouth again. Jaine watched, mesmerized. She imagined the Victorians must have had the same table manners. Her own manners were good, but Leah made her feel like a barbarian.

After a moment Leah said, “I suppose you saw that disgusting newsletter yesterday.”

Disgusting was one of Leah’s favorite words, Jaine had noticed.

“I assume you mean that article,” she said, because it seemed pointless to dance around. “I glanced at it. I didn’t read the entire thing.”

“People like that make me ashamed to be a woman.”

Well, that was going a little too far. Jaine knew she should leave it alone, because Leah was Leah and nothing was going to change her. But some little demon inside – okay, the same demon that always prompted her to open her mouth when she should keep it shut – made her say, “Why is that? I thought they were honest.”

Leah put down her sandwich and gave Jaine an outraged look. “Honest? They sounded like whores. All they wanted in a man was money and a big… a big…”

“Penis,” Jaine supplied, since Leah didn’t seem to know the word. ‘And I don’t think that was all they wanted. I seem to remember something about fidelity and dependability, sense of humor – ”

Leah dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “Believe that if you want, but the entire point of the whole article was sex and money. It was obvious. It was also vicious and cruel, because just think how it made men who didn’t have a lot of money and a big… thing – ”

“Penis,” Jaine interrupted. “It’s called a penis.”

Leah pressed her lips together. “Some things aren’t meant to be discussed in public, but I’ve noticed before you have a potty mouth.”

“I do not!” Jaine said heatedly. “I admit I swear sometimes, but I’m trying to stop, and penis isn’t a dirty word; it’s the correct word for a body part, just like saying ‘leg.’ Or do you have an objection to legs, too?”

Leah gripped the edge of the table with both hands, holding so tightly her knuckles turned white. She took a deep breath. “As I was saying, think how it made those men feel. They must think they aren’t good enough, that they’re somehow inferior.”

“Some of them are,” Jaine muttered. She should know. She had been engaged to three of the inferior ones, and she wasn’t thinking about their genitals, either.

“No one should be made to feel that way,” Leah said, her voice rising. She took another bite of sandwich, and Jaine saw, to her surprise, that the other woman’s hands were shaking. She was genuinely upset.

“Look, I think most people who read the article thought it was funny,” she said in a conciliatory tone. “It was obviously meant to be a humorous piece.”

“I don’t feel that way at all. It was filthy, ugly, and mean-spirited.”

So much for conciliation. “I don’t agree,” Jaine said flatly, gathering up her trash and depositing it in a can. “I think people see what they expect to see. Someone who’s mean expects others to be just as mean, the way people with dirty minds see smut everywhere.”

Leah went white, then red. “Are you saying I’m dirty-minded?”

“Take it any way you like.” Jaine went back to her office before their little disagreement escalated into open warfare. What was wrong with her lately? First her neighbor, and now Leah. She didn’t seem able to get along with anyone, not even BooBoo. Of course, no one got along with Leah, so she didn’t know if that should count, but she was definitely going to make a bigger effort to get along with Sam. So he rubbed her the wrong way; she had evidently been doing a good job of rubbing him the wrong way, too. The problem was, she was out of practice in getting along with men; since the breakup of her third engagement, she had been off men in a big way.

But what woman wouldn’t be, with her history? Three engagements and three breakups by the time she was twenty-three wasn’t a good track record. It wasn’t that she was dog food; she had a mirror, and the mirror reflected a slim, pretty woman with almost-dimples in her cheeks and an almost-cleft in her chin. She had been popular in high school, so popular that she had gotten engaged to Brett, the star pitcher on the baseball team, in her senior year. But she had wanted to go to college and Brett had wanted to give baseball a shot, and somehow they had just drifted apart. Brett’s baseball career had been a nonstarter, too.

Then there was Alan. She had been twenty-one, fresh out of college. Alan had waited until the night before the wedding, rehearsal night, to let her know he was in love with an ex-girlfriend and he had only gone with Jaine to prove he was really over the ex, but it hadn’t worked, sorry, no hard feelings.

Sure. In your dreams, bastard.

After Alan she had eventually become engaged to Warren, but maybe she had been too gun-shy by then to truly commit herself. For whatever reason, after he asked and she said yes, they both seemed to pull back and the relationship had kind of died a slow death. They had both been grateful to finally bury the thing.

She supposed she could have gone ahead and married Warren, despite the lack of heat on both their parts, but she was glad she hadn’t. What if they had had children, then split? If she ever did have children, Jaine wanted it to be in a solid marriage, the land her parents had.

She had never thought the demise of her engagements was her fault; two had been mutual decisions, and one had definitely been Alan’s fault, but… was something wrong with her? She didn’t seem to inspire lust, much less devotion, in the men she had dated.

She was jerked out of her unhappy thoughts when T.J. stuck her head in the office door. T.J. looked pale.

“A reporter for the News is here talking to Dawna,” she blurted. “God, you don’t think –?”

T.J. looked at Jaine; Jaine looked at T.J.

“Ah, hell,” Jaine said in disgust, and T.J. was so upset she didn’t even demand her quarter.

That night, Corin stared at the newsletter, reading and rereading the article. It was filth, pure filth.

His hands were shaking, making the little words dance. Didn’t they know how this hurt? How could they laugh?

He wanted to throw the newsletter away, but he couldn’t. Anguish gnawed at him. He couldn’t believe he actually worked with the people who had said all these hurtful things, who mocked and terrorized –

He took a deep breath. He had to control himself. That was what the doctors said. Just take the pills, and control yourself. And he did. He had been good, very good, for a long time now. Sometimes he even managed to forget himself.

But not now. He couldn’t forget now. This was too important.!!!Who were they?

He needed to know. He had to know.