THINK THE dog is going to be fine,” the physician told Kate and Mitchell as he looked around for his black bag.

The ambulance drivers had left earlier, after settling the dog on the floor near the coffee table in the main room. “He’ll sleep through the night, assuming I gave him the right dosage. Tomorrow, you should take him over to St. Maarten and let a vet there have a look at him and take some X-rays of his skull and shoulder.”

“I can’t thank you enough,” Kate said sincerely, “and I’m terribly sorry about your arm.”

“The bite isn’t extremely deep, but it is rather painful,” he replied stiffly while collecting bandages and antiseptic from the table near the terrace doors. “And of course now there’s the question of rabies to consider.”

Kate stifled a smile that was part anxiety and part mortification. “You did say that whoever you spoke to at the hospital just now told you there hasn’t been a case of rabies reported on the island in years?”

“Yes. However, it’s imperative that you keep that animal with you until you leave. After that, I’ll take care of him. I wish you would let me take him with me now.”

“I want to look after him myself while I’m here,” Kate said. She had a feeling the physician would prefer to euthanize Max to find out immediately if he had rabies, rather than wait out a ten-day quarantine period to see if Max developed symptoms.

“If he shows any symptoms of rabies while he’s with you, I need to know about it immediately so that I can be treated. Agreed?”

“Absolutely,” Kate said, and nodded for emphasis.

“And you understand clearly what those symptoms are?”

“I wrote them down right here,” Kate said, holding up the tablet.

“If this dog were to disappear before ten days from now,” the doctor lectured, “I would have to undergo treatment for rabies, whether he actually has rabies or not.”

Mitchell had heard enough about this highly unlikely eventuality that didn’t need to be addressed unless it became an unlikely reality. The dog had been so weak and disoriented that his bite had barely broken the physician’s skin, but the man had howled in pain and bandaged his arm as if a major artery had been severed. “We understand perfectly,” Mitchell said smoothly, and ushered the physician to the door. “We’ll keep him on a leash when he goes outside,” he added, and swept the door open.

In the doorway, the doctor hesitated, and turned back around. “Do you have a leash?”

“I’ll get one in the morning.”

The man still balked. “You’ll do it first thing in the morning?”

“At the crack of dawn,” Mitchell averred, and putting his hand lightly on the other man’s elbow, he turned him around and propelled him unceremoniously out the door.

Kate watched that maneuver from the other side of the room, amused and impressed by Mitchell’s blasé sangfroid and his swift efficiency in times of stress. In the few hours she’d known him, she’d criticized him soundly—and unjustly—for the Bloody Mary; dumped a drink on his shirt; reneged on the nice dinner she owed him; and involved him instead in a dramatic canine-rescue effort. He’d handled all of that imperturbably—and very, very graciously. An hour ago she’d imagined he might be a murderer; now she regarded him as a friend and ally.

Kate’s cordial feelings for him were evident in her warm smile as she said, “I still owe you dinner. I could call room service and we could eat out on the terrace, if you like.” Since Evan planned to arrive the next evening, Kate suggested the only other alternative she could offer. “Or would you rather forget about dinner and let me pay for your shirt instead?” She wondered if Mitchell would notice she’d limited him to only those two choices, but his reaction was so nonchalant that she decided he either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“Dinner here will be fine,” Mitchell replied. “You owe me a meal,” he added mildly, “and I always collect on debts that are owed to me.” She was obviously expecting a boyfriend to arrive the next day, he realized, or else she’d have offered an explanation for not being able to have dinner with him some other night.

Kate folded her arms loosely across her chest and regarded him with amusement. “Do you really?”

“Always,” he replied, reaching for the Hotel Services folder on the desk.

“Then how much do I owe you for the physician and ambulance?”

“Nothing,” Mitchell said, flipping to the Room Service section of the handbook.

“Didn’t you offer them money so that they’d agree to come out here and treat a dog?”

“I appealed to their humane instincts.”

“I see,” Kate replied, pretending she believed his story. “And is that why they got here so fast, too? I mean, they were here less than ten minutes after you walked into the lobby.”

Mitchell glanced at her from the corner of his eye. She was watching him with a knowing little smile, and he had a sudden, impossibly premature impulse to wrap her in his arms and cover that tantalizing mouth with his. That thought made a smile tug at the corner of his own lips as he shrugged and said, “They got here quickly because it’s a very small island.”

“And also because you promised them a very big tip?”

Trying to ignore the impulse to laugh, Mitchell focused on the menu. “What would you like for dinner?”

Kate named the same delicious meal she’d ordered the night before. “I think I’ll have the sea scallops and a prawn and avocado salad,” she said, bending down to check on the sleeping dog.

“Would you like me to phone room service?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” Kate said over her shoulder. “Order anything you like. Order everything you like,” she joked, imagining the enormous tip he must have given to entice the ambulance drivers and a physician to race at top speed to the rescue of an injured stray dog.

Max’s nose felt warm to her touch, and his breathing was shallow and a little fast, but the physician had told her to expect this. Behind her, she heard Mitchell pick up the telephone receiver, but a moment later he put it back in the cradle with a sharp clack. Puzzled, Kate glanced over her shoulder and saw him standing beside the phone, holding a piece of lined tablet paper in his hand, his dark brows drawn into a scowl.

A sheet of tablet paper...her tablet paper! Her tablet paper with the note she’d written to help the police identify him if she disappeared. “I can explain,” she said, surging to her feet and walking over to him.

“I’m dying to hear it,” he said coolly, and handed the note to her.

Kate reacted to the chill in his tone with an intensity that startled her. She didn’t want to insult him or make him think badly of her—not now, not when she was so grateful to him and liked him so much. He hadn’t sounded this curt and unfriendly when she blamed him for the Bloody Mary and dumped it on his shirt. Trying to think of the least offensive explanation she could give him, she reread what she’d written on the note.

“I’ve gone out to dinner with a man who says his name is Mitchell Wyatt. I met him this afternoon in the Sandbar when I spilled a Bloody Mary on his shirt. The waiter can give you his description.”

Stalling for time, she laid the offensive note back on the desk. “Tonight,” she began haltingly, “when I wasn’t sure what I should wear to dinner, I decided to call you and ask where we were going.” She paused, nervously rubbing her palms against the sides of her pants.

“Go on,” he said brusquely.

“But when I phoned the hotel operator and asked him to ring your room, he said you weren’t staying here. That made me... well... uneasy. Possibilities started to occur to me that I hadn’t considered earlier, when I believed you were a guest here and agreed to have dinner with you.”

“What possibilities?” he demanded.

Kate wanted to be evasive, but that was impossible with his rapier blue gaze pinning hers. “There were certain things about you that made me think you might be a—” She almost choked on the word. “—gigolo.”

His scowl deepened. “A what?”

“Please, just try to look at it from my perspective. You were hanging around a very expensive hotel that you’re not staying at, you’re outrageously handsome, you’re incredibly smooth, you’re totally charming, and you’re a very fast worker—within two or three minutes of meeting me, you asked me to take you to dinner.” His expression hadn’t softened a bit, which told Kate two things: He wasn’t flattered by her complimentary remarks about his looks and charm; and he was waiting for an explanation as to why she’d instructed whoever read the note to get a description of him from the waiter.

Raking her hair back off her forehead, she admitted the entire embarrassing truth. “I was upset at the possibility that I’d been tricked into having dinner with a gigolo, but then I realized you could be a lot worse than a gigolo.”

“I can’t think of anything more repulsive than being a gigolo.”

“No, but you could have been worse than ‘repulsive.’ You could have been dangerous. You could have been a murderer who picks up single women in hotels in the islands, kills them, and buries their bodies in the sand... or... something like that....” Kate trailed off, feeling like a colossal idiot.

“So you left a note for the authorities to find in case you disappeared?”

Kate nodded miserably.

“Because you wanted to be sure I wouldn’t get away with your murder?”

Kate was so mortified and so annoyed with herself that she missed the thread of amusement in his deep voice. Unable to hold his gaze, she looked toward Max. “It didn’t seem quite so idiotic then as it does now.”

For the second time in a few minutes, Mitchell had to fight down the impulse to haul her into his arms. To distract himself, he turned away and picked up the telephone.

Startled by his abrupt move, Kate said, “Who are you calling?”

“Room service,” he said mildly.

“In that case,” Kate said contritely, “you may change my order to a large plate of humble pie.”

Mitchell was still grinning when the room service operator answered his call.